A snippet from a dream I had last night:

I was sitting in a hotel bar somewhere in the Palestinian territories, drinking what I'm told is a specialty beer brewed locally by Hamas. (You would think Islamic fundamentalists made beer, would you?) The funny part is, I remember pretty vividly what it tasted like--almost like a mixture of rye whiskey with something fizzy and just the slightest hint of beer. "Ahmed, my good man," I finally said, "I've got to give it to you. I don't normally like beer"--even in my strangest dreams, I'm really more of a hard liquor person--"but I like this. My compliments to Hamas."

After that, things switched from the mideast to the U.S. and the rest of the stuff I remember had nada to do with beer, politics or Islamic fundamentalism, but it still makes for an interesting snippet.

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My sister just got a story published in the first issue Grendelsong. This is a Good Thing. Its not one I've read, but she wrote it and it's set in Elizabethean England, so between those two premises, it follows a priori that what results will be Very Cool.

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The night before last the first episode of the new season of South Park aired. I still wish they didn't feel the need to spice up the genuinely hilarious parts of the show--parodies of Hollywood movie formulas, nasty edgy social commentary, the juxtaposition of poorly drawn cartoon children with appalling dialogue, etc.--with fart jokes and the equivalent thereof, which are just irritating, but last night was a good reminder of why I love the show so much.

Last season, they did a savagely hilarious episode making fun of the Church of Scientology. Before the start of the new season, Isaac Hayes, who played "Chef"--sadly one of the funneist characters on the show--and is apperantly a devout Scientologist, quit in protest. As he explained, comedy is one thing, but making fun of people's deeply-held beliefs is another. (Of course, South Park creators Stone & Parker have always been equal-opportunity blasphemers, concocting pretty wicked humor at the expense of *all* of the major spiritual options, from Catholicism to Mormonism to Atheism and most everything in between since the show's inception, but I guess this is different.)

In any case, Wednesday night's episode was a pretty fun demonstration of the folly of crossing people with their own TV show (surely a potent modern adaptation of "ink by the barrel"), an evil sense of humor, and as satirists are more or less immune from libel suits.

Chef--they very, very obviously, only used disjointed bits of old clips from previous seasons for his lines--has joined the "Super Adventure Club." The long and the short of it is that this leads to his death, and they have a lot of fun throughout the whole episode making not-so-subtle jabs without ever saying the words "Scientology" or anything related, but I'm pretty sure the whole episode was designed just so they could use Stan's eulogy at Chef's funeral at the end of the episode:

"I know most of are disappointed at the choices Chef has made in the last week. But we all need to remember how funny he used to be...We shouldn't blame Chef for what happened. We should blame the fruity little club that brainwashed him."