Let the vote suppression begin!

I wish the Democratic Primary would end already. I mean, if Bill Clinton can put his foot in his mouth with borderline-racist comments, just imagine the inventive and hilarious racism we'll get from John McCain's supporters! This is like Racist Christmas Eve, with all that great racism right around the corner!

Well, here's an early gift: a nonprofit called Women's Voices Women Vote^* surreptitiously robo-called black neighborhoods in North Carolina to inform them that their mail-in voter registrations were on the way -- even though the deadline for mail-in registration in NC has passed.

To put this another way, a women's voting organization (not associated with Hillary Clinton) is responsible for "accidentally" confusing black voters (not associated with Barack Obama), using an automated message from someone who identifies himself as Lamont Williams, a person who definitely doesn't work for WVWV and who possibly doesn't exist. "Oops!"

When is the last time we used vote suppression in a primary? This truly is a golden age.

^*What a totally stupid name. It's not even a backronym.

Six Panel Movies Presents...The Karate Kid

A couple of days ago I happened upon a high school chum's illustrated blog (which, of course, puts my old one to shame). It got me thinking of my very favorite artistic medium: the Six Panel Movie. So here's one based on a wonderful little arthouse film I saw recently.

Click here to catch up on the Six-Panel Movies you shamefully missed.

Sing the praises of piracy

So it seems that Demonoid.com, in my estimation the very best thing about the internet, is back.

A little background: Demonoid is a torrent-hosting site. For the elderly reading this, it's a site where people upload media -- software, movies, television programs, music, anything you can think of, some public domain, some copyrighted -- that other people want to download. Remember Napster? I still have most of the mp3s I downloaded from Napster back in the day, before Metallica and Friends shut it down. Well, that was peer-to-peer, meaning your computer would download the file from one other computer. I was pretty bummed when Napster was shut down, but looking back on it, it's funny how much piracy has advanced. Thanks to torrent files, we now illegally download files from multiple sources at once, which means we get them much, much faster, which further means we can download much bigger files. Whereas in 1999 it took me hours to download "Pour Some Sugar On Me" by Def Leppard, these days if you want that song you're more likely to find the entire Hysteria album, and you'll probably get it a lot faster, too.

If you're looking for something very recent or very popular -- every episode of Dexter so far, the Britney Spears discography, any of this year's Best Picture nominees -- a Google search will alert you to several different sources. But over the last couple of years I've found that Demonoid, with its dedicated base of registered users -- joining is free, but you have to know someone or sign up during one of the rare open periods -- is the only place for rare or obscure digital media.

I originally stumbled upon Demonoid because it is the internet source for comic book back-issues. As a child and young adult I spent way, way too much money on old comic books -- the purchase of which, by the way, puts absolutely no money back into creators' or publishers' pockets. Trade paperback reprints are another story, but the comics that have been reprinted are just a drop in the bucket -- it's easy enough to find color reprints of the first fifty or so issues of Amazing Spider-Man, but anything between then and now you might only find in black-and-white, for example. Thanks to Demonoid, I've been able to download entire runs of comics I could never have reasonably afforded as a child (and wouldn't spend my money on now).

But even cooler than that is the comics I probably never could have read were it not for Demonoid. I've downloaded all five issues of Black Goliath, the first black superhero series; Omega the Unknown, ironically-titled in that I had never heard of it; and every appearance of Alan Moore's Miracleman, a property that's been tied up in legal copyright battles for decades now and may never be reprinted in any form in my lifetime. These are not the kinds of comics you'd find all in the same back-issue bin, and yet they're ready for download to absolutely anyone, anywhere.

Last Halloween, I watched a double-feature of downloaded films: Torso, a staple of the Italian giallo cannon and supposedly the inspiration for the wonderful Grindhouse trailer "Don't"; and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, which I wanted to see because the video case spooked me when I was a kid. The latter has since been released on DVD to cash in on the recent Prom Night remake, but at the time you could only get either of them on VHS. Before that, I downloaded the entire Rob Thomas series Cupid, starring Jeremy Piven as a possibly delusional lunatic, possibly omnipotent love god matchmaker -- a series neither in syndication nor available on DVD. (And, oddly, the episodes I downloaded came with scripts for two never-made episodes.)

So it was a sad day a few months back when Demonoid went down apparently for good, after the Canadian recording industry brought down the hammer. (It's always the ones you least expect.) It turns out the site was also down because its administrator -- a Serbian known only as "Deimos" (no, really) -- had some "family issues" he had to take care of. Deimos has passed the site along to someone else, and now it's back at last.

Julia's becoming a Bill Maher fan because of his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher. Last week I wanted to crush that impulse with a screening of that old USA Up All Night staple Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, but with no DVD release, that dream was ready to die. Two days ago Demonoid came back, and I had that movie within a few hours. Thanks, Internet. Thanks.

You heard it here first

Chaos theory pioneer Jeff Goldblum, er, I mean Edward Lorenz, died today, apparently when a butterfly flapped its wings directly into his eyeball. His last words: "Not like this! NOT LIKE THIS!!!!"

Mothers, don't let your sons play Little League

At last, the mainstream liberal media admits that, with my July 28 birthday, I could never compete in an August 1 Little League cutoff world. All those hours spent sitting on a bench (or, occasionally, standing in a field), for naught!

Let this be a lesson to those of you out there with babies who, I dunno, lets say they were born in June. Unless you want your kid to be nicknamed "Puny Furdell" by high school quarterback "Flash" Thompson, convince him to take up golf or something. Something where you don't have to be tall.