No post today, because the earth has been destroyed.

Don’t take my word for it. Check the IEDAB website.

Well, no new deaths today that I know of, though I haven’t really checked too closely. It’d be pretty eerie if a new celebrity started dying each day for a blog theme, after all. Like Michael Jackson, who is now confirmed to have died of a heart attack. (The default method of dying from having your name written in the notebook from Death Note, as I recall.)

Don’t think we had a firm established theme before that, so I’ll fall back on what I had been doing: posting Frank Zappa songs.

This one’s a rather nice rundown of televangelists and other religious groups, Jesus Thinks You’re A Jerk. Includes jabs at Jim & Tammy, and the Ku Klux Klan, among others. Pity the lyrics shown are occassionally misspelled, or incorrect. (Bush for Pat was one noticed, for example.)

It’s a fun song lambasting various people and groups that need it, anyways. And no, not work safe.

Cox acting up again, Sean?

Well, I was planning on waiting for the next post before posting, but I’ll be leaving for work in less then half an hour, and won’t be back before todays over.

So, I’ll use my superpowers to warp this post several hours in the future. Hopefully there will be another post up by then.

So, not knowing what the theme is, I’ll post a They Might Be Giants song, Shadow Government. As with many TMBG songs, it’s catchy and surreal.

Where's The Shadow Government when you need them?
It's a bad bad world...

You watch Rush Limbaugh? And if it helps, when I listen to IRA songs, they usually are songs from the old IRA, which signed a treaty with Britain, forming Northern Ireland, and not the later IRA that wasn’t satisfied with the treaty.

Ah, well, if we’re going to keep playing IRA songs, the original copy of Óró sé do bheatha ‘bhaile that I posted, as sung by Sinead O’Connor has gone where most youtube videos go, so I may as well post Darach Ó Catháin singing it[1]. Ever notice that What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor? borrowed its tune from this song?

And you know, with all this talk of war, there are a couple great truths to remember:

1) War is Stupid.

2) People are Stupid.

3) Boy George likes wearing womans clothing.

And here’s a song that exemplifies all three of these truths, The War Song. (and it’s funny how songs I reject posting to the blog end up coming back around and being posted eventually.)

[1] Yes, there are still plenty of clips with Sinead singing it, but I’ve already heard her singing it quite a few times…

Well, you know, Sean, the civil war was a little more complex then that.

Figure, first of all, slavery had been starting to die out. Then, around 1800, along comes the cotton gin. Suddenly, laborers could produce 50 times as much cotton in a day. And cotton was big business. So they started growing cotton everywhere, in a lot of places that they had been growing food (which led to a food shortage, incidentally).

Suddenly they were all growing one crop. (Sound familiar?). The south’s economy became dependant on cotton, which was dependant on slavery. At the same time, abolitionism was getting strong in the North. And, of course, Britain had abolished slavery in 1833, so that was going on in the background.

And we were doing a whole ton of expansion. We had a bunch of land, and we were carving it out into states. The fact that we had a bunch of land shouldn’t be too surprising; this was about the time that we forced 15000+ American indians to march 1000+ miles, with a massive death toll.

We needed to expand, too. We had a large influx of immigrants coming in from Ireland excaping the potato famine. However, the north didn’t want to allow  slavery in the new states that were being formed. And the south basically felt this would marginalise them, and lead to slavery being abolished entirely.

Not to mention that tensions were high anyways, with the issue of runaway slaves that made it to the North. What pushed things over the edge was that the Republican candidate running, Lincoln, had been compaigning on new states not allowing slavery.

His name didn’t even get on the ballots in most southern states, but the Democratic party was heavily split at the time, and he got in anyways, with 39% of the popular vote. And that is when the secession of a bunch of southern states happened.

This wasn’t the only reason for them to leave, either. There’d been some fairly high taxes at the time that were affecting mainly the south, and at that point, they didn’t feel the federal government was serving their interests.

A war didn’t really have to come out of it. We could have let them go on their merry way. But the federal government wasn’t willing to let any states leave for any reason. And that is how the civil war started. And the victory for the north tightened the grip of the federal government over the states.

But we were supposed to be playing music here, rather then writing essays about history, so why don’t I play some music from the civil war?

Here’s a song celebrating the flag of the Confederacy, The Bonnie Blue Star:

And here we have The Battle Cry of Freedom, on the Union side:

From all this, you can deduce one thing; Americans are crap at writing good civil war songs. The Irish have them beat all over with IRA songs, a number of which I’ve played here before (like Óró ’s é do bheatha ‘bhaile; that song’s awesome). Just for fun, here’s one more, One Shot Paddy:

I wouldn’t exactly call the Great Famine an act of God, Shanoah. The reasons are a little hard to explain, so just stay with me here.

First off, most of the land in Ireland was owned by about 8,000 landlords who – surprise, surprise – were English descendants. They rented out their lands to tenant farmers who, in turn, rented out their land to subistence farmers called cottiers.

And cottiers had it good, let me tell you. In return for tilling the tenants farmers’ land, the cottiers got the priceless privelege of tilling their own teeny tiny plots of land. They weren’t paid, mind, but they could grow their own food and – crazy, I know – keep it.

Well, turns out that the potato is perfect for growing in teeny tiny plots of land. I read somewhere that you could feed six people for a year on just an acre of potatoes. Whether this is true or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that, by 1845, when the famine broke out, most of the rural population was living on potatoes and buttermilk… and nothing else.

So let’s break it down. You have an entire population relying on one crop for its subsistence and, once the famine breaks out, a distant government that devolves all responsibility for dealing with the disaster to local government and the free market. (Sound familiar?)

As with most disasters, the gun was cocked long before the Great Famine. All the potato blight did was pull the trigger.

Again, sound familiar?

You’re right in one thing, though, Shanoah. The oppressed rarely manage to blow up the Death Star or kill the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham. A certain exchange from the film adaptation of V for Vendetta comes to mind:

“What do you think will happen?”
“What usually happens when people without guns stand up to people with guns.”

So, yeah, treasure the few times when the oppressed have managed to pull it off.

This song, Hard Times Come Again No More, was written in 1854 by Steven Foster. It was a popular song back during the American Civil War, when about half the United States had a collective temper tantrum because the mean old Fedril Gubmint wouldn’t let them own human beings as property. This version is sung by Mavis Staples, who pretty much sang the soundtrack for another struggle in the South, the civil rights movement.

The civil rights movements is one of those few times when the rebels did manage to blow up the Death Star. And they did it without firing a shot, too. Not bad.

Courtesy of Ellis Creative (site here).

By the way, Shanoah, I just thought of this: Guess what the English band was playing when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the nosepicking Continental Army at Yorktown. Why, it was The World Turned Upside Down.

Of course, this may not be true; I doubt an English military band would play a protest song against the English. That would sort of be like the boys in the NYPD choir singing Cop Killer. And like most things of this sort, I don’t care. A line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance comes to mind: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Well, meant to post this earlier, but I fell asleep. I’m going to make this one relatively quick, anyways.

This song is The World Turned Upside Down by Leon Rosselson, and is essentally a modernization of The Diggers song, from the 17th century. It’s basically a protest song about land rights. And, well, I like protest songs, as well as murder ballads, songs about outlaws, etc…

Of course, the diggers had fairly fnord communist[1] fnord views, too. Don’t really care about that, though. The song follows a trend I’ve noticed: a peaceful, proud community of people who get crushed and oppressed by the British. I tend to like songs like that for some reason.

[1] fnord Communist fnord is one of these trigger words that people tend to not think clearly when it’s mentioned, and substitute something like mother-raping baby-killing bastard for. Sort of like liberal.

It’s not really a horrible thing so much as something that idealists like to think will work, that tends to lead to lots of corruption if tried in the real world. Because if you try to share everything equally, someone is going to end up stashing all that they can grab somewhere along the line.

Of course, democracy has it’s own problems. It really requires a nation of educated voters, otherwise things like George W Bush happen. Of course, we aren’t really a democracy, either; we’re a democratic republic. Important thing to remember.

But enough political rambling…

Why, yes it was, Sean. In fact, I remember at least one quip about The Naked Time in the review I linked to. And, yes, the possibilities with sex androids are endless. Which is probably why Tasha Yar was so thrilled.

But if you’re going to post a fake documentary clip, I’ll post a fake documentary movie trailer. You see, there was this movie called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed by Ben Stein that was supposed to talk about Evolution and Intelligent Design[1], but was actually one big propaganda piece.

Well, I can’t really judge, not having seen it, but it looked like it, from the trailer, and people that have seen it claim it was. There are debunking sites for it and everything.

The trailer I’m going to show you I thought was rather amusing, though, and it’s from Richard Dawkins site. It is called Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed. Richard Dawkins as a sex maniac…

[1] A name I’ve never understood for the theory. Even if everything was created by some omnipotent being, take a quick look around you. Wouldn’t a more appropriate name for the idea be Damn Stupid Design?

Yeeeeaaaaaah… The Naked Now. Wasn’t that just the original series episode The Naked Time with a fresh coat of paint and some hot blonde-on-android action for the fanfickers?

Think of the possibilities with an android pleasurebot, though. The positions! The ATTACHMENTS! Star Trek meets Heavy Metal! Woo hoo!

On that somewhat disturbing note… Yesterday was Earth Day, when all of mankind comes together to recognize our stewardship of Earth for our children and our children’s children, the little ingrates. But what about an environmental holiday for non-environmentalists? who go into violent convulsions whenever they hear the words “spotted owl”? Hence, I’m proud, and I’m sure UhhSplat is proud, too, to present this PSA on “Earth Day for the Rest of Us”, otherwise known as Fuck the Earth Day.

Devil’s Advocate: But Sean, don’t you consider yourself an environmentalist?

I do, Mr. Pacino. But that doesn’t mean I can’t laugh at my own beliefs.

Not Work Safe, as if I have to tell you, for repeated use of a Very Bad Word. You know, fuck.

Well, it’s that time of the week again, where Sean takes a break from posting, and I totally diverge from whatever theme we had going, and post whatever I think of.

In this case, I thought I’d play a nicely controversal song by Voltaire. The name of this song is God Thinks. I’ve always loved a nice turn of irony, which this song is dripping with. And you can’t say he isn’t clear on his beliefs. Rated not worksafe for assorted statements that, suprisingly, some people believe.

And you can find a copy of the lyrics here. He certainly likes to stir things up, given lyrics like this:

I hate people who blame the Devil for their own shortcomings and
I hate people who thank God when things go right

And I
I know what God thinks
God thinks you’re an idiot
God prefers a heretic

God God
God thinks all people like you are hateful
God thinks all people like you are an embarrassment to creation
self-righteous, judgmental, first to throw the stone
and using His name for your own protection