Duty to Warn

The government shutdown engineered by the Republican tea party zealots in the House of Representatives is headed into its third week. The damage is spreading. Infants go without nutrition. Children are locked out of pre-school programs. Scientists are losing support and locking up labs. The people taking the biggest hit, of course, are public employees — the workers who serve the American people. Some 800,000 of them were initially furloughed without pay. Ironically, those deemed the most essential are paying the highest price. “Essential” government employees are now, as Jeffrey David Cox, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees, told me on my radio show, essentially “indentured servants.” They’re forced to work without pay. About half of AFGE’s 670,000 members are deemed “essential.” They are required to work, and face disciplinary action if they don’t. But they aren’t getting paid and won’t be until the shutdown ends and Congress decides to vote them retroactive pay. These employees include nurses, food inspectors, janitors, firefighters and more. Most are not big earners.

It's rare to hear something nerdy and not have it be an insulting joke or at best a great parody. Austin Texas resident Damp Heat shatters the artifacts of old with his 18 track hip-hop album “The Lich.” The concept album recounts a fairly standard tale of a Dungeons and Dragons adventure from first meeting to final confrontation. Listening to tracks on this album, which came highly recommended by my old Dungeon Master, one of the team at clawclawbite.com, it is clear this artist both loves and plays his D&D. Much D&D related media, even by players, is parody. The parody pandemic is so pervasive I can no longer cast magic missile without using “that” voice. If you play you know which one. Much nerd parody in media is fun, and full of inside jokes, but most of us don't live the life portrayed in Weird Al's “White and Nerdy.” The Album begins with a joyous party track called Tavern. The track is fun and upbeat. It also has multiple voices raping from a first person perspective and they sound the way a group of adventurers would if adventurers meeting in a Tavern and embarking on a perilous quest actually rapped.

Although I am an adoptee rights activist I seldom read adoption books outside of topics I have a specific interest in. I almost always avoid memoirs. To be honest, most are awful. It may be good therapy to write your adoption story, but please leave it in your desk drawer! Michael Allen Potter's The Last Invisible Continent: Essays on Adoption and Identity is quite a different story. I've been familiar with Mike's work for several years. I knew this book (currently on Kindle) would be important. Unlike the typical weepy adoption memoir this one is hard and gritty. It's of the street, but also of the heart. Mike doesn't pull any punches about his mother's mental illness, his battle with alcohol, or his rotten adoption, which he discusses almost in passing, though it it obviously the core of his essays. He calls his work "brutal yet equatable.” In "The Re-education of Michael Potter," he recounts his rescue of his mentality ill birth mother from the crack house she's been tossed into when rockhead neighbors decide to forcibly switch their dump for her government funded apartment—and charge her exorbitant rent for their dump to boot.

“A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale.” The Welcome to Night Vale podcast is like A Prairie Home Companion from a place where every supernatural theory and government conspiracy is horribly and yet mundanely real. The podcast, unusual for being a dramatic fictional production rather than just a couple people conversing into recording software, is done in the format of a radio show: From Night Vale Community Radio, our host Cecil gives the sort of general news and community information you'd hear on any little talk radio station in small-town America. But it's clear right from the beginning that something is horribly wrong in this little desert town. Cecil tells us in his matter-of-fact way about the new dog park that's opened in town, which is populated by “hooded figures” and no one is to enter or even speak of it under any circumstances. There's a man named Hiram McDaniels who is wanted by the Sheriff’s Secret Police on suspicion of insurance fraud. Wait, did I say man? I mean five-headed dragon. And it looks like he wants to run for mayor!

October is National Kink Month as declared by JT Stockroom and The Pleasure Coach, both of Los Angeles. They define it as “Kink Month is a public education campaign – but one that appeals as much to seasoned BDSM players looking to extend their repertoire as it does to beginners curious about incorporating fetish roleplay into their love life.”