BlackNotBlack.com

2006 Updates & Errata

What a strange 2006 it's been. When the clock strikes midnight and the year turns over, I'm going to toast this way: "To sanity!" And then I'm going to kiss my girlfriend and remember that life is good.

In my post How to Roast a Pig’s Head I shared a recipe and claimed that you wouldn’t find pig’s head recipes anywhere but on BlackNotBlack. I definitely spoke too soon on that one, because once I actually decided to poke around online I discovered there actually are other recipes. In fact there are quite a few. You can find three of those recipes here, here and here, should you decide that head roasting is your thing. But I daresay none of those recipes come complete with a deity summoning, as mine did, and none of them look as good on a table as mine (below).


In the post Flags of Our Soccer Hooligans, Part 2, which was about my visit to Iceland during Clint Eastwood’s shoot of Flags of Our Fathers, I discussed how certain Hollywood stars bird-dogged the local girls during their nights out on the town. I mentioned it only to point out the cultural differences between ultra-jaded Hollywood and Reykjavik, which is why I didn’t name names. However a few weeks after my post a certain Hollywood hunk who starred in the film announced his split from one of America’s sweethearts, so I guess it wouldn’t have mattered if I had. But I’m still not going to name names because, though the keywords might give my readerless blog a few more hits, it would be old news. If I was ever going to do it, I should have done it in the original post. Anyway, it isn’t as if you can’t figure it out on your own.

On another note, I also read that America’s Sweetheart alleges her husband used drugs during their marriage. I would think most people’s response to that would be: “No duh.” During my time in Los Angeles I worked at Playboy and South Park, and from those vantage points you can be as much of a Hollywood gadabout as you wish. I never took advantage of those jobs in that sense, but I saw plenty from the fringe and I still find it hard to believe that there are people in the world who don’t understand that drug use is a foregone conclusion in Hollywood. That isn’t to say that everyone does them. But everyone has to function around them with a certain level of tolerance.

Moving along, in my post The One Right Way, I described a remarkable old guy named Bo (pictured below) who I met in Guatemala, and who died shortly after I left. I mentioned that his friends found a condom and a coupon for a Swedish massage in his pocket. In a way, that encapsulates his essence, but perhaps the story of what happened after his death (which was related to me by a friend who was there) will serve as a better barometer of exactly who he was.

He’d mentioned to several friends at various times that he wanted to have a funeral pyre when he died. You tend to tell your friends things like this when you’re eighty-something. The style of pyre he was imagining is the type where a large pit is dug and the wood is piled atop it, arranged in a sort of scaffold shape. As the wood and the corpse burn, both slowly sink into the pit and are covered afterward with dirt—no muss, no fuss. His friends decided they could actually make this happen, and so they located a truck and bought the hundreds of pounds of wood needed to make sure Bo was reduced mostly to ashes. Finding a locale for the burning was the tricky part, but they made a deal with a landowner who owned a chunk of one of the local volcanoes and was willing to let the event take place there.


Word had already gotten out about Bo’s death, and by the time all the arrangements had been made for the burning hundreds of people had found out about it. This was an unexpected snag, because the entire event needed to occur under police radar. When it became obvious that the size of the gathering could not possibly go unnoticed by authorities the organizers called it off. Instead, they were forced to cremate Bo. They found the only crematorium in Guatemala and later scattered the ashes. So Bo never got his wish. Although he had many friends, most of the people who planned to attend his burning probably were more interested in the spectacle than in Bo. That would have really pissed him off, I’m pretty certain, because he wasn’t a superficial person and didn’t much like them, as far as I could tell. But that’s life, isn’t it? You don’t usually get what you want. Why should your last wishes be any different?

What would Bo have said? It's hard to guess, but I can almost hear a disembodied voice: “What does it matter, my friend—cherchez la femme.”

Moving on, I recieved a query regarding the photographs in my blog, and the answer is yes, I make all the photographs except those in which I appear, and those few which are obviously borrowed from news sources and depict Hugo Chavez, Ralph Arza, Muhammad Yunus, and the Texas bordercam images. I also did not make either the horse photo or the boat photo in the post A Gift to the Earth. Those were made by my friend El Cubano, a film editor in Hell A who was along on the Iceland trip. He doesn't mind my using them, I'm pretty sure, because he still owes me for almost putting my eye out in Guatemala.

Lastly, in my Hugo Chavez post Venezuela and Guatemala Stand Down I shared some pre-election poll numbers that showed Chavez would win re-election by a landslide. In the run up to the vote American websites like Yahoo and MSN faithfully reported rightist propaganda about the strength of Chavez’s opposition, and their presumed moral superiority as capitalists. They also printed quotes from Chavez opponents claiming the election was already rigged. Call me crazy, but I learned in school that this is irresponsible journalism. Venezuela was overrun with impartial election observers from all over the world at that time, and they declared the machinery of democracy corruption-free, yet Chavez’s accusers got all the ink.

Of all these reports, the most annoying were those suggesting Chavez was buying votes with his many social programs. The elitist right don’t usually like to so openly trumpet their conviction that they are entitled to more and better than everyone else, but in this instance they opened a window that shone light on the most fetid and murky fathoms of their dark beliefs. Specifically, they said that Chavez promising education and health care money to the poor equated to bribery in exchange for votes, but of course did not mention that they thought it was perfectly kosher to promise tax cuts and entitlements to the rich. As elitist double-standards go, that one pretty much takes the cake, but it’s a central belief of rightists everywhere—particularly in the topsy-turvy bizarro world of U.S. politics.

Whew, got that last rant in under the wire. See y’all in 2007 everyone.

posted by Egan Ehlers @ 5:56 PM