<=============================> < > < ANTI-PRESS EZINE #57 > < > <=============================> "We're Positive About The Negative" This E-dition filed 12/23/05 from NENYland (pronounced nee-nee-land), the northeastern corner of New York State (i.e. the hinterlands). Our Precision Reality Center, located in Plattsburgh -- The Fake City -- features Bull Tracker 9000 with Super Dopeler Radar. (C) Copyright 2005 Anti-Press NOTE: If you want positive negativity hot off the keyboard, check out www.anti-press.blogspot.com . Bookmark it or get a RSS feed via such services as www.bloglines.com . For archived issues of this ezine, check out www.disobey.com/detergent/zines/anti-press_ezine/ . Email subs also available. More details at the end of this E-dition. ================== * Getting Hip To The Prez & Co. * In a recent televised address, President George W. Bush claimed that the United States was winning the war in Iraq, despite the insurgents pressing on with their attacks, despite the specter of civil war hanging over the whole bomb-blasted mess. Do I believe the President? Of course, I do. Look! Here comes Peter Cottontail, hoppin' down the bunny trail, hippity, hoppity. Meanwhile, Ken Lay, an old buddy of the President, is getting ready to go on trial. He was the chairman of the Enron Corporation, the energy company accused of ripping off consumers for billions of dollars. Recently Lay stated that he is innocent; his underlings were the ones who lied, conspired, and committed fraud. Do I believe him? Of course, I do. Look! Once again, here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail, hippity, hoppity. Hop, hop, hop. The next time a public figure - politician, businessman, whatever -- tells you a story, expecting to you to accept it without question like a naive child, say that you believe him. And make sure to add: "Please, tell me more, Mr. Cottontail." Hippity, hoppity. Hop, hop, hop. Be a hophead. After all, Truth's on its way. * A Matter Of Words * Every winter I wait for summer, trying to hold on. The biggest hump to get over is the so-called holiday season. Peace On Earth, Good Will To Men. Unless some SOB is reaching for the last Xbox on sale; then break his arm! Of course, there are those who whine about how Christ has been taken out of Christmas. But most of them still swarm around the shopping malls like hungry rats, trying to get the perfect gift that doesn't exist. Some reporter or columnist will write an article about avoiding holiday stress and depression. An expert is interviewed; he will say anyone who is vulnerable should take it easy, not get caught up in the rush and unrealistic expectations. But the TeeVee will run those seasonal classics, all with the happy endings, reinforcing the programming that tries to keep everyone brainwashed, making sure that the trained rats will spend more this year, keeping sales healthy. After all, that's the reason for the season: profit$. Me, I opt out. I don't bother with the phony greeting cards, overpriced decorations, "perfect" gifts. I don't need a holiday to wish someone well or to send them a present. Lately a controversy has erupted over the use of "Merry Christmas." Some prefer the phrase "Happy Holidays," acknowledging that not all Americans are Christian, that others have their own beliefs, special celebrations. But that has triggered a strong response by the Faithful. Now if you say "Happy Holidays," you're suspected of being a liberal-commie-pinko Christ-hater. There's a better way to sum up this time of the year. Forget "Merry Christmas," "Happy Holidays," and even "Season's Greetings." Call the whole mess what it really is. Crap. * Students Finger Mayor * Some parents think Plattsburgh, NY was created to baby-sit their demon spawn. They send their kids here to college to get them far away from home. Whatever their rude, vandalizing offspring do here is out of sight and ergo should be out of mind -- at least the minds of the parents. Of course, students can become a little rowdy, but for a few there is no limit to their actions, how far they will go to aggravate, or even hurt, someone else. And when they get away with it, it's like an invitation for others to join in the "fun." For example, years ago a few college-age "young adults" came to town and they ended up causing serious trouble. They weren't PU students but their actions fell into the same category of "youthful indiscretion." They were walking right into traffic, endangering themselves and the drivers. At that time there used to be a neighborhood watch patrol, volunteer citizens contacting the police when they spotted trouble. The neighborhood watch patrol tried to get the guys out of the street before someone was hurt. For their good citizenship, a couple of the volunteers were rewarded with beatings. Those who meted out those beatings got off easy in court. (The neighborhood watch no longer patrols. Gee, wonder why?) This semester the mayor decided to try to control some of the disquiet and damage by notifying parents when their kid had been arrested. One mother was upset with the Burghomeister when she was informed of her overgrown brat's actions. She said that her son was just young, he would grown out of it, how dare you tell me about his arrest. The majority of students at Plattsburgh U stay out of trouble. It's just a troublesome minority of PU students who like to tear down street signs, steal property, smash windows, and screw in the bushes in someone's front yard. Of course, all of this seems to be not a big deal -- until it happens to you, your property is stolen or destroyed, you find vomit all over your front steps and a passed out stranger in your bed. In response, a few students have shown displeasure towards the crackdown by a making a particular gesture at the mayor: the middle finger salute. Obviously a sign of maturity. Wait until these assholes graduate, get jobs, become full-fledged property owners with mounting debt hanging over their heads. They'll be the first ones to call the cops and complain to the mayor when a few kids perpetrate a bit of mischief like smash the picture window to their new home or key the hell out of their new car. And what will happen to those young vandals? Simple: their Moms and Dads will send them to college way up there in Plattsburgh. The cycle goes on... * A Stink At PU? * Drugs! Theft! Ostracism! So what's really going on at Plattsburgh University? Since the college boasts both an award-winning student newspaper and an active journalism program, one would think the answer would be easy to find. The story on the street -- not necessarily the best way to get your news -- is that the last issue of the student newspaper, the one published before the Thanksgiving break, was stolen. Every last copy. Why? Censorship or cover-up, take your pick. That issue supposedly had content unfavorable to the Student Association and so persons unknown decided that no one should read it. This all leads back to an incident involving someone in the SA who reported that a few of his peers were allegedly taking illegal substances while they were attending an inter-campus meeting downstate. This student stirred up a ruckus, being labeled as either a hero or a snitch. He's experienced criticism and rejection by some students and certain faculty members, even though he thought he was doing the right thing. This dust-up was front page news for the student newspaper, but we only learned about it by chance, not directly from the paper. The trouble is, despite being an award-winning publication, for the last couple of years the student newspaper hasn't been delivered to any locations downtown. At one time you could drop by the bookstore or the pizza place and grab a copy. Now the paper is only distributed on campus, even though non-students do read it -- if it is available to them. We wanted to gather some facts but we're not going all the way into the campus to pick up a copy -- especially if copies are not available due to theft. Of course, since PU touts its journalism major, we expected that information would be available at the student newspaper website. Guess what. Between Googling and searching the PU site, we couldn't find any viable online presence. The closest results at the PU site were pages devoted to PR puff pieces bragging how the student newspaper won another "All American" award from the Associated Collegiate Press. A couple of other sites had listings of college papers online, including a link to PU's. But after clicking on that link, the inevitable "HTTP 404 -- Not Found" would pop up. (Don't accuse us of not doing our research.) So it seems at one time there was an online presence. What happened? Did someone hijack the site's content? And, more important, why isn't the site back up? Even cheap penny saver weeklies maintain their sites. One wonders what PU is teaching its journalism majors. Maybe the budding journalists are studying in meticulous detail how Guttenberg cranked out a bible centuries ago instead of learning how to update an actual website or blog. Maybe students are trained to regard their newspaper as a cultic house organ, avoiding any distribution off campus in either cyber- or meat- space. In the meantime, we're forced to get PU-related news from the street. We might luck out and meet an award-winning "All American" rumormonger. * Ugation: Holdiay Scam Or Anti-Artsy Subterfuge? * Art or just artsy? Real creativity or just a gag? It's called ugation, a neologism created from the term ugly creation. But don't tell someone that if you're giving such an item as a Christmas or birthday gift. And make sure to use the artsy pronunciation, yoo-gae-shen. After all, you don't want the recipient of your ugated gift to find out that you're a cheap bastard. Cheap is a key word. So is haste. Ugation is a combination of inexpensive or free objects quickly thrown together without much second thought. Walk through a craft store and pay attention to what's on sale. There's a block of green Styrofoam at a low price. Find some cheesy plastic flowers, jam them into that block, and then spray Silly String all over. If it looks like real art, you've failed. If it looks like pretentious arty crap -- congratulations! It's a successful ugation. All you have to do to come up with a connoisseur's spiel. With the above example, you could say it represents the plastic phoniness of commercialism, the Silly String representing the symbolic web that traps all consumers under the capitalistic system. Then make sure to put a $100 price tag on it. It's "Art," ain't it? * Just As Good As a Cheap French Door Handle * The French door handles. I had almost forgotten about them. Long gone, lost in the memory hole for most people. I was walking around downtown Plattsburgh, taking an informal survey of the empty storefronts. I noticed one spot on a corner that used to house a thriving magazine and tobacco shop. Someone had stripped out all the fixtures inside and now it sits there, waiting for someone else to make it into a small goldmine. The storefront hasn't been repainted; it's still trimmed with an off-green shade, something that was probably called Pea Soup Medium Ultra. Years ago the city spent money to renovate a number of storefronts with an uniform scheme, using the same green paint and adding fancy French door handles. If you're unfamiliar with that type of handle, imagine a "S" lying on its side and then flattened down enough to form a long curvy shape. While the green paint remained -- at least with this one storefront - the fancy door handles are long gone. There were a few of them downtown at different locations and it seemed that within a year of their installation they were all broken, replaced with real door handles. I wasn't surprised that the French handles didn't last. If you have a business with many people coming and going, you need a good quality handle that can stand up to relentless use. The ones selected by the downtown renovation project looked like they were found in the K-Mart bargain bin. But that's how the city wastes money. It'll either take a half-step, not spending a bit more for quality, or it just invests a bundle in a guaranteed doomed-to-failure project. More recently the city spent lots of $ in planting antique streetlights downtown, flooding the area with piss-yellow glare. On one block, with a period of a year or so, three of these cheap knock-offs have broken. A truck jumps bumps into one and it snaps like a matchstick. I looked inside a couple of these busted posts. I didn't expect each post to be solid, but at the same time it was surprising to see how hollow it was. The casting is thin for such a tall structure, around a quarter inch or so. And the metal itself looks like it was made from recycled tin cans. I've seen better casting with a hollow chocolate Easter bunny. It doesn't take much to get one of these posts to shake and shimmy. Just grab one, pull back and forth a few times, and watch it vibrate like a big tuning fork. A prime target for drunken college students bored with bending over street signs. One day a major windstorm will rip through downtown and most of the cheap antique streetlights will fall down, completely snapping free. Whoever is in power at that time will realize the streetlights aren't worth replacing and so they'll be all hauled away to the landfill. Then, centuries from now, archeologists will be digging through the landfill strata and they will stumble upon the layer with the broken antique lampposts. They shake their heads, upset with the waste of valuable materials. They dig deeper, finding a layer dotted pieces of inferior-quality brass. The archeologists put the pieces together: the parts form cheap French door handles. At this point their disgust turns into laughter. * Public BS Desperate For Fund$ * How low will PBS stoop to grease money out of your wallet? The local PBS TV stations run ads that would make a crooked televangelist blush. A couple of them are aimed at older viewers. The less offensive one shows Grandma baking cookies in her kitchen, while her grandkids, a cute boy and girl, are watching Sesame Street. In the voice-over she reveals that she is leaving part of her estate to the Public Broadcasting System so that it can provide her grandchildren with quality programming after she is gone. Of course, Granny won't be around when her grandkids become rebellious teens into drugs and all sorts of godawful stuff. PCP, not PBS, will be on their minds. Another ad has a pleasant shill talking nice to older viewers, asking them to remember PBS in their wills. Some of those viewers are sitting at home, all alone, and here is this person on TeeVee acting as their friend, trying to get some hot cash from their cold bodies. Ghoulish or what? The latest ad now presents PBS as saving marriages. Yup, by watching public TeeVee you can prevent divorce. In the spot a married woman talks about a program presented by PBS about John Adams or some other historical fart from the days of early America. The program showed the strong love between Adams and his wife. After the program was over, both husband and wife were moved by the story, sitting there in the dark of their living room, only the streetlight outside providing any illumination. That special show inspired that couple to mend their differences and become closer together. It made them realize what was important in life. Gee, I wonder if the PBS science program, NOVA, re-unites couples after it runs a show about the spread of genital herpes? ================= NOTICE: Unless indicated otherwise, all articles by Anti-Press. Articles submitted by others do not necessarily express or reflect the opinions or beliefs of Anti-Press. WHERE WE'RE AT: Anti-Press Ezine radiates from our Precision Reality Center. We're presently entrapped in the alleged city of Plattsburgh, northeastern New York State (NENYland), USA. ("So, Mr. Vice-President Cottontail, you claim the insurgency is in its death throes...") EMAIL: Antipress1@aol.com NEW POLICY: WE DO NOT ACCEPT ANY UNSOLICITED ARTICLES. We will accept a letter of comment (LOC) on any topic raised in our ezine. **Maximum Length: 300 words.** Plain text format. If you don't want your email printed, please tell us. To avoid being deleted as spam: Put LOC in the subject heading. E-DITIONS ONLINE: Anti-Press Ezine and its sporadically published issues are available at: http://www.disobey.com/detergent/zines/anti-press_ezine/ Copyright 1998-2005 Anti-Press Publication by Disobey. http://www.disobey.com/ TO SUBSCRIBE: majordomo@disobey.com BODY: Subscribe APE TO UNSUBSCRIBE: majordomo@disobey.com BODY: Unsubscribe APE