I've spent much of this past week realizing that I have many things, and that those many things have to be unpacked once they have been put in boxes and moved from one place to another. I feel like each box I moved from my old apartment somehow transformed into a Tardis en route--each one looks like it's a reasonable box-y size when closed, and then turns into a bottomless pit filled with things I really should just have thrown out when I was fourteen when opened (not that I should have thrown out the Doctor when I was 14--that analogy got away from me near the end).
I recently found a box filled with a) loose paper clips, b) unremarkable postcards from a person I'm no longer in contact with, and c) undergraduate essays. I will doubtless feel overwhelmed by the prospect of disposing of any of those things and find a way to stow it under my bed, where it will rest undisturbed until the next time I move (I sometimes think of what will happen to all of these things after I die. Some Value Village will some day be swimming in essays about Conrad featuring alliterated titles).
And at some point within the next two days, a cat will be joining me. The anxieties inspired by that could fill a whole entire post (although really I suppose it boils down to: "A cat is moving in. I fear he will not like me"). I now look at my apartment only as a collection of small, pointy things that could be eaten. What's that on the floor? Probably a screw from that box of screws I recently knocked over. Or maybe it's a nail from that box of nails I recently knocked over.
I suppose it's possible the cat will have a taste for pulpier things--maybe he'll pass on the hardware and eat all my undergraduate essays.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you're not entertained, fair enough.
I am still recovering from the 8-hour-long Blitzer-krieg pundit attack that was Tuesday night. It was like an awesome television-drama crossover episode (the classic Magnum P.I./Murder She Wrote two-parter springs to mind)—all my pundit friends were there AT ONE TIME. Jones and Castellanos and Gergen and Crowley! Carville and Martin and some blonde lady I'm pretty sure was Republican! (Gloria Borger could be Jessica Fletcher. Van Jones could be Magnum. David Gergen would obviously be Higgins. I was going to make a crack about how Ari Fleischer could be the person whose murder they'd be solving, but then I decided that was unnecessarily nasty).And I reaffirmed my sense of the places in America I would not like to live and the people I would not like to live with. I would not like to live with these people (because they're racists) or this person (because he's sexist—he seems to have now made this post private, so I was forced to track down a weird copied-and-then-pasted version). Although I have to thank the sexist Christian man, who credited the "slut vote" for Obama's win, because the only thing liberal sluts have been able to do in large groups together that doesn't involve crazy open-minded sex using birth control is walking, and now they have another option. You know that if this guy had published his reasoned argument about slutty lady voters a week ago, there would have been organized "slut votes," and left-wing women would have gotten all dressed up in their actual, everyday super-slut clothes and gone to the polls together. Maybe they'll still do that four years from now, but it's all too possible someone will call them sluts for doing something completely different, and then they'll start doing that together and forget all about voting in a big old harlot bloc. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you're not entertained, fair enough.
I will be taking next week off (and accidentally took last week off) because I am preparing to move, and it's difficult to organize one's time properly when there is so much organizing and planning and cleaning and general despairing to do. A great deal of time, for example, went into creating the following:  The orange paper was all I had on hand—I am not planning a Halloween- or Netherlands-themed apartment. And the place is fully equipped with both a kitchen AND bathroom, but as I won't be putting furniture in either of those places, I didn't build small orange versions of either of them. I didn't realize until after I took this photo that I've somehow managed to misplace my tiny orange chest of drawers—it's probably somewhere in the depths of my couch. I am not going to go in after it right now, because yesterday I unexpectedly happened upon a wizened and distressing cashew under one of the cushions, and moving prep has demoralized me enough for the moment, thank you very much.
And this is the "Stabler" that will take up so much space:
 She is extremely demanding and full of hate. But I couldn't let this week go by without at least mentioning the people who've recently made feel grateful that at least I'm not moving in with them:1. Ann Coulter (she would be difficult to live with because she's really mean and also crazy)She tweeted after the debate that she approved of Romney's decision "to be kind and gentle to the retard."She later tweeted (the "he" is Obama): "If he's 'the smartest guy in the room' it must be one retarded room."Probably she tweeted these tweets because not enough people had been outraged by an earlier tweet she tweeted, about a video Obama made for the National Forum on Disability Issues: "Been busy, but is Obama STILL talking about that video? I had no idea how crucial the retarded vote is in this election."2. Sue-Ann Levy (she's Canada's answer to "she would be difficult to live with because she's really mean and also crazy")During Monday's debate, she tweeted: "Obama says he 'will stand' with Israel if attacked and they are a 'true friend.' His nose is growing again. #MuslimBS"3. A bunch of scientistsResearchers asked a bunch of scientists to share their thoughts about why there aren't so many women in science, and why when women do go into science, they tend to be more interested in biology than physics:“Physics is more difficult for girls and you need a lot of thinking, and the calculation, and the logic. So that’s maybe hard for girls.” — male grad student, physicsAwesome. And if you think women can also say some worrisome and essentialist things about women, but do so in a slightly less douche-y fashion, you're absolutely right:"Physics is more abstract and biology is more concrete. Women are less likely to like abstract things.” — female associate professor, physics POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you're not entertained, fair enough.
I really don't like Paul Ryan. It's like some sweater-vest wearing candidate for student council treasurer built him out of left-over bits of Alex P. Keaton, Ayn Rand, and a malevolent badger.
Also, his features all seem squished and pinched into a very small section of his face. He's like a 1980's bond trader, but not the cool kind who did cocaine while not wearing socks—he's the kind who would have gotten all hot and bothered while wearing socks and talking about Reaganism for five hours.I seem to be one of the few people who does not think Mr. Atlas P. Badger is a fine figure of a man. I acknowledge that he has no body fat and that many people find sculpted muscles covered only by a thin layer of skin attractive. But there's something about his fatlessness that I find repellent; whenever I look at his muscles, I imagine them being sculpted by the forces of boringness, earnestness, and remorseless parsimony. It's not not like I've spent a whole lot of time and effort trying to imagine what's under all those suggestively cut suits and skimpy ties—he's more than happy to give us two free tickets to the NRA convention that is his biceps. He POSED WITH WEIGHTS for this Time Magazine photo shoot.All I think when I look at those photos is that the man might have muscle tone, but he has no lips. WHAT HAPPENED TO HIS LIPS?Now THIS is a man I find both personable and lippy: Lord love him.
And now I have to go assemble a buffet of snacks, liquors, and convincing rationalizations because the debate is only two-ish hours away.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you're not entertained, fair enough.
Everyone knows that the only thing funnier than death is the death of someone elderly and much loved. Just thinking of old, likable people dying is making me laugh out loud right now!Just like I laughed out loud when I read the following tweet: "Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! 'She died 3 days b4 he became president.'"As CNN notes, this zinger was inspired by the following comment made by Obama during Wednesday's debate: ""You know, my grandmother - some of you know - helped to raise me. My grandfather died a while back. My grandmother died three days before I was elected president. And she was fiercely independent. She worked her way up, only had a high school education, started as a secretary, ended up being the vice president of a local bank. And she ended up living alone by choice."
Who didn't hear that comment and spend the next half hour or so trying to come up with a gut-bustingly funny put-down? I know KitchenAid immediately got to panning for comedy gold. How do I know that? Because that tweet I mentioned earlier was sent out from their corporate twitter account.Of course, KitchenAid claims the comment was accidentally posted by a team member who'd intended to put it on their personal twitter feed, but I'm hoping the tweet is proof we're entering a new era of politically active appliances. If only we'd always had Twitter, partisan toaster ovens, and irreproachable senses of humour, past elections could have read something like this...Braun: Reagan's brain knew he was unfit to govern, so it tried to impeach itself! #LOLAlzheimer's
Black and Decker: Drowning in a car is a pretty dramatic way to get out of a date with Ted Kennedy, but who can blame her? #ROFLChappaquiddickCuisinart: Roosevelt said that "progressive government by its very terms, must be a living and growing thing, that the battle for it is never ending and that if we let up for one single moment or one single year, not merely do we stand still but we fall back in the march of civilization." Is he really the best authority on "standing" still or marching? #ParalysisAmIRightPeopleActually, that last one is probably too long.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you're not entertained, fair enough.
Frequently in life, we're called upon to apologize for things we don't feel the least bit sorry about, to people we have absolutely no respect for. It's hard to hit just the right note: you don't want your unconvincing expressions of contrition to be overshadowed by your thinly veiled attacks on your attackers, or vice versa. So how should one go about crafting a truly sincere non-apology? How can one say both "I'm sorry (but not really)" and also "fuck you"?Look no further than Margaret Wente's recent column dealing with the fact that it really does seem--if you define plagiarism according to how things like dictionaries and professors define plagiarism-- like she's been plagiarizing just a bit. (The entire background of the story is here, if you're not yet familiar with it.) It is a MASTERPIECE and suggests various lines of defense for the rightfully accused and wrongfully unrepentant: 1) The standard to which I am being held is ludicrously high and totally unreasonable...I'm far from perfect. This is just an awesome way to kick things off. It suggests both that Wente is modest and sensible and that her detractors are demanding she become perfect, rather than simply passably professional.Most of all, I regret the trouble I’ve created for my Globe colleagues by giving any opening at all to my many critics. In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be any openings. In the real world, there are.We have only two options: (1) a cloud-cuckoo fantasy land where people are infallible and capable of superhuman feats like using quotation marks in their notes and then reproducing those same quotation marks in their articles, or (2) a "real" world, where well-meaning journalists who try their best pretty much can't help but regularly take ideas and words from other people. Aren't her critics the outrageous ones for expecting journalists NOT to plagiarize? 2)...and the people who are holding me to this standard are irrational ideologues...
What I often am is a target for people who don’t like what I write.Wente is a no-nonsense truth-teller unafraid to say unpopular, controversial things. The people who find her behaviour unacceptable are not sound, objective readers who object to plagiarism, but loony and rigidly doctrinaire left-wingers who will inevitably object to anything Wente says or does.
2b)...who lack credibility...And now, some necessary background. The current firestorm started with a blogger named Carol Wainio, a professor at the University of Ottawa and a self-styled media watchdog.self-styled = the opposite of Globe-styled; without relevant skills; most likely sadly deluded and self-important. 2c)...and are also totally crazy...Her website, Media Culpa, is an obsessive list of accusations involving alleged plagiarism, factual errors, attribution lapses and much else. She has more than once accused me of stealing the work of other writers with whom I happen to share an opinion.This poor blogger is demented; she has found so many questionable bits in Wente's body of work not because they are at all questionable, but because she has become pathologically fixated on Wente. She repeatedly accuses Wente of outlandish things and her blog posts are not crisply written, scrupulously reasoned articles, but pathetic and disturbing cries for help. 3)...and also society. Hasn't it changed? I think it's changed.Journalistic practice around quotations and attribution has become far more cautious in the past few years, and mine has, too. If I were writing that column again today, I would quote and attribute more carefully.She's so right. Journalists plagiarized like crazy before 2009, because those were different times. In those post-war years, when a new generation was discovering free love and free quotations, what writer didn't just unthinkingly take words from another person and casually reuse them? What reader pre-2009 reader got all nit-picky about who said or thought what, and when? People today are SO UPTIGHT. 3b) Really, it's society that should be apologizing.But I’m also sorry we live in an age where attacks on people’s character and reputation seem to have become the norm. An instant classic. Our culture has been cheapened, not by her plagiarism, but by those who have identified and condemned it. She is world-weary, sorrowful. She yearns for the days when informed readers refrained from raising valid concerns. 4) When I was a kid…if you were caught plagiarizing, you got a zero.Sorry - how did that get there? And how did I manage to forget the quotation marks around it that would have indicated those weren't my words, but someone else's? I'll try that again:
“When I was a kid, everybody knew the rules and the penalties for breaking them. When the teacher walked into class, you stood up. If you arrived late, you got a late slip. If you were late a few times, you got a detention. If you handed in an assignment late without a good excuse, you were marked down, and if you were caught plagiarizing, you got a zero.” - Margaret Wente ("High-school daze: In Ontario, failure is not an option."Globe and Mail, August 30, 2008)
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
Many years ago, I watched an episode of Oprah that featured conjoined twin girls—I believe they were joined at the head. I insisted on sharing various responses to and insights about it with a friend (both the responses and insights went something like "I mean, imagine what it would be like. IMAGINE WHAT IT WOULD BE LIKE."). The friend with whom I was speaking, after agreeing that imagining what it would be like was indeed a rich and worthwhile undertaking, then said, "And, I mean, let's be honest: when they grow up, every man's fantasy."
There was a rather awkward silence, and then I said to him, "I think you mean identical twins. Just regular identical twins. Not conjoined twins - those ones aren't the stereotypical male fantasy ones."
He would certainly have agreed that he didn't have his finger on the pulse of mainstream culture (he once explained quite seriously to classmates that his presentation on Blake might be somewhat convoluted because he had, after all, written it while listening to both Rachmaninoff and Beethoven [I'm pretty sure it was those two—I'm not really an authority, and it's all too possible I wrote my own presentation while listening to radio stations playing a combination of Sisqo and Shaggy]) at the same time.
But how had I learned that identical twins were something the average man was supposed to want to have the sex with? Had I ever actually heard a man discuss wanting to have the sex with identical twins? No. I realized then that everything I knew about the Male Libido I learned from Dan Fielding.
Dan Fielding was a character played by John Larroquette on the sitcom Night Court. He was a prosecutor and also a devoted, unashamed pervy perv. From Dan Fielding, I learned that it was not unheard of for men to want to sleep with twins; I learned that stewardesses were the prostitutes of the skies, and that Swedish ones were especially awesome; I learned that successful prosecutors might well also visit with the prostitutes of the ground, known simply as prostitutes.
Dan Fielding was greedy, lecherous, thoughtless, craven, dishonest, and kind of vulnerably pathetic. In the opposite corner of Night Court manhood was Judge Harold T. Stone, a wistful, selfless child-man who would not think twice about leaving a plane full of Norwegian swimsuit models for the chance to eat an ice-cream cone with Mel Torme.
So it's because of Night Court that I developed a sense of there being two very clear types of men: those who get a woman alone in order to force unwanted sexual attentions upon her, and those who get a woman alone in order to force unwanted and unsuccessful magic tricks upon her.
I don't know why I didn't pay more attention to Mac. He was a pretty good husband to Quon Le.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
Next week, I plan to write about the television character who formed my idea of Male Lustfulness.
The television character I will be discussing was not played by Brent Spiner, but this photo is a clue.
This is a very exciting day for me. And also a startling one. It's exciting because I had not realized I had branched out into porn, and startling because I had not realized I had branched out into porn.
Despite the fact that this website is obviously titillating, salacious, and (if you look at it from just the right angle) full of boobies, I had not intended it to be a straightforwardly blue endeavour.
But blue it is, says the DANGEROUS SUPER-PORN PORNY PORN WEBSITE warning that has begun popping up on the computers of the people I know who work for the provincial government (and who only visit explicit pornographic sites while on their breaks, or by accident while not on their breaks when trying to search for explicit pornographic sites).
What's truly amazing is that I have managed to become pornographic in the way least calculated to make me more successful. The porn-iness of my website does not reveal itself on the larger internet, so that people searching, say, for "naked Kristen Stewart" (I absolutely put that in just so this website might pop up when people google "naked Kristen Stewart") or "co-ed lesbians" will not be led to my carefully considered meditations on fully-clothed people not having sex with one another. But at the same time, meditative and fully-clothed people not having sex at the Ontario government will now not be able to read me from work, and I will lose out on all those people frustrated because they can't use Facebook or youtube.
My only hope is that I will be able to tap into an entirely new demographic: civil servants, who, searching for considered, no-sex meditations about things, stumble across the warning message, are intrigued by the notion of porn, remember the website, come home to check out that porn they almost saw, and then find themselves delighted to not find porn.
I also wonder why, despite the fact that my site has been active and gone largely unnoticed for a very long time, they have chosen this moment to block it. I can only imagine they read the last few posts while clutching an imaginary set of dirty-making quotation marks.
From last week's post about the Bloodhound Gang (with added quotation marks):
They are for some reason allowed to moonlight as "private investigators" and regularly able to "foil" villains and their villainous plots by way of things like "pinhole cameras."
The post about the Phantom of the Muppet Show:
Also, it used to make me cry because no one would ever believe that Snuffleupagus existed, even though he'd just "been" RIGHT THERE.
The one about Vader living in my closet:
And before Jedi came out and Vader was revealed to have a boiled-fish, soft-unripened-cheese, triangular, vulnerable under-helmet head, I was more scared of him than of just about anything else, which was unfortunate, because he lived in my "closet."
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
Once again, I'm going to write about something that scared me when I was a kid-- partly because I spent so much of my childhood being terrified of things that this topic has triggered a seemingly endless stream of remembrances, and partly because I've spent the week thinking about how it's possible for a kid to be terrified of a Muppet. The Phantom of the Muppet Show (the ungodly fright puppet I discussed last week) was indeed a phantom who haunted places and people, but he was also surrounded by singing and dancing bundles of adorableness (and also Ethel Merman). My undeveloped brain, dominated by a sense that the world boasted many conspicuous threats, and many things that seemed innocuous and then turned out to be threats, and many children's puppets who wanted to sing and dance and then lie in wait and kill me, was capable of being frightened by Uncle Deadly (understanding the "Deadly" part), but not of correctly receiving and interpreting the very clear "Toddlers! Do not fear! This admittedly terrifying Muppet only draws near because he wants to sing and dance with you!" message (the "Uncle" part). It's not surprising that I was scared by something like Poltergeist when I was a kid. It's a scary movie. It's more surprising that I was so petrified by the following show-within-a-show that even just hearing the theme song was enough to make me want to retreat under my bed and set up house there. The show was called 3-2-1 Contact, and it ostensibly taught kids about science, although it taught me mostly about FEAR AND SUFFERING. I don't remember much about the larger show at all (i.e. I've forgotten most of the science-y bits), but I remember the embedded story, which focused on a group called the Bloodhound Gang. The Bloodhound Gang (proving that liberal, science-education-promoting, public-access-television-viewing parents don't truly love their children and so let them run about unsupervised and learn about scientific principles and near-death experiences) are for some reason allowed to moonlight as private investigators and regularly able to foil villains and their villainous plots by way of things like pinhole cameras. I no longer remember when the Bronze Age was or how to multiply fractions, but thirty or so years later, I still remembered that these kids found a stolen mummy, were thrown into a truck, and were threatened with death by hardened criminals.
Unfortunately, I managed to forget that a) the soundtrack regularly featured the "wah wah wah waaaaah" sound judiciously used by sitcoms to signify that something silly and unexpected has happened, b) the criminals were silly, and c) the children were never scared. I also managed to forget every bit of resourceful science-y-ness the kids used to get themselves out of danger. (Of course, I just watched this again as a 36-year-old and am still not convinced I know how to build and operate a pinhole camera.)
When I was little, I was able to edit out all the signals that were supposed to reassure me that children's television danger was neither truly dangerous nor likely to last very long. I was, though, able to grasp the fact that in emergencies, I would almost certainly be called upon save myself by drawing on my knowledge of things like the Bronze Age or the multiplication of fractions. If I'd been a member of the Bloodhound Gang, I WOULD HAVE DIED IN THE BACK OF THAT TRUCK.
POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
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