Reflections From a Murky Pond

During the morning of Tuesday, September 29, 2015 a street artist, identified by friends as Antonio Ramos, in Oakland, CA was gunned down and killed while working on a community art project, the Oakland Superheroes Mural Project which is a project sponsored by Oakland’s Attitudinal Healing Connection.

Straight Outta Oakland – Painted In Blood & Irony

Yes, this is sad. Indeed, it approaches the level of tragedy. It should, however, have been an expected outcome. It’s not rational to believe that one can to empower individuals to be self-aware and inspired through arts, creativity and education, making positive choices to break the cycle of violence for themselves and their communities in the ghettos and barrios. Crime and depravity are too entrenched for such efforts to work at any meaningful level and too many of the population of those zones will actively work against such efforts.

At best, such civic minded entertainments should await comprehensive law enforcement purges of the ghettos and barrios before being attempted. Otherwise, the street art ends up, as in Mr. Ramos’ sad case, painted in blood and irony.

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Most associate mermaids with the marine environment. It seems, however, that Gestiefeltekatze enjoys the beauty of mermaids who prefer to inhabit more lacustrine habitats.

As this blog is called Reflections From A Murky Pond, I’m 100% in favor of more freshwater mermaids, especially ones who love lakes and ponds. 😉

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I think we actually be nearing the Zombie Apocalypse. No, I’m not expecting the streets to soon fill with the hungry undead – DNC functions excepted 😛 – any time soon or, likely, ever. I’m talking about the apocalypse of the zombie meme itself.

I’m pretty sure that the existence and popularity of cartoonist massgrfx’s Girls In Their Undies vs. Zombies indicates that the Zombie Apocalypse meme is rotting away from the inside and that its end – Not with a bang but a groan – is fast approaching.

I mean, C’mon! There’s now the pop-culture term, “ZILFs” (Zombies I’d Like to Fuck) and iZombie exec producer Rob Thomas is comfortable taking full advantage of it.  Hence, while predicting the eschaton of a meme is inherently inaccurate, I think this one is done or nearly so.

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