I HAD TOO MUCH TO DREAM LAST NIGHT (“HARRY POTTER AND THE VOODOO ZOMBIES” EDITION)

I am in Disco Bay. It is the middle of the night, and for some reason I am trying to run an extension cord across the road. There are electrical plugs here and there embedded in the sidewalk. I plug the cord into one, then extend it across the road to the other side. I can’t remember what the cord is for, but when I plug it in, a red LED grid lights up on the ground, sort of like a Tron playing grid.

A mini-van drives by and runs over the cord. No damage, but the driver stops, gets out and tells me I can’t use those plugs. I am hustled into the van, at which point I either become Harry Potter, or start watching a film in which I have been playing him.

I switch to the audience POV and watch as Harry wonders why he’s in trouble. He notices there are other people in the van with him, who have also been rounded up for some reason. At that point, he realizes he’s lost not only the device he was trying to plug in, but also his wand. He figures he must have left them where he was picked up, and he starts thinking of a way to escape and get back.

Suddenly the van zaps through time and space and arrives in what looks like downtown Bangkok. Harry and the other wizards are brought to a place called the Bilderberg Hotel. The “hotel room” is more like a converted garage on the ground floor. A sign indicates that there is a Wendy’s in the lobby, but it actually looks like any run-down outdoor food court. The menu is only burgers – the fries and onion rings are complementary and sit in big bowls on the table alongside tubs of ketchup and sweet chili sauce.

As Harry gets something to eat, he sees a large Trinitron screen across the street. It starts broadcasting news that wizards are being picked up everywhere, and are unable to defend themselves because their wands have been stolen. Wizards are also reporting that at least one other item of theirs went missing as well – something small but of personal value.

Harry then realizes what has happened: someone has managed to simultaneously steal the wands of every wizard in England. Moreover, the same person has stolen a personal item from each of them – which means the wizards can all be controlled by remote. It’s a form of voodoo magic that hasn’t been practiced for hundreds of years – magic that the Ministry had thought was forgotten and lost. It looks like someone has discovered its existence and learned how to use it.

And then I woke up.

Voodoo you,

This is dF

DEÄTHMÜFFIN UPDATE: POP OF NOISE!

And it’s another perfect chart-topper from Banäna Deäthmüffins.

People ask us where we get song ideas from. The answer is: all sorts of places.

In this case, we got them from a throw pillow with a bunch of cute cartoon animals playing soccer. Literally. And verbatim.

The song has been sitting around for ages, and we only got around to recording it earlier this year. And since we don’t usually do songs about sports, we figured we might as well submit the song to FIFA to be the official theme song of World Cup 2014. Because hell, why not?

Obviously we lost, ostensibly because we weren’t Brazilian enough. (As if Pitbull is.) Maybe if we’d got Jennifer Lopez to sing on it …

Anyway, we’ve been unable to release it into the wild for legal reasons. Until now.

So imagine this being played during the World Cup instead of that Pitbull song.

( AND WE SING! )

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Nice goal,

This is dF

MIKE BROWN WOULD STILL BE ALIVE IF OBAMA WASN’T PRESIDENT

I hadn’t planned to write anything else about Ferguson. But I was kind of waiting for someone to find a way to blame all of this on Presidente Obama somehow.

Fox News did not let me down.

And now of course Ferguson isn’t the only place where grand juries are letting white cops who kill unarmed black people go free.



Which probably means the Cleveland cop who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice has nothing to worry about. Or that Phoenix cop who shot a black guy while he was reaching for a bottle of pills.

Because it’s not their fault, you see. It is Obama’s fault those people are dead now. Race relations were great until Obama started saying they weren’t. And if he had created jobs, everyone wouldn’t be so angry about cops killing unarmed black people.

Or something.

It’s depressing how many people I know on Facebook who point to these grand jury decisions – and that Fox News bit – as some kind of proof that (1) it’s okay for cops to shoot unarmed people and (2) cops aren’t racist, and the only racists in America are black people calling white cops racist. As far as they’re concerned, the system works, and police have to deal with dangerous people all the time, and by the way Mike Brown, Eric Garner and Rumain Brisbon were criminals, and that’s why they had to die for crimes involving tobacco products and (allegedly) drugs. And hey, they’d still be alive if they’d gone along quietly like white people do when they get rumbled by the fuzz. And as for Tamir Rice, hey, kids shouldn’t play with guns around cops.

Which is easy to say when the victim isn’t a member of your family.

No one’s actually saying that, of course. Not verbatim. But that’s the overall message I’m getting here – the victims aren’t nearly as important as the fact that white cops killing unarmed black people isn't racist and the grand jury decisions prove that, so yr wrong to keep saying it’s racist.

Okay, the rule of law is important, and sure, innocent until proven guilty, and yes, the police have a very difficult job, etc. I get all that. I also get that no one likes being called a racist, individually or as a group – to include the police. But I don’t believe those points cancel out the bigger picture here, which everyone is either missing or refusing to acknowledge. 

The fact remains that you ultimately have one group of people (mostly low-income black people) saying, “Look, this is the reality we have to live with every day and we’re pretty upset about that,” and another group of people (mostly middle/upper class white people) telling them, “No it isn’t, and even if it is, it’s yr own fault, so stop blaming us. And by the way, we’re not racist, therefore racism is not a problem, therefore you must be making it up.”

And I just don’t think that’s the proper response. I’m also not really convinced that it’s up to the majority ethnic group in a given country (in the case of America, white people) to tell the minority ethnic groups what counts as racism and what doesn’t.

And frankly, trying to blame all of this on Obama is just lazy buck-passing and a cheap shot. It’s also insulting.

Obviously I’m oversimplifying this. There are blacks who side with the police and whites who side with Brown, Garner, et al. That’s clearly confusing to a lot of people.

But you what else is confusing? How a cop can choke a guy to death on camera and be cleared of any wrongdoing. Or how Darren Wilson can walk free despite telling a story that only makes sense if you believe that Michael Brown’s response to being told to get on the sidewalk was to attack the cop, something no one really does unless they’re on PCP or insane (and Brown was neither).

No wonder African-Americans are on the streets protesting. They’ve endured a couple of centuries of racism in America to the point that they were only guaranteed civil rights at the national level for the last 50 years (and they still had to fight for them in the Southern states for at least another ten). Many of them still have to deal with discrimination in some form or other in a way that makes upward mobility more difficult for them than white people. Their relationship with the police is also profoundly different than white people. And they’re being asked to accept very improbable stories that vindicate the killing of unarmed people who weren’t committing any crimes that justified lethal force. And they don’t even get the benefit of a public trial that might actually answer some unanswered questions that really need answering.

So the least we could do is stop blaming the victims and trying to score political points and just listen to these people for a minute.

I can’t breathe,

This is dF