Chips Funklord: Man of the People

Let it never be said that I don't respond to public demand. Some days ago loyal follower Saxtim suggested that I should find some way to fuse my commercially unappealing interest in history and politics with the far more lucrative world of pornography. Never one to ignore a creative suggestion, I today announce the formation of XXX Officio, the world's first production company devoted solely to the development, production and publication of politically- and historically-themed pornographic material. As of press time tonight, XXX Officio already has one film in the works. The film, currently bearing the working title Impeached!, has a target release date of September 2009.

From the company's press release:

Impeached! tells the story of Peaches Delacroix, a plucky southern belle who escapes Atlanta in the summer of 1864, just weeks before the climactic Battle of Jonesborough that would serve as the decisive turning point of the Civil War (and later as the backdrop for the 1939 film Gone With the Wind). Peaches is taken in by Major General John Schofield's Army of the Tennessee and sees out the war performing favours for Union soldiers and officers. Highlights of the film's first act include a slow-motion money shot delivered by General William Tecumseh Sherman at the Battle of Lovejoy's Station.

Peaches' dalliances with prominent Northern officers enable her to blackmail her way into the corridors of power. At the cessation of hostilities she departs Georgia for the Nation's capital. Sadly, she arrives in Washington on 15 April 1865, the day of President Lincoln's death. The Nation's grief at the loss of its sixteenth President and the radical abolitionists' despair at the premature death of their dream of racial equality are brought to life through a heartwrenching dream-sequence in which Peaches fellates Frederick Douglass to the strains of a haunting solo-piano arrangement of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Honouring the memory of the Great Emancipator, Peaches takes a prominent role in Reconstruction-era politics, building support for the integration of freed slaves into the industrial workforce and publicly advocating women's suffrage. A passionate three-way between Peaches, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Susan B Anthony marks the climax of the film's second act.

Peaches' uncompromising politics earn her a position in the administration of President Andrew Johnson. Johnson's impeachment in 1868 forms the backdrop of the film's third act, in which Peaches uses her feminine wiles to persuade Republican Senators to vote against articles of impeachment presented by the House of Representatives. The Johnson administration is saved by the votes of dissenting Republican Senators William Fessenden, Joseph Fowler, James Grimes, John Henderson, Lyman Trumbull, Peter van Winkel and Edmund Ross. Have the senators cast their votes out of conscience or have incriminating daguerreotypes of an eight-way legislative f*ckfest subverted the democratic will? Perhaps we shall never know.

Impeached!: Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution of the United States of America just got a whole lot sexier.



From left to right: John Schofield, Susan B Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Andrew Johnson.

I think the film has a reasonable chance of attracting a hitherto untapped crossover market of porn-loving American history lecturers.

Captain Slow will surely murder us all...

I promised artistic criticism and artistic criticism I shall deliver.

I spent last night watching Boris Sagal's 1971 sci-fi classic 'The Omega Man'. With respect to the content of the film, I note only its self-evident superiority to the 2007 Will Smith vehicle, 'I Am Legend', a regrettable attempt to adapt the same source material and augment it with shinier special effects. An apocalypse survived only by the Fresh Prince? I'm afraid that stretches credulity. An apocalypse survived only by Moses, on the other hand, has the ring of verisimilitude. What struck me about the film is that Anthony Zerbe's Jonathan Matthias, leader of the horribly mutated, photophobic, technophobic 'survivors' of the aforementioned apocalypse bears an uncanny resemblance to English broadcaster James May:



One of these men is the harbinger of mankind's destruction. The other doesn't know the difference between Maidstone and Maidenhead. But which is which?

I was also fortunate enough to see Guillermo Del Toro's 'Hellboy II: The Golden Army'. Del Toro's extraordinary capacity to breathe life into fairy tales requires no discussion here. However, I had some difficulty following the film's plot. I re-watched Hellboy II this morning and I still don't understand why legendary Texan guitar slinger Johnny Winter was plotting to destroy mankind:



The film would have made more sense if, instead of trying to revive the titular Golden Army, Winter's character had taken it upon himself to heal the rift between the human world and the underworld through the timeless power of raw Texas blues-rock. Failing that, the film should have introduced some kind of enchanted guitar slide forged in the fires of hell which, when united with a solid silver Gibson Firebird purloined from Satan's lutherie on the first day of the Atlanta International Pop Festival in 1969, would reveal to its wielder the secret of the Diminished 5th Chord of Perdition, a source of uncontainable blues energy guarded since the dawn of man by an ageless titan whose body long ago united with that of 'Deborah-Jeanne', a 40-foot long Gibson SG carved at the birth of the universe from mahogany grown on the banks of a lake of fire in the darkest pits of the fifth circle of the underworld and finished with nitrocellulose lacquer so black that hope cannot escape its surface. I'm just saying that to me that would have made a lot more sense.

Finally, I've noticed that Senator John McCain (R-AZ) bears a rather striking resemblance to Sebastian, the singing crab from Disney's 'The Little Mermaid'. I think it's the beady eyes:



This may explain Sen McCain's discomfort with male homosexuality and his persistent opposition to the legalisation of gay marriage. After all, Sebastian sings in one of The Little Mermaid's musical numbers that it is 'better down where it's wetter, take it from me,' a clear assertion of the Republican party's views on the moral superiority of the heterosexual lifestyle.

I apologise to everyone for that last joke. It's rare for a single misdirected attempt at humour to simultaneously offend homosexuals, Republicans, children and crustaceans.

Goodnight everybody!

Send $5 to "What Was The Point?"

After yesterday's exercise in political drollery, I thought I'd take a moment to introduce my blog. Crudballs is a spin-off of Den of Inanity, a blog maintained by the Velour Fog. Just think of me as Stephen Colbert to the Fog's Jon Stewart or (perhaps less ambitiously) Rhoda to his Mary Tyler Moore. Between now and the time I start taking my job seriously, find a girlfriend or (which is perhaps most likely) can no longer afford to pay for an internet connection, I will maintain this blog as a forum for the dissemination of withering political satire, culinary and artistic criticism and, should the blog fail to attract a readership in its present form, Swedish pornography.

The road ahead will not be easy. But, to quote John F Kennedy, we choose to do these things 'not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win'. I leave you for today with those stirring words and with the following injunction:

Ask not what Chips Funklord can do for you. Ask what you can do for Chips Funklord.

Change We Can Believe In...

So I thought I would devote my 'inaugural' post to a review of the historic events of 20 January 2009. I doubt whether anyone who witnessed President Obama's address could have helped being deeply moved by the significance of the occasion. For the history buff, the day represented an opportunity to cast the eye back over the centuries and assess the sometimes brave, sometimes faltering, first steps of past Presidents:

William Henry Harrison took the oath of office on 9 March 1841, a bitterly cold, wet day. Having chosen to wear neither a hat nor an overcoat, Harrison contracted pneumonia and died 31 days into his Presidency.

James Madison, the Nation's fourth and, at just 5'4" and 100 lbs, most diminutive Commander-in-Chief, took office in 1809. His inaugural address, a mere 700 words long, took seven hours to complete, making it the longest such address in American history. The length of the address is attributed by historians to persistent, distracting taunts of 'Where's me Lucky Charms' emanating from onlookers and passersby.

Woodrow Wilson's second inaugural address, delivered in 1917, used the phrase 'fuck y'all' forty-three times, making it the second most profanity-laden presidential address of the twentieth century.

Abraham Lincoln's inauguration in 1861 took place during a time of growing national emergency. To add to the atmosphere of trepidation surrounding his ascension to the Presidency, administration of Lincoln's oath of office was delayed by anti-abolitionist Chief Justice Roger Taney's repeated heckling. Taney is reported to have yelled 'Hey, you with the hat... Down in front' on at least seven occasions before finally fulfilling his constitutional responsibility and administering the oath.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered his stirring 'fear itself' address in 1933. What is less well known is that he did not take the middle name 'Delano' until halfway through his second term of office. Throughout his first term he was known as Franklin Cougar Roosevelt.

During the course of his inauguration in 1909, William Howard Taft consumed three legs of lamb, a suckling pig, a live rabbit and three decorative tablecloths. Taft would go on to make history, becoming the first former President to be appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Like his predecessor Chief Justice Taney, Chief Justice Melville Fuller contributed to a significant delay in the orderly handover of executive power. In 1897, Fuller demanded that William McKinley 'pull his finger' eleven times before finally commencing the process of swearing in the new President.

In 1893 Grover Cleveland commenced his second term of office, becoming the first President to serve non-consecutive terms. Cleveland's Presidencies 'sandwiched' those of Republican Benjamin Harrison. The Nation would wait until the beginning of the Kennedy administration before seeing another person ceremonially sandwiched in the White House.

The place of religious texts in the swearing-in ceremony is controversial. Franklin Pierce, stricken by a crisis of faith after his son's untimely death, refused to swear on the Bible at his inauguration in 1853, preferring to use a law textbook. Barack Obama, by contrast, took the oath on a Bible formerly owned by Abraham Lincoln. At his second inauguration in 1997, William Jefferson Clinton took the oath of office on a rare Betamax copy of 'Gremlins 2: The New Batch'.