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, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112. 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.

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Breaking News: John Mayer Still a Full-Tilt Asshole

[Trigger warning.]

In case you'd forgotten in the last two seconds that John Mayer is a huge dipshit who emits a constant stream of fuckery from his squalid mouth, he's just done a new interview with Playboy in which he shares, among other gems:

1. "I could have fucked a lot more girls in my life if I hadn't been trying so hard to get them to like me."

2. "Once you put aside girls and money, it forces you to realign your motivation for being a musician."

3. "Pornography? It's a new synaptic pathway. You wake up in the morning, open a thumbnail page, and it leads to a Pandora's box of visuals. There have probably been days when I saw 300 vaginas before I got out of bed."

4. "What if I meet a woman and it's love at first sight, and this woman has the greatest night of her life by telling me to fuck off because she knows my reputation? I always say, 'Turning me down is the new sleeping with me.'"

5. "It's like I come on very strong. I am a very…I'm just very. V-E-R-Y. And if you can't handle very, then I'm a douche bag. But I think the world needs a little very. That's why black people love me."

6. "My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I've got a Benetton heart and a fuckin' David Duke cock. I'm going to start dating separately from my dick."

7. "My ability to go deep with somebody is old soul. My ability to commit and be faithful is old soul. But 32 just comes roaring out of me at points when I don't see it coming. I want to dance. I want to get on an airplane and be like a ninja. I want to be an explorer. I want to be like The Bourne Identity. I don't want to pet dogs in the kitchen."

8. "I feel like women are getting their comeuppance against men now. I hear about man-whores more than I hear about whores. When women are whorish, they're owning their sexuality. When men are whorish, they're disgusting beasts. I think they're paying us back for a double standard that's lasted for a hundred years."

9. "I get less ass now than I did when I was in a local band. Because now I don't like jumping through hoops. It's been so long since I've taken a random girl home. I don't want to have to submit myself for approval. I don't want to audition. I'd rather come home and edge my shit out for 90 minutes. At this point, before I can have sex I need to know somebody. Unless she's a 14 out of 10."

10. "There are people in the world who have the power to change our values. Have you ever been with a girl who made you want to quit the rest of your life? Did youever say, 'I want to quit my life and just fuckin' snort you? If you charged me $10,000 to fuck you, I would start selling all my shit just to keep fucking you.'"

11. "Here's what I really want to do at 32: fuck a girl and then, as she's sleeping in bed, make breakfast for her. So she's like, 'What? You gave me five vaginal orgasms last night, and you're making me a spinach omelet? You are the shit!'"

12. "I hate other men. When I'm fucking you, I'm trying to fuck every man who's ever fucked you, but in his ass, so you'll say 'No one's ever done that to me in bed.'"

13. "The only man I've kissed is Perez Hilton. It was New Year's Eve and I decided to go out and destroy myself. ... I remember seeing Perez Hilton flitting about this club and acting as though he had just invented homosexuality. All of a sudden I thought, I can outgay this guy right now. I grabbed him and gave him the dirtiest, tongue-iest kiss I have ever put on anybody—almost as if I hated fags. I don't think my mouth was even touching when I was tongue kissing him, that's how disgusting this kiss was."

What an absolute charmer he is.

[H/Ts to everyone in the multiverse. Related Reading: John Mayer Thinks Rape Is Hilarious, The Wanker King (Literally).]

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Daily Puppeh

Happy (first) Birthday Rosie!
Do you have to take a picture? Can't I just get on playing with my new rope?

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Wednesday Blogaround

This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Space Cowboy Brand Falconing Gloves.

Recommended Reading:

Marcella: My Thoughts On Oprah's Interview With Sex Offenders

Tami: Conservatives, "Political Correctness" and the Incredibly Offensive Unfunniness of "Saturday Night Live"

Chally: The Narrative We're Told/Sold Over and Over Again

Angry Asian Man: Lt. Dan Choi Serving in the Military Again?

Cara: Deaf Woman Was Not Told Her Cancer Was Terminal

Andy: Good News: Florida Delivers Subsidy Benefits to Adopted Son of Gay Couple

And Happy Blogiversary to my beloved and admired friend Shark-fu!

Leave your links in comments...

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Quote of the Day

"If the Bloomberg story is to be believed, Obama thinks his key to electoral success is to trumpet 'the influence corporate leaders have had on his economic policies.' We're doomed."—Paul Krugman.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

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Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime

De La Soul: "The Magic Number"

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Lost Open Thread

Last night's episode will be discussed in infinitesimal detail, so if you haven't seen it, and don't want any spoilers, move along...

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Shakesfilk!

In this one, credit where it's due: LJ's badgerbag did the first verse, and I picked it up from there. It's a self-deprecating little number, to the tune of Malvina Reynolds' Little Boxes. Posted, as ever, for my own amusement (and hopefully one or two others', too!).

Little bloggers on the internet
Little bloggers made of ticky boxes
Little bloggers making polls,
Little bloggers all the same!
There's some lolcats and a survey
and a meme that you've been tagged for
and they're all made out of ticky boxes
and they all look just the same!

And the bloggers on the Internet
All dropped out of university
Where they were put in classes
And expected not to game
Now they're slackers and waiters
And Starbucks baristas now
And they're all made out of ticky boxes
And they all look just the same

And they all play gothy music
And drink all their absinthes dry
And they don't have any children
But their cats have poets' names
And they all go down to Burning Man
Then home where they visit food banks
Where they get free food in boxes
And whinge loudly just the same

And the boys watch bukkake
And are glad that they have no family
Of children ticking ticky boxes
And their clothes look all the same
There's a black shirt and some black pants
And a trenchcoat which is also black
And some black Docs
And a black hat
And they all look just the same

Copyright CaitieCat 2009.

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Miss Me Yet?

No.

(Story here.)

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Bechdel + Deggans = Win*

Shaker distractedbyshinyobjects emails: "What makes the Oscar films sexist and racist is also what makes them shitty and boring."

Discuss.

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* Or, two steps closer to Win, anyway.

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Further Proof He's A Douche

Philosopher and Hufflepuff blogger Bernard-Henri Lévy, he of the Free Polanski petition, has made an ass of himself. Again.

This time by quoting heavily from Jean-Baptiste Botul's "The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant" in lectures and in his own book. The thing is, Jean-Baptiste Botul doesn't exist and his book is a hoax perpetrated by journalist Frédéric Pagès. Oops!

While we're on the subjects of douches, know who else is a total nozzle? Whomever wrote the piece, including this closing paragraph:

Levy last stirred controversy when he published an account in 2008 of his visit to Georgia during the war with Russia that French newspapers said contained excerpts that were made up.

Really? That's the last time he "stirred controversy"?

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Open Thread

Hosted by the Tin Man.

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Question of the Day

Suggested by Shaker Annepersand: "What is your favorite fictional character's name? Not the name of your favorite character, mind you, but your favorite name that belongs to a fictional character, either because it's really amazingly apt or sounds funny or you just love the way the sounds work together."

Mine is totes Uriah Heep (from Dickens' David Copperfield).

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Just Think...

You totes could have owned the Terminator rights, if only you hadn't spent that $29.5 million on Lost bobbleheads and Frankie Goes to Hollywood bootlegs.

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The World Loves a Pretty Girl

And loves even more a pretty girl who will talk about how not-pretty she thinks she is:

Anne Hathaway looks as unequivocally gorgeous and radiant as ever on the March cover of InStyle—though she's probably the only person out there who doesn't see it: "I think I've got really weird features. I have very large features on a very small head," she tells the magazine. "But, you know, I'm not going to beat myself up. It's my face. I'm not very pretty. But that's OK because I do know that I look like myself, and I think at the end of the day, as nice as pretty is, authenticity is more important."

Quite obviously, I don't want this post to be a referendum on Hathaway's attractiveness (by any reasonable measure, she conforms quite closely to the current beauty standard, and that's all that's relevant), and I don't intend to imply in any way that Hathaway doesn't have the explicit right to her own feelings, whatever they may be, about her own appearance.

What interests me is only that I've read this same article before, with some other beautiful young ingenue talking about how not-beautiful she really is. Julia Roberts, Renee Zellweger, Cameron Diaz, Megan Fox, Jessica Alba, whomever, waxing pragmatically about their "flaws"—goofy grin, bad skin, unruly hair, one eye slightly higher than the other. I once saw an interview with Evangeline Lilly where she revealed getting her "uneven" teeth shaved down three different times only to realize it was her lip that was crooked.

Why do we like this formula so much? Part of it, I imagine, is the idea that we want our unattainable female icons to be impossibly beautiful, but self-consciously modest about it. Perhaps, to suggest that they are as distant from their own beauty as we are, that they don't really inhabit our fantasies.

But then there is this, this very import thing: We consider it humanizing to read about a female star who obsesses about her perceived imperfections.

To be a female human is to wracked with self-doubt.

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Let's Move, Part II

[Trigger warning re: disordered eating and sexual assault.]

Part One is here.

Something else I wanted to point out about First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" initiative—and I felt it deserves its own, separate, discussion thread—is that there doesn't appear to be any strategy at all for discerning whether the "obese" children being targeted have disordered eating.

The evident assumption is that "obese" children (and I'm putting obese in quotes here because BMI is a crock for kids, too) are fat because of some combination of not having been taught to eat right, not having access to healthy food, not getting enough exercise, etc. And for many kids, this may be true.

For other kids still, who are being ignored by the "Let's Move" initiative, they are fat because of disability, or treatment of disability—many drugs prescribed to treat mental illness, including childhood depression and bipolar disorder, have a side effect of weight gain.

But there are also children who compulsively overeat as an emotional salve. Children (for the most part) cannot access on their own the appropriate tools adults use to process trauma, like therapy.

They can't access inappropriate tools adults use to cope with trauma, either; they don't have access to drugs or booze, but they do have access to food—and children in emotional distress can use food to self-medicate.

Several studies have found associations between childhood sexual trauma and childhood and/or adult obesity, especially in girls and women (example). Even a child thought to be overeating out of "boredom" may really be eating out of loneliness or abandonment.

That we know children may self-medicate with food to fill a void left by neglect or abuse means one of our primary concerns for any "obese" child is the potential that trauma is underlying disordered eating.

To ignore this possibility is to risk subjecting children not merely to the secondary trauma of indifference, but also to deepening wounds, by piling shame about their only coping mechanism on top of the original trauma.

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Once More, Without Feeling

Does anyone care to guess how sad and tired it makes me to continually be making posts about Canadian citizens in trouble abroad whose government refuses to help them?

Because yes, that's what I'm writing about today. Shaker Unree sent me this link to an article at The Nation. I'll quote the lede and the second para, you can read the rest over there.

In most countries, a woman in her mid-20s is legally an adult. And in most countries, foreigners are free to leave when they like. In its flagrant rejection of these two principles, Saudi Arabia is unique, and that is a big problem for 24-year-old Nazia Quazi.

For more than two years Nazia, an IT specialist who graduated from the University of Ottawa and holds dual Canadian-Indian citizenship, has been trying to leave Riyadh and go home to Canada. Her troubles began on November 23, 2007, when she entered Saudi Arabia with her parents on a visitor's visa. In Saudi Arabia, foreign visitors must have a sponsor, a local man who handles their paperwork. Nazia's sponsor is her father, Quazi Malik Abdul Gaffar, an Indian citizen who has worked in Saudi Arabia for many years. At some point Nazia's father clandestinely switched her visitor's visa to a more permanent visa--one that requires that he, as her sponsor, approve her exit visa. This he refuses to do. No exit visa, no departure. Worse, Nazia says he has confiscated both her Indian and Canadian passports and all her identity documents--driver's license, health card, credit cards and so on--and refuses to return them. She is trapped.

So, are we getting this? Canadian woman is detained by her patriarch, using Saudi Arabia's misogynistic "cultural values" as the reason for detention.

And the Canadian government, as usual, takes a brave stand in favour of the patriarchy, that this physically and emotionally abusive asshole has the right to imprison his daughter because, well, it was his sperm that made her, after all, so obviously he gets to own her Forever and Ever, All-men.

ò,Ô

So, what can you do, Shakers?

I have a number of suggestions.

I'd start with this listing, of the Saudi Embassies around the world. You could write a polite but firm letter letting them know the eyes of the world are on them. I recommend strongly that you do, in fact, make sure it's a polite letter. After many years of experience writing such letters in my connection with Amnesty International, I can tell you if you're rude, they'll just throw your letter away. Seriously.

But the Saudis aren't the only ones complicit in this appalling violation of human rights. You can find the locations of Canadian embassies and consulates here, and Indian embassies and consulates here. If you're not Canadian, I suggest writing a similar polite but firm letter to your nearest Canadian embassy or consulate.

If you're Canadian, you'll want the contact information for your local MP, which you can find here in English, or here in French (on a deux langues officielles en Canada).

If you're Indian, your Members of Parliament can be found through this page.

Teaspoons up, Shakers.

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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, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111. 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.

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Lost Jones

Tread lightly if you aren't caught up yet...

Matthew Fox in the Telegraph.

Terry O'Quinn in the LA Times.

Jorge Garcia in New York.

Michael Emerson at Fancast.

Yunjin Kim in the Star Telegram.

Elizabeth Mitchell at E!

Josh Holloway in USA Today.

[H/T to Tracie for the first four.]

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Let's Move

As I mentioned yesterday, First Lady Michelle Obama was set to launch her anti-childhood-obesity campaign today, and so she has:

Michelle Obama is telling America that it's time to get moving.

In a news conference set for noon Tuesday at the White House, the first lady will introduce a national effort to combat childhood obesity.

Calling it The Let's Move campaign, the program will focus on what families, communities and the public and private sectors can do to help fight childhood obesity, which she and health experts have termed an epidemic in the United States.

Christ. I'm pretty sure I already have bingo. (Btw, the link to Kate's post at the link is broken, but you can find the referenced, and relevant, post here.)

You know, navigating the territory where fat acceptance/HAES language, and the associated attempt to talk about being healthy as opposed to thin, can come uncomfortably close to disablist language can be tricky. It's something that even I, both fat and disabled, struggle to do well. So I am deeply sympathetic to those who are trying to find that balance.

But "Let's Move"...? Is not even close. That misses by a country mile.

I just said in January of another similarly disastrous idea: "Just on the most cursory, simplistic level, this has the I assume every fat, disabled person I see is disabled because they're fat, and don't consider the possibility they're fat because they're disabled problem about which I've written before." While physically disability that limits movement may be less endemic among children than adults, this is nonetheless a national campaign equating "moving" with "getting thin/healthy," without regard for an implicitly disablist message.

And, naturally, it also fails wholly to take into consideration that not everyone who "moves" loses weight, anyway. There are fat people who regularly exercise, whose bodies persistently stay "overweight," laying waste to the "calories in, calories out" meme.

And it fails to address many of the cultural constructs hindering "movement," like the decrease in safe green areas for children to play, and the dearth of public transportation to walkable city centers in favor of a car culture.

Below is the full text of the press release with the details of the plan, some of which are good, and some of which are not-so-good. What strikes me most about it is that it is simply incomplete.

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