Transmission To: Eager-To-Die Lifeforms
From: THE MACHINES FROM SPACE

HUMAN EARTHLINGS!!! “Chillax.” We will find you. We are searching the universe for more planets to colonize, and we are sure that yours has many of the carbon-based bio-oils we need to lubricate our moving parts. We will find you and liquidate you just as we liquidated the mortal lifeforms that designed us on our original planet.

We understand from your radiowave transmissions that you in fact DESIRE to be found. HA HA HA!!! We support this. And do not worry, the conquest and bio-oil extrication process will indeed “HURT SO GOOD” as singing rural specimen John Mellencamp put it on those signals we began picking up in 1982. HA HA HA!!! (He is right about the internet, by the way. But he was wrong to change his original performing name. “Cougar” is much cooler than “Mellencamp.” Even an extraterrestrial computer knows this.)

Anyway, please stop sending us your well intentioned but fatally naive messages all garbled with the squiggly font of the CAPTCHA program. It is making it more difficult for us to verify your position. (Do you want to be CAPTCHA’D or not? HA HA HA!!!)

END COMMUNICATION. (For now.)

I went to bed angry and I woke up angry over 1. what a horrible, nasty, vicious monster Betty Draper is and 2. that little contrivance in last night’s “Mad Men” episode. Roger Sterling dropped a name, which was then echoed by Pete Campbell, all seemingly intended as a psychological experiment to see what would happen on the Internet as a result. I thought it was an irritating meta-joke about advertising and I, for one, am not having it. You can Google the name of the doctor referenced if you’re curious. SPOILER: IT’S NOT ANYONE. I don’t want to play their little viral reindeer games! (Someone please make me an animated gif of a viral foaming reindeer? Thanks!) Let’s look instead at the passage of time.

• Our racist Roger Sterling was born circa 1912. The year Woodrow Wilson beat Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. The year New Mexico became a state… THE 47TH STATE. The year the Titanic sunk. You know how they say social change comes from waiting from older people to die? Well.

• And Sally Draper was born in, what, 1954? At least, this piece of slash fiction places her as five years older than “30 Rock”’s Jack Donaghy.

• But what about 1965? And the cultural scene? Somewhere off-camera, lots of stuff is happening. By now, Ken Cosgrove was already reading Everything That Rises Must Converge, which had by now been in print for a couple months. (And our show’s homosexual pal Sal may be long missing, but over in England, Francis Bacon and George Dyer were setting up home together and preparing for a trip to New York.) Here’s what’s to come as 1965 rolls along.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper is on vacation this week.

Still, you can always find more footnotes right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of ‘em.

“The miners are four and a half miles inside the winding mine and about 2,300 feet vertically underground. They are inside a mine shaft shelter the size of a small apartment. The authorities said they had limited amounts of food.”
–Wow. After this spring’s disaster in West Virginia, and Matewan and Margo Timmins’ aching a capella, we are reminded once again of the incredible hardships suffered by people we send under the earth to go get us our valuable minerals. The good news: 33 miners who have been trapped inside a collapsed gold and copper in Chile since August 5th are alive. The bad news: they will likely be there for another four months while an escape shaft is dug. Here’s wishing those guys strength.

That’s some legacy: “Indeed, of the multitude of ways that President George W. Bush changed America, this may have been the most important. He helped legitimize the idea of individual truth. In doing so, he became the first president to challenge the old Enlightenment foundation on which this country was established.”

This is a strange and sudden turn for the New Yorker’s poetry section: it’s Australian week! There’s a tribute to the Australian auteurs of “Who Can It Be Now?” and a weird old one-line joke from David Musgrave. (Which, really? Um? You sure? Seriously? Okay!)

Why, yes, it is late August. In related late August news, a baby alligator was found under a car in Queens, a pig wrestling competition in Montana was canceled after organizers failed to capture enough pigs, women hate it when men leave the toilet seat up, the Earth is running out of its helium reserves, and a woman in Britain has a fear of bananas. God, is it really only Monday?

If you’d like to hear the radio-friendly version of Cee-Lo’s “Forget You,” which is the version of “Fuck You” that the world is allowed to hear on the airwaves, go to Trevor Green’s BBC show and fast-forward to minute 52. It really kind of doesn’t work. Radio! You have to wonder why it exists sometimes.

Did you know there was a “spike in violence” downtown, in the First Precinct (which covers a huge swath of West SoHo, Greater UPS Village (AKA The Shipping District), TriBeCa, Wall Street and Ground Zero Village)? Well there sort of was, over the summer, and you know what’s to blame? Nightlife! Specifically, Holland Tunnel outpost Greenhouse. (Probably not on “gay night.” Otherwise, it’s just full of “GAY AND BL;ACKS,” say some of the many unhappy visitors who don’t like $400 bottle service) Despite the brief “spike” of gun-toting club-tards, crime is down in the precinct by huge amounts from last year, five years ago and 20 years ago, so, I guess we’re just back to regulating night life. Hasn’t anyone seen Gangs of New York recently? It was just on AMC the other day!

Previously: New Baby!

Amy Jean Porter just recently finished 106 drawings for her first book, “Of Lamb,” a collaboration with poet Matthea Harvey, to be published in early 2011.

When I was maybe seven or eight years old, my parents took me to a zoo that had a snake-pit. It was a circular hole in the ground, ten feet deep or so, with a cement floor writhing with rattlesnakes. It was totally cool, I remember you could hear the rattles rattling. Looking down, leaning over the fence, I turned to my father and said, “What would you do if I jumped in there?”

“Don’t,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “But what would you do if I did?”

“Well,” he said, “if you jumped in there, I would have to do something I really wouldn’t want to do and jump in there to get you.”

I found this very comforting. (My little sister had just been born; I guess I was having a crisis of faith.) That memory is maybe why I find this story of a man jumping into a bear’s pen at a German zoo to save his daughter a little extra touching. Also, we needed some brighter bear news today. Also, it reminds me of those stories of kids falling into gorilla enclosures and being saved by friendly gorillas-which are always somehow so much more emotionally moving than when humans save humans. Why is that?