Got Milk?

Here is another post in the "stuff I find at work" category. Today's fun new friend is far less terrifying than he looks. This dude is a baby lampropeltis triangulum, or eastern milk snake. Milk snakes are a species of king snake, and can look like corn snakes, fox snakes, and scarlet snakes, but are the only snake that looks like this north of New Jersey.

Young milk snakes, like my friend here, are non venomous and feast on slugs and earthworms, and insects like crickets. Adults mostly eat small lizards, frogs and rodents, but will also go after birds and their eggs and other snakes.

The snake gets it's name because they hang out in barns during the day. Apparently there is no other reason to be found in a barn unless you feed on cows milk... so because people are stupid, we created this myth that milk snakes suck on cow's udders. Idiots.

Poetry Slam: What Was is Again

The current state of things in the United States can seem overwhelming. It's election season. The country is reeling from a number of mass shootings, a water crisis in crumbling urban sprawls, protests for racial equality, and rallies for the underrepresented working class. There is an unpopular president in the White House, a tense relationship with Russia, and international terrorism. The country is wrestling with it's identity, progressing towards a more accepting diverse culture, but still attempting to cling to it's predominantly white, Christian roots.

Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem in 1975 about American involvement in nefarious acts foreign and domestic. The poem critiques capitalism, calling it's competitive nature fuel for anger. The themes of privilege, money and power, and inequality echo the present day and could just have easily been written in 2016. Themes from Black Lives Matter, I am the 99%, and the threat of the Islamic State fit right into the narrative. We still have drug problems. We still have a prison problem. We still have a rich banker problem. We still have a police brutality problem. After reading this, the parallels are very interesting. Those garbage cities are Detroit and Chicago. Those gangsters and goons and strong arm squads are the GOP, the militarized police, the lobbyists and SuperPacs that "got rich on wanting protection for the status quo". You could even swap out Kennedy for Obama in the line "Kennedy stretched and smiled and got double crossed by lowlife goons and agents" and it would make sense.

I've added the whole poem below. Enjoy.

Hadda Be Playing on the Jukebox

It had to be flashin' like the daily double
It had to be playin' on TV
It had to be loud mouthed on the comedy hour
It had to be announced over loud speakers

The CIA and Mafia are in cahoots

It had to be said in old ladies' language
It had to be said in American headlines

Kennedy stretched and smiled and got double crossed by lowlife goons and agents

Rich bankers with criminal connections

Dope pushers in CIA working with dope pushers from Cuba working with a big time
syndicate from Tampa, Florida

And it had to be said with a big mouth

It had to be moaned over factory foghorns
It had to be chattered on car radio news broadcasts
It had to be screamed in the kitchen
It had to be yelled in the basement where uncles were fighting

It had to be howled on the streets by newsboys to bus conductors
It had to be foghorned into New York harbor
It had to echo onto hard hats
It had to turn up the volume in university ballrooms

It had to be written in library books, footnoted
It had to be in the headlines of the Times and the mind
It had to be barked on TV
It had to be heard in alleys through ballroom doors

It had to be played on wire services
It had to be bells ringing
Comedians stopped dead in the middle of a joke in Las Vegas

It had to be FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Costello syndicate
mouthpiece meeting in Central Park, New York weekends,
reported Time magazine

It had to be the Mafia and the CIA together starting war on Cuba,
Bay of Pigs and poison assassination headlines

It had to be dope cops in the Mafia
Who sold all their heroin in America

It had to be the FBI and organized crime working together
in cahoots against the commies

It had to be ringing on multinational cash registers
World-wide laundry for organized criminal money

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI together
They were bigger than Nixon
And they were bigger than war

It had to be a large room full of murder
It had to be a mounted ass- a solid mass of rage
A red hot pen
A scream in the back of the throat

It had to be a kid that can breathe
It had to be in Rockefellers' mouth
It had to be central intelligence, the family, allofthis, the agency Mafia
It had to be organized crime

One big set of gangs working together in cahoots

Hitmen
Murderers everywhere

The secret
The drunk
The brutal
The dirty rich

On top of a slag heap of prisons
Industrial cancer
Plutonium smog
Garbage cities

Grandmas' bed soft from fathers' resentment

It had to be the rulers
They wanted law and order
And they got rich on wanting protection for the status quo

They wanted junkies
They wanted Attica
They wanted Kent State
They wanted war in Indochina

It had to be the CIA and the Mafia and the FBI

Multinational capitalists
Strong armed squads
Private detective agencies for the rich
And their armies and navies and their air force bombing planes

It had to be capitalism
The vortex of this rage
This competition
Man to man

The horses head in a capitalists' bed
The Cuban turf
It rumbles in hitmen
And gang wars across oceans

Bombing Cambodia settled the score when Soviet pilots
manned Egyptian fighter planes

Chiles' red democracy
Bumped off with White House pots and pans

A warning to Mediterranean governments

The secret police have been embraced for decades

The NKVD and CIA keep each other's secrets
The OGBU and DIA never hit their own
The KGB and the FBI are one mind

Brute force and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money
Brute force, world-wide, and full of money

It had to be rich and it had to be powerful
They had to murder in Indonesia 500000
They had to murder in Indochina 2000000
They had to murder in Czechoslovakia
They had to murder in Chile
They had to murder in Russia

And they had to murder in America

New York, May 30, 1975, 3 A.M.

Nerds Cannot Be Satisfied: Superman Edition

The new Warner Brothers/DC movie just came out this weekend. The reviews were much like Man of Steel reviews from 2013. No one has anything good to say about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Basically, if you believe all the reviews, this movie is an overhyped, gauche trainwreck.

To be fair, we kind of all saw this coming as the movie was being made and stuff was being leaked. My first clue that Warner Brothers was going to not be successful like their competition (Marvel Studios and Disney) was their shared universe plan. Instead of doing a few solo films which culminate in one big super team-up (like the Avengers) they were going to do the team up first and then split up into solo films.

Apparently the WB never learns lessons from past experiences. The large team-up movie always sacrifices something that makes a movie good. There are so many characters and so much going on, that either plot, character development, or dialogue (or all three) suffers. Marvel found a solution to this by developing characters in their own solo films, and then combining those characters later on. The characters continue to develop relationships in subsequent movies. Warner/DC decided they had to be different, and their film suffered.

The reviews hate on basically two fronts. The first being the pace and plot of the film, which on the surface doesn't seem to make sense. The second is how uncharacteristic the characters are.

I agree with the first point. There are basically two stories being told in this movie, the Batman story, and the Superman story. Two main plotlines are being told at the same time from two different perspectives. These perspectives then collide in the first part of the third act. The reason the plot makes no sense is because it's two stories being told at the same time, and neither has enough time to establish itself. So instead of one good well rounded plot, we have two semi-realized stories competing with each other. Both of which create their own plot holes. On top of that, there are other side plots and half plots thrown in to add to the confusion.

So, there are problems with the film and it's writing, and plot. However, how the characters are portrayed is not one of them. Comic book fans are the loudest, most difficult to please critics in the history of media. This film once again proves it. The main complaint seems to be "Superman is not Superman enough".

The Man of Steel has had a publication history of 78 years. Since his inception in 1938, Superman gained the powers of flight, xray vision, and heat vision and became bullet proof in addition to his super strength and super speed. He was joined by other super family members like Supergirl, Superwoman, Powergirl, a super dog and a super horse, a few clones, and an entire miniature Kryptonian city in a bottle. He married Lois Lane. Superman died in 1992, came back to life in 1993, and lost his powers altogether for a time in 2006. Superman evolved from an aggressive vigilante who killed, committed arson, and fought the police and national guard to a reserved, responsible protector of justice who upholds the law and works with the authorities.

My point to all this is Superman, like anyone who has been around for almost 80 years, has not been the same and deserves to be written as a more complex, multidimensional character. The fact that Superman has so many superpowers, and is essentially unflawed and indestructible has set him up to be an uninteresting and unrelatable failure. Writing interesting Superman stories is difficult. There are really only two stories to tell. The first is Superman meets another overly super powered man/thing and they punch each other silly until Superman comes out on top. The second is Superman has an existential crisis about how he's the last of his kind, or wrestles with his absolute power and responsibility.

Fans of comics want to see the comic up on a big screen. But which story? There are 78 years of Batman and Superman stories, and not all of them are good. The Superman in Man of Steel and Dawn of Justice is certainly the same Superman from the comics, it may take some looking, but you'll find bits and pieces of him popping up in storylines all throughout his publication history. Personally I would rather have the Henry Cavill Superman badass than the Christopher Reeve no personality Superman, or the Superman straight outa Dragnet that was on television in the 50s.

Instead of complaining about Superman, fans ought to be excited about the awesome Wonder Woman performance. Saying she stole the show and saved the film would be an understatement. I'm kind of disappointed we have to wait until 2017 for her solo film.

The more I think about this film, the less I believe it to be a bad movie. Could the writing have been better? Probably. Could the reason Batman and Superman stop fighting and team up been more realistic? Yes. Are there parts of the film that seemed unnecessary? I can think of a couple dream sequences that could have been left out. But otherwise, the film holds up, and delivers what the obvious title promises.

Feeding Frenzy!

Nature can be terrifying! Look at these monsters, devouring everything in sight! Horrifying! It's a good thing there was a screen between me and these insatiable birds.

These are American Goldfinches, spinis tristis. They don't look very yellow, but it is February, and goldfinches are the only finch to undergo a complete molt. This means they are super bright and yellow in the Summer, and boring and olive colored in the Winter. They like to hang out and feed in groups, like my picture suggests.

I was really hoping these were chicadees, because then I could use a bunch of homonym puns (genuses in the Paridae family are also known as tits or titmice). But, maybe I'll be able to get pictures of that kind of bird another time.

Doggin My Soul Since the Day I was Born

Ray Lamontagne

Trouble

2004, RCA

produced by Ethan Johns

singles-

• Trouble/Burn
• How Come/Crazy
• Forever My Friend
• Jolene/Crazy

This album proves anyone, even a shoe factory worker from Maine, can be the next great singer/songwriter. Ray Lamontagne debuted with this record, and it's amazing. He clearly shows parallels to his influences, Crosby Stills and Nash, Neil Young, Dylan, and Otis Redding. He has a distinct voice, giving off Van Morrison vibes.

Lucy Davies from the BBC wrote in 2004 that Lamontagne "manages to make typical singer-songwriter 3 chord fodder, with subject matter heard a thousand times before sound interesting and fresh". His approach to songwriting, and the way he delivers has helped revitalize the blues genre. Much like Ben Harper and Nathaniel Ratliffe, he plays the blues, but just differently enough to make it new.