baltakatei

For more retellings of US government atrocities, see the Relno the Storykeeper puppet shorts in Jason Steele’s Vulo Lives: The Shadow and João Goulart The Creature from the Northern Woods The Watcher and Juan José Torres The Hand that Guides the Butcher The Coming of the Valuable Fiend The Train on the Second Track The Falconer and the Dirty Bird The Story of the Midnight Hunter

Reminds me of the final pages of chapter 3 of the second volume of Maus (1991) in which a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust acts egregiously and unrepentantly racist to a black hitchhiker, surprising a friend who thought that the suffering would have engendered empathy for discriminated races.

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Torture damages people, plain and simple; don’t expect victims to gain wisdom or empathy from the process. So, maybe don’t give them nukes and back the religious megalomaniacs among them who end up committing the same genocidal practices against others such as the Palestinians.

“On one hand those trans kids give me the creeps. On the other, I get to call high school girls hot without consequences!”

Does it act as a dumb monitor? Can all smart TV features be permanently disabled?

“Hey, Uncle, can I use your age tokens to do my research homework? The rich kids all get to use the entire Internet because their uncles let them ride their age credentials. Thanks!”

a large … dumpling So… a dumple?

Great Simoleon Caper

Thanks for the summary. I’d’ve only watched it if he died mid-speech.

Winter solstice sacrifice mythology reminds me of Hogfather (1996) by Terry Pratchett about a fantasy world’s equivalent to Santa Claus who also wore red and white (blood on the snow) and was associated with gift giving/sacrifice:

Excerpt

… Images ribboned across her senses—wet fur, sweat, pine, soot, iced air, the tang of damp ash, pig…manure, her governess mind hastily corrected. There was blood…and the taste of…beans? It was all images without words. Almost…animal.

“But none of this is right! Everyone knows he’s a jolly old fat man who hands out presents to kids!” she said aloud.

“Is. Is. Not was. You know how it is,” said the raven.

“Do I?”

“It’s like, you know, industrial retraining,” said the bird. “Even gods have to move with the times, am I right? He was probably quite different thousands of years ago. Stands to reason. No one wore stockings, for one thing.” He scratched at his beak.

“Yersss,” he continued expansively, “he was probably just your basic winter demi-urge. You know…blood on the snow, making the sun come up. Starts off with animal sacrifice, y’know, hunt some big hairy animal to death, that kind of stuff. You know there’s some people up on the Ramtops who kill a wren at Hogswatch and walk around from house to house singing about it? With a whack-fol-oh-diddle-dildo. Very folkloric, very myffic.”

“A wren? Why?”

“I dunno. Maybe someone said, hey, how’d you like to hunt this evil bastard of an eagle with his big sharp beak and great ripping talons, sort of thing, or how about instead you hunt this wren, which is basically about the size of a pea and goes “twit”? Go on, you choose. Anyway, then later on it sinks to the level of religion and then they start this business where some poor bugger finds a special bean in his tucker, oho, everyone says, you’re king, mate, and he thinks “This is a bit of all right” only they don’t say it wouldn’t be a good idea to start any long books, ’cos next thing he’s legging it over the snow with a dozen other buggers chasing him with holy sickles so’s the earth’ll come to life again and all this snow’ll go away. Very, you know…ethnic. Then some bright spark thought, hey, looks like that damn sun comes up anyway, so how come we’re giving those druids all this free grub? Next thing you know, there’s a job vacancy. That’s the thing about gods. They’ll always find a way to, you know…hang on.”

The Secret of NIMH lore.