Today’s Moron: David Storck, Republican

Today’s Moron is David Storck, chairman of the Republican Party branch in some Florida town. He’s on the hot seat today for distributing an email he received from a volunteer in which the threat of BPG (Black People Gathering) was raised.

The name of the email’s original author has not been revealed, but he or she wrote about noticing “car loads of black Obama supporters coming from the inner city to cast their votes for Obama. This is their chance to get a black president and they seem to care little that he is at minimum a socialist and probably Marxist in his core beliefs. After all he is black — no experience or accomplishments but he is black.”

Storck, who is a middle-aged white man, trotted out a classic excuse: he didn’t know what he was doing. “I never should have done it. I do not agree with the statement or anything else. That’s not what we’re all about.”

First, he said he sent the email on because the first few paragraphs were all about getting voters out, and he missed the end. Then we read the actual full e-mail, so that became sort of not true.

So he issued a statement in which he said he hadn’t read the whole thing through before forwarding it to hundreds, if not thousands, of  Republicans, and included this odd remark: “I can certainly understand how the email could be misunderstood.”

Misunderstood? “No, I said you look FAT in those PANTS” is a misunderstanding. This is not a misunderstanding. This is moronity. And it’s all too common. Hey, this exact same thing happened a little while back, with the same excuse: “I didn’t really understand the email before I forwarded it.”

For every moron like David Storck — and the ubermoron who actually wrote the original message — there are many more who aren’t obvious enough to be caught.

I’m kind of sorry this is the last weekend before Americans go to the polls. This election has provided me with so much material, whether it’s daily morons or just general finger-firing Palin-bashing. I’ve said this before: I love watching America from up here in the sunny north.

Music Review: Type O Negative

It’s Halloween, and under these black sad skies and by the light of the rotting jack-o-lantern, I bring you the music of Type O Negative. I think it’s appropriate. Demons roam the Earth tonight, and so do these New York rockers.

Type O Negative is Halloween on CD. All those years Rob Zombie was power-rocking his way through schlock horror stereotypes, Type O Negative was creating the real deal, crafting dark gothic (not ‘goth’) metal with a tunesmanship and sense of melody that rescues it from the shit-for-brains dirges of death metal.

I’m of two minds when it comes to Type O Negative. There are about a dozen of their songs that rotate in and out of my playlists, and others I can’t stomach, mostly due to boredom. They can be hit or miss. But that’s okay, because the ones I do like, the ones that matter, are so monstrously epic that I am happy to go through life with a handful of brilliance.

The good songs I’m talking about include Love You To Death, Black No. 1 (the only song ever written abour hair dye; its subtitle is Little Miss Scare-All), My Girlfriend’s Girlfriend, Cinnamon Girl, Summer Breeze, I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else (there’s a title for you) and September Sun.

You know why this music works? Two things: keyboards, played like a Wagnerian opera and not like Howard Jones or whoever, and also the voice of Peter Steele.

Steele is a seven-foot-tall bodybuilder who sings like a low-register banshee. His voice is so rumbly and low-end that you can often find songs attributed to Type O Negative that are really just slowed-down versions of actual recordings. There’s a Hit Me Baby One More Time floating around out there like that. Peter Steele is also notorious for being the first Playgirl model to insist on appearing, uh, as the extended remix version.

Anyway, this is not everyone’s cup of tea, and not always mine. But there are days when Type O Negative makes perfect sense. Today is Halloween. So that’s one of them.

Here’s a couple of Type O Negative videos, one for Halloween:

And one for when you’re just feeling confused about things:

My Brilliant Little Geek

My youngest son is five, brilliant, funny, extremely cute … and he knows all this.

A while back, he wandered into the Weather Station and noticed the screensaver on my laptop: the Enterprise, the 1701, the original ship. He looked at it for a moment, then turned to me and said what is probably the best thing a child has ever said to me: “Is that the ship that brought you to this planet?”

Of course, I said “yes,” not thinking much of it at the time. Well. Since then, the little guy has concocted an entire sci-fi scenario better than most movies, all to explain just how it is that he and I (not his siblings, or anyone else) happen to be from a different planet.

He talks about it all the time. He told his teacher, in earnest intensity, about how we left our planet many years ago and took a long time to come to Earth, because we wanted to help people learn to play video games. He tells people that we look like humans because we all came from the same place a long time ago, only we went to our planet and the rest of you came here.

Yesterday, he and I were flopped on our backs in our field, watching a small plane cross the sky. “That’s smaller than our ship,” he said. I agreed. And then he came out with this:

“Did you know that gravity is different on our planet? And we have a thing we had to put in us to make gravity the same for us on Earth.”

“Really?” I asked.

You should know that he has a very serious voice. “Yes,” he said. “And if you take it out you would float up to the clouds and that’s where you would have to live.”

Now, what struck my about this is (a) it’s pretty inventive for a kid who just turned 5, and (b) it’s remarkably similar to a story I wrote when I was a kid about people who lived in cities hidden in the clouds. So I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m pretty sure my kid is something exceptional.

All in all, I’m pretty happy to have a little sci-fi genius hanging around. It makes me feel like I’ve done something right for a change.