Hilarious fic rec from liptonrm, Hail to the Chief. Really, is it that surprising that the White House is haunted?

Pippin and Kirk love the tree so very much.



In fact, they love it so much they can't agree on who owns it.



Merry Christmas to everyone celebrating, and Happy New Year to everyone!

I'm so excited about Dark Alec Con 2011 starting today! I just can't believe it's so close to my home! I know that oselle, liptonrm and dodger_sister and I will have a great time! The agenda includes:

Panel discussion: Alec - the Proto Dean
Round table: Motherhood vs. Manticore - Genevieve Teague, brainwashing and child-rearing
(Drinking) Game: What's the Dealio? Post-Pulse Street Lingo
Doctoral thesis presentation: Descent Into Madness - Tom Hanniger, Jason Todd, Jake Gray, Jason Teague and Ben X5-493: Typecasting and Jensen Ackles

Plus a special fic challenge (please, feel free to play along at home even if you can't join us for Dark Alec Con 2011): Alec, meet Castiel. Castiel, Alec. (Writer's choice: Original S4 Bad-Ass Castiel or Mortal The End Fallen Cas.)

And don't forget the cage-fighting exhibition, running all weekend!

Confession: oselle gave me Season One of Dark Angel for my birthday and I'm actually watching it.

Confession: oselle gave me this book for my birthday and I not only read it, I marked the parts that talked about how handsome Alec is with green sticky flags (for his beautiful emerald eyes) and then sent it back to oselle for her birthday so that I wouldn't be the only person in America to have ever read this horrible book.



(Sub-confession: This is actually the second Dark Angel tie-in novel that I've ever read. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I understand that it's serious.)

I am now rewarding oselle for her generosity by telling everyone she got me these crazy things as gifts, and that now she too is reading After the Dark. And today I received a text from her saying that she's accidentally texted me at home about said awful book. When I got home, I discovered that when you send a text to a home line, this crazy robot voice reads it to you. Did anyone else know this? Anyway, proof that even the robots know Dark Angel tie-in novels are bad.

Oh My God this book is so bad.

Final confession: I just went to tag this post and I already have a tag set up for Dark Angel. Just in case I'd forgotten how completely crazy I am.

My cousin Jack e-mails me: "Bought a DVD at Walmart today. An eight film terror miramax pack. For five bucks. 'Cursed,' 'Halloween H2O,' 'Dracula 2000,' 'Dracula II: Ascension,' 'Children of the Corn 5,' 'Hellraiser: Inferno,' 'Phantoms,' (Affleck was the bomb in that. Also starts Liev Schreiber, didn't remember him in that), and 'The Faculty.' Oh, Faculty, how far you have fallen."

I reply: "The Faculty just isn't appreciated in its own time. Someday it will be recognized and lauded as the seminal work that it is."

It hurts to see great works of art so derided.

Just because the apocalypse didn't arrive yesterday doesn't mean it isn't coming. And that it might not come in the form of zombies.




Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse

Podficced per request of brate7 — enjoy!

Title: Wish
Author: baylorsr
Read by: baylorsr
Rating: G
Pairing: None
Medium: Podfic
Summary: Wee!chesters. Sammy thinks that maybe it isn't that Genie is a curse, but that people ask for bad things, or foolish things, or things that they just shouldn't have. He thinks that maybe Genie is right, and people just get what they deserve for being silly or mean or greedy. Sammy doesn't think he's silly or mean or greedy.

Download: Wish (mp3)
21 minutes, 24 mb

Music: JCB, by Nizlopi

Story

When oselle set Detroit as the apocalyptic destination for In Country (podficced by yours truly), I successfully prevailed upon her to come to Michigan and see the D for herself. I am not a Detroiter, but I am a born and raised Michigander, and in the job I held for eight years until December 2010, I visited Detroit several times a month for community outreach activities.
 
In the 1950s, Detroit was the nation’s fifth largest city, with nearly 2 million people. If you wanted a good job, Detroit was a great place to move. The unions had created living wages and the five-day workweek and there was a car in every garage. You could work at an auto plant with no education, and the Big 3 hired minorities. There was a huge exodus of African-Americans from the South to the Rust Belt, and many came to Detroit and built good lives for their families.
 
But the same cars that built Detroit also let its workers leave Detroit and move to the suburbs. First there was white flight, especially after five days of race riots in 1967, and then there was black flight, until today, when most of the people left are those who don’t have the means to leave.
 
Detroit lost 25 percent of its population in the past decade, and now has less than three-quarter of a million people (Census 2010). More than a third of city residents live below the poverty level. Unemployment is more than 20 percent, and most economists say that’s a false number, and that nearly half the able-bodied, working-age residents of the city are not working. Every winter, the news reports that a family died in a house fire because they were heating their house with a kerosene heater or a stove or a fireplace after their heat was turned off when they couldn’t pay the bill.
 
More than one in five homes in Detroit stands empty. You can drive down eerie city blocks filled with vacant lots, the remains of burnt-out houses, shuttered buildings with overgrown yards and not see or hear a single person. Hear what it looked like to oselle, looking at the city without the filter of familiarity:

If you’ve read In Country then you might think the descriptions of Detroit are poetic license, but for the most part, they’re not. I’d seen photo essays on “the ruins of Detroit” for years, but I had no grasp of the scale of the devastation until I visited the city with baylorsr and liptonrm last August. I grew up in New York City during the ‘70s when it was probably at its lowest and ugliest point, so I thought I knew something about urban decay but this was…overwhelming.
 
Entire areas of the city seem completely deserted. Huge industrial buildings have crumbled down into piles of brick and glass that just sit there. You’ll drive down blocks full of lovely homes…or what must have been lovely homes, because most of them are either burned out, caved in, looted, or in a state that’s some combination of all three. And then there will somehow be one neat little house, intact and adrift amidst this destruction—who lives there? Why do they live there? How do they live?
 
Detroit embodies the term “ghost town.” It’s spooky. Haunted.  It gives you that fairy-tale feeling of some accursed place from which everyone has either fled or disappeared. Nowhere can you see this more than in the Michigan Central train station. Abandoned for more than twenty years, this thing comes looming up on the horizon like the dark palace of every bad guy from every horror story you ever read. It’s Dracula’s castle. It’s the tower of Barad-dûr. It’s…Lucifer’s post-apocalyptic digs on earth.

The station is incongruously situated far from downtown, and so it looks like the tallest thing for miles around and seems to cast a brooding shadow over the surrounding streets of tiny houses and vacant lots. Designed by the same architects as New York’s Grand Central Terminal, Michigan Central has the same Beaux-Arts grandeur, but fallen into such bleak ruin that it simply leaves you speechless. It’s hideous and bewitching at the same time. You can’t stop looking at it, and you want to get the hell away from it as fast as you can. If that’s not the stuff of the supernatural, I don’t know what is.
 
There were more than 300 murders in the city last year. Seventy percent of them will never be solved. A friend of mine was robbed at gunpoint earlier this year by a teenager – my friend was coming out of a meeting about finding mentors for young teenage boys. Last year, I came out of a community center in the afternoon and was unlocking my car when I heard gunfire. I got in the car thinking, “It must be a car backfiring. It’s not gunfire, on a commercial street at 3 in the afternoon.” Then there were two answering shots. I put the car in gear and left.
 
And the city is designed to make its residents fail. In the Motor City, you will pay the highest auto insurance premiums in the nation, more than $5,000 a car. It’s about $1,500 elsewhere in Michigan; I pay about $600 a year for full coverage on my 15-year-old car. If you talk to insurance industry people about it, they’ll say it’s because of the high auto theft rate. Which is why in the late 80s, the State Police and county sheriff formed an auto theft taskforce that cut auto theft in Detroit in half. How much did insurance rates go down? That’s right, they kept going up. And don’t think you won’t be gouged on your homeowners insurance too.
 
That’s all right, you don’t need a car. Take the bus. If it shows up. If it doesn’t, stand in the freezing cold on a dangerous street and listen to the gunfire. And hope you don’t get raped, like half a dozen teenaged girls did last year while they were waiting for a city bus. And I hope you like to walk, because stops are few and far between. Detroit is still the nation’s 18th largest city and has no true public transit system. Makes getting to work on time difficult.
 
Oh, don’t forget to dodge the packs of wild dogs while you’re walking to the bus stop. It’s so bad that the U.S. Postal Service has canceled home delivery to parts of the city because its carriers have been attacked so often. Many of the dogs are survivors of dog-fighting rings, big and feral and dangerous. (Animal Cops Detroit often touches on the huge dog-fighting problem in Detroit, but it’s also a great look at the city, with people at their worst and at their best. Be forewarned that it may make you give all your money to the Michigan Humane Society or drive to Detroit and adopt an animal.)
 
Don’t forget to go downtown. It’s wonderful. No, it truly is. Skyscrapers, riverfront condominiums, casinos, five-star restaurants – there has been a fantastic renaissance in downtown Detroit in the past 20 years. Don’t turn the wrong corner or you’ll end up at the homeless veterans center.
 
Drive up Woodward Avenue and see some beautiful architecture, like the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Public Library. There’s some beautiful churches too. And as you head west, away from downtown, the beauty gives way not gradually but abruptly, to payday lending offices in strip malls, boarded-over storefronts, dollar stores. Looking for a grocery store? There isn’t one. Not one in the entire city. Want some food to take home? Hit the Quicki-Mart. Your kids will grow big and strong on Spaghetti-Os and Lucky Charms. Sam and Dean did.
 
The renaissance of downtown Detroit isn’t for the people who live there. It’s for the people who work and visit there. Detroit has major financial, industry and legal headquarters downtown. Some of those people do live in Detroit, but most leave at the end of the day, and drive back out to the suburbs. Hop right on the Lodge Freeway from downtown and you don’t even have to see what the city looks like west of I-75.
 
There are still great parts of Detroit outside of downtown. Go to Palmer Woods or Indian Village and you’d swear you were in Grosse Pointe – immaculate yards, enormous mansions, wonderful residents. And private security, of course.
 
And there are incredible people in Detroit – impassioned, dedicated people who love their city and want to see it restored. My friend who was robbed at gunpoint? Still recruiting mentors for teen-aged boys. I’ll bypass the discussion of political corruption in Detroit, but if you’re interested you can check out the Detroit Free Press Complete Guide To Corruption. Suffice it to say, while plenty of people are willing to try to rape and rob a decimated city, many others are sincere. They love Detroit, they want to live in Detroit, and like all of us, they want to live someplace safe and beautiful.
 
We’ve all seen the Imported from Detroit ad, right? (If not, it’s at the end of this post.) Is it a truthful portrayal of the city? Yes. Is it a deceptive portrayal of the city? Yes. Is Lucifer going to show up and make Detroit the capital of his infernal kingdom on Earth? Could be he’s already there.
 
 
 
 
 
Time Assignment Detroit
 
Disappeared Detroit
 
Sean Hemmerle’s The Remains of Detroit for Time Magazine

Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled -- available at Amazon here

Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre’s Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline for Time Magazine
 
Imported from Detroit