January 14, 2008
In space no one can...
As previously mentioned, some time ago I spat out a short piece of warnography bulldada involving the grown-up Peanuts gang involved in a zombie apocalypse and time travel brought on by the Great Pumpkin (an otherworldy demonic horror, you see) with Linus as the corrupted evil sorcerous mastermind. It amused some people, and somewhere an angel got its wings.
I still think that was a fair characterization of a believable Linus path. Here's part of the reason why:
I've been buying the collected chronological sets of the strips as they've come out and as I remember (I imagine I'll stop when I find the point where they lost the undeniable edge it had in its earlier years; I'm curious as to when that may be. My suspicion is it's somewhere around the late 70s or very early 80s; it'll be awhile before the compilations reach that point), and just finished the '61-'62 compilation. One of the strips went like this:
Linus is standing out looking at a starry sky. He is silent for a few frames. One of the frames has the streak of a falling star in it. He goes back into the house. Lucy is sitting in a beanbag, watching television. "Guess what?" he says. "What?" she asks, one presumes, crabbily.
"Falling stars don't scream," he says.
In another strip, originally from December of 1962, he's bringing his own translation of bits of the Dead Sea Scrolls to show and tell.
I'm telling you: budding evil sorcerer.
EDIT: I knew I'd presented other evidence from earlier still, and found the relevant entry. These two posts really contain just a small representative sample, and are not exhaustive by any means. The picture they paint is truly damning.
posted by Gar @ 10:49 AM
I still think that was a fair characterization of a believable Linus path. Here's part of the reason why:
I've been buying the collected chronological sets of the strips as they've come out and as I remember (I imagine I'll stop when I find the point where they lost the undeniable edge it had in its earlier years; I'm curious as to when that may be. My suspicion is it's somewhere around the late 70s or very early 80s; it'll be awhile before the compilations reach that point), and just finished the '61-'62 compilation. One of the strips went like this:
Linus is standing out looking at a starry sky. He is silent for a few frames. One of the frames has the streak of a falling star in it. He goes back into the house. Lucy is sitting in a beanbag, watching television. "Guess what?" he says. "What?" she asks, one presumes, crabbily.
"Falling stars don't scream," he says.
In another strip, originally from December of 1962, he's bringing his own translation of bits of the Dead Sea Scrolls to show and tell.
I'm telling you: budding evil sorcerer.
EDIT: I knew I'd presented other evidence from earlier still, and found the relevant entry. These two posts really contain just a small representative sample, and are not exhaustive by any means. The picture they paint is truly damning.
posted by Gar @ 10:49 AM
January 04, 2008
Prophecy
I do not claim that this makes any rational sense. As an eggheaded intellectual who, spiritually speaking, is close to dead inside, I have a difficult time giving it credence. You can, if you also fall into that taxonomy, probably explain it away as a minor sort of temporal lobe seizure that spread a bit to hit some random memory circuits.
All I know is, the vision came to me entire and whole, in a single flash, as in a flash of lightning in the night as the Dalai Lama said of a major mahayana Buddhist sutra put it. (Or possibly some apocryphal gnostic bit; I may have that phrase indexed wrong.) It came to me while visiting family recently over the holidays, and a commercial promo for something godawfully trite involving dance troupes battling out for AMERICA TO DECIDE who the best was. DanceWar or DanceFight, something like that. Sort of like the end of Blazing Saddles where the cast crashes through into another set, and the angry choreographer leads his troupes into battle, only instead of Slim Pickens it's just another bunch of dancers. On its lonesome, just one of those little byblows of the scorched-earth response to the WGA strike, I imagine--if they're not writing a fresh stream of godawful shit, well, the networks can make even more godawful shit without them. (I also hear American Gladiators is coming back. Mark my words; when the WGA strikes a third time, it will also return then. As it will for the fourth.)
But that's just me being uncharitable. I can trace the causes and conditions of all that. But it was then I saw what was to come. Flash of lightning, yo.
There will be the distant sound of a scream of rage, a voice pushed past all endurance. A burial plot in Mississippi will shudder--and the reanimated corpse of Bill Hicks will explode out of the ground. Swelling with righteous holy fury channeled from beyond the grave, where his spirit was denied rest until his work could truly be done, bones and remnants of flesh and burial clothing will sublimate into a searing white light of holy fire; no longer truly a "body," his zombie will grow to well over a thousand feet tall. The thousand foot tall reanimated corpse of Bill Hicks will stride across the nation, leaving burning footprints in his wake, and tear the network headquarters into something that cannot even be rightly called rubble; no stone will remain atop the other, and indeed there shall be no stones, nor even dust. There will only be craters, which will smolder for centuries to come like the Centralia coal mine fire.
posted by Gar @ 11:19 AM
All I know is, the vision came to me entire and whole, in a single flash, as in a flash of lightning in the night as the Dalai Lama said of a major mahayana Buddhist sutra put it. (Or possibly some apocryphal gnostic bit; I may have that phrase indexed wrong.) It came to me while visiting family recently over the holidays, and a commercial promo for something godawfully trite involving dance troupes battling out for AMERICA TO DECIDE who the best was. DanceWar or DanceFight, something like that. Sort of like the end of Blazing Saddles where the cast crashes through into another set, and the angry choreographer leads his troupes into battle, only instead of Slim Pickens it's just another bunch of dancers. On its lonesome, just one of those little byblows of the scorched-earth response to the WGA strike, I imagine--if they're not writing a fresh stream of godawful shit, well, the networks can make even more godawful shit without them. (I also hear American Gladiators is coming back. Mark my words; when the WGA strikes a third time, it will also return then. As it will for the fourth.)
But that's just me being uncharitable. I can trace the causes and conditions of all that. But it was then I saw what was to come. Flash of lightning, yo.
There will be the distant sound of a scream of rage, a voice pushed past all endurance. A burial plot in Mississippi will shudder--and the reanimated corpse of Bill Hicks will explode out of the ground. Swelling with righteous holy fury channeled from beyond the grave, where his spirit was denied rest until his work could truly be done, bones and remnants of flesh and burial clothing will sublimate into a searing white light of holy fire; no longer truly a "body," his zombie will grow to well over a thousand feet tall. The thousand foot tall reanimated corpse of Bill Hicks will stride across the nation, leaving burning footprints in his wake, and tear the network headquarters into something that cannot even be rightly called rubble; no stone will remain atop the other, and indeed there shall be no stones, nor even dust. There will only be craters, which will smolder for centuries to come like the Centralia coal mine fire.
Labels: bill hicks, prophecy
posted by Gar @ 11:19 AM
