What the hell is wrong with Turkmenistan?

Or, "Damn you, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov!"

Ok, time to dust off the "Back From Indefinite Hiatus" tag. Sorry for the delay, but I've had a lot of things go down in the past few weeks, any of a number of which might have made interesting blogs, had I been so inclined. Here's a quick little bulleted list for those of you keeping score at home:

• I went to Disneyworld with my girlfriend and her family, where we were whisked around like royalty, getting in front of every line in the place (take that Make A Wish kids!).
• I got a nice little promotion at my job, making it entirely possible that I'm not underemployed anymore.
• I'll probably be in a show this summer. HamletMachine. More on that later.
• I watched the Cubs become an official Major League Baseball Team by putting up the best beginning of a season since--roughly--the Bronze Age.
• I battled the almighty, planet devouring Galactus to a standstill, finally getting him to agree to leave the Earth permanently.¹ No thanks to that damn Watcher.
• I have shown that I have the willpower to avoid murdering Sparky, despite the fact that he now barks nonstop for the duration of any meal I attempt to eat in the apartment.
• I have yet to destroy any other household appliances.
• Ali and I have managed to empty our storage locker, thus saving us literally 1.09 hundreds of dollars a month.
• I continued to not write about The Goonies.
• I have edged ever closer to my goal of winning the Presidency in 2012 on the back of my "Where's My Jetson's Shit" platform.²

But none of that matters, because Turkmenistan is turning its back on 90% of it's Gross Domestic Product: sheer lunatic leadership.

Apparently, per the BBC, new President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov has decided to undo the hard work that Slog favorite Saparmurat Niyazov performed to make Turkmenistan the wackiest Former Soviet Republic around. "Names of months and days have to comply with international standards," said Berdymukhamedov,³ thus ending the former Turkmenbashi's tradition of naming months after, well, whatever he damn well felt like calling them.

What's next, Kurbanguly?⁴ No more using the national treasury to make gold statues of The Father of Turkmen? No more compulsory reading of Niyazov's poetry in schools? No more "Free McRib Tuesdays?"⁵ I suppose you think you're going to be a respected world leader if you give in to peer pressure and run your country like every other central Asian state? Hardly. Turkmenbashi put you on the map⁶, pal. Without him, you're paractically Uzbekistan.

I mourn for you, Saparmurat.⁷ In your absence, the world is a colder, saner place.

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1. I may be confusing myself with the Fantastic Four.
2. The Future of Yesterday...Tomorrow!
3. Turkmen for "Killjoy."
4. Turkmen for "Total Doucheface."
5. Ok. That one is mine. But he'd have done it. He was cool like that.
6. Which, of course, no American can use.
7. Turkmen for "Totally Fucking Rad."

MySpace Archive: The Death of Saparmurat Niyazov

In an attempt to beef up this blog's appearance before I actually tell anyone about its existence, and also to relive some of my wacky antics over on MySpace, I am archiving all of my old posts over here at The Slog.

This little slice of half-assery is presented with an extended afterward, to give my 2.7 readers More Value For the Money.

[Originally posted on Thursday, December 21, 2006]

Well, my very favorite dictator just died (and it's not that rat-bastard Pinochet)

Oh, I will miss this man:

My original link from the blog is dead. But here's his Wikipedia entry.

This article doesn't do him justice [it didn't]. I urge everyone to google him and learn of his glory [which I have already done for you].

Truly the end of an era.

And I stopped blogging for like 2 months at this point. Even though this was not so much a blog as a link dump. Pretty much all of my blogs for the next year could technically be tagged Indefinite Hiatus, but I'm reserving that one for real-time lags

I was going to block-print the following, but my tangent overtook this rather paltry original entry:

Saparmurat Niyazov was a hoot. We shall not soon see his like again.

However, if I can get a hold of a small country (or better yet, a large North American one roughly south of Canada and north of Mexico), I have a few plans as well. The main one, of course being devoting the lion's share of the budget to developing Jetsons technology. And though this would be simpler through my own installation as Semi-Benevolent Dictator, I would be willing to work through the Democratic process (ie, in my long plotted presidential bid in 2012 for the "Where's My Jetsons Shit?" Party - more on that later, I'm sure). I am VERY serious about both Flying Cars and Sassy, Wise-Cracking Robot Maids.

But other plans in the works? A series of 50-foot high statues of myself, made entirely of stale circus peanuts, placed at 25-mile intervals across the land. You wanna talk job creation? Just fending off the birds alone would provide jobs for millions of our Nations' Illiterate Gun-Toting Loons. Not to mention a huge boost to both the Circus Peanut industry and the field of Candy-Related Artisanship.

Also, my state funeral will be BITCHIN': My huge marble mausoleum (made entirely of actual marbles glued together into a mosaic of Lee Van Cleef's face on each wall) will house a film projecter that broadcasts onto an IMAX screen (placed in front of the faces of Mt. Rushmore) a perpetual loop of Peter Grave's eulogy from the final minutes of It Conquered the World:

“He learned almost too late that Man is a feeling creature. And that because of it he is the greatest creature in the universe. He learned too late that Men have to make their own way and make their own mistakes and that there can’t be any gift of perfection from outside ourselves. That when we seek such perfection we only find death, fire, loss, disillusionment, the end of everything that’s gone forward. Men have always sought an end to toil and misery and if it can’t be given, it has to be achieved. There is hope but it has to come from Man himself.”

My god, it will be beautiful...