100,000! The Best of Beneath The Tin Foil Hat.

When I started this blog two years ago, I had very little expectation. I figured I would write about what interests me, and put it out on the intertubes for whoever else would care to read it. Hell, I’m surprised I’ve managed to stick with the blog this long. I never imagined that my blog would ever attract this much attention, as modest as that attention may be.

The blog recently passed the 100,000 view mark, and I want to thank everyone of you who support BTTFH. It’s been a lot of fun putting myself out there, as well as meeting and interacting with so many cool people!

To celebrate, I thought I would share links to my 5 favorite posts, as well as the top 5 posts by view. I hope you enjoy!

Top Five All Time Fan Favorites:

#5 Naked Family
A pic of a family in anatomically correct naked costumes. What’s not to like?

#4: I Got Nothing
Who knew bitching about school and writer’s block, would generate so much interest?

#3 Beneath The Tin Foil Hat Goes Global: My Interview On Russia Today
Like everybody else, I wrote a series of posts about Anders Breivik and the Utoya, Norway massacre. Somehow, my posts caught the attention of a producer on the Russian news network, Russia Today. The interview went horribly wrong, thus ending my brief career as a Russian TV pundit.
It was still fun as hell though!

#2 Dear Republicans
A meme I shared that highlights just how much today’s GOP dislikes – well, they dislike everybody.

#1 From Mittens To Kittens
I posted this shortly before the election, just to put a little irreverence into a tense atmosphere. Who knew so many people like pictures of cats?

My Top Five Favorites

#5 Angry Poetry Week: Howl – Allen Ginsberg
One of the best poems written by one of the best writers to ever walk the face of the earth!

#4 Why God Hates Al Gore: Judeo-Christianity and Ecology.
A small history lesson concerning religion, and it’s sense of entitlement to all things big and small on our planet.

#3 My Response to Republicans Over SB5? F*ck You!
This is me doing what I do best.

#2 The Pueblo Indians of The 17th Century.
Another history post: This one is about those naughty Pueblo Indians.

#1 Where is The Angela Davis of Today’s Generation? She Never Left!
What can I say? I’m a history geek.

Once again, I want to thank everyone who continues to support my little piece of crap blog. I love you all!

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2012 in review: Happy New Year!

I would like to thank everyone who visited my blog, and wish ya’ll a happy and healthy 2013!

 

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 41,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 9 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

 

Bold Liberalism

Reblogged from The Erstwhile Conservative: A Blog of Repentance:

"It's time for percolate-up economics for the middle class."

—Senator Tom Harkin defending the "Rebuild America Act"

his post may separate those of you out there who think you are liberals from those of you who really are.

From philosopher John Rawls I learned the "difference principle," which essentially states that social justice entails creating the kind of society in which the worst among us are as well off as possible.

Read more… 798 more words

Some good stuff here from Duane Graham. For the record, I'm also a firm believer in John Rawls and his "difference principle."

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Angry Poetry Week: Trajectory of the ‘Civilized’ – Michelle Beltano Curtis

Our next poem for angry poetry week comes from Michelle Beltano Curtis, who writes the blog Carving Out a Voice. Michelle writes about a number of issues, including themes about feminism, the environment, otherness, sexuality, aging and illness, in a very distinctive unmitigated voice. Her work has appeared in Ginger Piglet, Voice It!, Lambda Literary Review, and more.

This particular poem from Michelle rails against humanity’s systematic destruction of our planet in the name of Man’s one true god, capitalism. It contains disturbing imagery, and is a very haunting, angry condemnation of the nearly irreversible damage we have managed to wreak upon our planet in a very short time. 

Without further adieu, I give you:  

Trajectory of the ‘Civilized’

Michelle Beltano Curtis

 In honor of Allen Ginsberg

 

                        I

 

The inventor’s hands are speeding cars

following roadmaps of the damned,

metal and glass and gleaming light

of power plants and toy factories

expelling great gasps of endless vapors

hexavalent chromium, strontium chromate,

toxins in our air tongues can only trip on,

turn lakes and rivers neon green, vapid blue,

unthinking orbs mark the journey

skies a burnished haze of baby shit at dawn,

and aren’t the evening skies of dusk delightful

in rainbow shades of obliteration?

An unnatural world in endless trails of duplication

we buy for bottom dollar with the click of a mouse.

Instant gratification for our ultimate destruction.

 Hidden at last in heated ash of an angry Sun

we forgot to fear, respect, worship,

trailing incense, canted whispers,

aberrant kisses for Moloch as the forgotten

ends of some unjustified means bring us closer to the end—

 

to pyramids of rotting flesh, burnt offerings

for Madagascan cockroaches

in endless ecstasies—putrid meat

in razor jaws, and we’re on top where

always they insisted we should be,

skin excoriated by excruciating heat,

querulous children with castigated raisin eyes.

Blank sockets occupied once by pale marbles of

millennia ago— before we discovered the interstellar cacophony,

invented macros for love and invention, bought-sold-bartered

love, friends, sex, emotion, through airwaves

once meant for the simple act of sustaining life, breath.

 

                        II

 

Pale marbles in a vertical reality of grasslands and hippopotami

with angular jaws echoing like caverns

their trembling of equine energies,

organic angels without harpsichords

or unrequited love or beards and skirts

or adam’s imperfection; that fucking rib.

No vindicated harpes of eve

or revelations of marriage beds or boys in backseats

no sin on their minds none existed.

Just thumping flesh and pulsing tides

of tangled ecstasy and moaning limbs,

fucking and crying; enraptured motion and ethereal air

amid fat raindrops or crystalline stalactites

of winter’s clean, crunchy breath.

 

Death was life, cyclical journey of cleansing,

fertilizing the roots of new creation

within the ruins and the world cracked open

in splendiferous greens and vibrant hues of red, ochre, azure,

earth’s children huddled in the bosom of her

protective ranges; no us, them,

only all—in the occupation of survival

in the same rhythm of the world, freed

in the youth of the world to flourish to harvest to die

again and again.

 

                        III

Moloch, they worship you and they will sacrifice us all, and in our blind

passivity we deserve your sweltering damnation.

In the end, only that which birthed us will survive to mend

herself among cooling surf and settling rock to create anew

her own treasures of tree and pheasant and monarch.

And in a million years the scientists and archeologists who begin to discover

remnants of a world torn asunder will someday shake their heads at our

foolhardiness while they marvel at our cleverness

all the while fear brings a palsy to their people upon the revelation –

of greed among their own.

 

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Advertisers Are Flushing Rush And Giving His Career a Swirly.

Image via Wikipedia

Let’s see: So far we have 26 advertisers and 2 radio stations that have dumped Rush on his oxy saturated sexist ass. WHOOSH! You here that? WHOOSH! There it goes again! WHOOSH! It sounds to me like Rush’s broadcasting career is going down the toilet. Keep flushing, because a turd that big won’t go down easy. Maybe we should break it up with a toilet brush.

WHOOSH!

http://thinkprogress.org/media/2012/03/06/438817/four-more-advertisers-ditching-rush-limbaugh/

Posted from my CrapBerry

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America the Pacified (via Carving Out a Voice)

As most of you may know, I tend to write a little on the angry side I also love to read other works that lean to anger and outrage as well. My partner Michelle tends to write angry in her poetry (which I love by the way), and she does it better than anyone I know.

Without further adieu, I share with you America the Pacified.

By Michelle Beltano Curtis

Made dumb by reality television
numb by nightly news,
interpreting everything in a lens
of red, white and blue.
A contest of who killed who,
focusing only on minutiae,
views askance, never mind truth;
what’s not reported when focusing
on the robber down the street
or the prize awarded some pale boy
for doing what he already should?

Sheep for the slaughter
enthralled by credit cards.
Buy another cardigan to trash
long before the bill is gone.
America on credit, from the white house
to the white houses with their lying
little picket fences in assembly line
neighborhoods, SUV parked
beside a carcinogenic lawn
while the world chokes to death
on fossil fuels.

‘Cuz in America, we say fuck Mother Nature,
the only world we have to survive upon,
hoping for science fiction miracles.
We’ve lost the delineation
between fantasy and fact.
It’s all sponsored by Koch Industries
and the controlling one percent.

And while we’re at it fuck the future
of our children and exploit your mother, too.
Money is more enticing. Buying
more important than surviving.
And if that’s not enough,
chug down a brew, pick up a gram
of your favorite rescue compliments
of the Mexican mob we spend billions
of dollars on but can’t seem to dislodge.
It keeps us numb, the ninety-nine
percent left struggling along.

It’s only a needle. People do it
every day, because we’re
Americans, home of the privileged few,
the remainder broken and decayed.
But nobody cares, so long as they
don’t take the X-boxes, cell phones;
all our favorite drugs, away.

© 2011. All rights reserved. Reprint with permission of the author only.

via Carving Out a Voice

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And The Winner of Pick Your Topic Tuesday Is:

Talk and Politics with the topic ” my favorite historical event.”  I’m a third year history major, so I just had to pick this one. I have a lot of historical events that I love to talk about, so I’m really going to have to think long and hard about this one! Don’t worry though (as if you were); I will have a bright and shiny new post no later than Friday, complete with all the BTTFH trimmings. As part of winning this week’s contest, Talk and Politics will be featured in the post, complete with his blog information.

My thanks to everyone who posted a suggestion this week. They were all wonderful suggestions! Keep them coming folks!

Everything You Ever Needed To Know About Masturbation: From Unicorn Booty

Hopefully by now, most of you know that I don’t really take myself too seriously, which I think is a good attribute for every blogger to have. In keeping with the sometimes irreverent spirit of my blog, I thought I would share this graphic that tells you everything you need to know about, well, you know

My thanks to Unicorn Booty for sharing this!

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Rick Santorum Is Making It Too Easy!

Image via Wikipedia

I came across this little gem today at ThinkProgress. Rick Santorum, second in America to Fred Phelps in rampant homophobia, has a campaign slogan for his presidential bid.  Mr. Santorum is “Fighting to make America America again.” It’s a great thought; too bad Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes thought of it first. Hughes was a wonderful African-American poet during the renaissance. He wrote many poems that reflected the African-American struggles in white dominated America. He was also a very open homosexual. Hughes was a well spoken advocate for gay rights during a time when being out, particularly black and out, could mean a certain death sentence.

Santorum has stolen borrowed his campaign slogan from a poem of Hughes, titled ” Let America be America again.” According to the article from ThinkProgress, the poem is ” pro-union, pro racial justice, and pro immigrant.” Three issues that I’m sure Santorum holds dear to his heart.

Hmmm, maybe Santorum has decided to remove that massive, gay hating, christian stick from his ass, and is starting to view the world through rainbow-colored glasses. Naaah, it’s more likely he’s never heard of “Let America be America again.” Hell, he’s probably never heard of Langston Hughes. After all, there’s no mention of him in Leviticus.

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A Review Of Obama’s Speech In Haiku

Image by tsevis via Flickr

I know Haiku is not supposed to be metaphorical, but I’m breaking the rules. Here’s my summary of Obama’s address yesterday:

Tiger talks tough
Baboons spew rhetoric
Herd wanders dazed

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