Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

  • http://www.pegritz.com Derek C. F. Pegritz

    Saint Francis E! I’m a proud slave of the Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God!

  • jowlsey

    That’s good, but I prefer the Critters Buggin’ version.

     http://www.myspace.com/crittersbuggin/music/songs/bill-gates-43425913

  • nixiebunny

    “Donate money or even a manual typewriter to me for your only hope for a future.”

    That would explain the use of % for S and F for E.

  • Boundegar

    You laugh now, but when he is vindicated you will all weep bitter tears.

  • theophrastvs

    Do we really need to reincarnate this sad individual given as we have the majority of the republican party trying to revoke Roe vs Wade and otherwise take us back to the social norms of the 1870s?

  • http://www.facebook.com/peter.ek Peter Samir Ek

    How was Dec misogynic BTW? Missed that. And is it fair to call clearly psychotic people racist and misogynistic? If their racism etcetera stems from their psychosis, then it is hardly their fault. 

    • http://www.xeni.net/ Xeni Jardin

      that’s actually a fair point, and i’ve clarified the language.

  • Ashen Victor

    Sounds more reasonable and articulated than half of the world wide politician population.

  • Frank Diekman

    This should be mashed up with the Winter Wipeout lady:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fTRhOw76do

    • http://www.xeni.net/ Xeni Jardin

      P-E-N-I-S

    • http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby

      Wow!

    • http://www.pegritz.com Derek C. F. Pegritz

      Bringing Dec and that lady together would be like crossing the streams! The result: TOTAL PROTONIC REVERSAL!

  • OldBrownSquirrel

    This… reminds me of someone.  I’ve heard him go off on Google, the EFF, Google, Larry Lessig, Google, Tim O’Reilly, Google, the GPL, and Google.  Makes me wish he’d find some decent meds.

  • Frank Diekman

    Funny that the name of his disorder,  “machine-influencing-delusional” sounds like it would be something from one of his rants. Also make s a good band name.

  • http://nawel.tumblr.com Nawel

    Let me get my tin foil hat…

    • http://twitter.com/beep54orama B E Pratt

      You DO know, sir, that tin foil hats are actually a PART of the conspiracy!?!?!?? Yes!! You have been CAREFULLY deluded!! The tinfoil hats actually INCREASE the RADIO WAVF% FFFFCTIVFNF%%!!!!

      [it's true; they've done a study.....]

      • Just_Ok

        That’s what they WANT you to think.

    • TheOven
  • JoshP

    Was I the only one waiting (hoping) for Thrill Kill Kult to start dropping?

  • http://nawel.tumblr.com Nawel

    I can only relate this with a guy we have in Santiago de Chile. He calls himself “El Divino Anticristo” (Divine Antichrist, just in case), he lives in the streets and sell his photocopied-typewrited rants at some corners of a hipster district of Santiago center… He uses his own words and terms and is notoriously mysoginic…

  • John Mitchell

    Donna Kossy’s book “Kooks” is a must-read. She calmly documents a wide range of human interests, with a section devoted to Dec.

    • Halloween_Jack

      Kooks is a wonderful book. (It’s worth looking at the Amazon review page because a couple of reviews seem to be by subjects of her book.)

  • bobcorrigan

    I get all the wisdom I need from Dr. Bronner.  ALL ONE!

  • ldobe

    Interesting texture to the writing.  Starts out as a total word salad.
    Then it becomes what I can only assume is an advertisement for a revolutionary new surgery.  I could get my stature stretched a foot for free and with no ill effects (I’m a 5’5″ male.  I hate being a homunculus).  According to the babbling schizophrenic of course.

    Then we get into Dec’s philosophy, which just pretty much makes me giggle.  How did people like him get such a wide audience before the internet?  Wow.

    It’s sad he was so out of touch with reality, and schizophrenics are notoriously hard to treat.  The kind of crazy people who feel that they’re the sane ones, and everyone else is brainwashed.

    I used to have a boyfriend who developed schizophrenia during our relationship.  Had to end it eventually.  It’s a weird, almost contagious disorder.  The more time I spent with him, and the more he insisted on and babbled about his delusions of persecution, the crazier I felt.  I probably was crazy just for staying in such a bad situation for so long.

    • http://devojane.blogspot.com devophill

      How did people like him get such a wide audience before the internet?

      He typed out his rants, (as you can see) and mailed them to radio and tv stations all over the country for years. Boyd “Doc” Britton was working at a radio station in Colorado, and decided to record himself reading a bunch of them. After that, the recordings made their way into the same tape trading circuit that brought you Orson Welles’ pea ad, the Tube Bar Tapes, and the battles of Peter and Raymond.

      • ldobe

        It must have been a lot of work moving tapes all over the country. I’m a bit surprised these kinds of tapes survive at all. What with the generational loss, over umpteen parent to child to grandchild copies. Do the originals exist anymore for most of these tapes?

        • Halloween_Jack

          They may very well exist in the collections of obsessive collectors, who have kept them carefully preserved and organized for just such a day.

  • bruceburbank

    What, am I the only VSnares fan on BB?
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOqcdiwjnSE

    • ldobe

      I like Venetian Snares.  I just can’t listen very often.  Tinnitus, and also it manages to make me feel sick if if I listen too long.

      For me it’s music to listen to when I feel pissed or angry.  Goes well with bile.  Detrimentalist for the Win :-)

    • http://fallsastar.com Crashproof

      No, you just got to this post before I did.  Thanks for posting it so i don’t have to. :)

    • ifriit

      I wish the guy who did this had finished the whole thing.
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OzxNM8Nlsc

  • hacky

    Handed one of these in as an essay for a class I intended to drop. 

  • http://twitter.com/rabite Andrew Auernheimer

    You all call Dec crazy, but it is ye who are insane. Continue lining up to be harvested by the demons of Google, and see how far that gets you. They’ll pick you off one by one in autodriven car accidents, and the Google glases will hypnagogically program you to serve the Googleplex without question. Francis really was our only hope for a future!

  • Zadaz

    His writing has much the same feel and texture as the rantings of Frank Chu. (For those who don’t know, Frank has been commuting into San Francisco for years to strut his weird rambly stuff, carrying a placard featuring a daily mutating word salad. Things like “Impeach Lincoln 12 Galaxies Metagenic Apertures Enticement Crosshairs ABC NBC FOX Saucerliners Ultracompacts” It comes at comprehensible from the other side.)

    • Boundegar

       Long ago, a similar character mailed an unsolicited cassette to my office.  My friends and I had such a laugh.  I kept the cassette for many years, but it is gone now.  I just looked him up, but it seems he left no trace on the Internet.  Probably passed away too soon.

    • Halloween_Jack

      People like that probably exist in every big and mid-sized American city. There were a couple of people who used to come into the main branch of the Memphis Public Library (back when it used to be on the corner of Peabody and McLean in Midtown) who would promulgate their own special theories and stories in different ways. One would make photocopies of pages from newspapers, magazines and books on different subjects and arrange them in a particular order on one of the tables–say, juxtaposing stuff on the X-Files, the JFK assassination, and a Mars probe landing–and watch over them to make sure that no one removed or disturbed them. The other was a woman who had long rants about being “the Queen of Spain and Korean” (yes, with the N) written not only on a sign but also on her clothing.

      • nixiebunny

         My wife used to work in a public library and found a similar rant hand-written and left by one of the patrons. Lots of CIA mind control stuff.

    • http://jimbeach.net mindfu

       *That* freaking guy.

      Well it just goes to show that having a niche and being persistent and self-promoting will eventually bear fruit, even for schizophrenics.

  • http://borborygmist.influxofdust.com/ Wayne Dyer
  • Scurra

    I never knew that about “Esquire” and the US legal profession – in the UK it’s just a general term for a man (although I believe it originally related to the term “squire” as in “assistant to a knight”.)

    • http://jimbeach.net mindfu

      It’s used as custom by lawyers in the US, but there really is no reason why anyone in the US can’t use it either. If you look it up in the dictionary, it’s actually quite funny – it is a title that literally has no actual meaning! Pure fanciness with no actual substantive value.

  • http://fallsastar.com Crashproof

    I suspect we have one of these in St. Louis.  There’s a house on Ashby with white stones and a pink bridge in the yard, which has two brand new hand-painted signs.  They’re hard to read as you drive by, but one of them says something about robots and one says something about the New World Order.  I’m going to have to walk down there and take some photos, but carefully of course so nobody reports me for terrorism or something.

    • Sparg

      Is that Ashby Road or Avenue?  Google Maps has a view of the Road.  I may not have to cross the river to check it out. ;)

  • http://www.facebook.com/ian.brewer1 Ian Brewer

    He makes as much sense as Alex Jones, maybe more.

  • Pend-O-Matic

    Reminds me of Toynbee tiles (“TOYNBEE IDEA IN MOVIE 2001 RESURRECT DEAD ON PLANET JUPITER”) associated Minority Association, that handed out leaflets (speaking of alien-machine overlords- Archons if you will ) in Philly before the related tiles began to appear.  Dr. John C. Lilly (whose work is the bases for “Altered States”), spoke of nefarious alien-machines. Not to mention Authors Arthur C. Clark and, Phillip K. Dick. 

    It seems at the very least, this type of thought is an indicator of the inner-workings of the modern psyche- if nothing else. You could impose a pop-culture seeded hypothesis, assuming this to be a manner of regurgitating the aesthetics of scifi horror. Personally I feel that might be too simplistic and, that it’s just as plausible that man has a deep seated fear of a dependent society.

  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

    I used to love this kind of nuttery back when it was hard to find. The Internet made it easy to find and compare the rants, the dismal sameness, desperation,  and sadness became apparent.

    Schizophrenia mucks up your brain. One of the manifestations is that it removes the “breaks” on the brain’s pattern recognition circuitry. It doesn’t give up looking for connections.

    • Sparg

      I used to get this kooky crap thanks to High Weirdness By Mail.  Wonder if Douglass Truth Society is still around?

  • Richard Pusateri

    A place I worked in the 1970s received these single-spaced, 1000-word sentences on both sides of the page epistles about Frank Sinatra organizing the Kennedy assassination and cover-up that involved every celebrity of that era and every two weeks or so another one would arrive inexplicably to our place of business, which had nothing to do with Frank Sinatra or the C.I.A. or celebrity or assassination and I am so sorry I do not have any of them anymore… I could go on, but…

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=587884018 Bill Kates

    One used to see this guy’s crazy Xeroxes all over New York, especially in midtown; the stuff was ubiquitous. I’m surprised I didn’t know about his audio recordings, which are true priceless horrible yet fascinating nutcake weirdness insanity– eek now I’m gonna start talking like that. It’s so strangely dispassionate, robotic yet passionate and 50′s radio announcer-like. 

  • TheOven

    Psychic TV sampled this guy is the 90′s.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjNqKEpYnfw

    • Nick Dimmock

      Yeah, “Gone Paranoid” from (more accurately collected on) Ultradrug was another PTV Dec track. I had no idea where the rant had come from when I first heard it, but it fascinated me. Later I linked it to a reprint of one of Dec’s tracts on the back page of an issue of Weirdo, but it was years and years before access to the internet filled in the many blanks.