Lorenzo Chapman, a.k.a. DEVIOUS, is visiting Pierre and me in the northeast! After he arrived on Thursday night, Pierre, Lorenzo, and I traveled to Worcester, MA to support a Hip Hop community event at a local youth center. While Devious did not get a chance to compete in the 1v1 Popping battles, we had the chance to see first-hand all the socially beneficial aspects of Hip Hop that have helped The GR818ERS in Los Angeles bringing up the community in Worcester. Traveling the distance to support the cause made it all worth while! I also want to send a special thanks to O’Lick Maknoxa, an awesome Bboy from Providence, for coming all the way to Massachusetts to pick us up and bring us back to Providence (the other option was essentially finding somewhere to sleep in Boston haha).

Pierre and Devious have been organizing two huge events for Brown University, and I can’t wait until this weekend to see them! Friday evening’s event is called FLOORGASM, the first Hip Hop jam with Bboy competitions that has ever taken place at Brown University! Many dancers from across the northeast will be coming to support the event, including the Project 401 group, which recently performed on the steps outside the Blue Room; Devious, Pierre, and Special Browniez Crew are hosting the event. If you are in Rhode Island on Friday, you do NOT want to miss this!

The second is a dance workshop that Devious will be leading, all levels of experience welcome! You WILL leave a better dancer if you put your mind to it, the dancers leading the workshop are amazing teachers!

I will be posting about these events soon, but for more information visit:

1. FLOORGASM ON FACEBOOK

2. DANCE WORKSHOP WITH DEVIOUS ON FACEBOOK

The positive message of All City Rockers’ Hip-Hop breakdance competition “Nothing but the Breaks” was clear from the start, as Paris Fisher led the room in a collective prayer. “We pray that this day is a day of joy, where everybody has fun…we pray that there is no hatred.” Pierre introduced me to many great individuals and groups involved in Rhode Island’s movement for constructive youth empowerment and arts for social change. As we made our way around the event meeting dancers and community members gathered at Jubileo Christian Club, I became aware of how tight-knit this group was in their mission to help the community center and the community’s children. A Brown University affiliated judge for the competition named Donnie urged dancers not to engage in profane expressions toward their opponents so they could be stronger role models for the children present, and the room was filled with applause. Pierre also entered the competition, taking on Poppin’ Groove in a 1 on 1 popping battle!

Outside of this place of positive energy and social progress, a story of hardship was unfolding. The following events occurred between when we left “Nothing but the Breaks” and the time we reached the RIPTA bus that picked us up from Olneyville:

A police officer ignores a man and a woman with open wounds on their foreheads; it looked as if he had addressed the two injured civilians before deciding not to help. The officer gets in his car and drives away, leaving the teary-eyed couple to abandon a blood stained white jacket on the side of the busy intersection. As the two begin walking away from where they had met the officer, holding their heads as blood visibly runs down their faces, it is clear that no ambulance is coming to help them. We walk directly past them. Pierre tells me to walk faster as my instinct to stop and help starts to take hold. “Walk faster, chap!” he urges again, knowing that I am fundamentally shocked to see authorities completely ignoring the plight of hurt civilians, but reminding me that I don’t want to get involved, especially if the authorities are not going to help the already injured couple we saw. I guess the mild humor of my friend calling me “chap” was the only way I could keep walking without questioning the horror of the situation. (Pierre, if you hadn’t been there, I could have been in serious trouble, so I wanted to say a special thanks to you man, I know you always got my back).

We walked to a bus stop across from Bridgham Middle School, where the state of the school was clearly deteriorating. The letter “B” is unintentionally hanging angled to the “ridgham” part of the name. Two young women slowly chase after a toddler running dangerously close to the busy road. One woman says to the other “one of these days that girl’s gonna get hit by a car.” They walk the child back over to the bus stop, where the little girl begins stacking a small pile of asphalt pebbles next to the edge of the road. An eccentric man in a convertible pulls up to the two women with their small child across from the middle school, stops in the middle of the road while blasting “Shake Ya Tailfeatha,” and has a conversation with them. He then speeds off, with no regard to the infant near the curb.

People in this part of Providence obviously don't see tobacco as the biggest issue that needs to be addressed.

Every passing minute sitting at this bust stop caused me to see the world in a way that refueled my desire to work even harder to make a difference in communities outside the walls of the Brown bubble. I am so grateful that The GR818ERS are helping the youth in San Fernando Valley, CA and that groups on the East coast are helping out in Providence, RI. Because of these charitable groups actively supporting local non-profit youth organizations, the world does not seem like complete chaos, and I believe there is a hope that we can work today to make a brighter future tomorrow.

If you are interested in getting involved and helping the cause, please contact me and visit these sites:

• www.thegr818ers.com
• www.jubileochristianclub.com
• www.layo.org/valley.htm
• www.hazzehiphopcenter.org

On Wednesday afternoon, Brown’s campus was overwhelmed with energy as an anti-homosexual ‘protest’ group brought bagpipes, kilts, and large red banners onto the center of campus. They chanted verses saying that homosexuals will never find happiness, salvation, or love through God or marriage and expected us to stay silent. On top of that, their playing was absolutely awful. This particular contingent of twenty all-white, all-male Catholic zealots from the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family, and Property were advocating the persecution of a group based on their desire to love someone of the same sex. If you don’t see the connection between this kind of hateful rhetoric against gays and fascist persecution of minorities, I suggest you read up on the history of Nazis treatment of homosexuals. Obviously, Brown is a liberal campus, and hundreds of students decided to spend their time defending homosexuals who were undoubtedly scarred by the hating bagpipers. We helped by making signs of our own, chanting pro-equality verses, and eventually marching the TFP off of campus. In other words, BROWN WAS HAVING NONE OF THAT.

Do you think that I’m going to let a bunch of bagpipers spew hate-filled religious messages on MY campus? I heard the protest as I left class and charged to the front of the gathering crowds of Brown students to scream “What do we want? EQUALITY! When do we want it? NOW!” for a good ten or fifteen minutes, when Sarah Engle ’11 totally pwned these fools on their knowledge of scripture. Apparently there are no verses in the Bible saying that homosexuality is a sin; read up on it here!

After a few minutes, I ran back to my room to assemble my saxophone. I put the mouthpiece together and decided to disrupt their verses and bagpipery by making high-pitched squealing noises to the rhythm of “2-4-6-8 get your hate out of our state!” I think our group was quite effective, because after a few minutes of this the Brown crowd’s chants were overpowering the TFP and they disassembled and began leaving. We wanted to make sure they were leaving for good, so we followed them the whole way out chanting “God Bless Gays!” Once they left, I started to play “The Star Spangled Banner” (noted in the Brown Daily Herald!)

The group posted to their blog (right near the “don’t trust evolution” posts) calling to “watch the SHOCKING video.” Is it that shocking that we didn’t want you on our campus? That we didn’t want you to possibly encourage homosexuals who are insecure to commit suicide as they have on other campuses? They had this to say about our protest-of-the-protest:

“Brown: “If you talk to Father so and so, he’ll tell you that he’s in favor of same-sex ‘marriage.’”

TFP: “If he does, then he’s not faithful to the teachings of the Church.”"

GUESS WHAT? THERE’S VERY STRONG CATHOLIC SUPPORT FOR GAY MARRIAGE!

In the TFP’s video, I got a few special appearances!

This is a crowd of angry Brown students chanting "2-4-6-8 Get your hate out of our state!" as the TFP leaves our campus

The point of all of this is that if you’re a straight person (as we are told the TFP is comprised of) your way of life will not be affected at all by gay marriage. It doesn’t have anything to do with your right to marry, so why should you be unhappy about it? However, if you let a group persecute a minority like TFP does to homosexuals, there’s nothing to stop the TFP for persecuting anyone else for whatever minority status they want to label you with. What if they felt it was okay to shout “Jews are sinners” or “Muslims are evil” just because they have the right to free speech? I will always support gay rights because homosexuals contribute greatly to our world, and I believe that they have the right to be in love with people of the same sex and to marry those people. Gays don’t have to marry through the Catholic church if the church doesn’t want it, but the government should recognize that some religions support gay marriage just like they support heterosexual marriage. Defending homosexuals is crucial to protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

***NOTE: I originally wrote an entire post directed toward one commenter named MJoeLB when I realized, this is my blog. I shouldn’t spend an entire post directed toward one guy when I’m talking about a whole organization!***

Now, there are some seriously messed up things floating around the TFP website (which translates into messed up things floating around the heads of TFPers). First, their website claims that there is a dictatorship being brought about by people who fight for equality. Tradition, Family, and Property believes that equality is immoral! From their website:

An egalitarian person hates all inequalities, including distinguishing between the sexes or within the family:
• There is no recognition of any social, political, economical or other like distinction between men and women.
• Equality of roles and behavior between husband and wife, parents and children are promoted.

The Harmony of the Universe Demands Proportional Inequality

Inequality is a law of nature. God made everything with inequality. In all realms of creation there is inequality. The more perfect a being is, the greater is the inequality.

Fatherhood adds to a man’s condition something that makes him worthy of greater respect and consideration, in that he has become, as it were, a “partner” in God’s work of creation by begetting new life. In addition, parental authority participates in Divine authority. Therefore, the “paternity” accident gives parents a right to be obeyed by their children and be respected by society.

Similarly, government officials (whatever the form of government may be—monarchy, aristocracy or democracy), as well as teachers, employers and all those invested with lawful authority, participate in Divine authority and are therefore entitled to be obeyed and honored accordingly.- www.TFP.org

To begin, they make the father automatically more important than the mother. I have a huge problem with that because the role models in my life have been both male and female, and I would never diminish the importance of the women who raised me simply because they were women. Next, they claim there’s no difference between respecting a democracy and respecting a monarchy or a fascist dictatorship? I think the TFP would have no problem saluting a Nazi regime! They are using the logic that “if a government’s in power, it deserves respect.” So what if the government suddenly decided to ban the TFP from its right to free speech? Would the government deserve respect then?

The beauty of the rainbow is possible only through the harmonious inequality of its colors; and this harmony makes the rainbow more beautiful as a whole than in each color taken separately. Likewise, proportional inequality among musical notes is what makes music and gives it its beauty…

Once more, we see here yet another evil of abortion: it deprives society of millions of people with unique talents, who, according to God’s plan, had been called to contribute to the general welfare and happiness of other individuals. – www.TFP.org

You don’t want to deprive society of millions of people with unique talents who, according to God’s plan, had been called to contribute to the general welfare and happiness of other individuals, do you? That sounds a lot like advocating for gay rights; don’t deprive them of the right to contribute to society’s general welfare before you get to know them! You don’t want the separation of colors in the rainbow; you want all of the colors to get along! Of course, you want harmony between all the different notes! So you shouldn’t fight to separate gays from married communities, you should let hetero and gay married couples exist in harmony! It doesn’t mean that heterosexuals are gay, it means they are separate and existing next to one another peacefully, right? (Actually, the more I think about it, your logic sounds a lot like Plessy v. Ferguson’s 1898 “Separate but Equal” ruling for black and white citizens.)

Organizations like yours that try to prop up that one supporter who isn’t a white man to say “you liberals/leftist/communist/educated people don’t recognize our diversity” but at the same time advocate for total inequality between men and women, between classes, and between people in general, are so hypocritical that it is hard to begin a discussion. You believe in a hierarchy of rights as dictated by any form of government, whether it be authoritarian or democratic, and therefore support any government that makes minorities second-class citizens so long as they are “paternalistic.” And don’t you see the dangers in blindly supporting any government that happens to hold power over your livelihood? What if the paternal government you support decides to persecute TFP as a minority for being Catholic, as was the case in Nazi Germany? Through your logic, you could fully support slavery and/or fascism. Don’t pretend like you care about diversity if you hate equality, TFP!

P.S. If you support gay rights, watch the musical I wrote called “Second Lady!”

I'm playing guitar in the politically-themed "Second Lady", so I decided to paint it!

During my fifth semester at Brown, I took a class called “Musical Theater Songwriting”, where every student in the class worked with new musicians to write original songs on a weekly basis. Two songs I wrote that semester, “Second Lady” with Carolina Barry and Phoebe Nir, and “To Build a Den” with Alex Yuly, were produced as full-fledged mini-musicals this weekend!

Here’s an article in the Brown Daily Herald about these musicals!

I could not have been happier with the two casts that my fellow writers and I were able to entice into this strange set of musicals.

To the cast of Second Lady:

As the musical director for “Second Lady” and only given two weeks to prepare a fresh group of singers to perform the entire musical, I found that there was not enough time to instruct another guitarist to take my place, so I resolved to perform the show. It was this turn of events that gave me the chance to really get to know the cast, to hear their full vocal abilities, and to rework the music to emphasize their best ranges. Michael Gale, a freshman who made an unforgettable debut performance at Brown with “Second Lady”; Katie Jennings, an awesome senior who surprisingly has done more than one tango-related minimusical at Brown; Elsa Obus, a sophomore who gracefully transformed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into a romantic ballad; and Zack McKenzie, a freshmen whose never acted before yet his single line stole the show; all of these wonderfully talented and attractive (see picture below) actors and actresses were so much fun to work with, and I couldn’t have asked for better people to play the parts! Mike, Elsa, Katie, and Zack, you all are wonderful and this has been one of my best experiences in composing and performing music! I want to give a special thanks to Jon Cox for making the tango scene and the debate scene so much fun for me to play and for the cast to dance to by bringing his talented trombone skills to the musical!

While I focused on the chords, notes, and rhythms of the songs, our director Emily Kassie was able to transform the sheet music into an entire visual experience, complete with an all-out tango scene, coordinated dances throughout the musical, and acting cues that really brought the words to life. Emily was responsible not only for bringing the work to life on the stage, but she also displayed strong leadership and united the whole cast starting from day one with unique, fun, and productive warm-ups (i.e. DIDDLY DA, zip zap zop, be a buddah) and an unstoppable positive attitude that helped us keep the energy strong through every rehearsal and every performance. Emily worked so hard to make this play go off without a hitch, and I believe she did a fantastic job!

From left to right, Zack McKenzie, Emily Kassie, Elsia Obus, Katie Jennings, Michael Gale. I'm in front.

To the cast of Grizzly Man: The Musical

Casting Caroline Martin as Timothy Treadwell could not have been a better choice; on top of the humor of casting an African American girl as the white male bear wrangler, Caroline is a talented comedic improviser who brought a completely new set of hilarious lines to each performance, as well as a very talented singer. Natalie Kleeman, playing Timothy’s girlfriend Amy, is also a talented singer and actress; seeing her perform the song I wrote with Alex Yuly last semester “To Build a Den” with Caroline was a blast and I am honored to have two such amazing people perform that original work. Of course, our lively cast of animals was what truly brought the performance right into the audience’s laps; Annie, Will, Isaac, Jenny, and Alexis, you all are great and I can’t thank you enough for giving every single performance your all and being the beariest bears (and foxiest foxes, Alexis) ever!

Sam Koplewicz directed Grizzly Man: The Musical, and I was so impressed at how well he incorporated his vision of the multimedia experience combining actual footage from the “Grizzly Man” documentary with the songs and dialogue we had written. He was able to tap into the energy and passion of his cast and create an awesome live performance experience!

To Alex Yuly, Phoebe Nir, and Carolina Barry-Laso:

What an adventure this has been! It is amazing how much our musicals progressed from the first day they were accepted by the BrownBrokers board. I can’t tell you all enough how happy it has made me to work with you, our creative energies combined to make some really kick-ass productions this weekend. Carolina, thank you for pushing us to get the applications for both musicals in – I can’t imagine one without the other! And don’t worry, we’ll find a way to incorporate the cut song “Time to Mate” (featuring Timothy mating with a bear) into a future production! Alex, thank you for taking charge of the musical direction and guitar accompaniment for Grizzly Man, writing songs with you and Carolina was awesome! Phoebe, thank you for being determined for the ending of “Second Lady” to be Straight turning gay with the addition of Staffer Paul and, at the same time, being flexible in changing the ending script which allowed the musical to become the powerhouse we presented!

You may be saying to yourself as you read this “Sam, you’re being awfully dramatic. That musical theater songwriting class you took has surely made you even more hyperbolic than ever before; this television show simply cannot be as offensive to the soul as you say, my sir!” Nay. This program has single-handedly challenged whatever form of acceptance I once had for truly poor taste in media consumption. My parents started watching Bones as soon as we got Netflix on Demand to stream through the living room television, and have been watching every episode (they are now half way through Season Four) from the pilot on, so I can say to you safely that I have given this show more than an ample chance to win my heart over. Over the course of the past few weeks, I have seen science, drama, and comedy utterly butchered by this program’s bizarre and, at all times outrageous, plot developments involving comic book fans, British people, crime-solving hologram computers, sex toys, ghosts, goths, and the Illuminati. I have witnessed mild-mannered Zach Addy transform from a loyal and dependable sidekick to forensic anthropologist Temperance “Bones” Brennan into a cannibalistic freemason who can manipulate Argon to diffuse explosives. I have seen multiple episodes in which FBI agent Seely Booth is praised for verbal harassment of innocent suspects, even physically beating a hockey player on an ice skating rink until he spat bled in order to collect DNA evidence, only to find he was completely innocent. I have seen a crime lab set up within The Jeffersonian “Medico-Legal” Institute, and prosecution threatened against suspects based on the hypothetical murder scenarios ‘artistically represented’ on a three-dimensional hologram computer deep inside this place that seems extremely technically advanced even compared with CSI (I guess D.C.’s got a bigger budget than Las Vegas and Miami). Off the top of my head, I can think of at least three different cases where Bones, Booth, and/or the entire team at The Jeffersonian has violated federal laws in order to obtain or completely synthesize evidence or to physically harm guilty people for no apparent reason other than frustration and hatred of ‘evil’, yet I can only think of one episode in four entire seasons where I saw Booth read someone their Miranda rights before cuffing the person. This isn’t to say that I’ve watched four seasons of Bones, but I am saying that inside my house I have overheard snippets while Mom and Dad find some kind of entertainment value in watching this show other than utter shock at how scientifically false or legally frightening the real world of forensics would be if anything in the Bones universe were to come true.

Somehow, the way this show sucks people in reminds me of how Lost or 24 or House manages to draw viewers; boatloads of sex, violence, and a couple of misguided side-plots about drugs here and there. The comments made by Camille, the team’s seemingly sex crazed leader, would be some of the worst examples of sexual harassment in the workplace should anyone under her seem to mind. What Bones does, which I can’t say these other three Fox blasts do, is it manages to demonize a certain subsection of the population as blood-thirsty murderers on a regular basis. That subsection is, of course, the comic-book collecting population of felons in maximum-security prison. The first episode of the show I watched was about comic-book killers, and it featured Bones and Booth discovering the body of a young boy dressed in a makeshift superhero outfit. For a solid thirty minutes of this episode, the dialogue consisted of Bones saying “I think comic-book nerds are creepy and disgusting” and Booth replying “Bones, you have no social skills at all and your career is playing with corpses but you’re right, the entire fantasy culture is deplorable and consists of depressed masturbating murderers.” The only person who defends the fanboy/fangirl population from being described as utterly psychotic is Zach Addy, who toward the end of Season Two or Three turns out to be a cannibal freemason serial killer, so his opinion doesn’t weigh too heavily in favor of our comic-loving friends. The dead boy’s mother and father barely react to the news of his death, saying only that they wished he hadn’t spent so much time living in his fantasy world when it casually comes up that their child had a terminal illness and the fantasy-driven world of comic books was the only source of happiness he could find knowing his life expectancy was short. Oops! It doesn’t stop there, as Booth and Brennan chase around Avenged Sevenfold-loving hooligans around Washington D.C. only to find that it was in fact the domestically abusive non-fantasy obsessed owner of a bowling alley who murdered the young boy who threatened to expose the abusive treatment of the damsel in distress wife. Turns out the killers were not the kids with the mowhawks and blue hair; it was just the ordinary looking dude! Thankfully, Asian artist Angela makes great use of 3D technology to show the young man being stabbed in the neck repeatedly by a fictional villain character from his own self-drawn comic book, and buries him along with a final colorized version of his comic. Isn’t Angela great? I’m so glad the fictional government is paying her fictional dollars to do this kind of eye-candy work!

Angela! Setting stereotypes for Asians and women at work since 2005!

The next episode involving comic-inspired mayhem begins with three teenage boys dressed as a wizard, an archer, and a peasant Black boy walking into what appears to be a sewer on the edge of those woods in D.C. (you know the ones I’m talking about!) only to discover a family of rats playing in the heavily rotting corpse of a female Asian woman. Temperance and the eye-candy blond FBI woman begin profiling a host of people at ImagiCon, which is apparently the big comic-book convention continuously held in Washington D.C. where this particularly hot-but-dead Asian woman played the hearts and wallets of lovers. Her big find? Excaliber. Fast-forward to some crazy kinky “I like sharp against soft” goth chick that dude Joel Moore from Grandma’s Boy, Avatar, and Dodgeball, ends up having some kind of ridiculous sex with, only to discover that a key piece of evidence is an expandable sex toy called “The Pear of Anguish” that was put inside the Asian woman’s mouth and expanded until her skull became barely recognizable (thankfully her hair was intact). The team at The Jeffersonian waste some more time berating comic-book fans, medieval weapons collectors, fantasy fans, and people who participate in auctions when a man dressed as The Black Knight (I’m pretty sure from Monty Python and The Holy Grail) crashes his car into Bones and her new non-cannibal Psychologist sidekick. Luckily they’re completely unharmed, and Bones fights off this chain mail-clad knight with the dull-edged movie prop Excaliber sword that she organized and rigged an auction to make worth half a million dollars to legitimate collectors. Moore almost loses his job for sleeping with a suspect, but then the team catches the actual bad guy in the end in a Scooby Doo-style “It was the first guy we met at the carnival!” plot twist ending so he doesn’t lose his job in exchange for promising not to sleep with witnesses again. He didn’t say he wouldn’t sleep with the goth chick again now that she’s not a witness! Gotcha!

A hard day's work ends at The King's Diner!

Psychology is used in Bones the same way that electrical engineering is used in 24; it’s only brought into play to torture witnesses and suspects to agree with the story that the FBI/police love affair has going to tie seemingly unimportant shards of evidence together into what becomes a mockery of United States entertainment justice. I cannot tell you how many times Booth or the non-cannibal psychologist guy have said “I know you’re lying because your pupils are dilating and your tone of voice is changing.” While murder may be one reason that pupils dilate, have the writers at Fox considered that light may be responsible? Although some may exhibit different tones of voice as a result of cognitive dissonance or some other crap, isn’t it possible that the person who you just walked up to and never met in your life is experiencing some hesitation because they are being harassed by strangers, let alone strangers working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation?

You think this is good television? You cannot tell me that in a single episode, Bones can get away completely clean with STEALING A CORPSE FROM THE FBI, DESTROYING EVIDENCE IN A CASE AGAINST A SERIAL KILLER, AND manage to rescue Booth from an abandoned ship seconds before the entire thing explodes, when the lone serial killer who incapacitated and carried two-hundred pound hockey player Booth from his apartment to the bottom of an abandoned warship, packed enough C4 to destroy the warship, and still had time left in the day to pretend that she was a federal judge is a fifty year old woman with broken ribs WHO CAN’T HOLD UP A SHEET OF PAPER! Oh, that’s right, I forgot to mention that the ghost of a fallen war-buddy helped Booth escape the warship; it also turns out that the military keeps secret records on everyone in the United States, and you can only get access to those records if you ask really nicely. It’s formatted for smart phones, conveniently marketed on Fox Network’s television series Bones! Don’t call it “Spring Cleaning”, that’s the phrase paranoid people call it, as I learned from Booth’s high-rank military brother who has the inexplicable power to do anything so long as his brother’s in danger. If his brother isn’t in trouble, don’t even try reaching this guy, he’s drinking scotch at the same place uptown all day. Just watch The Hero in the Hold to see all of this wrapped up nice and tidy in a forty-three minute episode that ends with a tear jerker scene involving ghosts at Arlington National Cemetery. God Bless You, Fox!

So I return to this ever-present question that lingers in my head: how could my parents, both well-educated physicians, be so entranced by shows with such poor logic as Bones? As I am writing, my parents are watching an episode where a newlywed couple bungee jumps off of a hot air balloon only to confront a corpse over and over again as they plummet toward the ground and spring back up again! I have come to the conclusion that everyone derives a certain pleasure from horrible entertainment even when the viewer is aware of how terrible the entertainment may be, and Fox has milked away many hours of my life in the same way that it has all of ours with predictable attention-seeking cliffhangers, near-nudity gimmicks and plot twists that maintain one’s attention, if not only to divert our attention away from a bad day’s news, then it is at least to make one watch until the final seconds of the program to see the good guys carry the day and the baddies to land themselves life in prison. It helps us all rest well to see “justice” served cold to villains, and rules-be-damned we’ll find a way to catch the bastards and get them sent to the slammer! Who cares if there’s a warrant? Who cares if the evidence would be thrown away in court if the rules weren’t followed? It’s all worth it if the heroes get to whack those senior citizen serial killers over the head with heavy briefcases, spitting on them as they send their terrible, evil souls thundering to the ground! The more red tape you can break with your titanium-thick skull, the better! Maybe there’s a little voice in all of us that wishes there was more excitement like we see on Bones in our everyday lives, or maybe there’s an appeal to imagining a world that’s so clear-cut black and white, good and bad, a world where intuitions can be made facts with mystical scientific explanations like “your pupils are dilating so I know you did something wrong.”

Unfortunately (and I do hate to be “that guy”) I only see an illusion being propped up on national television, a hologram (if you will) that creates scenarios where people can be bullied and pushed around by authorities on the federal and on a personal level so long as those authorities are working for “good” and not for “evil,” and the line between good and evil is only determined by how much conviction you have in your beliefs rather than the contents of those beliefs. I see more than just a show, but rather an entire culture of people who spend time demonizing and persecuting others for their fantasy realms, or wizardry, or any other kind of “make-believe” while these demonizers embrace a culture accepting a reality of ghost accomplices to policemen, blatantly imaginary technology that synthesizes courtroom evidence sending people to life sentences or death row, and verbal harassment becoming more than just accepted but at times encouraged. I hope that everyone who participates in keeping Fox programming this way considers the real psychological consequences of supporting a national broadcasting network, and in a more general sense a public tone of discourse, that attacks the lifestyles of those who choose not to be a part of “the mainstream” images of beauty, wealth, love, profession, and legality that are portrayed through this illusion networks like Fox call “entertainment.” I believe that we, all the people like me who are fed up with ourselves and our friends being fed this negativity, can effectively change the tone of the discussion if we start actively participating in the discussion. This winter I had some great talks with some of my best friends and their families about how stupid it is that voices of hatred and ignorance, specifically the voices of outspoken fear-mongers such as Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh, get so much attention and end up crowding out other voices from the discussion, and we wished there were some way to promote more effective discussions in the mainstream media. My family and I are particularly fed up with people like Sarah Palin who think they know what “blood libel” means; we know that kind of ignorance only brings the nation closer to anti-Semitic thinking. While events like “The Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear)” aimed to stifle the voices of outspoken pundits, I think that instead we need to encourage the voices of the unspoken citizens! Our country is in dire need of discussions between communities of all different types that are in this country because the people of the United States are UNITED by our belief in the freedom to speak openly! People must start talking openly and without fear because if we don’t, Sarah Palin will! I know I will be wrong about some of the things I say, but it will be okay so long as I can have faith that the voices of others will enter civil discussion with me while recognizing my right to free speech as an American citizen.

Jon Stewart recently said of the Arizona shootings that we must find a way to distinguish the violently insane voices of potential murderers from what has become accepted as politics-as-usual on news broadcast. Logically, the only way to do this is to encourage everyone to speak more openly. In doing so, we may be able to peacefully and verbally correct one as sane human beings, and detect potentially dangerous mental and neurological illness in people like the Columbine shooters, or the VT shooter, or the Arizona shooter.

I propose that the way for everyday people to solve the “ignorant pundits dilemma” is for us all to speak up! There’s no way I’m letting my voice go unheard when idiots like Palin are throwing around that kind of idiocy on national television! And there’s no way I’m staying out of the discussion when shows like Bones threaten to discourage young, creative, fantasy-driven minds who might otherwise create great television shows!

And so, it is without further ado that I bring you…

BONERS: The Unofficial Parody of Fox Network’s “Bones”

(Warning: Explicit and offensive to all!)

Be sure to check out the Illustration section to read the comic through and take a longer look at the storyboard!

ALL OF MY VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE IN ONE PLACE

That’s right – over 70 videos from 2007-2010, featuring tons of family, friends, and great times!

Also, Figment is an online literary community for young authors, in which I have currently published nothing other than my satire “The Wasted Land” composed in high school as a rebellion against the awful T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land“!

Take a readthrough by clicking here!

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/27/us/ROBOT.html?ref=science

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-02/ff_aimystery

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/11876041

http://www.braingate2.org/

Also there’s a great song there called “Secrets from the Future” after the interview in the second part of the video.

Jon Stewart also has been keeping up with the WikiLeaks stories recently: November 29, 2010 AND November 30, 2010

WikiLeaks is the most important website on the internet. They have taken the debates over net neutrality, the War on Terror, the financial crisis, and diplomatic relationship-problems in general and thrown as much hidden dug-up facts as they can possibly obtain out into the public sphere. Now all of the closed-door politics behind these global issues, which the public has been told is ‘way over our heads’ are suddenly exposed to the public and things just aren’t adding up. The snide remarks of diplomats in the UN, the undercover work encouraged by Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, Yemen-US weapons trades, uncensored reports of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, are all available at the push of a button. This site scares the government a whole lot, and we’ve heard many politicians from around the world condemn WikiLeaks as “helping spread terror” or as having “no impact at all,” in the words of Putin. Some have asked Obama to label the website and its owner, Julian Assange, as a terrorist organization. While they aren’t being called ‘terrorists’, the State Department has said that it will not cooperate with the website in protecting confidentiality of persons in upcoming documents to be released. Way to go, Hillary.

The site released a video called “Collateral Murder” in April of 2010, and in August had private Ethan McCord talk about his experience when he entered the scene of the massacre where two innocent Reuters reporters (139 have been killed since war began in Iraq), along with unarmed civilians and children, were brutally gunned down by an Apache helicopter (listen to the pilot and gunners remarks as they laugh about sending bullets right through the windshield of a van, killing a father and fatally wounding his children, then the Humvee driver laughing “I think I just ran over a body”).

How did the American government react to this situation?

“The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured.

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own “Rules of Engagement”.

Consequently, WikiLeaks has released the classified Rules of Engagement for 2006, 2007 and 2008, revealing these rules before, during, and after the killings.” (http://www.collateralmurder.com/)

We need to remember that it is not leaked information that is dangerous to the public, as politicians and news sources have said of WikiLeaks in recent days. It is SECRECY that threatens innocent people around the world. Make sure that WikiLeaks is not a lost cause, and that soldiers like Ethan McCord who have to suffer in silence while serving in Iraq and abroad have a place to tell the TRUTH about what happens on the ground, in combat and afterward seeking psychological care for PTSD. Like Ethan McCord says in this video, senseless firing upon civilians, men, women, and children, happens every day in Iraq because it has become a part of the institution of how the war is run. If anything positive can come from the hundreds of thousands of secret failings in the military, international diplomacy, and financial sector (which WikiLeaks says it will release soon) overflowing from this website, it’s that we need to work together as a human race to fight the real problems that face us: disease, starvation, poverty, and natural disaster. If we continue to fight against each other, we will only continue to spread disease, starvation, poverty, and disaster on a global scale.

WikiLeaks’s existence is constantly threatened, and needs support. I think I’ve got a few ideas in mind for how I could raise some support for the site, but I’m just going to throw ideas out there and ask you what you think (if no one responds, I’ll probably just do something on my own and see what happens).

1. Record some songs, sell it as an album, donate the money.
2. Make a video for a contest over break, donate the winnings.
3. Spread their AWESOME wallpapers to friends who are willing to download them from their site:

Goodbye California, I’ll be back soon!