Hello, my name is Karen and I represent 50% of the women now guestblogging at Mightygodking while MGK is being a total pussy about his internet connection.

First, I’d like to confess that the idea of writing for a predominantly male readership freaks me out because I often talk about things like home decor, vaginas, and cute male celebrities and when posting on my own turf. Maybe we could come to an understanding: I will keep the vagina references to a minimum if you don’t insult my limited knowledge of the DC Universe. Deal?

Okay, deal. For the last few days, I’ve been trying to come up with a topic of discussion that would interest us both and it’s been really stressing me out. I decided to take a nap to clear my head. Now, I know a bit about psychoanalysis but there are some aspects of the subconscious that leave my perplexed. Like why did I suddenly have a dream about The Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog after not watching the show for 10 years and never really being a fan of it in the first place? Wait a second…

Obscure action-fantasy television show from the 90’s? Check. Superheros that control the elements? Check. Characters and plot loosely based in mythology? Check. People running around with swords and crossbows? Check. Let’s do this.

It was 1998. Haim Saban and Shuki Levy were enjoying the success of Saban Entertainment, then one of the premiere independent television production companies specializing in childrens programming. With hits like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, VR Troopers, and Big Bad Beetleborgs, Saban and Levy had the world at their fingertips.

“What next?” Levy asked Saban one night at his Beverly Hills mansion.

“I know just the thing,” Saban laughed, swirling a snifter of L’Esprit de Courvoisier, “Think Power Rangers meets Enya.”

“Solid. Fucking. Gold,” replied Levy.

And so the Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog was born. Set in a mythical Celtic otherworld, MKoTNN capitalized on the tail end of America’s pop cultural romance with all things Irish (God, I miss Claddagh rings). It was the only tokusatsu-style show in Saban’s roster to film its own fight scenes instead of cutting them directly from Japanese tokusatsu ala. Power Rangers.

Plot: a ragtag band of heroes―Rohan the druid-in-training, Angus the thief, Prince Ivor the token ethnic guy, and Princess Dierdre the wet blanket in a mini skirt―are charged with protecting the Kingdom of Kells against the evil Queen Maeve and her army of monsters. Luckily, the Mystic Knights have the power of the elements on their side and are able to call upon air, water, fire and earth―oh, and sometimes dragons―to get them out of a jam. They’re also trying to find a legendary hero, Draganta, who we eventually discover is one of their ranks.

Anyone familiar with MKoTNN can tell you it was not a good show, so why am I talking about it? Well, for one thing, it’s deliciously bad and can be found on YouTube. But MKoTNN represents the culmination of live-action tokusatsu-style programming from Saban Entertainment that was ever present in the afterschool television schedule of the mid-to-late 1990’s. The genre would die out with MKoTNN.

What became of the live-action tokusatsu-style fantasy series? Well, North America certainly lost interest, but so did Haim Saban. Saban Entertainment had merged with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Kids Network in 1995 and in 1997 formed Fox Family Worldwide. This restructuring put Saban’s shows into 81 million homes. The Mystic Knights were an experiment in giving live-action tokusatsu a higher budget and a larger audience―and the experiment was a failure. MKoTNN was canceled after 38 lackluster episodes.

In 2001, Saban and Murdoch sold Fox Family Worldwide to Disney, a transaction that propelled Saban into the Forbes 400. Soon after, he formed Saban Capital Group and now spends his days buying foreign media conglomerates, spending millions on his Zionist political agenda, and dreaming of poorly-dubbed ninjas in colourful body armour.

And that, boys and girls (Hi Wendy), is how the man behind the Power Rangers and Samurai Pizza Cats became the 102nd richest person in America. So the next time your friends say that your lifelong dream of writing a tv pilot about kung-fu centaurs is futile, tell them to go suck on a Megazord.

Man builds his own rollercoaster.

A mock-Tijuana Bible featuring John McCain and George W. Bush.

Explicit, NSFW, and more than a little gross, frankly.

Pick one:

A) Racist people making “fun” of Barack Obama

B) The most incredibly stupid boosterism ever

The amount of drama and sheer stupidity being generated by the Livejournal Advisory Board election is beyond belief.

For those of you wise enough to stay the hell away from Livejournal (“going downhill since 2005”), a brief summary. The Livejournal Advisory Board is exactly what it sounds like: a bunch of people who advise Livejournal about their corporate policies. With no actual power beyond that to advise. Hence, “Advisory Board,” you see. And Livejournal decided that they would have a user election to put a Livejournal user on said advisory board, to advise the new Russian corporate powers-that-be about capitalism and drinks other than vodka. This is rather blatantly a position with no actual power worth mentioning.

Naturally, Livejournallers having the collective sense of perspective as Salvador Dali drunk on absinthe and wearing an eyepatch, the user election for the position has become all but the campaign to be President of Livejournal or something. The drama got ratcheted up to fever pitch when Jameth, who is exactly the sort of completely harmless troll that you want a dickhead on the interwebs to be (loudmouthed, often annoying, but essentially harmless if you are capable of, say, ignoring a person), signed on as a candidate and got the Something Awful goons and their Livejournal equivalents to vote for him, mostly to piss off the Harry Potter fandomsphere.

The Potter fans responded exactly as you would expect the least rational, most spoiled fan base on the entire goddamned planet [1] to react when you poke them with a stick: they exploded and launched a massive campaign to deny Jameth the nomination by giving it to one of the various fanboi/grrls running for nomination. Currently their favored candidate is Legomymalfoy, who is already on the Livejournal Support Team. You might think that working for the company and simultaneously representing the userbase might be a pretty basic and obvious conflict of interest. Thankfully, LMM has responded to criticisms on this score by banning comments and locking posts from public view.

HP fans have spread rumours about Jameth “attacking” epileptics by having flashing icons. I was curious about this, and it’s easily disproven, but the dynamics of the Livejournal election are an interesting microcosm of how the Internet makes people stupid in regard to elections – say, for example, real ones that matter, where certain candidates are said to be Muslims or something. The parallels are honestly kind of striking: you have people accusing others of using their sockpuppet RP/troll accounts to gin up vote totals (election fraud!), baseless attacks from both sides (meaningless propaganda!)…

…and, since we’re talking about the Livejournal election as an example in microcosm for the real thing, it is worth noting that now, the fever pitch over this completely meaningless election has escalated to include violent threats.

For a meaningless position with no real power and no monetary compensation.

SWEET JESUS.

Fresh air, people! Go out! Walk in the park! Watch little doggies play! Or whatever it is you do in parks.

[1] Seriously, sometimes I think the entire Harry Potter fan phenomenon is just a massive psychological experiment by J.K. Rowling to see if she could create a subspecies of nerd more despised than furries.

Might be NSFW, although only barely.

I’m working on a long-form project which involves gorillas (I’m not really able to say more at this point), and during my research I was reminded of this.

Gorillas are gentle, shy creatures who would almost always rather run than fight, and they’re some of our closest relatives in the world; we know they’re intelligent, on the very borderline of human intelligence. There is no reason to kill them; mountain gorillas aren’t even good bushmeat. This is the work of some asshole or assholes with guns who couldn’t think of anything better to do with their time than slaughter some gorillas.

This makes me so angry I have trouble expressing it.

Did you know you can run your car on water? It’s true! Just send me $500 and I will send you a kit explaining the miracle of oxyhydrogen, also known as “Brown’s Gas,” and you will never again have to worry about fueling up! This miracle fuel which in no way violates the laws of thermodynamics will CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

Ha, ha, just kidding! You’re too smart to fall for something like that, and if you send me $25 I will send you a pamphlet explaining exactly why you were so right and smart to immediately dismiss this as a scam, despite the little talking model person in the bottom of the screen.

If you send me an additional fifty dollars, I will also explain why oil prices will not drop significantly until it no longer matters to you that they have dropped. These are bargains, people!

Via Junkyard Clubhouse, I discovered this site filled with image captures from a 1979 church-group cookbook, and after having looked through the (really disgusting) recipes, I have a question.

A lot of the recipes seem to combine Jell-O and pineapple. But I thought pineapple was, like, the thing you couldn’t combine with Jell-O? Because of some acid or chemical or something in the pineapple that prevents gelatin from setting?

Am I wrong about this? Is this just erroneous conventional folk wisdom? Please inform me, people! This is rocking my world!

“”Unfortunately, I can’t decry the process of “asking repeatedly,” mainly because it’s the only stimuli a lot of women respond to. Frankly, I think any woman who has to be begged fifteen times before she eventually accepts should be drug into the back alleyways and beaten”

What what what?

Okay, previous statement about generally decent guy making mistake retracted.

(Hat tip for additional context and WTF.)

I can’t stop shuddering.

Federally funded scientists created fertilizer from human and industrial waste and tested it in poor black neighborhoods without informing residents of the potential risks.

Key sentence:

“However, there has been a paucity of research into the possible harmful effects of heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, other chemicals, and disease-causing microorganisms often found in sludge.”

Like anybody with a blog, I deal with a reasonable amount of comment spam. My spamblocker add-ons catch most of it, and the rest I manually delete. In most cases this is a very small amount.

But can somebody tell me why this post in particular gets so much goddamned spam? I get at least a dozen spam comments per day on that post. I even tried renaming the slug to avoid linkback spam, to no luck.

Why is it that one, specifically? Any WordPress gurus or those knowledgeable about comment spambots in general care to comment?

Via Alasdair Watson, we have this fine campaign video starring Mike “The Latest Crazy Old Guy To Be The Libertarian Party Candidate For President” Gravel. (I think it’s a rule that the Libertarian candidate has to be at least 65, white, and unreasonably privileged.) I know it’s a trial, but try to watch the whole thing. You will not in any way feel as if your time has been completely wasted, I promise! (For given value of “completely wasted,” of course.)

For a real treat, click to the Youtube site and read the comments, which like all libertarian gathering points are the usual clustering repetition of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises quotes, none of which actually address the salient point that the video is fucking insane and presents no actual argument worth mentioning. (But of course, the wisdom of libertarianism is self-evident, you see.)

Okay, now if it was me, and someone came to me and said “look, we need to have you make a commercial for our pasta sauce,” I would probably shoot a commercial that is at least slightly conceptually related to the pasta sauce in question. You know: the pasta sauce tastes good, the pasta sauce is just like Grandma used to make, the pasta sauce reminds you of better days, the pasta sauce is something which the whole family enjoys at dinnertime. The usual tropes.

This is why I could never get a job in marketing in Japan. (Well, quite beyond the fact that I don’t speak Japanese.) It would never occur to me to say “hey – let’s advertise your pasta sauce with a little white girl dressed up as a cheerleader, dancing around, with pompoms made out of hundreds of your vaguely dildo-shaped mascot.”