They almost got me with Dr. Anton Spiteri’s blog about the Xaiobeetle and its role as a carrier of a flesh-eating, nerve-damaging parasite, linked from their Myspace blog. FUCKERS! I guess my first clue should have been the fact that Spiteri himself had a Myspace page. The second one should have been that his profile song is Saosin. But hey, I’m feeling a bit slow today. The worst part about it is, I’ve now helped this stupid ass shit get even more viral. ZOMG CIRCULAR TRAFFIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

In the midst of what is quickly becoming Puppygate 2008, it is interesting (to me at least) to note that, many of the same internet-dwellers that believe 9/11 was an engineered event meant to shift the will of the general population in favor of a certain socio-political viewpoint, are so quick to vouch for the authenticity of a grainy, unsourced YouTube clip. I’m not saying its NOT real, however, I’m definitely not gonna say it is. As the above video points out, remember not so long ago the whole “bird shitting in the reporters mouth” clip that was a supposed outtake of real news footage? Well it turned out to be fake, after of course, getting a few million views on YouTube and getting linked by Huffington Post along with every other blog, most of whom are probably posting this puppy video as we speak. Like I said, maybe this video is real. Maybe I’m totally off base. But I’d rather be the guy who was wrong about it being some engineered viral meme, than the guy that’s wrong but can’t go back and unpost a United State’s Marine’s mother’s home address, or worse yet, threats of physical violence.

And even if it is real, Who are we to decry the senseless death of one animal, when everyday in every single city in our entire country, who legions of animals are routinely slaughtered, for food, because they’re “pests”, or because they happen to walk onto our roads? Or how about the 3-4 million dogs and cats euthanized each year at United States animal shelters. Where’s the outcry over that? How many hundreds of thousands of puppies do you think that includes? Why is no one storming the gates of these humane societies and demanding justice?

If we want to punish someone for purposely mistreating animals why don’t we start with the people we can at least prove are doing it? Such as the factory farms that produce the majority of America’s meat? Pigs, which are known to be as intelligent, if not more so than dogs are just one of the animals that suffer unimaginable deaths every single day on their way to our sandwiches, tacos, etc:

Pigs are very clean animals who take to the mud primarily to cool off and evade flies. They are just as friendly and gregarious as dogs, and according to Professor Donald Broom at the Cambridge University Veterinary School, “They have the cognitive ability to be quite sophisticated. Even more so than dogs and certainly three-year-olds.” Mother pigs in factory farms in the U.S. live most of their lives in individual crates that are 7 feet long and 2 feet wide. They display signs of extreme boredom and stress, such as biting the bars of their cages and gnashing their teeth. Their piglets are taken away three weeks after birth and packed into pens until they are singled out to be raised for breeding or for meat. Like chickens and turkeys, pigs are genetically manipulated and pumped full of drugs, and many become crippled under their own weight. Although pigs are naturally affable and social animals, the confinement of these crowded pens causes neurotic behaviors such as cannibalism and tail-biting, so farmers use pliers to break off the ends of piglets’ teeth and cut off their tails without any painkillers.

Makes being thrown off a cliff sound pretty humane.

So The Arcade Fire’s new web site for the song Black Mirror is now online. I’m not really sure what that means, since so far it’s just been counting SUPER FUCKING SLOWLY to what is hopefully 100. I’ll keep you posted. I guess it would help if I actually cared about The Arcade Fire. I mean, at first I thought they really sucked, now I actually think they don’t suck that bad. But whatever. Bruce Springsteen likes them and he knows way more about music than me so I guess they must have something to them. Anyways, if I had to guess, I would wager that this web site probably has something to do with the video for the song, also posted today on YouTube:

UPDATE: Its actually kind of cool, you can watch the video while turning on and off certain parts of the music, such as the vocals, the strings, etc, fucking with different combos. ZOMG TOTALLY VIRALLLLLLLLLL!!!!!111