Archive for January 18th, 2012


Can’t make this stuff up, folks. I mean, you could, but everybody would think you were, well, making stuff up.

On tonight’s episode of Modern Family (perhaps TV’s best sitcom), one of the storylines deals with what happens when a young child starts using curse words. One of America’s more prominent gatekeepers of the public morality, the Parents Television council, immediately lurched into a galloping conniption. That they haven’t actually seen the episode, and hence, have no fudging idea what they’re screeching about, is beside the point.

“It’s not suitable language for a child that young in the real world, and it’s not suitable language for a child that young on television, either.” Full story »


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#23: Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey Into the Heart of Darkness by Jeffrey Tayler (2000)

I’ve written before about my fascination with the Congo and Africa’s mythical “dark heart.” Conrad. Tarzan. Mkele-Mbembe. Stanley and Livingston and Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. “Mistah Kurtz. He dead.” Oh, the horror, the horror.

Beyond all the myth is a country torn by war, wracked by poverty and tainted by the overexploitation of colonialism. It might hold allure as an exotic place to go for adventure, but really, it’s a place to die—or nearly so, as Jeffrey Tayler chronicled in his book Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey in the Heart of Darkness.

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