hurl in this

Last night around 10:30 I was doing some yoga. Bonnie the cat was walking around the room and jumped onto a chair next to me. Just as I was doing Upright Prancing Dog or whatever Bonnie said, "This is what I think of your yoga," and projectile vomitted across the chair, carpet, and yoga mat. Then she jumped down from the chair and looked at me with an expression that said, "Hm, how about that."

Sometimes, the cosmos just don't want you to do yoga. They want you to clean up cat puke.

white house sez: blah blah blah!

This morning, the prez at Annapolis: Who needs a new speech? Let's just feed them the same line about how the Iraqi soldiers are being trained blah blah blah.

Later this morning, Lynne Cheney on The Diane Rehm Show: Deny everything. In response to a listener's questions about suggestions of the president and vice president tying 9/11 to Saddam Hussien: "I'm not really sure what you're talking about..."

Blah blah blah. Why do they even bother? Bullshit is to be expected, but this isn't even half-assed bullshit.

southern metropolis recap

After Thanksgiving, Dick and I took a trip to visit Htrouser and Lady McT in Southern Metropolis. It was all kind of a blur of drinking, amazing large southern lesbian-made breakfasts, public transit, and Grand Theft Auto.



And the ass peach. In fact, it was such a blur that I can't remember what I had at the Flying Biscuit save the biscuit that came on the side and the totally fucking amazing grits; after waiting for an hour to be seated, all I recall is an intense feeling of joy and contentment as my hunger and hangover were conquered by deliciousness.

Thanks, HT and LMT, for the first class hospitality!

can we start a grant for this?

You know, sometimes I'm astounded by the things that have yet to be invented. I hear many people, especially those who grew up with the "Back to the Future" movie series, complaining about the delayed appearance of the flying car. The flying car is crap.



What I need is a bandaid that will actually fit over the top of my finger. Tip-of-finger injuries must abound, what with the hazards of occupational paper-shuffling and bagel-slicing being what they are. And once you get a boo-boo there, it keeps hitting everything, because it's the fucking tip of your finger.

Of the many shapes bandaids come in, not a single one easily stays on a finger without modification. I mean, what we need here is, like, a bandaid thimble. Doesn't sound so tough to me. And there can be bandaid finger puppets for the kids.

Then you can start on the flying car thing. But don't expect me to buy one. Cause they're going to be a bunch of crap.

thank fuck

Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller tells the world (well, at least the NPR-listening world) that he believes there is no god. As a member of the segment of the population happily and openly unburdened by belief in a divine force, it's a fucking relief to see someone publicly taking this stance. I particularly like, and agree with, Penn's rejection of atheism's non-belief for a belief in there not being god. I remember some similar discussion of this belief on some fellow blogger's blog a few months ago, but I don't remember quite who/when.

I've had an oddly difficult time writing this post without the use of religiously-rooted expressions. At first the post's title was "amen, brother", and I kept wanting to write, "thank god" in response to Penn's essay. But in this context I realized how weird it is for someone adamantly opposed to god-belief to use those expressions: if anything good happened, it sure as hell didn't have anything to do with, as Penn puts it, some "imaginary friend."

I imagine in the UK, an English-speaking society that seems to have a stronger and longer-standing relationship with secularism than the US (a.k.a. the land of Christian bullyism), they've developed linguistic alternatives to god phrases. I mean, maybe if I incorporated the words "bloody" and "sodding" into my speech I wouldn't need to rely on "goddamn" and "jesus christ" so much. Or, I could simply replace every reference to god or jesus with the word "fuck." For example, "Thank fuck I didn't burn the cookies!"

Fuck, now that's something I can get behind.

yet another reason to buy records

I've done a considerable amount of record-buying lately - at least, considerable for me, as I've always been a bit behind the curve of average record collector purchashing. But I attended the annual WFMU Record Fair in NYC and the grand opening of a new record store in Southern Ex-Industrial Town on consecutive Saturdays, and the result is a pretty good stack of vinyl.

I'm sure glad I didn't waste my money on CDs, especially those recently released by Sony. It seems the clever people at Sony included in their CDs software that secretly installed a rootkit that both alowed Sony to spy on users' online activities and created a weakness hackers can exploit. Story here.

Also, an extensive discussion some years ago resulted in the conclusion that records are a superior weapon to CDs when slung, frisbee-style, at high velocities.

oh shit

This is one of those days I'm prompted to make sure my passport is up to date.

Bush nominates Alito to Supreme Court

Meirs "God tells me to hate baby-killers" isn't nearly as frightening as the "Satan tells me to regulate every hormonal activity of a woman's reproductive system with my court decisions" of Alito. "

mark e. smith interview

Mark E. Smith, on BBC television.

In the words of Harriet Miers, OMG OMG OMG!

the four elements

By request, here is a jpeg of a crazy print (woodcut, perhaps?), I'm guessing 16th or 17th century, of the four elements. The illustration is careful to point out that every element has nipples and a navel.

target responds

In response to my form email submitted via Planned Parenthood yesterday in protestation of Target allowing a pharmacist to refuse to fill a prescription for emergency contraception, Target has sent me its own form email:

Dear Target Guest,

Target places a high priority on our role as a community pharmacy and our obligation to meet the needs of the patients we serve. We expect all our team members, including our pharmacists, to provide respectful service to our guests, particularly when it comes to their health care needs.

Like many other retailers, Target has a policy that ensures a guest’s prescription for emergency contraception is filled, whether at Target or at a different pharmacy, in a timely and respectful manner. This policy meets the health care needs of our guests while respecting the diversity of our team members.

Your thoughts help us learn more about what our guests expect, so I’ll be sure to share your feedback with our pharmacy executives.

Thanks for taking the time to share your questions, thoughts and comments. I hope we’ll see you again soon at Target.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Hanson
Target Executive Offices

Ok, so, it sure sounds like they're saying "No, you've got us all wrong, we'll fill anyone's prescription for EC!" But what they actually say is their policy "ensures a guest’s prescription for emergency contraception is filled, whether at Target or at a different pharmacy." i.e., if our moralizing christian pharmacists decide to preach from the medicine dispenser, you can feel free to go to the Walgreens across the street. Damn you public relations professional and your sneaky speech!

right...

To all of you who claim that Harriet Miers wouldn't vote to overturn Roe v. Wade:

"If Congress passes a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution that would prohibit abortion except when it was necessary to prevent the death of the mother, would you actively support its ratification by the Texas Legislature," asked an April 1989 questionnaire sent out by the Texans United for Life group.

Miers checked "yes" to that question, and all of the group's questions, including whether she would oppose the use of public moneys for abortions and whether she would use her influence to keep "pro-abortion" people off city health boards and commissions.


Awesome.

In other depressing anti-reproductive rights news, Target pharmacists can, and do, refuse to fill prescriptions for the morning-after pill (thanks to dickumbrage for informing me about this from Planned Parenthood, though oddly I can't find anything about it on their website). "What, you were raped last night? My god would damn me for eternity for filling your prescription for this effective post-intercourse contraceptive that has been widely approved of by the medical community. But we do have some stylish and amazingly inexpensive baby clothes just past aisle 4..."

I am officially off Target. This is going to be very difficult.

way better than bear vs. shark

Snake eats alligator, then explodes.

There are so many lessons to be learned from this, I think it should be made into a children's book. Or a political cartoon.

i'm that parent who can't stop talking about how freaking cute her kid is

I'm also that kind of person that refers to their pet as their "kid" and to herself as the pet's "parent."

To prove my point, and because in this world of vast suckage I have nothing clever to contribute to the wailing and gnashing of teeth, here are some more photos of my little kitty, Bonnie.

On a bed:


On a rug:


On a bed again:


At a window:

national paranoia-inducing radio

I'm back on the NPR wagon, harkening back to the days when the only thing that kept me from dunking my head into the acid stop bath in my darkroom job was 8 straight hours of public radio. I work at a job I actually kind of like now, but for some reason the last week has seen a shift in hours spent listening to music to hours spent listening to NPR.

The result is that my sense of how much life in the US of Ass sucks has been suddenly made much more keen. I am fucking terrified. Future Supreme Court Robot Meir is going get Roe v. Wade overturned, whiny right-wing college kids are getting Congress to pass a law that will allow Harriet Meir robot clones to pubicly flog any university faculty member that dares to crack a Cheney joke, and the Catholic Church is doing its part to undo years of psychology proving homosexuality and pedophilia aren't connected.

And, as a couple of friends reminded me over drinks last night, avain flu is going to kill us all.

At least I can die with the knowledge that my fuel-efficient car ran circles around the big ass chunks of cash SUV-owners have had to pay to get from their suburban McMansion to work at semi-urban sprawl office park. Plus, my car is baby blue. When was the last time you saw a baby blue Expedition?

(do not fuck with) my cat

Bonnie M says: "Spray bottle? I fucked that spray bottle up."

things that are hot, things that are fermented

A little over a week ago dickumbrage and I took a trip to the Asia Market. It smelled pretty funny in there, and by funny I mean like rotting vegetables, but was packed with a variety of Asian foodstuffs, mostly East Asian like Chinese, Japanese, Thai...you have to go to a different store for the South Asian foodstuffs. A year ago I was inspired to purchase a variety of Asian sauces on the recommendation of a friend who spent a couple of years working in Beijing, who claimed to be feeding himself and his housemates on little else than rice and six different flavors of Chinese sauces.

A while back a bought a jar of Chili Garlic Sauce, which, let me tell you, is the goddamn shit. About a quarter of a teaspoon of the stuff is enough to make one bowl of rice and tofu pretty pungently hot. It's a fast, sharp burn that seems to be putting a hole in your tongue and/or stomach but doesn't make your throat suffer too much. They make sure to pack in the sodium, too, to satisfy that animal craving for as many NaCl molecules as can be consumed.

At Asia Market, along with a few packages of Pocky, which is like crack in cookie form, I bought a couple more sauces: Black Bean and Garlic Sauce and something called Tasty Noodle Sauce or something similar that I can't seem to find referenced on the Internets. Last night I cooked up some food with the Black Bean and Garlic Sauce, which is made from fermented black beans. It is sweet and gooey, and not spicy at all, but quite delicious and also packed with plenty of sodium to keep those synapses firing.

I haven't yet had the courage to try Finely Ground Shrimp Sauce. It is described as "definitely aromatic," which I take to mean "smells like a dolphin's butthole."

a proper drink

From a style guide at work:


Scot, Scots, Scottish, Scotch

A Scot is a native of Scotland.

Scots are the people of Scotland.

Scottish modifies someone or something from Scotland.

Scotch is a type of whiskey. When the two words are used together they are spelled Scotch whisky.

carfree day!

Tomorrow, September 22, is World CarFree Day. Or, if you live in Slovenia:



I'll be biking it for the day and participating in a group bike ride at noon in Small Southern Town to attempt to raise awareness of bike-friendly issues in the town.

Unfortunately, I won't be dressed as a velociraptor, like Vancouver's Dinosaurs Against Fossil Fuels. If you're not excited about carfree day yet, this video - nay, opera - describing their origin is amazing and will make us self-loathing Americans lust after west coast Canada even more.

But please, no naked bike riding. It's just not right.

the roberts hearing so far...

Senate Judiciary Committees opening statements thus far, in summary:

Leahy: I know this might be an exercise in futility, but I actually want to talk about things like protecting the rights of people who aren't white male landowners. Turns out someone made a big mistake and let them vote.

Hatch: Remember back in the days when a guy could get appointed to the Supreme Court without any questioning just based on the fact that he was a white male landowner? Those were the days. Also, I used the word "politicized."

Kennedy: I'm making many good points, but all anyone will remember is that I pronounced the word gender "gen-dah."

Kyl: Remember back in the days when a guy could get appointed to the Supreme Court without any questioning just based on the fact that he was a white male landowner? Those were the days. Also, I've just found out there is this thing called the "internet," and apparently it makes it even more annoying for white male landowners to get appointed without questioning these days. I've never seen this "internet" before, but it sounds like anyone who uses it probably deserves to be put on an FBI watch list.

things that piss me off

In order of severity of pissed-off feeling caused:

1. People who think criticizing the president, or other leader, in a time of crisis is wrong.

2. White people who think racial inequality isn't a problem.

3. The phrase "the blame game."

4. Scrapbooking

5. Gwen Stefani

trent lott's house

I heard this first a few days ago, but it infuriates me every time I read it:

''Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house -- he's lost his entire house -- there's going to be a fantastic house," Bush said in Mobile. ''And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."

(Quoted various places, like here.)

So, how long till the revolution? Or will the Visigoths simply take over while Bush and Lott drink mai tais?

aftermath and animals

Although it's been mentally consuming over the last week, I haven't posted much about the aftermath of Hurrican Katrina mostly because so many other people did it much better and I was more in an information consumption mode than information production. I mostly followed the Katrina-related posts of Big Whicker Ventriloquist, who did an excellent job keeping up with the news and issues.

Early on in the ordeal I got tuned into the plight of animals in post-disaster situations by a report on early animal rescues at CNN.com, then found out that The Humane Society has a disaster rescue team specifically for animals. Being an avid lover of all animals, and one who often prefers their company to that of people, I was really moved by what they do. So far they've rescued several hundred animals left behind in the fetid Superdome (evacuees were prohibited from taking pets on the buses out of New Orleans) and have started house-to-house rescue missions for pets stranded in houses. The HSUS needs financial support for their disaster relief operations, too, so if you'd like to donate:



https://secure.hsus.org/01/disaster_relief_fund_2005?source=drfhb4

humans try to conquer nature, fail

In light of the current crisis and tragedy in New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina, I've been musing on the hubris of human (or perhaps just American?) engineering. Certainly no one can control the devastation wreaked by a natural disaster, but what has really led to the catastrophe in New Orleans is the fact that the city is built in a geographical area below sea level in the Mississippi River delta that, as dickumbrage put it, "would be underwater but for the grace of the Army Corps of Engineers."

In the nineteenth and twentieth century, apparently, Americans decided that they could conquer nature. The fact that California was a big fucking desert was no problem to clever engineers who could figure out how to pump water there for happy little suburban lawns. Nor did anyone seem to think it a bad idea to build multi-million dollar beach homes 50 feet away from the Atlantic surf. Or, for that matter, inexpensive homes in hurricane-prone coastland. And though I don't know the history of New Orleans, I do know that the only time you should build a major city on top of a swamp is when a magical bird eats a snake on it.

Nature is relentless, and there are some places that is just doesn't make sense for people to live. Us egotistical humans have a hard time accepting that fact. People don't want to be told their beautiful beach house is eventually going to be washed away, nor do people (like the residents of New Orleans) want to be told that the city they've lived in all their life is disaster waiting to happen (or as it is now, happened). We fork over a few million dollars at it for man-made tactics to stall the inevitable, all the while pretending the inevitable isn't.

Oh, and your Jeep Grand Cherokee is not fucking capable of driving through 4 feet of water, no matter what you saw in the commercial.

if there was any doubt in my mind

I hate to be the ten millionth person to talk about Cindy Sheehan, but I've been listening to the local NPR webstream (mostly for hurricane Katrina news) and Cindy Sheehan happened to be the featured guest, via phone from Crawford, TX. Not only did the woman sound like she had the mental acuity of one who has taken few too many Sudafed, but as soon as host Neil Conan asked a moderately tough questions, she refused to answer ("Can we talk about something else? I don't really want to talk about that"), said she only had two minutes left to talk (she was supposed to be there for the better part of the hour), then abruptly hung up in the middle of a national broadcast. And they were the obvious questions - Didn't your son make a free choice to enlist in the army?, etc. My opinion of her has changed from misguided grieving mother to bona fide flake.

I don't know how I feel about this "she's being exploited by evil left-wing groups with an agenda" argument. Certainly her case is being fueled by excessive media attention and support from left-wing groups that will snatch up any kook with excessive media attention as a spokesperson (at least so I surmise), but Sheehan has freely chosen to take up this cause without even thinking her way through the tough questions she should have asked herself long ago. Blue ribbons all around for freely acted stupidity.

And just so it can finally go on record: if you or your spouse/child/friend/neighbor/favorite football player enlist in the armed forces, there is a chance they may get killed. It's one of those crazy things about being paid to kill other people - sometimes the people you are trying to kill try to kill you back. Be as sad as you want, but please don't act so fucking surprised when it happens.

p.s. Does anyone else find it fucking hysterical when blogger's spell check picks up "fuck?" Like it says, "Oh, golly, I simply have no idea what this word is; were you trying to spell 'bucking' instead, dear wholesome blogger?"

Kittyfied

My apartment is now complete with a cute and somewhat cranky light orange cat by the name of Bonnie M. I call her Bonnie. You can call her Ms. M. She looks like this:



Fortunately, the red font is not there in real life. I'll post better pictures once I get my hands on a digital camera.

Bonnie's first twelve hours Chez Elsa involved hiding under my bed, deciding to come out and get some petting, and waking me up at 5 a.m. with persistant squeaky meowing and a facial expression that said "Why the hell don't you understand what I'm saying?"

Before her kitty foster care (which appears to be much less traumatic, generally, than child foster care), she was a feral cat, and so one of her ears is clipped. While living the tough life on the streets she also got an infected tail, so most of it had to be removed. Now it looks like a little deer tail, and it wags like a dog's when she's happy or excited, like she gets when she looks at the ceiling fan.

Bonnie M, you are awesome.

London attempted bombing suspect unexpectedly hot

I feel strange saying this, but Hussein Osman, the first suspect in custody for the attempted London tube bombings July 21, is...hot.


But don't worry - (alleged) religious extremists/terrorists *rarely* show up on Elsa's List of Boyfriends.

elsa's boyfriend sacked

Dick Gordon, host of public radio program "The Connection" broadcast on Boston's WBUR and syndicated to many other NPR stations across the country (including my local NPR station), has been let go from the station and the show cancelled. Dick, one of Mental Archipelago's featured boyfriends, shall no longer grace my weekday mornings with that smooth 'n' smarmy voice discussing every possible current events-related topic with that magical balance of plasticine concern and skeevy sensitivity. When Dick talks to his guests, he sounds like he is seducing him or her into a hot tub. I bet you don't have to be around him too long before he puts his tongue in your ear.

The reasons stated by WBUR's official press release amount to little reason at all, though this Boston Phoenix medialog entry quotes WBUR spokeswoman Nancy Sterling saying that "the performance of the show has been flat for a number of years." This op-ed by a Harvard prof Howard Gardner printed in the Boston Globe Wednesday describes it well and parallels my own thoughts on the move.

I don't know if I'd call Dick the best in public radio programming, but as Gardner points out, it's his idiosyncracies that make him appealing. Also, I spent many a lonely day in the dark, fume-ridden closet of a darkroom at The Job I Hated during which the discussions on "The Connection" and other NPR programs were both the only thing to keep me from going completely insane and my first hook into being a regular consumer of news.

And now where am I going to hear US3's "Cantaloop" on a regular basis?

It's not like I still own a tape single of that song or anything...

playboyskool

Do you want to know how to pull girls?

Ok! What is pulling a girl?

Fortunately, if you want to know how to pull girls, there are some fine young men who have dedicated their lives to teaching you world class girl-pulling techniques. They are Playboyskool. They are professional ladies-men. They are from around the world (ok, like, two countries). They have the writing skills of your average thirteen-year-old. And their website has an image of founder Nick Star with a subtly photoshopped bulging crotch.

A sampling from Playboyskool: The Book...

On excercise:

Grow balls, not muscles! The more muscles you have and the more time you spend pumping away in the gym, the smaller your balls will get. This ain’t a joke, they physically really do get smaller if you wanna become a musclehead …

On religion's role in social sexual mores:

Not a long time ago the church told everyone “thou shalt not hump before your wedding”, but do you really give a wooden nickel? Didn’t think so, but even thou such rules from the church are out of date big time, the society stepped in and took it’s place. The society calls the shots nowadays in the subject of ethics and morals. You get brainwashed and sucked right into it every single day … and you might not even be aware of it.

If you're not convinced yet, you can check out profiles of the "crew" and the 1-6 start ratings for Game, Coolness, Talent, Style, and Crazyness [sic]. Damn, that Hutchy. He's a little low on the Talent scale, but he's got 6 starts for Style!

But why are all the reviews of Playboyskool HQ: The Club in German? And what's with the "unique Playboy feather-hat"?

7/11 at 7-Eleven

MeFi tells me that 7-Eleven is giving away free Slurpees in honor of the day that could be its namesake, 7-11, which happens to be today. However, Small Southern City does not have any 7-Eleven stores, which isn't really a big deal except when it's a hot July day and they're offering free high-fructose corn syrup and food coloring frozen drinks. SSC does have a gas/mini-mart establishment named simply "Joy" on a slightly sketchy semi-urban semi-sprawl road, but I've never been there.

The 7-Eleven figured more prominently into my development as a young adult in West Virginia, but even more important is regional food-and-gas chain Go-Mart. Go-Mart doesn't even have a website, meaning the company doesn't need your freaking internet or that it went bust in the last couple of years. A brief drive into the sparsely populated area outside of You Call This A City?, where I grew up, will get you a gas/snack/self-degratory Appalachian souvenir shop called Pit 'n' Git (Now With 33% More Local Flavor!). I love the name of Pit 'n' Git, for its clarity in describing what one does at the shop, for its use as a guide to the phonetic particulars of the regional accent, and for its pleasant use of the double-contracted "and."

Eat'n Park, a chain of barely mediocre restaurants that breached the wilderness of WV, is guilty of utter contracted "and" abuse. Few people are able to pass its sign without having their lives marred by the unanswerable question: "Does that mean Eat and Park, or Eating Park?" Neither option satisfies me. What the hell is an eating park? Don't you park, and then eat?

Two years after the You Call This A City? Eat'n Park opened, its doors unceremoniously closed. I like to think it was a result of the boycott of a people protesting the bastardization of quaint store names into the meaningless slogans of a greedy corporate world.

Or maybe it was just that the wait staff there was always too high to pour a glass of ice water.

big and little bangs

Yesterday's July 4th festivities indicated that if there's one thing Americans love more than freedom, it's blowing shit up. After a lifetime of pyrotechnic excitement restricted to sparklers, which generally don't blow up in your face or present the possibility of losing a finger, I finally experienced the pleasure of holding a toy consisting of an inch-long, lit fuse attached to small cylinders of explosives wrapped in festive paper. The bangs and whirling, colorful sparks are, in my opinion, only a fringe benefit of the home fireworks; the real fun is the nearness of gratuitous danger. "I may have lost a chunk of flesh, but instead a got a flashing light!"

Our nation's scientists seem to agree. In an attempt to create the firework with the greatest danger-to-visceral entertainment ratio (DVER) possible, they hurled a big heavy piece of metal at a comet. They named the project "Deep Impact" after their favorite pornographic film. "Deep Impact" was a resounding success: on July 3 at 10:52pm EST, the big heavy piece of metal hit the comet and made a big thud and a brief flash of light. The incredibly boring display, compared to the possible ramifications of throwing something into a comet, like the extinction of life on a planet, far surpassed the DVER of the previous record-setting event, Jim Thompson Mixes Bleach and Ammonia Just To See What Happens.

panda cam!

You can watch the pandas at the Atlanta Zoo ALL DAY. Well, at least from 10-5. Which, being work-time, is of course the perfect time for watching pandas.

derrida: good for lunch, but better off dead

There was a time in my life when I wanted to make a t-shirt with Jacques Derrida's face on it and the words "Fuck you, Derrida!" But I think making him protect my peanut butter and honey sandwiches is a way more fitting task for the deceased man's image. Its says: "Do not eat my cookies or the ghost of Jacque Derrida will haunt you!"

Interestingly, the source of this image is the archives of a Catholic blog, Times Against Humanity (charming play on words, eh?), from a post on the occassion of Derrida's death in October 2004. And guess what? These Catholics apparently really hate Derrida. Or at least his ideas. Quoting an article by James Heartfield, the entry sums up its distate for Derrida thusly:

Thus, we conclude with Heartfield:

There is little doubt that Derrida was an erudite and learned philosopher, but his erudition was bent towards a destructive aim. In him the unreason of the age found its cunning articulator. The pernicious influence of Derrida's philosophy, underpinned by the confusion of the times, persists after his death.

May it, unlike its creator, be buried forever.

In the terms of this blog's interpretation of Catholocism, apparently Derrida's thinking is bad because logocentrism is good. Because, like, destroying language is destroying stuff. And that's bad. Like masturbation.

But I guess I won't have to worry about any hardcore Catholics stealing shit from that lunchbox.

woman, knit me a sweater!

A couple days ago I heard a story on BBC World Service about a new law soon to be introduced in Spain that will require men to do 50% of household chores and family care. As strongly as I generally feel about gender inequality, the concept of legally requiring an equal distribution of household labor leaves me a bit perplexed. Certainly, statistics show Spanish society is still has entrenched cultural ideas enforcing gender inequality, where a study showed Spanish fathers spent an average of 13 minutes a day looking after their children. Anecdotally, one woman interviewed by the BBC said her husband refused to iron his own shirts (and it seems she actually puts up with it). I imagine this happens in the U.S. also, but I prefer to let my mind imagine happy things, like a world full of puppies and mango-chile popsicles.

Part of me wants to tell the women of Spain to get some balls and learn to tell any man that refuses to iron his own shirt to fuck off. Personally, I don't want a law to take away the sort of satisfaction that comes from standing up to your garden variety sexist pig or unassuming misogynist.

Then, the part of me that likes to take things to their logical/absurd extent wants even more laws like this to appear, like a law that requires men to give their wives as many orgasms as they get.

This law also brings up a sort of vague notion I've had for some time that although Western Europe is, generally, more politically and socially liberal than the U.S., cultural gender inequality remains prevalent. Never having spent any significant amount of time in Europe or having done research on the topic, I can't say I know much about continental sexism. Smoking trends in Spain are one interesting indication, however. I first heard about this when a female college classmate from Spain bemoaned the increase in smoking among Spanish women and attributed it to a strong, prevailing cultural attitude that smoking is sexy. This article says smoking among Spanish women has double over the last twenty-five years, whereas smoking among Spanish men has actually decreased 24%.

large and absurd project!

club detail, grayscale w/ "stained glass"
Originally uploaded by elsacapuntas.

As previously mentioned, Asshat Of All Asshats, aka our landlord/owner of the house I live in, wants his house back and is making my housemates and I leave at the end of July. After a couple weeks of housing-search stress, I have signed a lease on a place only a few blocks from where I'm living now.

One web site I stumbled upon while searching for advice on making a couch slipcover suggested creating a "focal point" for a boxy room, like the rooms in most houses built between 1920 and 1950 in this country, before the rectangle was discovered. This is the sort of place I will be moving into.

Thus, I have undertaken the task of creating a "focal point." My "focal point" is to be a large piece of wall art based on a Slovenian beehive painting (a type of traditional folk art from Slovenia, the homeland of the maternal side of my family) of two women jousting on cows with a club and a pitchfork.



I'm not sure what the story is behind this, but it seems like everyday Slovenian fun to me.

The first steps involved using Photoshop and time I should have been doing work at work enlarging the image to 60"x32" and converting it to grayscale and applying the "stained glass" photoshop filter (I really wanted to make it look like a dot matrix, but I couldn't figure out how and got impatient, choosing the stained glass thing as the closest approximation). Since it's unlikely printing an image that size will be easy or cheap, I divided the big image into a grid of 24 10"x8" rectangles and saved them as separate files. So, I can print out 24 sheets of normal sized paper. Easy and cheap!

This is where things get a little fuzzy. In the end I want to somehow make the picture colorful and adhere it to a large piece of lightweight wood or wood product, then shellac it or decoupage it or otherwise make it so liquids that may be tossed at eye-level will not instantly ruin it. Ah, and I don't particularly have any painting skills or experience with any of this. Only an assumption that my innate craftiness will yield a satisfactory final product.

Stay tuned for updates on progress, or the lack thereof. Hopefully this will go much better than my recent attempts at carving boobs into a potato (note to anyone attempting this in the future: the nipples break very easily).

'seven samurai' vs. 'magnificent seven'

Last night, as part of the Father's Day festivities I participated in with my dear Dadoo, we watched Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" (awesome thing #22 about Dadoo: love of Japanese samurai movies). I've seen it before, but that was a few years ago and I remember having trouble getting through the full three and a half hour lenght of it. This time, however, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute. I need not waste your time elaborating on the wonderousness of Akira Kurosawa. But I was really struck this time in how "Seven Samurai" is far better than it's American re-make, "The Magnificent Seven." Now this may seem obvious, but "The Magnificent Seven" isn't a bad piece of 1960's Technicolor Hollywood output - I mean, Yul Brynner, Steven McQueen, and Charles Bronson together in a cowboy movie is enough for me.

A few reasons "Seven Samurai" is way better:
- In "Magnificent Seven" the battle lasts, oh, fifteen minutes or so. You know, "Let's show some fake-looking shooting with as little blood as possible and make sure we finish up before the womenfolk start fainting on us." "Seven Samurai"'s lasts three days or so, ending in the final battle with the farmers and bandits slogging around in torrential rain.
-Kyuzo, aka the Bad Motherfucker. Kyuzo, quiet, somber, physically unimposing, but "dedicated only to improving his skill" and ready to kick the shit out of anyone in three seconds, is the fucking shit. No character in "Magnificent Seven" comes close.
-Kikuchiyo and Shino rolling around in the hay. The obnoxious 16-year-old and the whiny mexican chick are about as real as a plastic wedding-cake topper.
-People die, and it sucks. Every death of a major good-guy character in "Magnificent Seven" is somehow twisted so that you're hit over the head with the thought that the character is much better off dying. Like, "Oh, how nice, he has a little Mexican boy to cry over his grave. If I had a little Mexican boy whose pure stupidity caused my death, but who also promised to cry over my grave, why, I'd pray for death right now!"
-The song-coordinated rice planting. Strangely similar to the Electric Slide...
-Granny taking out the first bandit with a pitchfork. Even the most noble of the samurai won't stand in the way of an elderly lady seeking revenge with a dull gardening tool.

Sort of a side note is the sheer amount of agonized wailing that occurs in "Seven Samurai." I'd like to edit together all of the melodramatic screams into a fun little film.

sea creatures make elsa happy

This weekend myself and Companion took advantage of one of Southern Private University's benefits, the Un-Holiday of Your Choice. Last Friday was selected as Un-Holiday, and off the the beach we went. On recommendation from my Boss Hoss we headed past the touristy beaches to seek out Fort Fisher State Recreation Area, a lovely natural beach with dunes, weathered live oaks, a reasonably-priced snack bar (with "the best deal on a bottle of water," said the security guard), and an on-site aquarium. Another great thing about Fort Fisher is it seems to be an enclave of diversity in the blindingly white beach area. You know, the kind of white that fits confederate flags onto every possible item of beach parephenalia, including flip-flops and sunglasses.

Anyone who prefers seeing dunes and open sky to hotels and million-dollar beachhouses from their beach blanket should definitely check out this beach, arguably the closest lovely beach habitat to Small Southern City. And if you're a once-would-be student of environmental policy as I am, you can have the knowledge that you're sitting on a beach that is actually likely to exist in twenty years, since beaches without the dunes, grasses and tress that extend beyond the sandcastle building area don't have the ability to replenish themselves naturally.

However, you will not be able to resist a fit of highly American consumerist behavior at the aquarium gift shop after seeing the amazingly wonderful creatures on display. All of the aquarium visitors seemed to be under the same money-spending spell, compulsively grabbing the extraordinarily cute stuffed animals of snapping turtles and octopi (I am now the proud owner of a fuzzy pink squid named Fred) and other animal emblemed products. All of the gift shop money supports the aquarium, so it's as close to feeling good about compulsive spending as you can probably get. One of the funniest things is that many of the items in the shop featured animals that you couldn't see at the aquarium (which features creatures from the region's aquatic habitats). I put together a gift package for my sister including a candy tube with plastic giggling dolphin cap, highly adorable sea otter socks, and a colorful little plastic poison dart frog - none of which can actually be seen on exhibit.

independent music boys club

Having been involved in the independent music/college radio world for the last five or so years, and spending far too much time, energy, and emotional involvement on it, one of the most contradictory aspects of it has been the way this scene posits itself as liberal/leftist and progressive in a nearly self-righteous way while also existing as a sub-culture more male-dominated than our mass culture. The latest microcosm of this situation that's been ruffling my feathers is Dusted Magazine, which describes itself thusly: "Daily online magazine highlighting independent and fringe artists. Features a weekly radio chart and interviews"

It's sort of a smaller, snobbier Pitchfork (less pop, less mainstream), but less obnoxious than Pitchfork in that it lacks the preponderence of silliness of Pitchfork, like those damned 1-10 scale ratings for each record. But a smaller, snobbier Pitchfork is the sort of thing I go for, plus Dusted functions as an alternative to the indisputably very very obnoxious CMJ (College Music Journal). Good labels that release worthwhile music pay attention to Dusted. I know a few people personally who are contributing writers.

But Dusted's dirty little secret is that looking at the list of writers is like looking at the list of characters in Tolkien novel: almost no women at all. To be precise, out of 42 writers listed on their website, only 3 have names that could be female (Britt Brown, K. Ross Hoffman, Casey Rea). That's 9.5% women, if they are all women. I know from experience that women constitute a bit more than 9.5% of the contributing body of college radio. From what I understand, the guys that run Dusted, Otis Hart and Sam Hunt, mostly acquire writers by asking people they know of one way or other to write for the online mag. On the "About" page of the site, they claim "Our reviewers live all over the country and vary greatly in age and background." Unless, of course, you consider gender as part of background.

So, this great progressive music website leading the vanguard of people who care about independent music? A fucking boys club. I could just decide that Dusted Magazine is a hypocritical, pretentious publication not worth the eye-strain I sacrifice to read one paragraph from their site. But that would deny that Dusted actually has an important role in things I care a great deal about, that good friends of mine (yes, male) contribute to it, and that women are frequently excluded or subordinated in a sub-culture that brightly paints itself as liberal and progressive.

I wrote a polite (no, really, I was actually polite) email expressing my thoughts on the matter to them today. I haven't heard back from them yet. But I do encourage anyone reading this to also send an email to dusted@dustedmagazine.com, if you feel so moved.

Fuck you, Dusted Magazine Boys Club.

an imperial post

Recently, at my job working for the Office of Computers 'n' Stuff at Southern Private University (where, I must clarify, I don't actually do things that require a special knowledge of computers 'n' stuff), I downloaded a driver for a new program made by people who work about ten feet away from me that promptly killed my brand new laptop. Well, it killed the Windows start-up, at least, so I spent the whole day in a small gray cube twidding my thumbs. The only reading material available was a 1973 edition of Websters New Collegiate Dictionary. The result of my perusal and boredom is a quaint little story, below, illustrating ten different definitions for the word "imperial."

"Ah, the life of an imperial[1] subject," he sighed, stroking his imperial[2] as he read the imperial[3] decree printed on a sheet of nearly imperial[4] size paper. "Despite my imperial[5] yearly stipend, the task of spreading the imperial[6] measurement system to every corner of the imperial[7] world is quite an imperial[8], and leaves me wishing I were instead an imperial[9] in days past slaying heretics and heathens for the holy imperial[10]."

1. adj; of, relating to, or befitting an empire or an emperor
2. n; [fr. the beard worm by Napolean III]: a pointed beard growing below the lower lip
3. adj; regal; imperious
4. n; a size of paper usu. 23x 31 inches
5. adj; of superior or unusual size or excellence
6. adj; belonging to the official British series of weights and measure
7. adj; of or relating to the British Commonwealth and Empire
8. n; something of unusual size or excellence
9. n; an adherent or soldier of the Holy Roman Empire
10. n; emperor

mouse on mars vs. mark e. smith

If you, like me, have always thought that the one thing conspicuously missing from your sweaty booty-shaking dance party was Mark E. Smith, your dreams have come true. German techno funksters Mouse on Mars take what is arguably the best track from their last full-length, "Wipe That Sound" (a song that made my list of Top Booty-Shakers of 2004) and remix it with fucking Mark E. Smith in the "Sound City" remix. Pure fucking genius. The dancefloor will never be the same-uh.

joys of apartment living

For all of you out there who own your own home, or at least a portion of your own home, let me remind you of those quaint, care-free apartment days.

Charming aspect of apartment living #1: Tomorrow, you may or may not be living in the rental property you may or may not think is really great and you would like to live in for a long time. My two housemates and I are being kicked out of our happy home (a delightful one-story 1920's era affair in Old North Small Southern City) because the bastard that owns it has decided he wants to live here again. I won't go into details. I leave that up to Dick Umbrage, who may have already ranted about the ordeal. If not, he probably should, and file it right next to the story about the asshat who was listening to the radio station 24 hours a day.

Charming aspect of apartment living #2: Your delightful spring evening may or may not be interrupted at any point by a man with a chainsaw. Right now (and it's 8pm, mind you, and he's been here for at least half an hour) there is a man with a chainsaw hacking away at a line of ornamental trees in our backyard with complete disregard to Designated House Naptime (daily between 6:00 and 8:00pm), my Tuesday Night Post-5.2 Mile Run Law & Order SVU Marathon (8:00 to 11:00pm), or the principles of bonsai. I mean, how can I enjoy Detective Benson's nail-biting interrogation of an alleged homeless ex-preacher coke addict rapist with VROOM VROOM every three seconds?

boredoms bliss

Ah, thank you Japanese noise-rock heroes Boredoms for providing my daily dose of the sublime. The 18-year-old group (ooh, does that mean I can have sex with it now?) has just released a new one in the U.S. on Vice Records. This one contains two long tracks that fall wonderfully outside my expectations for noise-rock: "Seadrum" clocks in at 23:03 and sounds more like jazz in the rhapsodic, spiritual fervor of Eddie Gale (and the vocals sound quite alot like Joann Stevens-Gale, featured on Gale's Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening); "House of Sun" runs barely shorter at 20:03 and is a hypnotic, Eastern-inflected droney affair. Add it all up and you get forty-three minutes and six seconds of FUCKING AMAZING shit.

I'd post links to the tracks, if I could get my damn file transfer client to work.

garrison keillor: radio icon, rambling old fucker

In a move that has a faint whiff of BW Ventril's recent post on trite celebrity opinions plopped onto a website like warm turds into a gently leftward-flowing stream, Garrison Keillor gets all "I'm gonna talk about what radio is like these days" in this piece in the latest issue of The Nation.

You may think, as I did, that Keillor will take this opportunity to address some of the profoundly fucked-up things going on in radio today, like the reactionary FCC or the genocide of local radio programming at the hands of frequency-gobbling corporate monopolies, from his particular perspective as one of the most popular voices on non-corporate radio.

Instead, Keillor takes up space that could have been used to advertise important products that could improve my life and help me find my SoulMate(TM) to convince me that he is completely drunk. In his typical mode of self-indulgent, nostaligic literary excess, Keillor makes some limp jabs at Clear Channel, right-wing AM ranters, iPods, and an even weaker attempt at coherence. The man jumps from anecdotes about retarded girls to George McGovern (" a kindly, grandfatherly man who lives in Mitchell, South Dakota, and winters in Florida and every year") to shameless promos for NPR syndicate-pals and sums it all up with these words of Zen-like mysticism:

We will make the demented uncle shut up so we can listen to somebody who actually knows something.

Who the fuck is The Demented Uncle?

i'm the flash animation that's sensitive about menstruation

In honor of the 45th anniversary of The Pill's approval by the U.S. FDA, the PBS website has some special features on the good ol' contraceptive, including this animation of the woman's monthly hormonal cycle with and without the pill (click on "How the Pill Works"). I stole the link from this metafilter post.

But hey, where's the bleeding? Despite the lovely colorful dots representing hormones drifting from the lady's brain to her uterus (somehow it reminds me of a Target commercial), I'm pretty disappointed to find PBS has not even attempted to subtly suggest the process of menstruation as so many female hygiene product advertisers have mastered, let alone display it in all its fecund glory. More like the Pussy Broadcasting System, I say, and by that I certainly don't mean the good kind of pussy. They passed up their chance for that.

Honestly, I'm pretty impressed by PBS's presentation of information, as it's informative and remarkably pro-pill (counting down to decreased federal funding, ten, nine, eight...), if not exactly exhaustive. I don't think I'd ever heard about early opposition to the pill from segments of the black community due to suspicians that it was an attempt to control black reproduction to the point of being called black genocide. And check out the Chinese paper pill.

Ok, PBS, I guess maybe you can be the good kind of pussy too. But just this once.

burn my eye, boil my water

I stumbled across the Bartleby.com website today, and though I'm quite sure I'm the last one to hear about it, I thought the idea of an online resource of complete texts of books was rather neat. The question is, does anyone actually want to read an entire book from the monitor attached to their humming electro death box? As one who has recently been chastized by an optometrist/diagnosed with neovascularization , I don't think spending hours staring at tiny font on a luminous square is quite for me. And the constant scrolling? Eesh.

I ain't no technophobe, now. On the contrary, I am smitten with my hummming electro death box. However, I think computing technology seems to excel in doing things quickly, and fails miserably at the sort of task that is supposed to take a great deal of time. Like reading 19th century novels and boiling water*

*If your CPU can, in fact, be used as a make-shift hot plate for boiling water, you are a) lucky to be able to make yourself cups of hot steaming beverage without missing a single refreshed page of a webcam and b) likely developing some sort of tumor in a place you didn't know you could get a tumor, like the earlobe or Islets of Langerhans.**

**This reminds me that I intended to include an example of the sort of delightful prose that can be found on Bartelby.com, this one by the fantastically named author Björnstjerne Björnson from the equally fantastically named book A Happy Boy:

He got hot all over, looked about, and called: “Goatie-goatie, and goatie-wee!”

(It's not a Fall quote, but I do like to think of Mark E. Smith saying it.)

procrastination, old-school style

As I spend my not-so-highly paid time writing a blog post, in addition to checking email every 15 minutes or more, reading others blogs, searching for a store location near me, etc., I have to wonder...how did people procrastinate at work before the internet? Or even before computers, since even young'un me can remember a pre-internet-infestation time of computers replete with the quick minimizing of solitaire and minesweeper windows at the sound of a boss' footsteps on the industrial-grade carpet.

My only indication so far is from one of my favorite songs by The Fall, "An Older Lover etc."

Get ready for old stories
Of teenage sex
From the early sixties
Under cover
Behind office desks

when elsa can't park, elsa gets cranky

It is a lovely day, i am no longer in the midwaste, i have recently been notified that i will be getting a raise at my job, and yet i am cranky as fuck. This is because the same Southern Private University that will be paying for my increase in pay chooses to mock my sense of all that is just by refusing to let me park. Now, i'm not talking about free parking - that would be asking an awful lot from any institution run by obscenely affluent white men in suits. However, at Southern Private U. it is virtually impossible for any visitor to pay to park, even in the designated visitor's parking lots, because the one visitor's parking lot near anything on campus one might wish to be near is always either full or "reserved" for some special event that usually involves aforementioned obscenely affluent white men drinking expensive scotch and watching Hot College Chicks All-Anal Action VI in the fancy board room. Of the last 6 or 7 times I have desired to park in the visitor's parking lot, I have successfully parked there exactly 0 times. Each subsequent failed parking attempt results in a fit of rage greater in intensity and shorter in calmness to crankiness time, today's incident resulting in shouted declarations to the nearby shrubbery what I wished to cover the visitor's parking lot with flaming napalm. "Why," I beseeched the shrubs, "Does this university seem to have such a flippant attitude towards its visitors' parking needs? Why was this parking lot, built only two years ago, designed with a seeming ignorance of the number of people who actually wish to park there, in combination with the fact that visitors are rarely actually allowed to park there, unless they are affluent white men who wish to watch pornographic videos in the fancy board room?? Could they not have simply added a couple more stories to this structure? Or dug underground? Or have built an elaborate network of canals to be navigated by gondolas, thus eliminating the need for auto traffic and consequently auto parking, also increasing the romantic factor and uniqueness of the university?"

The shrubs could provide no answer.

food i have eaten so far today

1. Bowl of Vanilla Creme Frosted Mini Wheats. Sort of like eating a bowl of normal frosted mini wheats with diet vanilla coke instead of milk. Nasty, but not as nasty as the other cereal option at my mom's house this morning, Peanut Butter Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Plus the Mini Wheats give you fiber with your nasty, which I prefer to the 12 Essential Vitamins and Minerals of the Toast Crunch.
2. Travel mug full of coffee with sugar. This also came from my mom's pantry, and fortunately her taste for the most disgusting breakfast cereals on the market is countered by a keen particularity when it comes to breakfast beverages. This particular pot of coffee was made from beans special ordered from a tiny place in the Appalachian hamlet/Confederate hold-out of Lexington, VA that roasts their own beans. This bean is called "General's Blend" (named after Granddaddy Lee) and is the complete shit. The stuff was so fresh it's practically made me high.
3. Plate full of Chex Mix (Traditional). An enourmous bag of this stuff has been sitting around at work, and I have come to determine that one of the key seasonings is crack, as I have developed a crack-addiction-like need to eat platefuls of this stuff around 11:00am for the last three days. And I must be building up a tolerance to the stuff, because today it took two plates to provide the same shudder of sudden electrolyte imbalance I got from one plate of salty goodness two days ago. Combined with the General's crack coffee, I feel as though I'm about to hatch into some sort of lizard creature, not unlike the little girl in 80's mini-series "V."

Go English!

Just passed onto me from a fellow transplant, it seems that the bright legislators in my home state of West Virginia have just passed a law making English the official language of the state. Fortunately I don't have to feel too much shame for idiotic, xenophobic elected officials: most of them didn't realize they were signing the bill into law since it was tacked onto an innocuous bill about parks and recreation in the last moments of the legislative session by state Sen. Larry Edgell, a proponent of U.S. English, "the nation's oldest, largest citizens' action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States." Most of them didn't realize what they had done until the AP picked up on it, and I can't even find any mention of it in the local papers. So now I just have to feel the shame for idiotic, inattentive elected officials. And that whole mountain-top removal thing.

behold, the sharpened pencil

Once I had a dream that I was sleeping in my parents's house. In the dream I awoke to find that the house had been broken into by a burglar who made himself known by singing in the kitchen on the first floor. My parents and I were rather afraid and convened in their room. My dad proceded to arm my mom and I with the nearest available weapons to battle the singing burglar. Mom got a straight pin and I got a very sharp pencil. From then on my weapon of choice has been the very sharp pencil, and my suburban superhero persona "El Sacapuntas," The Pencil Sharpener.

This should not be confused with my much longer running woodland fantasy persona, Warrior Princess, which I still kind of prefer because in my estimation it involves me wearing fringed buckskin pants. Hot.