Elvis among the Nazi gamers

This morning I checked a certain website (the kind you can go to prison for reading in Australia), which was invariably described as “neo-Nazi” in the press back when the press was still allowed to mention it, which takes its name from a paleo-Nazi newspaper, and which is associated with a “gamer forum.” I found that the header image, which changes from time to time, had been changed to Elvis Presley’s mugshot. A sidebar image which had gone unchanged for years — a message expressing solidarity with U.S. political prisoner Douglass Mackey — had also been replaced with a photo of Elvis.

In the afternoon, I read a bit in Robert Rankin’s 1996 novel Nostradamus Ate My Hamster, which I recently downloaded for complex psychological reasons. One of the characters is recounting a trip he took in a time-traveling Nazi flying saucer. He finds himself in a futuristic London which has been taken over by time-traveling Nazis. He first tries and fails to find a newspaper (a Nazi newspaper) to ascertain the date. Failing that, he decides to explore a shop which sells advanced video-game equipment:

“. . . Russell, you should have seen the gear they had. Computer games like you wouldn’t believe. Holographic stuff. Kids were in there playing them, sitting on little chairs, but they didn’t have those silly virtual reality helmets on, they were right in the middle of the games they were playing, spaceships whizzing past them, laser beams going everywhere. And that’s when I saw him.”

“Saw who?”

“Elvis,” said Bobby Boy.

This Elvis turns out to be a computer-generated hologram, but I still thought it was a fairly impressive coincidence: Nazis, newspapers, video games, and Elvis.