hey your big gay taint is tickling my blogaround!
Recommended Reading:
Tigtog: How Hollywood Made Its Heroines Weight-Obsessed and Man Mad
Blue Girl: The Culture War Has Lost a Soldier
mzbitca: Just Another Little Bit of Sexism
Renee: Polytechnique: Of Course We Need a Male Perspective
Andy: Foo Fighters Grohl and Shiflett Show Marriage Equality Support
Melissa: Calling All Funny Female Filmmakers
Heads-up, Losties: Rachel's newest recap is up!
Leave your links in comments...
Monday Blogaround
Happy Blogiversary...
...to Tracey, celebrating two years of being Unapologetically Female! (Just a totally kickass blog. If you're not reading Tracey, you should be!)
Blue Indiana
Welcome to our broke-ass state, President Obama.
One year ago, unemployment in Elkhart County was at 4.7%. Today, it's the highest in the nation at 15.3%, fueled largely by the rapid decline in the recreational vehicle business.We went blue for you in November, but we've been feeling blue for a long time. Hope you can help us.
..."People who have never had to ask for assistance are having to," says Mayor Dick Moore, a Democrat in this largely Republican area.
Unemployment in the city of Elkhart (population 52,000) has hit 18%, he says.
"That's a pretty tough number," Moore says. "People are hanging in there, but … I don't think we've hit the bottom yet."
Hope you stop treating the GOP like they're ever going to play fair, like they actually give a shit about average Americans. Because they don't.
They just fucking don't.
Yes Means Yes Virtual Tour Reminder
Just a reminder that the Yes Means Yes virtual tour will be stopping by Shakesville today.
At 3pm EST, Jaclyn Friedman will be our guest in a live chat about the book. We'll also be talking about the concept of enthusiastic consent and other issues surrounding the rape culture, and we'd very much like your participation.
So I hope you'll join us, and bring your questions and comments, which you'll have the opportunity to submit during the chat. (You are also welcome to email questions in advance, if you prefer.)
What News Anchors Do During Commercial Breaks
The two anchors are Robert Jordan and Jackie Bange, from Chicago's WGN (Home of the Cubs!!!!11!), who have been anchoring together for many years. The two of them started doing a little routine for fun during commercial breaks, which has become increasingly elaborate—and someone onset filmed it and put it up on YouTube so we could all enjoy:
You can see them doing it another time in this video, in which their routine has been set to music.
Totally cute! (And they're great anchors, too.)
[H/T to Shaker Clayton.]
Something About England
Forget Blur. Forget Hyde Park. Forget Worcestershire sauce. Forget Hadrian's Wall and Dusty Springfield. Forget Benny Hill, The Brontë sisters, the Kemp brothers. Forget Benjamin Britten, the East End, Wedgwood plates, bangers and mash. I don't care. Hunky Dory, the Globe Theater, the Mini Cooper? Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill? Earl Grey, "How Soon Is Now", George Sanders, Oxford... St. James's and Elizabeth I... We're done. Vivien Leigh, the Savoy, Yorkshire pudding? It doesn't matter. Because England officially sucks now.
Assvertising
Virgin Atlantic is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year—and what better way than an advertising campaign which casts its (universally female, tall, thin, light-skinned, and mostly blonde) flight attendants as bait for male passengers?
If you can't view the video, it opens with a note telling us the time and place—"June 22, 1984, London," presumably the day of Virgin's first flight out of Heathrow—and verisimilitude is added with a newspaper headline about a miners' strike and a businessman using a giant cell phone at the airport. Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax (When You Want to Come)" plays in the background as the disembodied parts of the sexy flight attendants are revealed through the crowd:
—while various men are showed gawking, slack-jawed and possibly jizzing in their pants, at the gaggle of flight attendants*:
—and, naturally, "ugly" flight attendants from other, less-sexy airlines gaze on with a mixture of contempt, fear, and jealousy (you know how women are!):
—before the full breadth of the Virgin team's glory is finally revealed, in a scene simultaneously reminiscent of Catch Me If You Can and any one of a number of shitty Robert Palmer videos:
I'm not certain, but I believe Virgin Airlines is telling us that, in the '80s, their pilots also served as pimps, arranging Mile-High Club dates between Virgin stewardesses and the discerning male business traveler.
The ad is truly a clusterfucktastrophe of mythic proportions, but, of course, we're supposed to recognize how "fun" it is because it's all retro and shit, wherein sexism and a lack of diversity is justified by judicious use of the word "vintage." (See: The Mad Men Model.)
Shaker SapphireCate, who gets the hat tip, notes that only 29 people have reportedly complained to the UK's Advertising Standards Authority about this advert, and adds: "It would be nice if more than 29 people would bother to tell the advertising standards agency that this sort of advertising is regressive, offensive and damaging to the dignity and professionalism of the men and women who work in the airline industry."
File an ASA complaint here. Contact Virgin here. (How to Complain.)Maybe you'd like to ask Virgin why their Responsible Business Practice doesn't include refusing to promote prejudice.
--------------------------------
* Did you see The Fat GuyTM spilling food on his shirt?! Hilarious!!! Gawd, making fun of fat people is awesome!
Swimming with Sharks
Coloradan Jennifer Figge, 56, has become the first woman on record to swim across the Atlantic Ocean:
Jennifer Figge pressed her toes into the Caribbean sand, exhilarated and exhausted as she touched land this week for the first time in almost a month [since leaving the Cape Verde Islands off Africa's western coast on Jan. 12 and having battling waves of up to 30 feet along the way].Figge didn't actually see any sharks on her journey, although she did see "a pod of pilot whales, several turtles, dozens of dolphins, [and] plenty of Portuguese man-of-war." She kept with her "a picture of Gertrude Ederle, an American who became the first woman to swim across the English Channel."
Reaching a beach in Trinidad [after inclement weather forced her 1,000 miles of course from her original destination in the Bahamas], she became the first woman on record to swim across the Atlantic Ocean — a dream she'd had since the early 1960s, when a stormy trans-Atlantic flight got her thinking she could don a life vest and swim the rest of the way if needed.
...Figge plans to continue her odyssey, swimming from Trinidad to the British Virgin Islands, where she expects to arrive in late February. The crew won't compute the total distance Figge swam until after she completes the journey, Higdon said.
"We have a few things in common," Figge said. "She wore a red hat and she was of German descent. We both talk to the sea, and neither one of us wanted to get out."Cool.
..."I was never scared," Figge said. "Looking back, I wouldn't have it any other way. I can always swim in a pool."
You Pulled Me Through
Jennifer Hudson, who won Best R&B Album for her self-titled CD, performs "You Pulled Me Through" last night at the Grammys:
Her voice gives me goosebumps.
Blog Note
Shakers, I'm pleased to tell you that we have a new contributor: Erica C. Barnett, who you may recognize as a previous guest poster, or, more likely, as a contributor to Slog, where she has long fought the good fight on behalf of the Cult of the Feminazi Cooter.
Welcome to our virtual den of iniquity, Erica!
Republicans: Back on Top!
The triumphant odes are already being written for the party in exile (emphasis mine):
Three months after their Election Day drubbing, Republican leaders see glimmers of rebirth in the party's liberation from an unpopular president, its selection of its first African American chairman and, most of all, its stand against a stimulus package that they are increasingly confident will provide little economic jolt but will pay off politically for those who oppose it.Look, I fixed your computer! Yeah, but you're the one who broke it. But I fixed it! Uh, okay, thanks, but I really wish you just wouldn't have taken a sledgehammer to it in the first place. I admit, that was dumb. It really was. But it made me feel so good at the time. I, however, was pretty unhappy about it. I know. But I fixed it! You keep saying you fixed it, but it looks like it's just being held together with duct tape, and it, well, it isn't really working and smells of burnt toast. I've got excellent principles! That's why I fixed it. It looks like now you're kicking it. I am kicking it—that will make it work even better! No, it really won't. I mean, look at it. It's falling apart again. I probably just need to kick it harder. You're making it worse! PRINCIPLES! ME! I'M THE ONE! Okay, I'm going to need you to stop kicking my computer now. Obstructionist. Excuse me? I win!
After giving the package zero votes in the House, and with their counterparts in the Senate likely to provide in a crucial procedural vote today only the handful of votes needed to avoid a filibuster, Republicans are relishing the opportunity to make a big statement.
…"We're so far ahead of where we thought we'd be at this time," said Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), one of several younger congressmen seeking to lead the party's renewal. "It's not a sign that we're back to where we need to be, but it's a sign that we're beginning to find our voice. We're standing on our core principles, and the core principle that suffered the most in recent years was fiscal conservatism and economic liberty. That was the tallest pole in our tent, and we took an ax to it, but now we're building it back."
The party, these Republicans say, need only hold true to its small-government principles for a center-right electorate to gravitate back. That means rejecting the stimulus package and offering in its place an alternative package centered mostly on tax cuts, as House Republicans did last week."Objective Journalism" = dismissively framing a woman's right to control her reproduction as an old culture war, like funding the NEA. No more important than that, really. Not a fundamental disagreement over whether woman are autonomous and equal human beings who should be afforded the same freedom, and respect for their choices, as men. Nope. Just a spending issue.
It also means focusing the stimulus critique on relatively small slivers of the package that echo old culture wars, such as spending for contraceptives and for the National Endowment for the Arts.
It's pretty easy to get back on top when the ref is in your corner, never calling foul.
You're Telling on Us?
by Shaker Sunless Nick
Over here in Blighty, the Binyan Mohammed case is making depressingly minor ripples in the public consciousness. Mohammed claims that evidence used against him was obtained by the US through torture. I don't know whether it was or not. I don't know whether he's guilty of anything or not. What I do know is that purported evidence of that torture has been ruled inadmissible, and that:
A US government letter to the Foreign Office warned of "lasting damage" to intelligence sharing if... that evidence was allowed before a court. The judges in the case interpret this as a threat to break off intelligence cooperation with the UK. Foreign Secretary David Miliband denies that it's a threat, supporting the US line that revealing the evidence would harm national security. Both governments deny that there was any torture.
Because Obama represents change we can believe in, the stance has been the same since he took office.
So what's the danger to US national security? All the US government need supply is the evidence showing whether Mohammed was tortured—which both governments claim would exonerate them anyway—there's no need to reveal what, if anything, he told his interrogators. And if the evidence wouldn't exonerate them? It wouldn't harm national security either, unless they're trying to copyright a particular method or something. Or unless by security, they mean image.
But they'd rather threaten allied nations about it. Because really, warning of "lasting damage" when the word refers to your own actions? That's a threat.
If you're doing something, you should be able to say it. If it's the right thing to do, it should be the right thing to admit to. If America doesn't torture prisoners, it has little reason to offer evidence of that. And if it does... its secrecy speaks volumes about its own doubt as to its rightness. And the same for Britain: if it doesn't condone torture, or join in, the way Miliband claims, then prove it and investigate; and if it does, its own secrecy makes it complicit or worse.
Sunday YouTubery: Lalo's Symphony Espagnole
It had been one of those weeks, and come Friday night, I was really looking forward to attending the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO) concert. I love Beethoven’s 8th Symphony, though I can do without Ravel’s Bolero (a piece which Ravel himself said “contained no music”).
But I was really excited for Lalo’s Symphony Espagnole, a five-movement symphony with solo violin written in 1874 especially for legendary Spanish violinist Pablo de Sarasate. Edouard Lalo was French, of Spanish descent; Sarasate was Spanish, but educated in France. So the work comes across as Spanish and French at the same time. Many of the themes are inspired by Spanish and Spanish-influenced dance rhythms, such as the habanera and the danzón, a Cuban dance mixing both Spanish and French influences.
The Symphony Espagnole is an excellent test of a violinist; to play it, you need both perfect technical skill and a sense of dance, almost an ability to dance and play at the same time. I'm a violinist myself (though my own playing has lately fallen prey to a near-lethal combination of rheumatic disease and perfectionism), so I attend all PSO performances of pieces I know with a special edge-of-the-seat, moving-my-fingers-along-with the soloist intensity. The PSO's concertmaster, Andrés Cárdenes, is playing the Lalo all weekend. Although Cárdenes is an excellent concertmaster, I have never been too impressed by him as a soloist. But I really love this piece and I allowed myself to hope.
Cárdenes sort of struggled through the first four movements, dropping a few notes and runs, and not really getting the swing of the piece. But then, in the middle of the final movement, something happened. The thing a violinist fears most aside from sitting on one's violin and crushing it: Cárdenes got lost. Completely lost—not just a bit of a flub, where you drop a run and pick up the flow again in a few bars, no. He just stood there, while the orchestra went on, for maybe 20 seconds, until the conductor, Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, stopped the orchestra and they began the movement from the top.
The violinists in the audience were visibly cringing; the woman next to me, who I noticed had been moving her fingers along with the piece, had her head in her hands. back when I was performing, even seeing something like this was like getting the evil eye—very bad luck. The worst part for Cárdenas is that he needs to play the piece twice more this weekend. I felt ill.
After the re-start, he sort of barely muddled through it. The audience was great, giving him a standing ovation. Almost everyone, including Cárdenes himself, appeared to laugh the whole ugly thing off. The woman next to me, however, refused to stand. She told me that he ruined her favorite last movement of any piece she knew.
In order to cleanse my soul and shake the bad luck, I came home and googled up a 2002 performance by Vadim Repin with David Robertson and the Orchestre National de Lyon. In 2002, Repin was playing the 1708 “Ruby” Stradivarius violin, which was once owned by none other than Pablo de Sarasate himself (if you’re wondering how violinists manage to get their talented hands on these rare instruments, Repin had the Ruby on loan from the Stradivarius Society; many artists do this).
If the experience of seeing the first movement of the Symphony Espagnole played by a master on Sarasate's own violin does not give you heart palpitations, then please check your pulse, because you may actually be dead!
To see the fateful final movement as it was meant to be played, please find below the fold Romanian violinist Silvia Marcovici with C. Mandeal and the Bucharest philharmonic. Pardon the orchestra; they are a bit plodding compared to Marcovici's fire and sense of danzón, which are brilliant here:
While we’re on the subject of amazing violinists playing Spanish music on Strads, here is the astounding Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos playing Francisco Tárrega’s classic Spanish guitar piece Recuerdos de la Alhambra, arranged for violin by Ruggiero Ricci. Kavakos plays the 1692 Falmouth Stradivarius. The Falmouth is one of Stadivari’s “long-pattern” instruments, which are slightly longer, narrower, and known for their “dark” sound quality. I love dark sound quality!
Sorry that last video is just a still shot. If you are dying to see Kavakos’ mad bowing skills on this piece, there’s another YouTube of it here, but the sound is not as good.
The Reality of Amendment 2
Christianists and homophobes in Florida said that passing Amendment 2 last November was necessary to protect families: "This amendment protects marriage as the legal union of only one man and one woman as husband and wife and provides that no other legal union that is treated as marriage or the substantial equivalent thereof shall be valid or recognized." Well, for one family, that mindset has caused enough pain and negligence to prompt a lawsuit against a hospital in Miami that refused to grant visitation rights to a dying woman's partner.
As her partner of 17 years slipped into a coma, Janice Langbehn pleaded with doctors and anyone who would listen to let her into the woman's hospital room.The hospital's reasoning -- they're doing people a favor by letting anyone in to see someone in the hospital -- is cruel and inhuman on its face, and it's made even worse because they wouldn't recognize the legal documents that Ms. Langbehn had to prove that she was Ms. Pond's legal guardian.
Eight anguishing hours passed before Langbehn would be allowed into Jackson Memorial Hospital's Ryder Trauma Center. By then, she could only say her final farewell as a priest performed the last rites on 39-year-old Lisa Marie Pond.
Jackson staffers advised Langbehn that she could not see Pond earlier because the hospital's visitation policy in cases of emergency was limited to immediate family and spouses -- not partners. In Florida, same-sex marriages or partnerships are not recognized. On Friday, two years after her partner's death, Langbehn and her attorneys were in federal court, claiming emotional distress and negligence in a suit they filed last June.
Jackson attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the case on grounds that the hospital has no obligation to allow patients' visitors.
The conservatives and the fundamentalists like to imagine a nice gauzy world of Disneyland and Ozzie and Harriet, where the families are all made up of mommies and daddies and the kids are all gee-whiz cute and golly-gee happy and the Baby Jesus gurgles with joy at all the hetero-normality. But even straight families don't all fall into the "traditional" mold, and for every lesbian couple that worries about whether or not their personal life will suddenly be the subject of scrutiny by the absolute strangers at a hospital, there's a man and a woman living together who have the same basic question: will they let me in to be there when my partner needs me?
You can dress it up and call it "preserving the family," but its intent was clear: Amendment 2 was meant to keep the LGBT community from attaining equal rights as citizens in the state of Florida. It passed, and the homophobes rejoiced because they struck a blow for life, liberty, and the suppression of icky sex, since they are incapable of separating the idea of being gay and getting laid. But in tossing this grenade of hetero-wholesomeness into the state constitution, they fragged their own, too, because now the state doesn't have to recognize any relationship outside of one man, one woman, a white picket fence, and 2.5 children.
Let's see what happens when an unmarried couple who happen to be straight shows up at the hospital and is denied visitation rights. Will the Christianists take up their cause?
Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.
Pondering the withdrawal method...
Crossposted from AngryBlackBitch.com.
Shall we?
President Obama admitted that he “screwed up” in pursuing the nomination of Tom Daschle to Health Secretary after Daschle’s tax drama erupted into a festering mess of drama in the press and on the Hill.
Daschle has withdrawn from consideration, along with Nancy Killefer who was on track to become the first White House performance officer.
Pause…sip coffee…continue.
Most people know that the Obama administration has one of the toughest applications out there…so detailed that the detailing made news all on its own. And this bitch remembers wondering who the fuck could make it through to the interview much less the nomination hearing-based advise and consent shit.
So ‘tis important to note that these recent incidents of withdrawal are likely not due to a failure of the screening process…which was intense as a motherfucker…but are more likely due to some break-down in the evaluation phase.
You know, the period between screening and before hearings where the administration decides whether a candidate’s fuck ups are terminal or treatable.
Cough.
And that brings a bitch to the withdrawal method and how that shit isn’t a wise prevention choice.
The withdrawal method may work once or twice but each time you use it you increase the odds that the next time you…um, withdraw…cough…may result in a lasting scandal-based drama that won’t just go away with the next news cycle.
This bitch hopes that Team Obama has learned a lesson here – that one should use the protection they are carrying (i.e., the motherfucking screening process and criteria associated with it).
Because not knowing about a candidates skeletons is one thing but knowing and deciding to throw caution to the wind...not once or twice but at least three times...is guaranteed to feed the ‘when will he fuck up, please let me be the one to break that story, Lawd I hope it’s a big one too’ beast that haunts every administration and sure as shit haunts this one.
And a bitch is pretty sure the Obama administration burned through their get out of tax-based trouble involving a nominee jail free card with Geithner.
Sigh.
This bitch is wondering why the fuck the IRS isn’t taking heat for this shit too…since we the people are broke as hell and they the agency have just been outed for leaving some serious cash on table and walking away.
Mayhap a Wall Street/Federal government personal income tax review should be added to the stimulus plan…
…’cause Lawd knows the IRS don’t play nice with the masses living on Main Street.
But that’d be too much like right…right?
Wince.
ARGH
I swear to Jebus, if I hear one more fucking Republican whinge about "pork" in the stimulus package, I'm going to go on a five state killing spree.
After we lost six hundred fucking thousand jobs last month (and these Republican ghouls insist we shouldn't worry about helping too quickly,) another scalpel is taken to the stimulus plan. And where are the cuts happening, friends and neighbors?Total Reductions: $80 billion
Because the last thing people need when they're out of work is education, nutrition for their children, transportation assistance, and fucking food stamps.
Eliminations:
Head Start, Education for the Disadvantaged, School improvement, Child Nutrition, Firefighters, Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Prisons, COPS Hiring, Violence Against Women, NASA, NSF, Western Area Power Administration, CDC, Food Stamps
*****************************
Reductions:
Public Transit $3.4 billion, School Construction $60 billion
Republicans would rather let people starve than give up their tax cuts.
The next time someone complains about the cost of this package, tell them that. Republicans would rather let people starve than give up their tax cuts.
They're plenty happy to give more money to defense, though.Increases:
But hey, at least you can still beat the shit out of women, huh?
Defense operations and procurement, STAG Grants, Brownfields, Additional transportation funding
Republicans would rather let people starve than give up their tax cuts.
Republicans would rather subject women to abuse than give up their tax cuts.
Republicans would rather deprive the disadvantaged of education than give up their tax cuts.
Why the hell are they allowing Republicans to do any of this?
I fucking despair. I really do.
Quote of the Day
"The Republicans [leading the country the last eight years] almost killed me. …I try to be charitable and there are some really good Republicans, but I just don't understand how anyone would want to be a Republican. I just can't figure it. I don't understand. If you're poor, if you're any kind of minority—gay, black, Latino, anything. If you're not a rich—I don't know. If you're not a rich born-again Christian, I don't get it."—Cher, who should consider going on a national tour to movie-smack every Republican across the face and tell them to "Snap out of it!"
Daily Kitteh
"The box is mine!"
"The box is mine!"
"The box is mine."
"And I'm closing myself in it and you'll never get me out! NEVAR!"
That box has been sitting on the floor next to my desk for about three days. It is officially The Greatest Box in the History of the Multiverse. Battles have been waged over this box. Fur has flown. This box is the boxiest box of all boxes, and if you don't agree, you're a big doodyheaded Two-Legs.
