General Lee Would Have Hated the Confederate Flag Bikini

To celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and the collapse of the Confederacy, I’d like to share some facts about the flag we today think of as the Confederate flag.

First, the flag with two diagonal blue stripes on a red background commonly believed to be the flag of the Confederacy is NOT the flag of the Confederacy. It was the battle flag of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and was later incorporated in part into the Confederate flag in 1863.

Second, Robert E. Lee was a deeply conservative man who would probably object to women wearing his battle flag as a bikini. 

Third, as much as people take pride in the battle flag today, your ancestors probably didn’t.  Desertion was a huge problem in the Confederate army, described as “more damning than slaughter” to the CSA’s fortunes.  Over 100,000 Confederate soldiers, some 10% of the troops in uniform, deserted, and many more wanted to desert or tried and failed.  If you have ancestors that fought for the Confederacy, there is a good chance that they either deserted the army or wanted to, so wearing a Confederate battle flag isn’t honoring them, it’s representing a symbol of a system that trapped them.

Fourth, the secession of the Confederate States may have been about States Rights, but the only states rights issue that mattered in the 1860’s was slavery.  Name me one other that ever came up in the antebellum debates in the 1840’s &1850’s; the arguments of apologists from the 1920’s “glorious cause” era and forward don’t count when compared to the statements of people who live in the time.

Fifth, no matter what you think you are symbolizing when displaying a Confederate flag on your wall, your truck, or your body, it is at its heart a racist message.  The man who brought the battle flag into the main national flag put it on a white background because, “As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.” —William T. Thompson (April 23, 1863), Daily Morning News

Quickshots- Yellow Hill: The Stranger's Tale

I really tried to like this short film but... ugh, it is terrible.  Brutal, ugly, painful, no fun at all.  Which is a shame, because it stars Bai Ling, an actress that I really enjoy and don't see nearly enough on the screen.  Yellow Hill is a 15 minute short tale of revenge and people doing horrible things to each other.  The schtick is that it involves a Chinese woman in the West, rather than the white woman who is usually victimized in twisted and ugly revenge tales, but that variation alone doesn't rescue the film.  It can be seen over at Vimeo, on Facebook, or the vid below, but why would you want to?  If anyone out there likes it, let me know why.

Gay Cowboys of Fallout: New Vegas

The days are getting longer, the temperature warmer, and the snow is less than three feet deep.  It’s almost spring time here in New England, and that means my mind and gaming habits turn towards raucous outdoor adventure.  I recently fired up Fallout: New Vegas, a game as much about surviving in the wilderness as it is about blasting mutants, and was greeted by the mustachioed face of my smiling, badass, gay cowboy.

Yes, you read that right.  Fallout: New Vegas is a game that rewards you for playing a friendly gay cowboy (mustache optional) in a world where cowboys and rangers are fighting Imperial Rome over the Las Vegas strip (yup, that’s more or less the whole plot).  Here’s how you do it:

First, be Good Natured.  Taking this perk at first level deducts points from all of your combat skills while increasing many of the important non-combat skills like First Aid, Speech, and Barter.  Sounds bad for a gunslinging cowboy, but you are only going to want the cowboy-oriented combat skills (guns & melee) so it’s easy to move points around to get all the wild west wasteland shootin’ and stabbin’ skills you need.

  

Second, you should be into dudes.  Serious.  By second level, if you are male, you can take the perk Confirmed Bachelor which rewards you for your intimate familiarity with the male body to give you +10% damage to the same sex (and a good chunk of your enemies are men), plus the chance to flirt with an occasional wasteland wanderer.

Third, make sure to get good at shootin’ and stabbin’, because by level eight with 45 points in guns & melee you can take the Cowboy perk, giving you +25% damage done by dynamite, hatchets, knives, revolvers, and lever-action guns.  

 

From there you can add in perks like quick draw, gunslinger, and a host of other gunfighter & survivalist perks to round out your cowpoke.  By building a gay cowboy step by step, you get a whopping +35% damage to some of the best some of the coolest weapons on your most common enemies.  Certainly this was a crafty plan of the writers, and I love them for it.

Gay Space Cowboy

Recently a gaming buddy suggested that we take a break from our Pathfinder D&D game and try the new Star Wars system.  He asked if I would rather play a scoundrel on the edge of the frontier or a rebel against the Empire.  I deliberated for some time (I love the frontier, but the chance to try out an ahimsa insurgent?) until he got bored, finished his beer, and found someone else to talk to.  Late last night, though, the answer struck me.  Frontier, of course, because in what other game would I have a chance to play…

A Gay Space Cowboy.

Rainbow Rocket Ranger to the Rescue!  The Empire will never see him coming.  So here are some space cowboys, or gay cowboys, or gay space cowboys, for you to consider.

Quickshots- Linda and Abilene

Among the dregs of B-movies on Netflix you can find a bizarre softcore sexploitation film called Linda and Abilene.  The description reads “In this erotic Western, two orphaned siblings struggle to suppress their feelings when they begin to develop a sexual attraction to each other.”  While that may sound like an interesting premise, it really is a struggle to understand what this film is about.  Mostly what I took away from it is that women in the old west wore pantyhose, and bad men liked to push them to the ground and dry hump them to death.  That is literally how the film begins, and the remainder of the film follows the daughter of our first victim falling into a regular, identical fate, when not doing tedious farm chores.  We also learn that once men see a woman nude they can never get the image out of their minds, and it will drive them forever to savagely dry hump every woman they encounter, or masturbate furiously under the covers.  Ninety minutes of dry humping and masturbation in the Wild West.  Who knew such a film existed?  Or needed to exist?

Happy 4th of July!

God bless America!

The Great Quotes of Jonah Hex