R.I.P.

George Carlin.

Well, shit. Piss cunt cocksucker motherfucker and tits.

He was like America's dirty old uncle.

Carpe Diem.

Seven songs meme: youTubing version!

Daisy tagged me with this ages ago. Sorry! D'oh!

Also, this will be my chance to out myself as some kind of semi-aged hipster music geek from ten years ago.

~*~

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring-summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

1. They Might be Giants: Birdhouse in Your Soul


Whenever this song comes on the ipod in the car, Brian always sings the main part and I always sing "Who watches over youuuuu!!" It happens every time. Incidentally, I knew I loved the really great show Pushing Daisies when this happened.

2. The White Stripes - Hotel Yorba


I find the White Stripes get crappier with each progressive album. (Seriously, this is the first track off their first album. Awesome, right?) Their first album is awesome, IMHO. This is from their second one, I think. My friend put this on a mix CD of really upbeat songs, and I've had it stuck in my head recently. Happy earworms!!

3. Beastie Boys - Shake Your Rump


For no reason. There's no need for a reason with rump-shaking of this caliber.

4. Venice Shoreline Chris - Rock Steady


Reminds me of hot summer afternoons smoking weed on the porch while living in a run-down old ginormous Victorian house in Allston. Good times.

5. Zebda - Tomber la chemise


I always feel kind of dumb listening to music in languages I don't speak. I'm afraid the lyrics might be really racist or sexist or otherwise horrible. I'm pretty sure the title of this song translates to "take off the shirt" or something, which seems somehow like a cultural thing I don't get. Oh well, I still like it.

6. Gogol Bordello - 60 Revolutions


Abbie can't get enough of Start Wearing Purple, and that's a good song too, but hearing it seventy trillion times is enough for me. I like this one better, anyway, so I'm trying to wean her off the purple song to this one. Listen at around 2:45 where they start to play Master of Puppets for like a nanosecond.

7. Seu Jorge - Queen Bitch


From the soundtrack of the criminally underrated The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I also like this one. And this one. Also the Mark Mothersbaugh score for this film is kind of weirdly wonderful.

Well, there you go. Since I kind of missed the window on this meme and everybody's probably been tagged with it already, I tag whomever wants to do it still.

R,I,P

Cyd Charisse.

In this scene, Cyd looks just like my friend Chrissy from High School (except Chrissy was a redhead).

More on the Mammy thing.

Because, dammit, it keeps coming up.

In comments here, in defense of another blogger's owning a Mammy figurine (and using it as a reminder not to foolishly drunk-dial men), PrObama says:

There are far more destructive contemporary stereotypes at work, ones that remain unacknowledged, and therefore that much more insidious. On balance, a blogger making light of racist shtick from 80 years ago is a less worthy adversary than, say, an entire news network equating everyday black culture with terrorism.

Okay. The image of a happy, helpful female servant of color with a bountiful body that gives and gives selflessly? A thing of the past?

Tell that to her.

Georgia Danan was both laughing and crying. It was Friday, June 6, and she was sitting in a Barnard College classroom, telling the tale of how she came to be a 76-year-old Filipina domestic worker fighting to win $22,000 in back wages from a recalcitrant employer. Speaking in hurried, distraught sentences, she unfurled the story of how she immigrated to Los Angeles in 2005, sought a job as a domestic worker through the Mt. Sinai Home Care agency, and then, like so many before her, found herself being both poorly treated--she said she was regularly yelled at and accused of stealing--and cheated out of a minimum wage. For one fifteen-day period, she said, the agency didn't pay her at all.

Or her.

"The lady said, 'Scrub it, scrub it, scrub it!'" recalled Araceli Herrera, a 58-year-old housekeeper in San Antonio, replaying a former employer's obsessive insistence that she clean, clean, clean even though Herrera was suffering from agonizingly painful gallstones. Later, when she tried to return to work after a monthlong recovery from gallbladder surgery, she found that the employer had hired somebody else.

..."They never think we are humans," Herrera said, her genial voice turning suddenly raw. "I am a lady. I am a woman. I have dreams. I want to do something. No, they never [think] that. They maybe think we are machines."

Or her.

"The roots really date back from the days of slavery," she said, tracing the evolution of modern-day domestic work from the forced household labor performed by women slaves, to the free but rarely voluntary housework performed by post-abolition-era African-American domestics, to her own degrading treatment in the house of her first employer.

"To see the way I was treated in that first job, having to wear a white uniform from head to toe and white shoes," said Gill-Campbell, describing a scene in which, while dressed in this full servant regalia, she was forced to push her employer's dog in a stroller.

I'd say the stereotype is alive and well. (Via Jill.)

From the original offending post:

I keep Emancipatia by my bed now, and whenever I look at her, I hear Brian’s falsetto voice saying, “Now Miss Sarah, you know you don’ wanna be callin’ that boy!” Everyone needs one of these. They should hand them out at bars.

Just remember while you and your friends are yuking it up over how funny and weird and baffling it is that people were treated like your Mammy was, people are still being treated like your Mammy was. This stereotype is not a thing of the past. This stereotype continues to affect the lives of millions of women in the United States and elsewhere.

Dear White People Everywhere

If a bunch of people of color have just agreed that something you're saying/doing/owning is racist, it probably is. Saying "No, it isn't!" is not a convincing argument otherwise.

(See the comment thread to this post.)

Yes, that.

Read this by brownfemipower (whose return to blogtopia is most excellent) about the rhetoric surrounding veganism as a so-called "cruelty-free" lifestyle.

Is a vegan lifestyle really a “cruelty free” lifestyle? Why is it so easy to prioritize cruelty inflicted on animals over cruelty inflicted on brown people? Why can people list a whole litany of wrongs committed against animals by the food industry–but at the same time those people “never really thought” about what happens to the workers?

Should I consider these things while contemplating veganism? Should I mourn them?

Can I bring myself to say with a straight face that I no longer eat meat because I care about ending violence against animals? Can I say to the workers, to myself, that even animals are more important to me than they are, than I am? Can I continue my own people’s erasure? Can I continue mine?

How do I make eating vegan/vegetarian a political choice about liberation without making the sacrifice one set of beings make with their bodies more important than another set of beings?

Yes, that.

I mean, there's no easy answers. There's no one product to boycott, or class of products to avoid that can save your soul and make you a perfect ethical consumer. Tomatoes and peppers and cucumbers are usually as tainted with suffering as meat. And meat is often as tainted with the suffering of humans as it is with animals.

And yet it's the suffering of animals that's so often given preference in these discussions.

I know I've said this before (in a slightly different context), but we in the West live off of the backs of most of the rest of the world. Pretty much everything you touch is laced with cruelty. Calling a vegan diet "Cruelty free" privileges the suffering of animals over the suffering of your fellow humans.

Take that, Kenya

Norway now has lions. Holy crap! Lions!

Eat it, catchy internet flash animation about Kenya!

Via Cute Overload.

YouTubing

The "women with deep voices and probably emotional issues" version. With commentary!



Ethyl Meatplow - Ripened Peach. I love love love this band. My favorite song of theirs though is the profanity-laced Queenie, which I was unable to find online.

**ADDED** Oh, look, I found it.

Artist Site

More Videos

Fiona Apple - Fast As You Can. (Sorry about the ad, this was the only embeddable version I could find.) Actually a really good song, I think, on that super-pretentio-titled "When the Pawn blahblahblah" album. Which, if you're trying to make a serious album where you prove you're not a spoiled pop princess, you should probably avoid really gimmicky titles. Because that was a really good album overall, with a really stupid title that made it easy to overlook.



Amy Winehouse - Rehab. Yes, I know, I know. But it's a good song.

Thanks to years of drinking whisky and smoking cigars (joking!), I too have a deep voice. So much so that sometimes on the phones at work people I'm talking to call me "sir." One time, a woman called me, memorably, "Sir, er uh, maam. Um, sir."

This baffles me because like the above three women, my voice is deep but not masculine, really. Gender conformity, then, extends to things as inane as vocal pitch. Whenever this happens I shift my voice up a few octaves and get all breathy-Marylin Monroe-in-Some Like it Hot on them. Just to brighten up my day.

Tim Russert, R.I.P.

Carpe diem, kids.

Although I really think Russert was part of the Iraq war hype machine, I hope I'm not famous when I die, because it's kind of icky watching MSNBC right now with all his colleagues exclaiming how they didn't know he had a health problem.

Well, now everybody knows he had a health problem, and I'm sure that's just what he would have wanted.

But part of me is still touched seeing all the stoic newspeople choking back tears.

So yeah, carpe the diem.

Ummm, no.

So a friend of mine told me that the latest winner of America's Next Top Model was plus-sized, and I thought, cool! That's awesome!

Well, it would be awesome, if she were actually plus-sized.



I mean, don't get me wrong, she's a very beautiful woman, and I'm sure she's very talented and charismatic. (Really, honestly not being sarcastic.) But she's a size 10! That is not plus-size! That's just not really skinny! (Which, I guess, is a step.) Seriously, folks plus-sized doesn't really start until size 12 or 14 depending on the clothing brand/designer.

Unless you're paying the extra ten bucks for the same outfit, it's not plus sized!

Gaze, Internets, at what a plus-sized woman is actually shaped like!



Also, gaze at the dirtiness of my bathroom mirror and my inability to set the white balance on my digital camera!

Now, I certainly lack the talent to be a model, I'm not photogenic and I don't have the acting ability or the physical stamina. But come on, people. There is an entire industry full of plus-sized models that would probably be happy to win reality shows, too.

And besides, Project Runway is still more interesting.

Please

Send some internet love to my blog friend Goody MacGruder, whose house was destroyed by a tornado. I'm thinking of you Goody!

Lol

The PBS N Political team talking about Obama's keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004:



Found while idly browsing YouTube because Abbie's at Grandpa's and I have nothing to do.

Dennis Kucinich files articles of impeachment against President Bush.

Read all 35 articles at Zuky.

Huh. I'm a little amazed I didn't see this on the news at all in the past few days.

Well, not really amazed. But still.

Quirky Meme

I was tagged by Daisy with a quirky meme!

Which is great, because I probably have a lot of quirks.

Six quirky things about me:

1) I have a thing with tape. Clear plastic scotch tape. I'm addicted to it, somehow. At my job, in my cubicle there's a dispenser and I have to guess I go through a roll a week. I'm constantly tearing off pieces, absentmindedly wrapping my fingers with it, shredding it into strips, rolling it up into little balls, and making a huge waste. It's a serious problem.

2) I hate the sound of blown raspberries. You know, that farty noise that children make. Bi-labial fricatives. It's like nails on a chalkboard to me for some reason.

3) Every male I've ever had a romantic involvement in has known all the words to "The Humpty Dance" by the Digital Underground. From the guy I first kissed when I was twelve on. Yes, even Brian. Especially Brian.



4) I love the movie The Legend of Billie Jean, and I'm not sorry. Fair is fair!



5) I love smartees. You know, the Halloween candy that comes in little, pastel-colored rolls? My favorite part of Halloween. I lovingly savor each one, knowing that by mid-November they're going to be all gone and I will spend the entire year craving them again.

6) I only dress in black. I am the lady Johnny Cash. This dates back before the punk thing, before the goth thing, back to middle school. I only wear black. I'm in mourning or something, I guess.


~*~

Lessee, who do I tag...Jack and Lilo and Belle.

Dear 90 percent of the people I'm related to,

And a good deal of my friends, too.



If I could afford to pay Mary J. Blige to deliver singing telegrams, this would be happening on your lawn right now. No more drama!

And there goes George III again

Pointing and laughing at our dumb asses.

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana (Reuters) - Memo to disappointed women supporters of Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton: Republican John McCain wants your vote.

McCain, the senator from Arizona who has wrapped up his party's White House nomination, moved on Wednesday to woo women and other Clinton backers whose disappointment over her defeat by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama could cause them to switch teams.

..."I'm disappointed that Hillary didn't make it, being a female," said Brittany Ford, 19, a black student from Columbus, Ohio. She said she's now looking at McCain, adding simply: "I don't care for Obama."

I'll say it right now. Brittany Ford, 19, from Columbus Ohio is a total asshole. She is willing to risk my reproductive freedom and the freedom of my daughter out of spite for her practically the same, policy-wise candidate not winning.

Brittany Ford is willing to risk going back to this:

Almost any implement you can imagine had been and was used to start an abortion — darning needles, crochet hooks, cut-glass salt shakers, soda bottles, sometimes intact, sometimes with the top broken off.

Another method that I did not encounter, but heard about from colleagues in other hospitals, was a soap solution forced through the cervical canal with a syringe. This could cause almost immediate death if a bubble in the solution entered a blood vessel and was transported to the heart.

The worst case I saw, and one I hope no one else will ever have to face, was that of a nurse who was admitted with what looked like a partly delivered umbilical cord. Yet as soon as we examined her, we realized that what we thought was the cord was in fact part of her intestine, which had been hooked and torn by whatever implement had been used in the abortion. It took six hours of surgery to remove the infected uterus and ovaries and repair the part of the bowel that was still functional.

Brittany Ford is okay with women returning to a status of second-class citizens when President McCain's appointments to the Supreme Court (who would remain on the bench for decades) overturn Roe v. Wade. Out of spite for Obama, she is willing to create a situation where it might be my daughter some day lying on that table with her intestines hanging out of her.

To any Clinton supporter who is now considering a vote for McCain because they're mad at Obama: fuck you. Die in a fire. Etc, etc.

I certainly hope so.

Yes, we can?

The fast-paced developments unfolded as the long Democratic nominating struggle ended with primaries in Montana and South Dakota.

Only 31 delegates were at stake, the final few among the thousands that once drew Obama, Clinton and six other Democratic candidates into the campaign to replace President Bush and become the nation's 44th president.

Obama arranged an evening appearance in St. Paul, Minn., sending McCain an unmistakable message by claiming his victory in the very hall where the Arizonan will accept his party's nomination in early September.

Clinton was in New York for an appearance before home-state supporters. Officials said she would concede Obama had the delegates to secure the Democratic nomination, effectively ending her bid to be the nation's first female president.

Well, okay. **deep breath** Is it really all over? Can we can get down to defeating the other guys? (You do remember the other guys? The really bad ones who want to take away reproductive freedom and stay in a quagmire war for the next thousand years, just to pick two examples?)

Seems so. Let's get to it.

(Now, just don't fuck it up Mr. Obama.)

And just so everyone remembers how to be inspired again:

R.I.P.

Bo Diddley.

Many other artists, including the Who, Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello copied aspects of Diddley's style.

Growing up, Diddley said he had no musical idols, and he wasn't entirely pleased that others drew on his innovations.

"I don't like to copy anybody. Everybody tries to do what I do, update it," he said. "I don't have any idols I copied after."

"They copied everything I did, upgraded it, messed it up. It seems to me that nobody can come up with their own thing, they have to put a little bit of Bo Diddley there," he said.

Yes. *Original snarky comment removed. But I'm sure you could guess what it was.*