The Machinery of Night

Posted 9:47 PM by Angie Schultz

The Huffer Zone

Holy Mother of Mental Illness. You know what's really freaking me out? It's getting harder to tell Arianna Huffington's real blog from the parody site, Huffington's Toast.

I offer in evidence this post by revered old washed-up blowhard Norman Mailer, on the whole Newsweek/Koran thing. His premise is that the White House set up Newsweek for a fall. They arranged those riots in Pakistan, too. Behold the master's words:

At present, I have a few thoughts I can certainly not prove, but the gaffe over the Michael Isikoff story in Newsweek concerning the Koran and the toilet is redolent with bad odor...

There still resides, however, under my aging novelist's pate a volunteer intelligence agent, sadly manque. He does suggest that the outcome was too neat.

The Republic teeters, for the little man who lives in Mailer's skull is suspicious.

Is the real Mailer any less loony than the fictional Hunter S. Thompson? Or, hell, than the real Thompson?

Steve H. of Hog on Ice is doing most of the Thompson posts, and they're a hoot. I've never read any Thompson before, but I am seized with the desire to run out and buy some, if they're half as crazy as this. Some samples:

Have you ever smoked a page from the Book of Revelation, amigo? Great stuff in there. Marvelous cure for writer’s block.

“Twenty grains?,” I asked my Samoan attorney, “What kind of pansy-ass load is that? That won’t go through both doors of a Crown Vic and light up a G-man crouching on the other side with a laser microphone in his hand.”

I wonder if George W. Bush ever ate a Jimson weed...Maybe he comes across them while clearing brush down in Crawford. Madness in his eyes as his hungry fingers grasp the fleshy stalk...Cheney nearby, nude, sunning himself on a Navajo blanket, egging him on. “I ate two this morning. Catch up before I peak...” Bush’s chimplike digits clasping the stem as he chews. “...I ought to kill you for tripping naked in front of the twins. Ah, yes. I see the colors now. Someone gather my clothes and bring me a dozen ripe watermelons and some shoulder-fired Stinger missiles.”

Then out comes Condi Rice, bare to the waist, carrying a tray of Jell-O shots,but not inclined to mention that one of them is laced with synthetic pineal gland extract, fresh from the kitchens at Langley. With an extra acetyl group tacked to the end of every molecule, just to see if anything kooky happens.

See this post from two years ago(!) on Mailer's theory that George Bush invaded Iraq in order to enslave the technologically-superior Chinese by singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at baseball games. No, really. Pass me that mezcal, man. I got dibs on the worm. They're hallucinogenic, you know.