DUMPER

One of the moves Slippy pulls on Fogelberg in Episode 7 of BLOWBACK: Season One is called "the Dumper." Slippy learned it from Dan Fogelberg himself during the Thousand Islands training; Dan notes this with proprietary dismay :

"Hey, that's my move!"

A bunch of ( not men, maybe boys ) giving elaborate wedgies funny, simple names, making movies about them.

Joy!

MAURY POVICH WAS AT AN EXPENSIVE BAR MITZVAH I HEARD ABOUT. IT HAPPENED AT THE UNION STATION EVENT SPACE IN DC, THE REDSKINETTES WERE THERE. THE PLACE WAS DECKED OUT LIKE A MINI FOOTBALL STADIUM.

"Pickles are destroying my life."

Thud.

ACTA/BACKMAN

Man. When I started in on imagining Acta as Mets king controller of Robot Randolph I didn't realize Acta had once been passed over by the Diamondbacks for Wally Backman, a FILO name-drop favorite if there ever was one (Just say his name: WALLY BACKMAN). Backman vs. Acta. Backman wins, and then gets canned over the blowback from some scandal from his colorful prank past.

SOMEBODY'S BASSING ON THE SLY

To further my anxiety about name choice for this guerilla wedgie squad or whatever we are, now I find that somebody calling themselves Team FILO has come in 43rd in some bass bonanza. Pete- that you? You been catching fish in our name and not splitting the prize pot? You owe me 500 bucks.

What I'm saying is I've always been worried about whether TeamFILO is a good name...actually I'm making that up. But pretend I've been worried. Then imagine how I felt when I found out a fishing troupe had chosen the same moniker. Dismay Town!

LONG AGO

Leafy Green Once Watched Blowback, Pissed Pants

Bumped into this, had forgotten about December 10, 2005. Team FILO.

(Team Filo)

ACTA OK

This one is from the FILO news dept:

Just came back from Chicago where they had cheap good franks (I suspended vegetarianism for $ reasons; well, actually because I'm morally weak and the franks taste good if I fake blindness about how meat works)- anyway, was there and Season 2 stuff happened. So much stuff!

Manny Acta's safe but the Mets lost anyway- Lidle should've finished the mission- it would've been more dramatic.

We shot a lot of bullcrap out there. I will write more about it when I'm not watching The Departed, which I'm about to do.

JUST WATCHED DISCLOSURE

uh...Crichton's manic trend-dropping is dumb and unrealistic. "Wanna Prozac?" some guy says to Douglas after he gets bad news. That doesn't happen. Prozac doesn't even work unless you take it for a month. Lots of stuff like this: "oh this is mid-nineties thing that's changing our world". And of course Crichton's a reactionary disguising his backward yearnings as "common sense". See "Rising Sun", etc. This movie blows except for the dream sequence where Donald Sutherland tries to french Douglas. Yes, old man Donald: we see down his throat from the point of view of the about-to-be-kissed. Actually now that I'm thinking about it there are lots of unintentional funny parts. Rent it to hate it (in a fun way)!

GEORGE ALLEN IS BAD BUT HE'S REALLY JUST A FRAT BULLY DUMBY
THE (WORSE) BAD GUYS ARE THOSE WHO CYNICALLY DEPLOY HATE THEY DON'T PERSONALLY SHARE AS A VOTE-GETTER

What was George Allen thinking when he gave the Confederate flag billboard space in his life? Doesn't he watch PBS? (I just did)

Supposedly the thing "did not adorn his home after 1992."

Adorn?

Of course, he was thinking something: His flag-flirtings began in high school and
college (in California!), as dumb, misdirected anti-establishment brattiness. I know this type of guy, there are some in NJ with bad flags on their Jeeps. They need emergency history lessons ("Just 40 years ago, dumb ass") driven home with righteous knuckles.

Allen transferred from UCLA to Virginia where he could continue his reactionary rebellion, get more earnestly racist. Then George grew up into a Republican politician and realized his flag fetish dovetailed well with the confederate code of the continuing Southern Strategy: drop hints and symbols for the soft bigots to let them know you're on their team. Get elected Governor with C-flag hints, then three times proclaim April Confederate History and Heritage Month, and call the Civil War "a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights."

Soft bigots are the large remnants of the big block of people freaked out, starting around '64, by efforts like the MFDP to reform the Democratic party's racist machine in the South; they all bolt to the Republicans blah blah, etc. Everybody knows this. So how can anybody not be honest about what the current Republican majority is built on? It's not the McCain types: even John has compromised himself for some fence-sitters by making the commencement address at Liberty university, Jerry Falwell's place. He once called that guy "an agent of intolerance," now he's making a speech at his school; this is because the evangelical crew has the party by the balls. (The speech wasn't that bad though; it didn't pander to Christian weirdos particularly and encouraged Americans to "argue" about the Iraq war).

The Republican majority is built on the soft bigots plus the evangelicals. People with big hang-ups. These hang-ups are easily teased by wedge-issue deployment like fear of gays (fear of themselves-see Foley) and aforementioned confederate code. It's a visceral thing: how can you beat a party whose politics play on the physical power of the dark side of sex and race? They are going to make it to the polls. Liberals, generally not as hung-up and hence not as viscerally motivated, may be watching their Netflix Nov 4.

Besides this crazy core, of course, the Republicans do need all the McCains, the Lindsey Grahams, and the voters like them, the big deniers, to be a majority, and diffuse the ugliness. People with decent "moderate" sensibilities vote Republican thinkingits a vote for the McCain mold, refusing to get real and be disgusted by their Falwellian bedfellows. I'm sure though that those people would love to place a guiltless vote for Olympia Snowe or whoever untainted by association with a freaky national party. Can't the Lindsey Grahams see that people are yearning for the moderates to jettison they're creepy pals and form a still somewhat crappy but secular and sexually libertarian new party? Or are these moderates just not ready to abandon the wedge weapons that reliably keep their party in power?

Allen has to be buried, but only because he's a sloppy half-adult frat mess. People are coming out of the woodwork with stories of his youthful n-bomb drops! And mailbox stops! Amazing asshole. But others speaking the Confederate code, the more cynical users who actually aren't racist but know it's a good way to win over those who are, benefit from their winks to the initiated, and squeak through because they're smart.