Heavy Metal Sunday is feeling the Burn!

The Man Burned last night, meaing it's time for the second half of our special Banging Man Festival.

While searching around for good videos, I was amused to find that Queensrÿche had actually written a song about the event! The lyrics are pretty short, so here they are:

Miles of desert fly, the quiet of dawn.
I ride the winds of morning to see the man that’s burning.

Burning man

Miles of desert fly, the quiet of dawn.
I ride the winds of morning to see the man that’s burning.

In my head I hear the song a million voices strong.
I feel the heart of conscious returning, that’s why the man is burning.

Burning man

Watch on YouTube

But Burning Man is more than the Man getting torched. Black Rock City is, for one week, the fourth largest city in Nevada, and it is a city on fire.. with rock and roll.

Tonight? Testament, Motörhead, Heaven & Hell, and JUDAS PRIEST!!!

I want to move. TODAY

Before going to the concert, I decided to get some things done, like a load of laundry. Socks, underwear, t-shirts (including my Black Sabbath shirt for the show) some uniform items. Washer, dryer, go down to collect them...

And everything is still damp. I heard the dryer start moving when I put the coins in, but obviously we have no heat. So yet another repair request to Coinmach, and I now have laundry hanging in every conceivable place around the apartment.

Of course, I'm also looking at the two expensive mountain bikes the Neighbors We Don't Like have locked to the staircase and counting down the days until they get stolen.

To quote Operation: Mindcrime.. I want out!

OK, this almost makes me believe in a loving, but sarcastic God.

James Dobson's Focus on the Family employs Stuart Shepard to make short, "clever" religious-right videos for the evangelical powerhouse. Shepard creates these videos regularly, and most of them are entirely forgettable. In mid-August, however, Focus unveiled a new video, asking politically-conservative Christians to pray for rain on Aug. 28, in order to disrupt Barack Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention. Shepard called for "abundant rain, torrential rain ... flood-advisory rain." He adds, "I'm talking about umbrella-ain't-gonna-help-you rain ... swamp-the-intersections rain."

The weather in Denver was beautiful for Obama's speech.. not a cloud in the sky.

But... The Republican National Convention opens tomorrow in St, Paul. Which will be about the time an expected Category 5 hurricane will be blasting New Orleans. Y'all might remember that a hurricane hitting the Big Easy caused no end of problems three years ago.

Heck of a job there, Stuart.

While I'm hoping that everyone gets out safely, and that the damage is minimal, I can't help feeling some glee over the fact that this is derailing the RNC's plans for the convention. They simply can't have a big party while an American city is getting toasted, they can't be seen to be cheering and happy while the storm causes a spike in gas prices, and Gustav is going to push them off the top of the news cycle, especially if levees fail along the Mississippi. They have been pushed completely off message. Already Bush and Cheney have had to cancel along with the already staggering number of Congressional Republicans who had decided not to attend their own national event.

If Gustav is as bad as being predicted, the GOP won't have a message. It will be washed away with the storm surge.

Do not piss off the gamers, for we have creative uses for a d4

Politics’ new third rail: Dungeons & Dragons

Michael Goldfarb, John McCain’s campaign blogger-in-residence, “has discovered an unknown third rail of politics: Dungeons & Dragons,” said Jackson West in the blog Valleywag. In two separate posts, he ridiculed the “pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd” that stooped to “disparage a fellow countryman’s memory of war from the comfort of mom’s basement.” Goldfarb apologized, apparently after he realized that many “Republican-leaning libertarians have a velvet bag of polyhedral dice tucked away somewhere safe.”

The apology might have come too late, said Steve Benen in The Carpetbagger Report. Judging from the reaction in the blogosphere, “the McCain campaign has inadvertently woken an angry nerd army.”

And some members of the U.S. army, too, said Robert Mackey in The Huffington Post. “I’m a card carrying geek” who’s played D&D for years, several of those years as a soldier. And I wasn’t the only one. There are D&D players “all over the U.S. military,” and it seems a little rich for a blogger to criticize them. When their country called, “gaming geeks rallied around the flag.”

At one point during my time in service I was in three different games (2 AD&D, 1 Traveller) at once. Combat arms especially seemed to be filled with RPG freaks.