Finally, a Boy Scout Badge for Fat Kids

As if to reinforce their emphatic anti-homosexuality stance, the Boy Scouts of America have introduced a new badge--for playing video games.

Finally, overweight suburban heterosexual boys can get their first badge!

Next on the docket? Badges for masturbation, weight gain, and accidental napping.

Talk about playing to your audience...


In other Boy Scout news--from three years ago--the Radioactive Boy Scout has been arrested!

Viz:

David Hahn, 31, aka the radioactive boy scout was arrested and charged felony larceny on August 1st [2007] after a maintenance worker saw him stealing a smoke detector (smoke detectors contain a small amount of a radioactive isotope) from a ceiling in an apartment in the complex where he lived in Clinton Township, Michigan. Officials later found 16 smoke detectors in Hahn's Detroit suburb apartment.

Hahn became known as the radioactive boy scout in 1994 for his attempt to build a nuclear reactor in his family's backyard shed in Commerce Township, Michigan, he was 17 at the time.

In August of 1994 police stopped Hahn during a investigation into neighborhood tire thefts. This lead officers to find radioactive materials, chemicals, rocks, plastic, glass bottles and two exploded pipes in his car.

In an interview with Michigan health officials, Hahn, said he had been trying to produce energy and hoped it would help him earn his Eagle Scout badge. He acknowledge having a backyard laboratory in a potting shed at his mother's home.

Hahn's reactor was a large, cored-out block of lead, and he used lithium from $1000 worth of batteries to transform samples of thorium and uranium into fissionable isotopes. He gather radioactive materials by collecting small amounts from household products, such as americium from smoke detectors, thorium form camping lantern mantles, radium from clocks and tritium from gunsights. His home made reactor ended up emitting toxic levels of radioactivity, around 1000 times normal background radiation.

The United States Environmental Protection Agency designated Hahn's mother's property as a superfund hazardous materials cleanup site, dismantled the shed and its contents and buried them as low-level radioactive waste in Utah. Hahn refused medical evaluation for radiation exposure.

Hahn's recent mugshot shows that his face is covered with sores which investigators claim are from exposure to radioactive materials. He is being held on a $5,000 bond in the Macomb County jail. If convicted, he could face up to four years in jail.

(courtesy Rad Journal)

In addition to everything else about this news story, I love that 'cleaning up' a Superfund site amounts to little more than 'burying it in Utah.'

This explains so much about the fine people of Utah...

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Oh, no you didn't...

In his admonishing response to Manola Darghis' scathing review of the upcoming release Gentlemen Broncos, Richard Brody (of New Yorker magazine) went too far in his appraisal of director Jared Hess, no matter how good or bad that particular movie may be.

In light of the gratuitous bodily function jokes apparently present in Broncos, Brody claims the director that Jared Hess is most similar to--in all of film history--is none other than philosophical Italian provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Huh? Yeah. Peep this:

But then, she also thinks that Benjamin (Michael Angarano), the teen-ager at the film’s center—a science-fiction fantasist whose work is pilfered by a blocked, aging novelist and by a pair of local filmmakers—is a “rotten writer.” In fact, he’s the author of a new gospel, and Hess’s wondrously ingenuous filming of Benjamin’s visions are both as sublime and as crudely carnal as scripture itself. The grotesque bodily functions, human, animal, and alien, that the movie depicts unflinchingly—as well as the “unpleasant, unattractive characters” Dargis says the film is filled with—are the point. It’s easy to present the beautiful people and the scrubbed world as divine creations; Hess’s vision sacralizes what other filmmakers don’t. The director he’s closest to in this regard is Pier Paolo Pasolini (and Pasolini, too, had an extraordinary sense of the naïve, the repellent, and the ridiculous).

Now, I don't know how many of you are familiar with Pasolini's work, but it is nothing like Napolean Dynamite, Nacho Libre, or Gentlemen Broncos. Nothing. Unless you find semi-amusing fart jokes and frightening, ritualistic depravity to prove a philosophical point one and the same.

Comparing Jared Hess to Pier Paolo Pasolini simply because they both made movies about outcasts living on the fringes of society is like comparing Scorsese to Taxi director James Burrows because they both made projects involving taxi drivers. There is nothing funny about Pasolini's depravity; there is nothing insightful about Hess' fart jokes.


Here is a quick recap of Jared Hess' life and works:

He is a 30 year-old heterosexual Mormon who studied film at Brigham Young University, is married to his college sweetheart, Jerusha Hess, has one child, lives in Salt Lake City, and has co-written and directed three feature-length oddball-comedies with his wife, one of which (Napolean Dynamite) became a cult hit.


Now, here is a quick recap of Pier Paolo Pasolini's life:

He studied literature and philosophy in college, was drafted into WWII, escaped from a Nazi prison to join his mother as a teacher of children in remote villages, was persecuted by the state due to his homosexuality and candor, became an accomplished poet, journalist, novelist, playwright, photographer, filmmaker, linguist, and political activist, troublesomely preached that a shift to communism was the only way to save Italy, had most of his films censored at one time or another due to their stark exploration of the depressing lives people led in the suburbs of Rome and their focus on sexual themes, and was brutally murdered by being repeatedly run over by his own car on a beach near Rome, not long before the premiere of what Time Out recently dubbed "The Most Controversial Film of All Time," Salo, his magnificent and horrifying adaptation of the the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, in which he calls out fascism for being not unlike sadomasochism.

Okay, so...a sheltered and ignorant Mormon (a Mormon, for Christ's sake!) out for cheap laughs by exploring the fictional lives of losers living on the fringes of society in Middle America is supposed to be comparable to a notoriously revolutionary, oft-censored, communist homosexual Italian poet/filmmaker who unflinchingly documented the darker side of humanity in his starkly realistic explorations of the depths of the mind and its potential for depravity? An artist whom intellectuals still revere 34 years after his death?

Ich don't think so, Richard Brody...

The confused Richard Brody

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Oh, Yeah, Baby--I Got Them Good Friday Blues

It has come to my attention that many people have today off work. My immediate reaction is: what?!

Once I sat down and thought about it for a minute, my reaction is this:

Why are people who are religious not required to use personal days to observe religious holidays, when religion is clearly a personal issue? If lifting weights is my religion, do I get three days a week off? Or would I have to pick and choose only the big days, like my semi-annual weightlifting exhibitions? Something tells me I wouldn't...

Church and state are far from separated, but at least the US Government has avoided observing most religious holidays--with the glaring exception of Christmas, which should really be renamed Presents and Egg Nog Day, if you ask me (okay, so who's starting the official petition?).

Why is the private sector so surprisingly ingratiating? I mean, paying people for days off for no legitimate reason, when the law does not require them to do so? That doesn't sound like a good way to make five extra cents this quarter!* And since when do companies care about using morale to boost productivity? Didn't that concept evaporate with the 40-hr work week, health benefits, tungsten lighting, vacation days, pensions, and a gold watch?

Do followers of all religions get their holidays off? Which religion has the most days off (I'm guessing the Jews)? What is required for a religion to be deemed legitimate? Can I start my own, coerce a few followers, and choose my holidays?** Why not, right? That is, by the way, how every other religion started--brick by brick, following around a persuasive man with some crazy ideas. It isn't usually until later that the corruption, theft, mind control, and murder begin.***

I'm just full of questions--and, sadly, answers. That's the thing about rhetorical questions, I guess...


* Especially 'in this economy,' long-ago the clear favorite among the many phrases I wish I would never have to hear again.

** The month of September would be the main holiday, known as Adventure, when all followers would be forced to observe themselves having fun somewhere exotic and eat extravagant meals.

*** The Mormon church, for example, is a glaring exception--Joseph Smith was an unabashed con artist from the get-go. Oddly, I actually respect him more than I would have because of that. You won't find out anything about this on his wikipedia site, however, as the good church has probably hired a team of people to cleanse it of truth minutely (they also have a team who purchase any documents available for sale that involve the truth about Joseph Smith). All the info you need, if you are curious, can be found in Jon Krakauer's marvelous book Under the Banner of Heaven.

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