lifeafterfabio

Originally published at The Fiction of Douglas Lain. You can comment here or there.

I attended the film “Up in the Air” last night and, as is typical for me, I’ve been reading reviews of the picture today in order to search out my own position on the movie. The impression I had while watching was that the picture was making light entertainment out of our moral/cultural/economic bankruptcy, but when the story didn’t end happily I decided that perhaps it was a more subversive and thus better picture than I originally thought. In any case, here’s a review I found interesting.

Unemployment Gets a Lift in ‘Up in the Air’

In downtown Portland, there used to a billboard advertising two State Farm insurance agents, one male and one female. They smiled down on motorists accompanied by their phone numbers in case you want to call them while you drive toward SW Burnside to get a drink at Mary's Nude Revue (or wherever you're going). I don't know if insurance agents and realtors have indisputable data that proves that plastering their mugs on bus stop benches and large signs along major roads increase their revenue, but that's not why I'm mentioning this. I'm mentioning this because the female insurance agent's name was Angel Devllin. I have added an extra letter in this name so that Ms. Devllin and her family/friends/clients do not find this blog when they're bored and Google her name... because I plan to go off a little.

If she was born with this name, did her parents think that they were being funny? When parents include a pun in their child's name (we all have our (least) "favorite," no need for examples here), do they understand that they are naming a human being and not a guinea pig? If Ms. Devillin's parents were responsible for this name, I want their sense of humor surgically extracted from their brain. With a rusty spoon found on a beach. Imagine Mrs. Devillin speaking to Mr. Devillin while holding their still bloody newborn: "Let's name her Angel! That will be funny!" "You're right!" Mr. Devillin replies. "This clever joke will be with our daughter for the rest of her life, until she dies, when it'll be etched into her headstone." "What about all of the lame jokes she will get about her name?" "It will build character, my darling."

Adult film starlets weren't around when Ms. Devillin was a child in the mid-1950's, but strippers existed. You could imagine someone named Angel Devillin working at Jack Ruby's Carousel club in Dallas, circa 1962. And tell me, with a straight face, that you wouldn't circle this name if you were playing a rousing game of "Guess the Actual Porn Star Names" in an issue of Maxim.

Mystic blogger Neil Kramer is this week’s guest for a Christmastime episode of Diet Soap. Also featured this week is Shen Findell and Tibet2Timbuk2’s song “Beautiful Girl” from the album Music is Life. Neil and KMO of the C-Realm podcast will be visiting Portland, Oregon on January 20th and 21st, and there will be an event and presentation on Peak Oil, Collapse, Control Systems, Transdimensional Shifts, and Revolution. Email douglain@dietsoap.org if you need or want more information or just have something to say, or call Diet Soap at 971-285-4604 and leave a voicemail message to get your voice on the podcast. Miriam says hello and hopes you get a lifejacket this Christmas. You can find this episode at dietsoap.podomatic.com, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Originally published at Diet Soap. Please leave any comments there.

Originally published at The Fiction of Douglas Lain. You can comment here or there.

A Coffee Cup/Alien Invasion Story

The UFOs in the sky over Portland look like hubcaps. Silver or chrome-plated saucers, all of them roughly the same size and all of them spinning, hang miraculously in midair, but most people either don’t see them or pretend that they don’t see. [...]