Shakesville

For My Friend Sam, On His Birthday

Sonnet, Written on the Author's Birthday, 1793
On hearing a thrush sing in his morning walk.

Sing on, sweet thrush, upon the leafless bough,
Sing on, sweet bird, I listen to thy strain,
See aged Winter, 'mid his surly reign,
At thy blythe carol, clears his furrowed brow.
So in lone Poverty's dominion drear,
Sits meek Content with light, unanxious heart;
Welcomes the rapid moments, bids them part,
Nor asks if they bring ought to hope or fear.
I thank thee, Author of this opening day!
Thou whose bright sun now gilds yon orient skies!
Riches denied, thy boon was purer joys—
What wealth could never give nor take away!
Yet come, thou child of poverty and care,
The mite high heav'n bestow'd, that mite with thee I'll share.

— Robert Burns

Btw, I have it on good authority that he penned
this sonnet by the light of a W.C. Fields lamp.

Happy Birthday, Sam.

[And I still have no idea how old Sam actually is.]

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

That Girl

A retail conversation

M's new guardian angels at the office

A recent conversation with staffers at a nearby Hallmark store:

Male sales associate: Hello, Hallmark Gold Crown at ___________, can I help you?

Waveflux: Hi! I called to see if you guys stocked any of the Hoops & Yoyo dolls.

Male sales associate: [silent]

Waveflux: [silent]

Male sales associate (warily): ...Hoops and who?

Waveflux: Uh, Hoops & Yoyo....they're characters that Hallmark made into dolls. They're very popular.

Male sales associate: Um...I don't know what that is. Hoops?

Waveflux: And Yoyo, yes. They're featured on the Hallmark website. The dolls are sold through the website. I thought I'd see if I could pick them up from a store.

Male sales associate: I'm gonna put somebody else on. She might know.

Waveflux: Okay.

(murmuring on other end of line)

Female sales associate: Hello, how may I help you?

Waveflux: Hello. I was looking for...are you familiar with the Hallmark characters Hoops & Yoyo?

Female sales associate: Hoops and...Yoyo? (laughs) No, no I'm not, sir.

Waveflux: They're characters on the Hallmark website, little cartoon characters. There are video clips of them on the site, they sell dolls and t-shirts of them...

Female sales associate: Are you talking about Webkinz?

Waveflux: Webkinz? No, I don't think - no, I've never heard of Webkinz.

Female sales associate: Because we do sell those.

Waveflux: Hoops & Yoyo are two different animals. Hoops is a bunny - no, I'm sorry, Hoops is the cat, a pink cat, and Yoyo is a green bunny...I think they're fairly popular.

Female sales associate: I'm afraid I'm not familiar with them, sir. Unless they might be Webkinz.

Waveflux: I don't think they are. It doesn't sound as if you carry them...I was going to come by and buy them from the store rather than order them from the website, but I'll just go ahead and order them.

Female sales associate: Okay.

Waveflux: If you get a chance, you might want to look up "Hoops & Yoyo" on the web. Just Google it and you'll see what I mean.

Female sales associate (laughs): Okay.

Waveflux: Okay, thanks very much.

Female sales associate: Goodbye.

##########

So what I'm thinking is that Hallmark may not have the whole clicks and mortar concept balanced out just yet. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

(Cross-posted.)

Question of the Day

Shaker Aram emailed me with the following: "I've been particularly taken recently with the Peter Gabriel/Youssou N'Dour song Shaking The Tree (lyrics here). What's strange to me is that I can't immediately think of any other songs by male artists that are so explicitly feminist. … I'm sure that if you put the question to your readers, they'll immediately come up with a dozen that will have me slapping my head, but for the moment, I'm stumped."

I thought this was an interesting question, particularly in light of how often we talk about how important allies are generally, and, more specifically, how many times Shaker fans of Joss Whedon have mentioned admiringly how well he writes female characters (something about which you can see him talking here).

So…whatcha got?

How about a little good news?

To be filed under Not All Religious People Hate Gays…

Gay bishop says no to ultimatum: "The first openly gay Episcopal bishop, whose consecration has brought the world's Anglicans to the brink of schism, said Tuesday that the Episcopal Church should not give in to demands that it roll back its acceptance of gays. New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson said in a statement … 'Now is the time for courage, not fear'." Right on, brother. Err, father. Whatever.

To be filed under Not All States Are Trying to Fight SSM…

Hawaii Civil Union Bill Heads To Committee: "Legislation to legalize civil unions will receive its first public hearing in the Hawaii legislature on Tuesday evening. The House Judiciary Committee will hear from people on both sides of the issue. If passed the bill would grant the equal rights and responsibilities of marriage, while stopping short of being defined as marriage … [and] Hawaii would join Vermont, Connecticut and New Jersey in allowing civil unions."

Gay Relationship Bill Introduced In Oregon: "Legislation that would recognize same-sex couples was introduced in the Oregon legislature on Monday. Called the Family Fairness Act it would provide many of the state rights of marriage on gay couples. Oregon has a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage and the Fairness Act carefully avoids using the terms civil unions or domestic partnerships. But many LGBT activists who pushed for the bill are calling it civil union legislation."

I know that the proposed legislation in Hawaii and Oregon is not the same as marriage; in other words, not good enough. But the point is just to remember that there is forward momentum, slow though it may be. It's easy to get discouraged, but we should celebrate even the smallest steps that bring us closer to the day when we are all truly equal under the law.

Caption This Photo

"Get me back to Canada. No, seriously. Now."

Betty Heath from Mississauga, Ontario stands next to Clyde Hymel from Laplace, La., on Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras in New Orleans Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

More on Laura

All day, something else about Laura Bush's much-discussed comment—"[M]any parts of Iraq are stable now. But, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everybody."—has been niggling at the back of my mind, and I finally figured out what it is, after Shaker Carovee said in comments, "Can you imagine what the headlines would be like here … if there was ONE bombing a day?!"

Yes, I can. And not only that, I can imagine that if there were one day in which four airplanes were used as missiles, the entire country would plummet into a profound, grief-stricken shock from the depths of which we still wouldn't have fully recovered almost six years later.

That the scale of the average bombing in Iraq is not remotely the same as what happened here on 9/11 is not the point—the grotesque beauty of terror is that intimate attacks can be equally as effective at terrorizing, if not at killing, as those writ large.

This country was stunned by 9/11. We were wounded. We were discombobulated. We were, according to plan, terrorized. In other words, we reacted as humans react to such things. Given time, humans heal, too. But George Bush prevented America from healing, from emerging out from under the weight of terror. Our collective fear, the pliant submission it yielded, was blissfully useful for a president with pretensions of tyranny and a yen to dismantle that pesky Constitution. Where Bin Laden left off, Dubya took over—and he's been screaming panic-inducing reminders from the top of that pile of rubble ever since. Remember 9/11.

Few people should know better the intensity of the fear after 9/11, should know better the power of continually exploiting the fear of terrorized people, should know better their inability to heal if terror never ends, should know better that one bombing a day is enough to do more than discourage people than the First Lady. How can she pretend she doesn't understand the significance, the fear, the pain, of one bombing a day, when her husband's entire presidency has been built around one day of bombing?

What bothers me is the undercurrent of her comment that those of us who despair at the loss of innocent life in Iraq—which now far exceeds the American blood spilled on 9/11 and the number of troops who have made the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan and Iraq—are wrong to care about the people we were supposedly liberating, that their pain is not equal to ours, that, while one day of bombing here fundamentally changed this country and anyone who disagreed was a traitor, one bombing a day there is deserving neither of our attention nor our anguish.

One of Them

The Right are notoriously forgiving in practice. It doesn't matter if their champion of family values is a lifelong "bachelor" or a divorcee or a compulsive philanderer or all three. It doesn't matter to them if their warrior hero kings are draft-dodgers. It doesn't matter to them if their anti-choice, anti-gay marriage candidate was once pro-choice and pro gay rights and may still be and is lying to them about it. It doesn't matter to them if their "Christian" candidate goes to their church, a church, or even truly believes.

All that matters is that the candidate proves he is one of them.

There are two important steps in becoming one of them. First you have to be able to pay repeated and flattering lip service to them, to their goodness, to their wisdom, to what they believe. The second, and this is the one that makes it impossible for even the most "Christian" Democrat to convince them he is one of them, you have to hate who they hate with the same red hot passion.

The hating is crucial because who they hate is everybody who is not them, and everybody who is not them, is on the side of the devil.

Similar to the thoughts I was having here and here earlier today, except way better and shit. Go read the whole thing; it's good.

UPDATE: Fred Clark's got some similar thoughts, too. I also like "people of good will," btw.

Happy Birthday, Misty!

Because you love Barbie so much,
I baked you your very own Barbie birthday cake!

May it bring you this much joy—and more!

Holy Crap

Ramadi Bombing Kills 18 Boys

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A car bomb exploded Tuesday near a park popular with young soccer players, killing at least 18 boys in a city west of Baghdad known as a center of the Sunni insurgency, police said. The attack occurred just three days after more than 50 people were killed outside a mosque in a nearby village where the imam had spoken out against the group al-Qaida in Iraq — pointing to an increasingly bloody attempts to silence its opponents. But the deaths of the boys, aged 10 to 15, left authorities grasping for a possible motive.

The bomb-rigged car blew apart late Tuesday afternoon while the boys were playing in central Ramadi, about 70 miles west of Baghdad. Both local police and state television said 18 boys died.

The Interior Ministry did not immediately return calls for further details of the attack. U.S. Marines are stationed near Ramadi.

[...]

In July 2005, a suicide bombing in Baghdad killed 27 people, including 18 children and an American soldier. A moment of silence across Iraq was later held.
But now, the violence has become so frequent and numbing that it's possible the boys' death will pass without any special note. At least 10 people were killed in bombings in Baghdad, where a security operation was launched earlier this month targeting militant factions and sectarian death squads that have ruled Baghdad's streets.

And yet, we're still hearing the "no one reports on the good things in Iraq" meme.

I don't want to hear any more of this "liberals/democrats/anti-war protesters want us to lose" bullshit. This war is fucking lost. Will we "win" when every citizen in Iraq sits huddled in their home, afraid to open the door lest they get blown to pieces?

Cue the "blame Islam" shrieking from the Right.

YouTube- The Busy Blogger's Best Friend

I've been swamped with work and school annoyances this week... completely AWOL from the blog yesterday; writer's block today... what's a blogger to do?

Why, post YouTube clips of course!

Best use of Bjork evah!

Shaker Gourmet

Today's recipe comes from...me! It's my birthday, so I'm putting my own stuff in today. Mwahahahahaha, I have the power. :-)

Tastes Like Chicken…Pot Pie

* 1 rotisserie chicken
* 1 cup sliced frozen carrots
* 3/4 cup frozen green peas
* 1/3 cup butter
* 1/3 cup chopped onion
* 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
* 1/4 teaspoon celery seed
* dash thyme
* 1 3/4 cups chicken broth
* 2/3 cup milk

* 2 (9 inch) unbaked pie crusts
* egg white

—Preheat oven to 425

—Pick all the chicken off (at least) half of the rotisserie chicken, shred it by hand. (Take the rest of the meat off and use for another recipe). Place one crust in pie plate, form to plate, and bake for 5 minutes. Take out of oven when done and let cool.

—Pour chicken broth in small pot w/lid. Boil carrots, covered, in broth for appx 10 minutes. Put peas in pot in last 4 minutes. Drain and keep broth! Set veggies aside.

—Cook onion in butter and all spices until onion is translucent. Add flour and mix. Slowly stir in broth and milk. Simmer and stir over med-low heat until thickened and smooth.

—Retrieve pre-baked crust. Layer chicken on bottom, then veggies on top. Pour sauce over top. Add top crust. Be sure to cut a few slits on top to let steam out. Brush thin layer of egg white over top crust.

—Cook for 35 minutes and let stand for 15 minutes before serving.

This really is excellent, if I do say so myself. You should try it!

Bonus recipe:

Upside-Down Cake

* 3 tablespoons butter, melted
* 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
* 1/4 cup shortening
* 1/4 cup butter
* 1 cup white sugar
* 1 egg
* 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
* 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
* 2 teaspoons baking powder
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1 cup milk
* fruit—2 peeled & sliced apples; can crushed pineapple, sliced peaches, etc
(whatever you want)

—Heat oven to 350 degrees.

—Pour melted butter into the bottom of an 8 inch square baking dish. Tilt the
dish so that it is evenly coated. Sprinkle the brown sugar over the butter. Arrange the fruit to cover the brown sugar, set aside.

—In a medium bowl, cream together the shortening, butter, and white sugar. Beat in the egg and vanilla until light and fluffy. Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt, stir into the creamed mixture alternately with the milk. Pour into the baking dish so that the fruit is completely covered.

—Bake for 40 to 50 minutes in the preheated oven, until a toothpick inserted, comes out clean. Immediately invert onto a serving plate.

I actually make this with bananas. The key is to have ripe bananas, as one would for banana bread. I slice the bananas fairly thin and layer them on the brown sugar. "Banana Cake" is a family favorite breakfast treat!

My Sisters

I've been meaning to write something about the atrocious evictions from the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta of 23 women who were overweight, non-white, geeky, and/or otherwise nonconforming to a stereotypically "sorority girl" archetype, but I just don't know what to say that hasn't already been said by Bitch, PhD, Grabapple, Jason, and others.

These are some of the gals that Delta Zeta thought weren't good enough
for them, and some of the girls who quit in protest of their sisters' eviction.

These are my sisters. No dues required.

if it's not grilled cheese or a door it must be...

Many Houstonians say they see something on a pizza pan that's nothing short of a miracle. And now, hundreds are flocking to an east Houston house on Leslie at Hahlo to get a peek.

Apparently, they're serving something special at the cafeteria of Pugh Elementary. On Ash Wednesday, HISD employee Guadalupe Rodriguez was washing and scrubbing a sheet pan when she noticed something.

"On the third rinse I started watching it, trying to discover what it was," she recalled.

So moved by the discovery, Rodriguez took the pan to her manager, who saw the vision too.

What the women saw was an image that is unmistakable to them. It drew so much attention the pan was moved to a nearby home, where it has become the center of a shrine.

In the pizza pan they see an image of Mary. Now I've looked at the image several times and to me, it looks a bit like a gourd:

Or a Boobah...

Holy folks Gone Wild on doggy doors, ice, peanuts, x-rays, turtles, ultrasounds, chocolate, dying plants, sheet metal, trees, more trees, more trees, more trees, more trees, wardrobes, water stains, grilled cheese sandwiches, potato chips, plates of pasta, drywall, fish, and more fish.

I'm Not Worried

Mike the Mad Biologist explains his worry about why political pandering to creationists matters:

In March, there's going to be a report released about antibiotic resistance in bacteria. A major finding of the report: roughly 40,000 people die every year from hospital-acquired antibiotic resistant bacterial infections.

The problem of antibiotic resistance is, fundamentally, a problem of evolutionary biology. Species of bacteria which had very few resistant strains (or none at all) now contain high frequencies of resistance strains (e.g., methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as MRSA). In other words, populations of bacteria have undergone genetic change—evolution—which has led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. How can one expect any administration which has to pander to creationists to take this evolutionary problem seriously?

One's answer to that question is predicated on whether one believes the person doing the pandering actually believes their own bullshit. See, I imagine that if one of the dopes currently pandering to creationists, in spite of having shown a vague respect for science and reason in the past, actually became president, an evolutionary biology-related health crisis of unspeakable proportions would be no more (or less) likely than if a non-panderer became president. Guys like McCain and Giuliani are full of shit and desperate to get elected, but they're not stupid.

It's not the panderers about whom we have to worry. It's the jerkoffs who actually believe this shit. But, frankly, even then, in the face of an imminent and unavoidable calamity, I imagine the relationship between their allergy to evolutionary biology and their aversion to aiding and abetting a plague would look eerily similar to the relationship between Bush's rhetoric about a culture of life and Bush's foreign policy. The thing to always keep in mind is that these people are first and foremost disingenuous tossers without a speck of integrity or consistency.

That said, I wouldn't, with any confidence, put it past any of them to let half of America succumb to rogue bacteria—but if they did, it wouldn't be because they're creationists. It would be because they couldn't find a way to profit from stopping it, or because their corporate masters found a way to profit from not stopping it, or because they're generally evil shits with a penchant for social Darwinism (the irony). In any case, it's probably safer not to assume you can predict anything based on the stated principles of modern movement conservatives.

HOFF!

This is a game of skill and precision.
Click on the Hoff to play.
[Via Radmila. Sometimes, directly after a post that makes me so mad I barely know what to do with myself, I think the best thing for all of us is a little silliness.]

A Tale of Two Posts

By the fate of an alphabetized Bloglines list, I just read these two posts back-to-back…

Mustang Bobby:

Question of the Day: When was the last time you put something—i.e. a job—on the line in order to stand up for your principles?

Bil Browning, writing about his life after last week's protest at the Indiana Statehouse against SJR-7, the proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage:

The day after the rally, my phone rang off the hook with folks calling to support me after the brouhaha. However, what is disturbing (since my cell phone number isn't published!) is how many phone calls I got from people telling me I was going to burn in hell, I was a sinner, I should be run out of town, etc.

The politics of personal destruction have begun in earnest and it seems that my family and I are taking the brunt this time.

For example, the window on my car was busted out last night. It was parked on the street since it's the old car that we don't use as much. The car was obviously searched, but nothing was taken—not even the spare change. Footsteps in the snow lead directly up to our car and then back away. No other car on the street was touched—and ours is the ugliest, oldest car parked on the block. The police don't think robbery was the motive, obviously, but instead have asked who we've pissed off lately.

And that's just the stuff that I feel comfortable talking about.

I can't even begin to express how furious and deeply concerned I am that Bil and his family are being subjected to this shit. Bil is a friend of mine, along with being a fellow Hoosier blogger. What are the odds that two people who know each other, both bloggers, who live in the same state, would be threatened and harassed by rightwing nutjobs within weeks of one another? Pretty fucking good, I guess, considering that the common theme is that we're both vociferous supporters of same-sex marriage equality. Nearly every last post of mine that was cited as evidence of my alleged bigotry had been written in support of SSM.

Meanwhile, the epidemic of hatred against the LGBT community continues with another heinous week in which a 21-year-old woman was left severely injured after being attacked for identifying herself as a lesbian, and a 72-year-old man was left dead after being attacked for being presumed gay. And where is the national outrage? Where is the anger that people are being attacked and killed for being gay, that people are being threatened and having their property destroyed for protesting their state-sanctioned inequality? Where are our national leaders? Where are the Democrats, who are meant to champion equality and progress? Where are the Republicans, who are meant to champion keeping the government out of our personal lives? Where are all the religious people who supposedly hate the sin but love the sinner?

To reference Bobby's question again, there are people regularly putting their lives on the line for something in this country—but nobody seems to notice. It's a national disgrace.

Be safe, Bil.

High Drudgeon

Drudge is all in a dither trying to promulgate—again—the story that Al Gore isn't really green, a claim predicated on the erroneous presumption that it's easy being green. But, as any singing frog worth his salt will tell you, it isn't easy being green, and it isn't always obvious how big energy-users make themselves green. Gore, for instance, couldn't possibly travel the world giving talks about global warming without using carbon-based fuels, so he buys carbon offsets. It's not the least bit complicated to understand, but it's so much fun to scream about how Gore's a hypocrite.

Or, as August so perfectly put it, Shocking report reveals Al Gore uses electricity, says popular idiot.

The number of times I've now seen some rightwinger or other declaring Gore's energy use "his inconvenient truth"—ho ho ho!—has now got to be approaching triple digits. And aside from the fact that the accusation is patently inaccurate on its bloody face, evidencing yet again the widespread contempt for truth and void of integrity plaguing the rightwing, it's just tiring to see people who vociferously support an administration led by two incredibly wealthy oilmen demand that liberals live like goddamned monks. Gore is a big old hypocrite, just like John Edwards, who has the temerity to be rich while advocating on behalf of the poor, just like John Kerry, who couldn't possibly have cared about real people because he married an extremely wealthy woman, etc.

And it’s the same bullshit about every issue: Gore's and Kerry's voluntary service in Vietnam was questionable, and Gore was only a journalist and Kerry probably shot himself and they both hate the troops squawwwwwk screeeeeeech cawwwww! But Bush's pathetic showing in a service position wrangled by Daddy and Cheney having "other priorities" during the war that warranted his four deferments are unassailable evidence that they're the ones with honor and the guts to protect this country.

On and and on and on ad infinitum. Because it's such a fun game to play, and that's the only thing that matters, besides winning, truth be damned.

A Tale of Two Stories

Laura Bush, First Propagandist, said yesterday on Larry King Live: "[M]any parts of Iraq are stable now. But, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everybody." This is, of course, total horseshit; as Think Progress notes, "According to the latest Brookings Institution Iraq Index, as of November 2006, there were approximately 185 insurgent and militia attacks every day."

But let's pretend she's right as we move to the next story, shall we?

Bagram, Afghanistan, today: "A suicide bomber killed 19 people and wounded 11 outside the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan on Tuesday during a visit by Vice President Dick Cheney, officials said. The Taliban claimed responsibility and said Cheney was the target."

Cheney's fine, btw. And has apparently asked Laura Bush to go hunting with him to show his appreciation for her thoughtful comments the day before his ass was nearly blown up.

Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

The Wonder Years