Dark Brown Waffles

(Image from this post.) I’ll never love anybody as much as...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:19:37 -0500

(Image from this post.)

I’ll never love anybody as much as I love the people who refuse to treat politicians as if they’re anything more than human beings, almost always flawed ones who thirst for the opportunity to tell other human beings what to do with their lives. Look at that picture. In amongst the mass of political activists - themselves desperate to get politicians into office who will crackdown on women, on gays, or minorities - there was one who showed up with a sign that read, “Frothy Santorum” a reference to Rick Santorum’s neologism.

In other words, somebody was simultaneously possessed to wade into a crowd of people there to advocate for particular politicians and communicate his own, simple message: Rick Santorum is an asshole. (At least, I assume that’s why s/he was there. I suppose that person might have been trying to reclaim the term from the gay and straight activists who championed its use as a response to Santorum’s caveman politics.) That is a person I can be friends with.

The same sort of thing happened to President George W. Bush in 2006. A student at Kansas State approached the microphone at a rare public question-and-answer session to ask the president if he’d seen Brokeback Mountain:

“You’re a rancher. A lot of us here in Kansas are ranchers. I was just wanting to get your opinion on ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ if you’ve seen it.”

Predictably, people get uptight about this sort of thing, indignantly asking how anybody could ask the President such a thing, then getting the vapors and passing out. What’s important though about acts like this is that they, intentionally or not, remind us that not everybody worships at politics.

Nor should they.

To put that another way, it is sometimes okay to simply call another person an asshole, or in lieu of being quite so crass, finding a clever way to do so that gets the same message across. The guy with the sign last night? Jeremy Parker in 2006? Others throughout history? They might as well have been saying, “Hey, this guy’s an asshole. Let’s not forget that.”

Lewis Black remains one of my favorite comedians, if only...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 09:54:00 -0500

Lewis Black remains one of my favorite comedians, if only because his total-meltdown style of delivery is so appealing to my own sensibilities. Melting down is a key component of life. Pretending otherwise is grating at best.

A transcendant performance by all involved but mostly Maya...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 15:28:11 -0500

A transcendant performance by all involved but mostly Maya Rudolph and Amy Poehler.

Walking Dead, Season 2, Episode 9

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:43:07 -0500

You know what I’ve learned from watching The Walking Dead? Women ruin everything. If I didn’t know better, the entirety of the show is dedicated solely to communicating this point, never so much as in last night’s catastrophe of an episode. Let’s focus on what we learned:

-Women Go Too Crazy: last week, Lori lost her mind because she had been without Rick for almost five minutes, jumping into a car and screeching off toward town. But because she’s a woman, she wasn’t capable of looking at a map and driving, which lead to her hitting a zombie and flipping the car. This week, after found by Shane and tricked back to coming to the farm, she freaks out about the lies it took to get her there, even though those lies were an entirely defensible mechanism for getting her home safely. Ugh. Women.

-Women Love Too Much: in the midst of a ridiculously stupid gun battle in the middle of “town,” Glenn freezes. We think that it is because he is uncomfortable with the idea of shooting at other human beings, but upon getting back to the farm, we realize that the actual reason for his fear is that bitch Maggie Greene, who had the audacity to confess to loving him. Instead of getting into the fact that a woman fell in love with a guy fourteen seconds after meeting him, let’s instead focus on the fact that her love for him caused him to think twice. How dare she!

-Women Keep Too Many Secrets: upon getting back to the farm, Shane spills Lori’s secret. She’s pregnant. This is news to many at the farm, including Lori’s own son, Doofus. (Err, Carl.) She acknowledges the fact that she’s knocked up and has to apologize for not telling Carl, even though there is some advantage to keeping a secret like this, as it doesn’t make any sense why she’s imagining bringing a pregnancy to term in a world filled with carnivorous walking ghouls. But whatever. That’s what women do.

-Women Keep Getting Too Many Vapors: after Hershel makes it back to the farm, Maggie confronts him in her screamiest voice, shouting that she didn’t know what to do without his firm leadership. Because women need men. Maggie couldn’t bath or eat or dress herself properly without a man nearby to provide the sort of stability necessary to make those sorts of decisions. Vaginas are the WORST!

-Women Scheme Too Much: twice during the episode, women sew the seeds of doubt in their partners ears. Andrea’s the first. She’s nursing a lady hard-on for Shane (mostly because she’s lady crazy) and repeatedly tries to tell him that his problem is that he isn’t delivering his excellent leadership with quite the panache that he ought to. If only he was a better leader, the people would listen to him and not Rick. Later, Lori whispers in Rick’s ear, telling him that Shane cannot be trusted and to watch his back at all times. Although this is good advice, she cannot know that Andrea has had a similar conversation with Shane. Both of them, independently, are setting up their chosen man to take down the other. That’s how it goes with ladies: gossip, gossip, gossip.

-Women Fall Into Catatonic States Too Much: Finally, let’s not forget the woman who dropped into the coma-ish state after the barn slaughter. Her delicate sensibilities were overwhelmed in that moment to the point that her body shut down. Is there anything women can do right?

Next Week: a woman accidentally shoots herself? Accidentally shoots somebody else? Accidentally has an affair with a zombie? I don’t know. Rest assured it will definitely involve a woman doing something that endangers the group.

I’m old enough by far to have listened to Tribe Called...

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 16:05:40 -0500

I’m old enough by far to have listened to Tribe Called Quest, but I have to admit to having never done so. I don’t know. Maybe I thought I’d heard it? Maybe I thought I was familiar with its work? But I wasn’t.

So when I started the other day, I’m not sure what I was expecting. Let me just say that the group’s plaudits are earned. This stuff is excellent. And I’m an idiot for not getting to it sooner.

I think the part of this song I like the most is when it...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 11:04:44 -0500

I think the part of this song I like the most is when it absolutely rocks my balls off. No sense pretending otherwise. It reminds of something Led Zeppelin might have done, except without all of the extra douchebaggery that usually accompanies Zeppelin’s music (like hobbits). The slow start is particularly effective. I remember running into it the first time I heard the album and thinking, “Really? These guys are supposed to rock out.” I was literally annoyed for the first two minutes.

And then the song re-establishes itself as the aforementioned ball-rocker. I was in. That is all.

The War Is Over. The Bums Lost.

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:37:30 -0500

You know how you end up thinking that writing this article is a good idea? You’re fucking bonkers insane. No normal, reasonable person looks at the ingestion of contraception and sees a Leviathan at work, tearing our society apart. No normal, reasonable person looks at the ingestion of contraception and sees anything other than a woman who doesn’t want to get pregnant.

But not George Weigel. He sees women taking contraception and he immediately launches into the fevered paranoia of a lunatic, convinced that this simple thing is evidence of a massive sexual conspiracy designed to destroy society. You think I’m kidding. I’m not:

For that was precisely what was at issue 18 years ago, and it is precisely what is at issue today: Will the sexual revolution, which reduced sex to a recreational activity of no moral consequence, be protected, advanced, and indeed mandated by the coercive powers of the modern state?

Wiegel objects, you see, because sex ought to be an activity frought with moral consequence at every imaginable turn. That it isn’t - that people have the audacity to have sexy sex with one another simply because it is an enjoyable way to spend eight minutes - makes his blood boil. It is plainly unjust that this sort of behavior is occurring anywhere. Churches have said that it is wrong. How can anybody, anywhere, take issue with that?

Weigel’s problem is that he is convinced it is centuries earlier than it actually is. He doesn’t understand why the social oppression that was practiced for so long by so many is no longer working. So he melts down, describing the idea that women are having carefree sexual experiences as a Leviathan that will, at any moment, destroy society. Just look at what he writes:

What began as a movement to liberate sexuality from the constraints of moral reason, custom, and law has become a movement determined to use the instruments of law to impose its deconstruction of human sexuality and its moral relativism on all of society.

The movement he’s referencing is presumably an amalgamation of liberalism, feminism, and general sexual freedom, the sort of things that make social regressives go even limper than they usually are. Note his misunderstanding of what was happening as society changed: he thinks people were angry at “moral reason, custom, and law.” He doesn’t recognize that people were angry with sanctimonious dickheads who believes that they should have dominion over the decisions made by others. People like Weigel. Although he doesn’t say it, he strongly implies that society’s problem is that it doesn’t do what Weigel wants it to. How dare society stray from Weigel’s vision? Look at him here:

Where this is all leading is not pleasant to contemplate. But if Leviathan is to be confronted, and defeated, in his attempt to impose the sexual revolution by brute state power, a critical mass of morally serious minds have got to get clear on one crucial point: The invention of the oral contraceptive was, with the splitting of the atom and the unraveling of the DNA double helix, one of the three world-historical scientific developments of the last century — scientific accomplishments that have within themselves the capacity to change culture and history in fundamental ways. By effectively sundering sexual expression from procreation, modern contraceptives have done something their less-effective predecessors were unable to do for millennia: They have created a contraceptive culture that identifies fertility with disease and willful infertility with “health.” Those who celebrate that culture are not interested in compromise: They are interested in having everyone pay for what they want, and in levying serious penalties on those who won’t truckle to their will.

He imagines jack-booted thugs forcing churches to perform abortions because he is a madman, not because anybody anywhere seriously proposed such a thing. He looks at contraceptives and sees an evil, precisely because it freed women from the servitude of parenting if parenting wasn’t what they were interested in. He might as well be saying, “But women belong in the home!” That’s his argument. But it’s one he can’t make plainly, so he dresses this up with talk of a Leviathan.

Put simply: it isn’t contraception that’s the problem. It’s conservatism’s idea that women have certain lives and certain freedoms that they shouldn’t. Standing around decades after the introduction of the birth control we now know and complaining about it?

Maybe Jeffrey Lebowski can put it better. “The war’s over. The bums lost.”

The Walking Dead, Mid-Season Premiere

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:16:24 -0500

Last December, The Walking Dead ended on a high-note with the plain execution of the girl-zombie Sofia. Yes it was emotionally painful. Yes it was perhaps overdramatic. Yes it was a plainly obvious outcome. But at least something finally made sense.

So when The Walking Dead re-emerged from its self-imposed break, it was easy to imagine a show that had finally gotten itself together thematically. Simply put: less human drama, more zombie drama. There is nothing difficult about the formula. Last year’s mid-season finale had ended so well that I imagined that the show was finally getting down into a crouch, like a sprinter in the blocks, and I told myself (and was told) that tonight’s show was excellence.

And then I watched it.

I wouldn’t describe my reaction so much as disappointment. That word doesn’t accurately capture it. Instead, perhaps: bemusement. I was bemused. The entire time I watch with a smirk and just enough of an eye-roll so that I could still the screen. What else can you do when the realization sets in that, no, the producers haven’t learned anything, and no, they weren’t getting their acts together after the killing of Sofia, and no, we weren’t on the precipice of something special.

There are a thousand different reasons to think this. Here are a few. Warning, there are spoilers, but really, who cares?

-There were two zombies tonight, one who tried to eat the unnamed girl grieving after the execution of the barn zombies, and a second who wandered out onto the road in front of Lori. That’s the entirety of their appearance in the show. (Note: I’m not counting the zombies we saw in flashback to the barn shooting, because that’s cheap.) This show is about zombies at least tangentially, right? And here I’m not talking metaphorically about the survivors; I’m specifically referencing the undead ghouls who wander around hoping to eat human flesh.

-The show introduces us to Michael Raymond-James just long enough for him to out-act every other person on the screen: Rick, Glenn, and Hershel. Then? Rick shoots him. And his friend. Why? Because they wanted to go back to the farm. They might have been threats; they might have been friends. But for Rick, who wanted to prove desperately to Hershel that he was a leader, the threat was too much so he shot them both. I get that the show wants us to understand that this is a different world with different rules, but I’m baffled at what we’re supposed to with Rick shooting two living, capable human beings, experienced fighters who had apparently made it from Philadelphia to Georgia. What a brilliant plan.

-The rules about dealing with zombies continue to be utterly meaningless. Minutes after seeing a zombie suspected to be dead pop back to life and try to eat a child, Lori climbs into the back of a truck full of dead zombies, instead of riding in the open seat BESIDE THE DRIVER. T-Dog (which never stops being an offensive name for the show’s only black character), days after having a badly bleeding wound sewn shut on his arm, throws zombie bodies around without wearing any protection beyond the bandage that is already on there. A giant pile of zombies is burned in the hot summer sun, which surely couldn’t be anything but a brilliant idea.

-I’m excited beyond words for the Videogum recap of the show. They’re always the best.

If I was writing a story about delicious recipes for pie, it...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:34:00 -0500

If I was writing a story about delicious recipes for pie, it would literally never dawn on me, even once, to go and get the opinions of people who have never eaten a slice of pie. That isn’t a demographic whose concerns I would ever bother to note. And yet look at the image above (from this), showing that it has been men - overwhelmingly men - asked to comment on the ongoing contraception meltdown on our national media shows, as if women are somehow secondary in this conversation, as if their needs don’t even register. In a nation where enormously large majorities of women ingest contraception, they can barely get a seat at the table to discuss the stuff while getting crowded out by men who have never even tasted the stuff get a spot.

In case that isn’t galling enough, consider the presence of the Catholic Bishops, a collection of men, overwhelmingly elderly, who are all virgins. Not only have they never taken contraception, they’ve never had to consider the possibility of wanting it in the first place. They’re being treated like experts in all of this, as if the individual who has never driven an automobile is as important to the conversation about how to fix one as a god-damned mechanic.

The people who run these television news programs are stupid. There simply isn’t a nicer way to make that point; they’re fucking dumb. They have to be if they think that women don’t at least deserve an equal number of appearances on these shows, although any reasonable person would probably agree that if there’s going to be any sort of imbalance, it probably ought to be toward the gender that actually takes the stuff we’re all arguing about.

But no. We’re taking as seriously the opinion of a bunch of elderly virgins as we are the opinions of sexually active, potentially pregnant women. We’re acting as though we’ve achieved some sort of impartiality by treating both sides equally. Lest anybody forget though, those same Catholic Bishops who are claiming to occupy the moral high ground now? They’re assholes like this, men who cheerleaded the sexual abuse of children for decades, men who have steadfastly refused to acknowledge their guilt in what amounted to an enormous criminal conspiracy designed solely to protect the church from responsibility for what it had done.

Our media is broken. There is simply no other worthwhile conclusion to be drawn from any of this. Making matters worse are the bigger and deeper societal problems that become painfully obvious whenever realize that we’re taking seriously the opinions of people who will never take contraception as we do of the the people that will.

Howard Stern Crushing Republican Demagogues

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 00:43:13 -0500

Howard Stern crushes Republicans for their abhorrent views on gays. Howard Stern. When you’re getting crushed for your indecency by somebody like Howard Stern, the tide is turning mightily against your positions. How on Earth are Republicans going to run on this stuff this year? Or in 2014? Or in 2016?

The Incessant Whining Of Social Conservatives

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:05:00 -0500

(Catholics love birth control, incidentally. It’s just their bishops that don’t.)

Socially conservative Christians would like me to believe that a governmental rule forcing their organizations to pay for birth control is oppressive at best and tyrannical at worst. You can see at least some of their seething contempt for the rule in this article. As is typically the case with socially conservative Christians, they are under the impression that any government policy which does not align entirely with their own views is an injustice of the highest order. Why, it’s even comparable to 1930’s era Germany!

Of course, social conservatives aren’t nearly as whiny when the things Americans they’re forced to pay for are things that they do believe in, even in scenarios in which their own churches stand in opposition. For example, the Vatican (an awful institution by almost any measure) stands forcefully against the imposition of a death penalty. Americans in states where the death penalty is legal - even Catholic Americans - are forced to contribute via taxation to a system that their spiritual ruler has declared out-of-bounds. Do these same social conservatives currently comparing Barack Obama to Adolph Hitler object? Of course they don’t. Just as they didn’t object to wars waged in Afghanistan and Iraq (over the objections of the Catholic Church) because if there is one true thing about social conservatives, it is that they are raging, feckless hypocrites.

Social conservatives wail about the institution of marriage while the highest divorce rates happen to occur in socially conservative strongholds. Social conservatives wail about contraceptives and yet, they’re used everywhere and almost certainly by least some of the same socially conservative women complaining about them.

But nothing stops social conservatives from complaining, mostly because society and culture is passing them by without really having much concern for the religious fundamentalism that once predominated American culture. Instead of accepting the fact that their refusal to adjust to a changing society has rendered their political and religious beliefs unpopular, they instead demand that exemptions be carved out for themselves, so that at no time are they ever forced to do anything that they don’t personally approve of.

Welcome to the world. We all pay for things that we’d rather not. It’s part of living in a pluralistic society comprised of diverse people with diverse beliefs. Acting as though it shouldn’t be this way because suddenly you’re also being forced to do what the rest of us have been forced to do for generations is nothing more than whining.

We can safely say this is great news for an old, and beautiful,...

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:25:17 -0500

We can safely say this is great news for an old, and beautiful, tradition. There’s something hauntingly strange about what the Indian chiefs do, something captured by Treme’s Albert Lambreaux. And let’s face it: the idea of not bowing down, not on anybody’s ground? That’s just gold.

Takes Guts

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 00:25:05 -0500

It takes guts to run a website dedicated to hugely expensive, utterly over-the-top fashion well beyond the means of most Americans and then recoil in horror as if you’re not part of the problem. Because yes, it is insane to pay $500 for something cheap, but it is just as insane to pay a “pretty penny” for clothing that doesn’t even fit you.

If you’re going to endorse spending huge money on clothes that you can’t wear, I don’t see how you can then turn around and complain about what the fashion industry is willing to try in an attempt to profit.

Spectacularly Bored?

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:26:31 -0500

If you find yourself bored beyond your wildest imagination, you could consider reading something I wrote about preferences. It is posted here. I suppose it would be fair to say that the thing I believe in the most strongly is the equality of human preferences. Which makes me a megadork.

Thanks to Erik Kain for publishing it. He is super famous.

I want to be as enthusiastic about anything in my life the way...

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:58:11 -0500

I want to be as enthusiastic about anything in my life the way this guy is about his dancing.

And So You TRY To Write...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:52:30 -0500

…and then some asshole writes something like this and you want to say, “Fuck it, I can’t do that.” That, for the record, is good journalism, entirely unlike the utter crap that is produced so mindlessly by so many, and if that makes me nothing more than the author’s fanboy, so be it. I’d be willing to wager that there is more real work done in that relatively brief article than appears in the entirety of almost every American newspaper on a daily basis.

Megan Amram: Paula Deen’s Health Food Cook Book

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:01:01 -0500

Megan Amram: Paula Deen’s Health Food Cook Book:

meganamram:

Recently, Paula Deen has admitted that she’s had Type II Diabetes for years. Accordingly, she’s putting out a cookbook of healthy food. Here are some excerpts!

FRUIT SALAD

INGREDIENTS:

1 lb. bag of Skittles

3 cups ranch dressing

DIRECTIONS:

Mix well. Serve room temperature.

-

Gotta quit using my phone for this stuff. It doesn’t get...

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:11:19 -0500

Gotta quit using my phone for this stuff. It doesn’t get the job done sufficiently.

The Utterly Infuriating Notion of Appropriate Clothing

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:05:21 -0500

In what was an apparently horrendous fashion faux-pas, an actress at the Golden Globes - an actress whose work was highly praised via a nomination that she received for it- was caught wearing toe shoes. This is nightmarish, according to the people who trouble themselves with caring about what third-parties are wearing out in public. The author writes:

Vibram Five Fingers are not appropriate footwear for a black tie event. Nor, I would argue, are toe shoes (this kind, not the sort used in ballet) appropriate for the supermarket, the airport, the library, the restaurant, or anywhere else that’s not a running trail or a gym: nobody wants to see your creepy, articulated toes, hippies.

Here is another option for the author: fuck off. Without ever having spoken to the actress in question, whose work I haven’t seen, I’m going to assume that she chose those particular shoes because she found them - HEAVEN FORBID! - comfortable. The author acknowledges as much later:

They should be allowed to wear things that are weird, or unflattering, or that betray a preference for comfort, or show what someone older and more sensible might say is “too much” skin; making mistakes, so long as you learn from them, is a large part of developing your own taste.

You’ll note that in this acknowledgement though, the author writes as though preferring comfort over the alternative (discomfort) is somehow a mistake that public figures must learn to avoid. Why? Because if they don’t…the author will be bored:

The alternative — awards show after awards show of generically flattering, stylist-selected blush-colored dresses and Louboutins — is almost too stultifying to contemplate.

Because you see, this young woman owes the author the entertainment value of her clothing. Owes her. Just as journalists owe their corporate owners a world in which jeans don’t exist. Just as everybody owes hipsters a world without fashion that they personally approve of. It is almost as if none of these people is capable of accepting a world in which different people make decisions differently than their own.

My wife today was aghast that I chose to go to work without having combed my hair. I chose to do so for three reasons: my hair is at a length where it cannot be combed, it was pouring rain which allowed my hair to get wet and thus fixed, and because if somebody is going to interact with me professionally but not be able to get past the bird’s nest upon my dome, fuck ‘em. Seriously, fuck ‘em. As if somehow I cannot be good at my job if my hair is a wreck; as if somehow I cannot be effective because I am wearing jeans instead of a three piece suit; as if somehow I am less capable because I haven’t shaved in several weeks.

Because implicitly, that is at least part of the argument that these people are making. Let’s revisit that actress for a minute. She appeared in a film - the well-reviewed George Clooney The Descendants - and was nominated for her performance. So she chose to dress nicely by almost every standard that people (who she has probably never met) invented out of ether, save one. And that one refusal to conform to standards that she never agreed to her in the first place is enough for these people to make her an object of derision. The fact that she apparently gave a great performance in an appreciated movie is outweighed by the HIDEOUS DECISION TO PRIORITIZE HER OWN COMFORT OVER THEIR FRANKLY INSANE STANDARDS.

I dream of the day when this sort of judgment is turned around; when it isn’t the person who prioritizes their own comfort getting described as the weirdo, but the person getting bent out of shape about is. Because that’s how it ought to work. These folks revel in the rank condescension that they visit upon others for the crime of prioritizing their world differently. That’s literally the entirety of their contribution to the world. They offer nothing more substantive than a list of rules which they have privately agreed too; that the rest of us haven’t is simply of no matter.

What truly confuses is why they simply can’t enjoy the things that they enjoy - like being uncomfortable apparently - without insisting that everybody else be uncomfortable too. Is the world really so awful if somebody thinks wearing toe shoes is a better idea than wearing whatever ridiculous shoes the author would have put her in instead?

A Statute of Limitations

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:37:58 -0500

Surely, there is some sort of statute of limitations on anger, on unrelenting fury that grabs ahold of you at the most unexpected and unwelcome times. How can anybody continue to be angry about things that happened five, ten, fifteen years ago?

And when I ask generally, I mean specifically, about myself. I suppose there are some things that I can push into the background far enough to be beyond my reach. But there are some things that cannot, despite enough time having passed so that even I think the response outweighs the crime.

I was asked about the specifics by a friend. They don’t matter I don’t think, at least in this case, but maybe only because I don’t want them to matter.

Also, how can I be 31 and still writing like a teenager? Surely I’ll outgrow this phase.