Poncho Peligroso: 2011 Poet Laureate

               I think I’m starting to get sucked into the world of online (or maybe Real Life) poetry. Poncho Peligroso may be one of those people who might help get me more into poetry. Reading his tumblr explaining how he became interested in poetry sort of resonated with me. Rather than coming about as something forced, it happened almost by pure chance, due to a technological limitation.

                Now he’s become something else, something far greater than his humble Texan origins might have suggested: he is in the running to become the 2011 Poet Laureate. This honored position offers a great deal of prestige and money. As the Poet Laureate, he’ll be able to offer the President sound advice in both economic and military spheres through the power of poetry. In case this boon wasn’t enough, the $35,000 offers him the ability to life the high life, in places as diverse as Bozeman, MT, Buffalo, NY, and Colfax, WA. These places are fully American according to the 2010 US census, since Congress had determined a requirement of all Poet Laureates is to ‘live off the land’ like a true American.

                Archer M. Huntington originally funded the project as a gift. Seeing the despair going around during the Great Depression, he thought of what America really needed to get itself out of the doldrums. Looking around at all the unemployed poets eating out of his trash cans, he created a $35,000 stipend to allow them to explore their art and eat. 

                Why do I think Poncho Peligroso has a chance at winning this prestigious award? To you, I simply direct you to the 2011 Poet Laureate. Having read his work, I can assure you it is only of the highest quality not only on the internet, but anywhere. Single-handedly he’s been able to create a vast outpouring of work unrivaled in the underground poetry scene. His tumblr exudes the confidence of a man who has just found himself.

                He states how he hadn’t voluntarily written poetry until 2010. The long, circuitous route he traveled to get there speaks to the failing of twenty-somethings: the constant problems, financial, professional, and otherwise. Our parents had it easier. All they had to worry about was some foreign power launching an Atomic Bomb against the United States. You know, simpler times.

                The 2011 Poet Laureate knows these are trickier times, know what needs to be said and also unsaid. For a lot of poetry derives its power for the implied spaces, people and places it never states explicitly. Please take a moment to discover this true literary icon doing something he truly loves. Maybe someday all of us will find our true calling, until then, we can watch others.

Mollom: Will it ruin millions of Spammers careers?

Mollom runs its business under the premise that you don’t want spam clogging up your website. Naturally you’ll only want the very best commenters so you can “have more time and energy to interact with your community”. They claim to have a 99.91% success rate in this field. But really, are they thinking about the little guy?

The little guy might enjoy your writing. But the little guy might like it so much that they must tell you about heavily discounted Viagra or getting better protection for your computer. Without this information, what will you do? How can your computer be protected against nasty viruses, and how can you sexually satisfy your significant other. 

Perhaps your writing attracts a certain loner, ready and willing to bring you the best in online advertising.  Maybe your website is the only way they can interact with humanity, since they suffer badly from agoraphobia. But Mollom doesn’t care about this individual. No, instead they are using the worst of internet etiquette against your very readership. In fact, they even bluntly state that they “kill unwanted content”. Honestly though, who doesn’t want to help out a member of royalty get their money out of their bank account for only a small fee? They even state that you’ll get a piece of the action, so Mollom just ruins that chance for you. 

Your readership has a right to explain how important their rights are as your faithful followers. Online spam advertising brings in billions of dollars of revenue, lifting thousands of people out of poverty every day. Of course, these heartless Belgians couldn’t care less. And isn’t it ironic that Belgians want you to be closer to your community, despite the very fact that their country is being torn apart by indifference to the concept of the nation state. Maybe they should stick to what they are good at, making waffles and being Europe’s Canada. 

 Benjamin Schrauwen appears to be the ringleader, having grown in the demo scene, a sick perverse underworld of nerdom so extreme I can’t even explain in here on a music blog, which in itself is extremely nerdy. Oh, he says he has a blog, but you can’t even follow the link. Some computer programmer this guy must be. Each morning when he wakes up he paraglides over the drab, featureless Belgian landscape, wondering why he hasn’t moved to a more physically appealing country. Maybe a country that has trees or anything resembling “soul”. As he is up there, he looks for the .09% of spammers he hasn’t caught, and, when he finds them, he immediately hits them with a dart containing a deadly combination of Nutella and rattlesnake venom. Every time a spammer on the internet can no longer make pointless posts about pharmaceutical products for cheap, Ben gets a new pair of wings (gliders).

If Ben is the ‘bad cop’, spying on others from far above, Dries Buytaert presents a more positive face to the unsuspecting public. For one, his blog actually works. There you see his inner most workings reveled, like the international conspiracy to rid the internet of spam, delicious, barely relevant spam. And you see how an amateur photographer works, very immaturely.

Together they have their pictures up on Mollum’s website with the requisite sunglasses. Sunglasses are needed to cover their eyes, since it has been said that “eyes are the window to your soul”. Rather than expose their true evil, these Antwerps hide their true colors. They talk about “spambots” as if they weren’t living things, complete with emotions, grammatical errors and misspellings. So heavy is their sheer gall that they even call desirable content ‘ham’ with little to no concern about vegans who may operate websites and may take offense to such harshly worded language.

Spambots are needed. People need to feed themselves off of Spam, not everybody has access to high quality food products like some Western European populations. And they don’t charge, but they say “you MAY never have to pay for our service”. By using the word may instead of will, they open you up to potential gouging, all the while hiding behind obtuse European laws. The laws which are so absolutely boring that even the Europeans who wrote them don’t care.  

They’ve already begun to charge. “Only 1 Euro per day” their site proclaims, but in US dollars that comes out to an unreasonable sum of money (via the collapse of the US dollar in foreign exchanges). Concern about the American way doesn’t end there. When asked if their system jeopardizes freedom of speech, they’re all like “Hells yeah it does, but it was like that when we got here”. Obviously this is an affront to the joy of speaking about offensive topics, like pornography or Nickelback. Falling back on an established way of doing things through the internet isn’t enough.

 America is number one at Spam making, so perhaps Europe just wanted a little piece of the spam pie. Mollum will allow our Spam making competitors to beat us. I mean, we’re literally light years ahead of Iceland’s spam making abilities (1 spam attack) or Norway’s (3). That’s pitiful. We need to continue being number one at this, so our economy can grow more robustly. It is the roughest economic downturn that America has faced since the Great Depression. Please Mollum, let us have this one, not just for me, but for my future children, who yearn to tell you about discounted pharmaceuticals and offensive images. Thank you.

Mollom

Dick Chicken: Best Tag Ever?

Perhaps if you’ve gone perusing in North Brooklyn or a place of equal coolness, you’ve seen it. That. You know a shaft which sticks out of a chicken. Without getting too technical, it is a penis that grew out of a chicken. Neither man nor poultry, it acts as a label for a particular area, primarily “this is an up and coming or already there area”.  When real estate agents see it, they scream with glee, knowing that area is about to get hot and bothered.

There’s been email communication with this anonymous tagger, even a girlfriend (Pussy Ham) coming on in to join in on the fun. A few theories have been made as to who this person is:

1.       Poster Boy, a street artist who grew up in a large East Coast city

2.       Zombie Andy Warhol

3.       Former head of the Central African Republic Ange-Félix Patassé
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Of course, this being the modern age, even an anonymous graffiti artist engages in online interviews. Hell, Carles from HRO does it, why can’t some guy who draws chicken dicks do it. But I think that this isn’t an actual person per se. Rather, this is an elaborate attempt to mark out territory for the next wave of gentrifying artists. Think of those red aerosol tags on tree in “FernGully”: they claimed they were protecting the trees but were secretly destroying them.

That’s what is happening here. Supposedly “hip” artists come with a spray paint can and try their best to show that indeed it is their land. But it is just a giant conspiracy by the ultimate dick chicken. Of course I’m talking about Donald Trump. 

Donald Trump is the creator of dick chicken. Hair-cut wise, the chicken matches up. And the real estate near these symbols is always in good areas. Areas you can’t afford if you’re reading this, or soon will be unable to afford. Going into bankruptcy over and over again drove the Donald mad. Plus, those divorces added up. Slowly he thought of foods to sample with his penis. Pies were the obvious choice, but he moved on to Cantaloupe, Watermelon, Squash, and Pumpkin before moving onto meats. Meats felt right, they felt a bit cannibalistic. Having already feasted on the flesh of man, he decided to try chicken, since hell, everything tastes like it. So these portraits are of his meat-laden lovers.

Using an unusual real estate tactic, he created a perfect environment for poor artist types to move in and gentrify an area. Installing used book stores and independent coffee shops (which don't even let non-paying customers use the bathrooms), he had a dream. Or rather, his brain slug (aka hair) decided this would be a better course of action than his usual modus operandi. Selling generic apartments filled with tacky gold and trim, with his name slapped on to add an extra 120-200K onto the price tag just can't cut it in the Great Recession. Dick Chicken appealed to that half-mocking/half-serious homo-erotic humor that certain (well-to-do) segments of the population indulge in.

Love and power drove him to the dick chicken, like moths to the light. Live long and prosper, you corporate cock.