Natural Disaster

Natural Disaster is the compilation of Issues #10, #11, #12 and #13 of Burn Collector as well as Issues #1 and #2 of Natural Disaster. Al Burian weaves an excellent fictional but real account of twenty / thirty something life in the modern USA. Here is an Excerpt: "We see humans engage in similar behavior, although admittedly less in the context of procreation and Darwinistic survival and more in the are of pay-per-view cable entertainment options, in the form of the "Ultimate Fighting Championship" program, an international sporting event in which there seem to be no rules except those generally governing global human rights abuses and war crimes. Martial arts masters from the Far East go up against guys from Newark whose idea of fighting expertise is drinking from a bottle of gin and starting a bar fight. The results are often surprising. The constant is the insane violence, the disturbing spectacle of seeing people pounding on each other like animals. "Ultimate Fighting Championship" viewing never fails to deliver a queasy, unsanitary sensation, the bottom-feeding feeling of watching the very lowest common denominator in what can still be identified as "entertainment" - one step up, maybe, from watching videos of police car wreck footage. Although, I must concede: if, as in ape culture, the prize for being the winner of "Ultimate Fighting Championship" was the exclusive right to mate with the women of earth, it would probably make the program more compelling viewing. In any case, I am not sure where I stand in regards to this whole mating-for-life-issue. Humans, Judith points out, are the only creatures that mate for entertainment. That whole aspect complicates everything greatly, we both agree. The great apes have a good thing going for their needs, in that they have an effective, albeit socio-mechanically primitive, form of assuring that the greatest of the ape qualities are passed on, and since these great qualities consist of exactly two, ass-kicking and chest-pounding, the selection process is reasonably simple. If humans subscribed to a winner-takes-all pecking order of the type the great apes favor, the only person currently allowed to initiate sexual intercourse would be someone like Bill Gates, a man of great power and influence but also a man whose dancing was characterized by Newsweek magazine as looking like "a twelve year old kicking around a squirrel."