RIP the Very Yellow One

I had my pet salamander since before I was married 25 years ago. This one was my favorite and I used him on several logos for my blog. I’ll be taking them off soon as he died yesterday and it seems inappropriate to use a dead friend. Maby I can make him into a silloute or cartoon as I have Mao and other historical figures, but he is dead and although he may not seem like much being just a small animal with a small brain, he was very friendly and I always enjoyed having him. He live a long time and I guess that’s what matters most. I got him from a fish bait store when he was a larva. He’s been a land pet for years now. 25 years is a good life for a salamander so I guess I should be grateful that I had him so long. He didn’t really have a name since he couldn’t read or hear. I guess I just refered to him as the Very Yellow One.

A Lesson in Concrete poetry

This is the concrete poem b y Dr. 史蒂夫・奥多, The Dr. of poetry. He is a student of Dr. J. Newton Numbskull and has learned much about poetry after all these years. He has also studied under Dr. សតិវ អតុ, another great peot. Just remember, Dr. សតិវ អតុ Respects Taoism and Zen Buddihsm. He just hates belief in the supernatural. He likes Taoism.

Kent State

The following is from my new book, The Pol Pot Journals, a novel about Pol Pot and his rise to power. It is filled with fake news paper accounts, based on real ones showing how the outside world saw and reacted to events in Cambodia. During the Kent State shootings, anti-war students were angered that President Richard Nixon, who promised to get the US out of Vietnam with “honor” had just ordered an invasion into Cambodia. He gave a televised speech to let the people know what he already had planned and executed in private. He couldn’t have polarized this country more, especially when he had clones such as James Allen Rhodes, of Ohio, to work as one of his own henchmen. Rhodes made no secret of his contempt for anti-war protesters as the following article states. The article is true, but it was condensed and rewritten since this my new book is actually a novel.

Excerpts: The Pol Pot Journals:

News Time:
May 11, 1970

“America’s youth: War on war”

Campus violence has erupted since President Richard Nixon decided to send thousands of troops across the border into Cambodia. Students called for immediate “provisional” strikes, across the country. One of the worst cases of violence was in Ohio last week.
Kent State, an obscure teachers college, became the national center of the anti-war debate, when National Guardsman opened fired, indiscriminately, on a crowd of about 2,000 unarmed students.
At first there was a carnival like atmosphere as students were drinking beer and dancing. Some students began using gasoline to light fires. Governor James Rhodes arrived. Without consulting the president of the college, Robert White, he began dispensing National Guard troops throughout the campus. There were about 500 in an hour. Rhodes said the campus trouble makers were worse than “brown-shirts, communists and vigilantes.”
He announced that he had banned all demonstrations, but he students hollered “This is our campus.”
Rhodes said “Evacuate the Commons area. You have no right to assemble.”
To that the students yelled back “Pigs of Campus! We don’t want your war”
At first tear gas was fired into the crowd, then the guards started running out and getting nervous. Facing rock throwing students, the guards retreated, but many held their guns, M-16 riffles, on the crowd. The guards opened fire and many students thought they were blanks at first.
“My God, this is for real,” a student shouted as she realized the bullets were chipping things around her.
Students began to run for cover.
“My God, they’re killing us,” one terrified girl said. A river of blood flowed from the head of one boy, while another tried to stop the profuse bleeding of another boy’s stomach. When the shooting stopped, four young people, none of whom were radicals for even protest leaders, were dead. Ten students were wounded.





“There can never be peace for those who have waged war on the innocent” - 史蒂夫・奥多

Summer jobs

What kind of crappy shit job will I end up with?



And what kind of boss?
The Dumbass?



The Pompous prick?

The just plain unbearable lightness of (wish there was no) being?

The totally unbearable?

Maybe I'll get lucky---when pigs fly

Kirbys is opened again

I found out Friday, real late before I could go. My oasis in this dung pile is back.
Since I have hep C, I can't really drink any more. There are times when I wish I could. Sometimes I don't miss it, other times I miss getting stinking drunk and making a complete ass of myself.

(for the record, there's only a 3% chance of some one getting that through having sex with me)

One thing that really pisses me off is that hep C is caused by a virus and many people believe they are not really living things. Just biological mechanical microbes. So why can't I at least have a disease cause by something living, like a protozoa, worm or bacterium. No…. I get sick from a biological robot, and I hate robots.

Happy Days are here again.

The history of censorship - the Comstock Act

An excerpt from: Can You Pass the Acid Test?: A History of the Drug and Sex Counterculture and Its Censorship in the 20th Century


The Comstock Act

History of the Early Underground Press
It’s hard to say when underground newspapers really got their start.
Author Laurence Leamer said the first underground newspaper actually
surfaced in 1690, the Public Occurrences. It was banned after one issue,
by Boston officials, for being too critical. Ben Franklin’s brother James
was thrown in prison for satirizing the local government with his New
England Currant. By 1892 there was an estimated 900 papers dominated
by the Populist movement. Between 1912 and 1913 many socialist papers
had begun to appear. From Girard, Kansas, there was Appeal to Reason.337
Some of these papers had huge circulations. The Halletsville Texas Rebel

had a circulation of 35,000.338
As with magazines, most of the cultural opposition to America’s
Puritanism came from anarchist-oriented papers such as Lucifer, the
Light-Bearer. It was a well-known newspaper published in Valley Falls,
Kansas, that advocated anarchy and free love (1880 to 1907).
The paper often had poems or editorials on its front page. Its attacks of
sexual codes were very similar to those made by the 1960s and 1970s
counterculture. An example of such writings was called “Survival of the
Fear of Sex”:
“The Censor has the support of the body of the people because, third
and particularly, the fact of sex is held to be a blunder of God or nature,
one or the other, as your sexphobist’s viewpoint is that of the Theist and
Christian, or the Rationalist.”
The censor he talked about concerned a court case used to try and shut
the paper down and imprison its publisher, under obscenity charges. The
article appeared in the Nov. 5, 1903, edition. Other comments in the
editorial include:
“The religious belief was that this world is merely a temporary
stopping-place in which we prepare for heaven or hell. Whatever distracts
our attention from our future home, one or the other place named, is bad
for our souls. If we are happy here we are likely to forget God and go to
hell. If we are miserable here we are likely to be reminded of God and go
to heaven. The fear of sex is about the only survival of it that is doing
business amongst us. It was said that not even ambition wealth and fame
were so apt to turn men’s thoughts from God and his saints and from the
devil and his never-dying worms as were sexual joy and domestic
happiness.”339
Other articles typical of the paper include “Rulers Are Not
Originators,” by Thomas Henry Huckle, in that same issue. He states that
political reforms or improvements have never originated from leaders.
Just as the 1960s counterculture was concerned with the war in
Indochina, Lucifer also commented on foreign wars. On the front page of
one issue (Oct. 17, 1903), was a news brief that criticized English liberals
for wanting to go to war in Turkey on behalf of Christians living in
Macedonia.

Early Censorship
Lucifer’s editor, Moses Harmon, was convicted of obscenity in the
federal courts in 1904. Lucifer was repeatedly held by postal
authorities.340 Much of this was the work of the “Comstock Act,” named
after a sexual moral crusader at the turn of the century.
Anthony Comstock was a Christian social activist who took it upon
himself to use censorship laws to suppress anything of a sexual nature. His
crusades caught the eye of the New York Young Men’s Christian
Association (YMCA). They gave him a salaried position. He not only
campaigned against pornography and sinful behavior, he lobbied for
federal and state anti-obscenity legislation. This led to the Comstock Act,
which gave an offender up to ten years imprisonment for mailing or
receiving “obscene, lewd or lascivious” printed and graphic material.341
Then, as now, there are those who attempted to use censorship to close
down newspapers. Although the reason for censorship was sexual
material, it spilled over into political and philosophy debates, just as it did
in the later part of the 20th century. Censorship laws have always tried to
protect the culture of the status quo.

Still available from Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

http://steveottosbooks.tk/

Where’s the grim reaper when you need him?

I’m feeling OK about now. I have electricity. If I didn’t, I couldn’t write this new poém. This is from my book Poems of the Great Poets. (unpublished)

By 史蒂夫・奥多

Public Utilities

I came home yesterday with a surprise in my door,

It was after five,

Electricity no more,

No warnings in the mail,

No one coming to the door,

Perhaps a phone call,

Sounds like a solicitor and nothing more,

I had the sudden urge to kill,

One less beauracrat taking up my space,

My air, our food, our gas to fill his/her SUV,

One more person with a head full of air,

If we split it like a melon no one would care,

He/she is no gain in keeping, no loss to get rid of,

The body would make great fertilizer as opposed to what it does now.

“We’re a public utility, a monopoly,

Surely you expect us to act like that!?”

Where’s the Grim Reaper when we need him?

1990 Clark Dissmeyer

Unknown Part 2 –brought to you by Hell Muck Cards

By 史蒂夫・奥多


Life is like a box of chocolates,
You never know what you’re going to get.
Sometimes the box is empty,
Sometimes there’s just an IOU from some one who took the chocolates,
Sometimes the chocolates have been replaced with Exlax,
Or shit.
You just never know.
What’s worse is if you bought the chocolates for a lot of money,
The box is empty and they guy sold you the box is dead.


I found out from my doctor I won’t die before the end of May (unless someone runs over me).
I guess that’s like getting a box with one peace of chocolate.

Unknown

Unknown

Fear!
Anxious!
Uncertainty!
The Black whole of my soul!
តុ​សកែរមនឹតែរុរ when I look to the future!
សុតែនិថារ
The black whole

My home away from home, Kirby’s is closed—Owner Steve Schroeder died

For those who do not live in Wichita, but may have seen my earlier blogs describing my city as an open sewer, a magnet for religious and political crackpots, a home of idiotic ideas and backwards thinking, today was a real loss for those who do not fall in that category..
There has always been a pin prick of a sanctuary at a small bar called Kirby's. I've gone there every Friday afternoon now for several years. Today it was closed as the owner, Steve Schroeder died last night. I knew him as all the people there did. Kirby's was no ordinary bar. The website for the bar gives the history:
"Kirby's Beer Store was established in 1972 by Jim Kirby, was established in 1972 by Jim Kirby, who set out to develop an entity that to this day has endured and evolved into one of the most collective gatherings of Musicians, Artists, Hipsters, Heads, Thinkers, Freaks, etc. Please take the time to look over some of the memories taken from within."
It is closed right now. We hope his closest living relative will be able to get the place up and running as soon as possible. Of the many head bars of the late 1970s, Kirby's is the last. While it's not a gay bar, it is gay friendly so gay couples never needed to fear harassment while they were there. Such great bands as the Futants have played there and there has often been a Disco Macob night or goth night.
Those of us who knew Steve will miss him. I've had some great conversations with him. He's not much older than I.
So long Steve and I hope we get Kirby's back.

http://www.kirbysbeerstore.com/