Posts Tagged Ronnie James Dio
Ronnie James Dio’s Family To Sue University of Texas For Stealing Heavy Metal Horns Symbol
Posted by Keith Spillett in General Weirdness on October 20, 2014
For years, the University of Texas has used the “Hook’em Horns” hand gesture without properly crediting its originator, hard rock icon Ronnie James Dio. According to a representative from the Dio family, it’s time that Texas starts paying for it.
In a lawsuit filed in Texas Superior Court on Monday, the Dio family has asked University of Texas to pay 730 billion dollars to Dio’s estate for “taking the most significant symbol in the satanic heavy metal community and polluting it by associating it with college football and a state best known for barbeque, executions and electing half-wit governors.”
Dio’s horns have been stolen by thousands of organizations and artists in an attempt to seem more edgy. Everyone from Eminem to soon-to-be presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have co-opted the sign in order to cash in on “the metal image” while not paying any respects to the man who created the symbol. The American Sign Language community has even perverted the satanic horns gesture and made it mean “I love you”.
Dio first began using the gesture at a Black Sabbath concert in Birmingham, Alabama in 1979. In an interview with MetalRoofing.com in 2001, Dio claimed that he saw the image of the Virgin Mary hovering over an International House of Pancakes about an hour before the concert. That image was devoured by the image of the demon Azazel. When the demon finished eating the Virgin Mary it stared Dio in the eye and flashed him “the sign”. The rest is history.
The lawsuit is another in a series of blows to the once proud University of Texas football program. The team is off to a horrendous 3 and 4 start and several key players have been kicked off of the team.
Many have questioned whether the curse placed on the program by Dio at the end of the 2005-06 National Championship season is responsible. Dio, who was a huge USC fan, and his spiritual advisor Ned LaVey, son of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, allegedly performed a ceremony where they drank a mixture of bulls’ blood, Jagermeister and the spinal fluid of Longhorns quarterback Vince Young.
This ritual has led to a series of troubles for the University of Texas including a critical injury to Quarterback Colt McCoy during the 2009-10 National Championship Game and boils developing on the face of Coach Mack Brown during a 2011 game against Oklahoma. Once the University pays the Dio family the 730 billion dollars it is owed, the curse will be removed and Texas will once again return to prominence in the college football world.
I Voted For Heavy Metal and All I Got Is This Lousy Country
Posted by Keith Spillett in The Politics Of Catastrophe on May 21, 2014
Americans vote for a variety of reasons. In some cases, they are concerned citizens who believe they can use the ballot box to change the direction our nation. In other cases, they do so because they feel an obligation to participate in the rituals of the democratic process. Not me. I vote every chance I get in order to amuse myself to no end by voting for my favorite metal artists.
It usually takes me a half an hour to vote. I go through the races I’ve followed closely and am able to intelligently evaluate, like Senatorial or Congressional elections, and try to pick the best person for the job. I know I’m being hustled here and am sure that nearly any candidate I pick is a shill for some multinational corporation, but I saw “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” one too many times and allow myself the illusion of “making a difference”. Once that nonsense is out of the way, I get to the fun stuff.
Often in elections, you are given the choice of candidates you have almost no hope of being able to evaluate. For example, how on earth can I possibly determine who would be the best Head of the State Department of Agriculture? I don’t know a thing about farming and wouldn’t have the foggiest notion of how to pick the most appropriate person for the job. I don’t even really know what they do. That’s when I start voting metal.
Georgia offers the write-in option in all races. Therefore, if you want to vote, like I did, for Venom’s gravel throated frontman Cronos to make the state’s agricultural policies, you can do just that! I felt bad about leaving the rest of the original Venom crew out so Abbadon and Mantas received my nod for seats on my local school board. For County Sheriff, I voted for Sodom’s Tom Angelripper. After all, shouldn’t the saw be the law?
I stand there typing in metal artists laughing maniacally. I have voted for Ronnie James Dio in every election going back to 1998 for positions ranging from Superintendent of Schools to Federal Judge. Confused people peer over at me and avert their eyes when I look back at them. They probably think I’m a madman. I’m merely a Surrealist-American doing his part to bring this nation one step closer to the golden age of weirdness that has come to be known as The Freak Future.
Usually, you have about 20 different judges to vote for. They often run unopposed, so unless they happened to give you a night in jail for going 15 miles per hour over the speed limit or get caught in a brothel covered from head-to-toe in ox blood, you are going to vote for them. I see this as a great opportunity to pack the courts with metal luminaries ranging from Quorthon to Lemmy. I voted “Slayer” for a seat on the Bench. The whole band. I struggled mightily with the question of whether this would mean the original Slayer lineup or some of the later incarnations. Who would be the Court drummer Bostaph, Lombardo or Jon Dette?
Sometimes I get bored and switch to other weird possible candidates. One year when the ballot was particularly long, I began voting for excellent defensive shortstops. Mark Belanger, Ozzie Smith, Omar Vizquel, Rey Ordonez…on and on.
Mostly I stick to voting metal because this is America and I have been told I can vote for what I believe in. I have been fed an endless supply of bromides and hackneyed platitudes about what size the government is supposed to be or when a baby is truly alive or how a marriage should be defined or what this nation should stand for. Politics is about who gets what and how much of it. At the end of the day, I’m really just voting on whether Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and Boeing are going to receive larger tax breaks based on the size of their contributions.
The horrible truth is that climate change is causing environmental catastrophes everywhere. We are engaged in an endless stream of costly, bloody foreign wars. Politicians are empty vessels who have become nearly indistinguishable from mattress salesmen. America is circling the proverbial drain and there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it. When someone asks me how I believe we should handle these problems, I look them square in the eyes and I tell them the only thing I can say that makes any sense to me anymore…
“Don’t blame me, I voted for Heavy Metal”
Halestorm Cover of “Straight Through The Heart” Causes Tear To Stream Down Face of Dio’s Corpse
Posted by Keith Spillett in General Weirdness on March 27, 2014
The soon to be released Dio cover album “This Is Your Life” has already received criticism from the person who knew Ronnie James Dio the best, Dio himself. After his untimely passing in May of 2010, Dio’s corpse was preserved and put in a case at Oxford University, where he occasionally taught classes in the history of utopian socialism during his breaks from his life on the road. Dio fans from across the world have made pilgrimages to visit his body since it was encased in glass; regularly flooding the campus with some of the most unkempt, swarthy people that you could possibly imagine.
On Monday afternoon, Robert Owen, an overzealous British fan of the fallen rock icon visited the body in order to play Halestorm’s recently released cover of “Straight Through The Heart”. According to several witnesses, about 36 seconds into the song, a tear streamed down Dio’s mummified face. “Even though he was dead, you could tell that he felt terribly uncomfortable with what they had done to the song. All of a sudden, God as my witness, a tear streamed down his face,” said John Mill, a Dio fan who had flown in from New Zealand to pay his respects.
Dio’s Preserved Body At Oxford University
Reports of weeping corpses are not uncommon in England, where the average person walks around dead for ten years before being buried. However, it is highly irregular for an inanimate corpse to excrete tears after being embalmed. Many Black Sabbath fans have speculated that if Dio’s corpse does rise from the dead his preserved remains might be replaced by vocalist Ian Gillan.
Some are calling the event a miracle. The Catholic Church has sent a representative to Oxford to confirm the weeping body. If they are able to verify the claims of the witnesses Pope Francis has intimated that he would consider making Dio a saint. In parts of Central America, where a strange hybrid of Catholicism and Dio worship has become a popular religion, many are hailing this event as the coming of a new spiritual age of enlightenment.
However, many skeptics are claiming the “Weeping Dio” is merely a hoax concocted by mercenary publicists in order to promote the upcoming cover album. Several attempts have been made to cause the body to continue sobbing, including blasting the entire Disturbed discography for 24 straight hours only inches away from Dio’s ears. As of yet, no new tears have been spotted.
George Clooney Agrees to Buy Bones of Bathory’s Quorthon For 1.6 Million Dollars
Posted by Keith Spillett in General Weirdness on July 11, 2011
In a highly awaited auction, film star George Clooney outbid several other interested collectors for the rights to purchase the bones of former Bathory frontman Quorthon at Southeby’s in London on Friday. Clooney paid a record 1.6 million dollars for the skeleton, the most ever paid for the remains of a metal artist.
Clooney, a lifelong Bathory fan, felt this was the best way to pay his respects to the band that got him into metal. “I’ll never forget the day I bought Under The Sign of the Black Mark,” said Clooney with a nostalgic, distant look in his eye, “it was the first time I ever fell in love.”
The purchase of the organs and bones of dead metal artists has become a hobby among Hollywood celebrities of late. Julia Roberts started the trend last year when she purchased the spinal column and jawbone of Ronnie James Dio for five hundred thousand dollars. Roberts has already offered two million for the corpse of former Iron Maiden singer Paul Di’Anno, who has not yet died. Roberts plans to consume the corpse in a stew with several other diehard Maiden fans while listening to the album Killers at her palatial home in Malibu, California.
The bidding war over the corpse of Mayhem and Burzum’s Varg Vikernes reportedly may run over 10 million dollars. The country of Albania has already expressed interest in buying his lungs and placing them in the town square in the city of Tirana as a potential way to ward off the evil spirits that have plagued that European nation for the past century.
The recent surge of interest in the band Bathory contributed to the high cost of Quorthon’s bones, which six months ago could have been purchased on Ebay for only four thousand dollars. However, since last month’s release of the Bathory celebrity tribute album, “It’s Never a Fine Day to Die”, the band has become a household name. The first single of off the album, a duet version of Necromansy performed by Elton John and Ke$ha, climbed to number 7 on the Billboard chart this week. Other major Bathory tributes are popping up all across the United States.
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour proposed a bill to recognize February 17th as Quorthon day in the state “for his contributions to the black metal movement” and Dairy Queen has offered to give anyone free French fries if they bring a copy of “Blood Fire Death” into any of their nearly nine thousand nationwide stores for the next month.
Quorthon’s estate upped the bidding by promising to give a full ten percent of the purchase price to The Salvation Army. Clooney was thrilled not only to be able to finally caress the femur bone of his favorite vocalist; he was also happy to be able to help out a good cause in the process. Salvation Army spokesman Marshall Whitcomb praised the donation and remarked “I haven’t heard much of this Bathory, but my daughter assures me they are great. We look forward to building churches and community centers around America in Quorthon’s name.”
The Tyranny of Tradition 