Hosted by James Lipton.
This week's open threads have been brought to you by the insides of things: filling empty spaces since 1972.
Open Thread
Hosted by James Lipton.
This week's open threads have been brought to you by the insides of things: filling empty spaces since 1972.
The Virtual Pub Is Open
[Explanations: lol your fat. pathetic anger bread. hey your gay.]
TFIF, Shakers!
Belly up to the bar,
and name your poison!
News from Shakes Manor
So, I just got back from running a quick errand, and on my journey, I was behind a guy who was driving sort of slow and veeringly. Nothing terribly scary, but I could see that he was trying to do something while he drove; I always love being within wrecking distance of someone who enjoys multitasking while they're operating heavy machinery.
No sooner had "What's this a-hole up to?" crossed my mind than I saw a meatball sub come flying out the guy's window and land in the road with a saucy splat. I mean, this thing wasn't casually tossed, or dropped; it was launched with determined disgust.
As I drove past it, I saw it was missing a single bite, which just made me burst out laughing. It was like he took one bite and was all, "Fuck this sandwich!" and pitched it into the street.
(That is, in fact, not the vehicle that was in front of me today, but a vehicle of which I took a picture while stopped at a red light a couple of weeks ago, because its bumper sticker reads, "I never saw an American flag burned at a gun show.")
I'm very anti-litter (and food-wasting), but that was some hilarious shit. And the coyote who's been running about the neighborhood will have a special dinner tonight—if the raccoons don't get to it first.
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
Strips One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100. In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman and a biracial queerbait telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.
In Things a Fat Woman Could Have Told You Years Ago
The biggest risk to your health as a fat woman could be prejudice and ignorance in the medical community.
[H/T to Shaker Peter.]
Some of Scott Baio's Wife's Best Friends Are Black
Let me start off by saying sending death threats to Scott Baio is not cool. In fact, sending death threats to anyone is not cool. Threatening a person just because you disagree with them is actually quite shitty. Doubly shitty is threatening that person's family. I wish that went without saying, but it doesn't, apparently.
So, what prompted the threats? A recent Baio tweet (oh, how I hate that word, by the way) of a picture of Michelle Obama accompanied by the text "WOW He wakes up to this every morning."
Baio immediately found himself deflecting charges he's a racist. "I'm NOT racist for posting a pic of M.O. My WIFE'S BEST FRD IS BLACK, HELLO." Hey, I don't know if Baio is a racist, but I do know he's just taken the racist's most tired, empty tack to defend himself. Some of Baio's best friends are black, so he can't be racist! Yeah, okay.
I do, however, know that Baio is a privileged jackass:
If YOU are born in AMERICA, U ARE AN AMERICAN. I don't insist on being called Italian-American. Therefore Black Amer are not Afr-Amer. Or that would mean people (white or black) born in Africa would be called African-Africans ... Just a thought to think about...
Baio, an Italian-American, does not "insist" you refer to him as an Italian-American, so it follows that Black Americans are not African-Americans. I'll leave it to you to parse that bit of Baio Logic yourself.
I guess all those years on Bibleman have clouded his head just a bit.
I think it's time.
We need to talk. Yes, Apple Genius, I'm talking to you. I know I've been amused in the past when you've thrown in some totally strange and unrelated song into a mix/playlist. Like, say, a playlist based on Paolo Nutini's "Last Request" and getting Metallica in the mix.
However this "Brit Pop" mix you came up with...
See, I expected U2 would be there, even if they're pretty well known as an Irish band. The Kooks, Muse, The Thompson Twins, Radiohead...yes. I'll even give you a pass on Rufus Wainwright, even though he's Canadian-American. And maybe on Interpol too, just for their name. But this?
Satellite, The Dave Matthews Band
Just. No.
Yes, yes, I know there's probably some formula it uses to make the lists. Still. LOL
Um, Okay
Obama Seen as Anti-Business: "The global quarterly poll of investors and analysts who are Bloomberg subscribers finds that 77% of U.S. respondents believe Obama is too anti-business."
Iain and I just laughed about this on the phone for like 10 minutes.
You know, since the '90s (thanks, Bill Clinton!), the Dems have been cozying up to corporations as much as possible, and all that awesome strategy has accomplished is to provide space for the Republicans to get even cozier with them and not look like the absolutely ruthless and soulless scum they would appear to be if the Dems were serving working (or looking for work) Americans. Instead, the Republicans just look like the slightly-more-evil of two evils.
The Dems still don't get that they'll never be able to out-corporate the GOP.
And by making corporate cronyism mainstream, by turning every American into someone who hopelessly sighs that every politician is bought and sold by some corporation or other anyway, they're just hastening this country's slide into fascism.
That's not to absolve the Republicans of their dirty deeds, but they were never going to be the Good Guys in this game.
Discussion Thread: Masturbation, Euphemisms, Hidden Female Sexual Agency, and Other Fun Stuff
by Shaker EastSideKate
Some readers may recall that Liss recently broke the stunning news that John Edwards is a wanker. But enough about Mr. Edwards, I'm interested in wanking. Not just generally, but also strictly for reals linguistically. It was asserted in that thread that "wanker" was a gendered insult. I'm not that interested in building a strawwang here, so I'd like to point out that Liss, Deeky, Merriam and/or Webster already put forth that wankers (and wanking) are gender-neutral. Good for them. But I digress. I can find less reputable dictionaries written by uninformed Americans that say otherwise. And in the end, isn't that what really matters?
When we say a masturbational term is gender-neutral, it may be because the term has gender-neutral roots, or because it is a term that refers to one gender (e.g. guys) that people frequently expand to include references to folks outside of that gender.
I've always had the impression that there's a lot more talk about masturbation among men than among the rest of us, regardless of whether insult is implied, which may lead to a cultural perception that masturbation is a predominantly (or exclusively) male occupation. It may also result in a larger culturally understood vocabulary for male masturbation than for female masturbation. Both of these hypotheses may also explain why many of us perceive wanker as a gendered term.
The thing is, I can't think of a single euphemism that exclusively describes female masturbation.
My minimal research hasn't been of much use. I'm not the type of person to suggest that my partner pose such questions to women she meets at a gay bar. Regardless of what certain folks in the Psychology department at Northwestern think, this isn't a valid methodology for scientific research, so I'd never post the results here :cough: weird looks :cough:. A brief survey of fiction in our household yielded similarly tangential results. Maybe we should be reading Philip Roth. In any case, I thank the internets for turning smut into work. (If there are any academics out there that write off erotica on their tax returns, do let me know.)
To wrap up, academic jibberish, cultural erasure of female sexual agency and vague references to how testosterone and Darwin totally make for teh horny (for reals, in *totes objective science reality* ) explain all.
Here are a few questions for y'all to discuss: Are the terms that you frequently encounter for masturbation typically gender-specific? If so, which gender? What's the origin of these terms? Are they descriptive? Onomatopoeic?
Most comments that refrain from mentioning Inuit people and snow are encouraged at this point.
Au Revoir, Air America
Air America goes silent.
I can't say I'm surprised, or particularly disappointed. Although Air America was touted as the Left's answer to rightwing talk radio, which dominates the airwaves, there were always issues with how progressive Air America ever really was. Randi Rhodes, for example, was casually transphobic, homophobic, and misogynist as it suited her shtick, and there were instances of naked racism on the channel.
The problem with Air America from the get-go was that much of the programming (with a few notable exceptions) was progressive only insomuch as people who hated George Bush were considered de facto "progressives" by fauxgressives who don't give a damn about social progress.
And then there's the question of how well-matched progressivism and the talk radio format are in the first place. In October '06, when Air America first filed for bankruptcy, I explained my indifference to the liberal radio channel:
I'm ostensibly the perfect target audience for Air America, and I can't frigging stand it. Obviously, it's not because I disagree with what they're saying most of the time, but because I just find political talk radio absolute shit no matter who it is or what they're saying.Talk radio just doesn't suit me. Or I don't suit it. And I suspect that there are an awful lot more progressives who strongly prefer to engage with information, who gravitate toward interactive news sources, which might suggest that the medium of talk radio was going to struggle to build a sustainable audience.
The thing about talk radio is that the discussions just hang in the air and I can't wrap my hands around them. If someone says something, and I think, "That can't be right, can it?" I have to note it, then go research it—and half the time they don't even cite sources, because the nature of the medium doesn't really accommodate such detail, so I'm stumbling around in the dark trying to find the origin of some esoteric statistic or whatever. Books have endnotes, or footnotes. Blogs have links. People can be asked, "Where did you get that number?" I'm not good at being a passive receiver of information.
Or maybe I'm overthinking it and Air America was just garbage.
In any case, Senator Al Franken and MSNBC Host Rachel Maddow are probably a pretty good result, in the end.
Personal Note: Stage Appearance Cancelled
After being sick all day yesterday, the headache part of my migraine has now arrived, and I will be unable to make my performance appearance this evening. My apologies to anyone who's made plans specifically because I was on.
Now back to hide in the darkness some more.
Today in Hopey Changey
Detainees Will Still Be Held, but Not Tried, Official Says: "The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday."
Well, listen, if a high-level task force says that we've got to continue illegally and unethically holding people in a dehumanizing manner totally contrary to our stated notions of justice and in a place where they may be killed and their murders covered up, who can argue with that?
It's a high-level task force, people!
Perfect
Leno to headline White House correspondents' dinner:
Comedian Jay Leno will headline the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner in May, the group said Friday.Yeah, he's totes "bipartisan," so Obama should love it.
...The comedian will share the stage with President Obama at the correspondents' dinner at the Washington Hilton. By tradition, presidents fire jokes at the news corps, political opponents and even themselves at the event, where politicians, journalists and celebrities rub elbows.
Leno headlined the 2004, 2000 and 1987 dinners during the administrations of both parties.
I can't wait to watch this. The sight of Chris Matthews yukking it up to Jay Leno's awesome jokery will be the greatest thing ever broadcast on television.
"Apparently, Lindsay Lohan is a real bipartisan. She parties with men and women! With men and women! Men and women!"
"HA!"
Just take me now, Maude.
Texting! With Liss and Deeky!
Last night, after I texted Deeks asking him to post the Question of the Day, because I was eating dinner.
Deeks: I wanna be an ocelot, by the way.
Liss: I want to be a unicorn!
Deeks: No fake animals!
Liss: Fine. I want to be a pegasus. Those are totes real.
Deeks: LOL! What's with you and fake animals?
Liss: Fine! I want to be a sphinx!
Deeks: LOLs for real.
Liss: God! Fine! I'll be a griffin.
Deeks: That's just a halfbreed pegasus, ya know.
Liss: Touché, celery shaft.
[Previously.]
Question of the Day
What animal would you like to be reincarnated as?
I totally want to come back as an ocelot (see above).
Veggie Tale
I just ate an entire head (?) of celery. That's got to be good for me, right? No matter how much ranch dressing it is slathered in.
[Cross-posted.]
