Dear Cablevision and ABC,
I'll get right to the point.
I think both of you suck for trying to manipulate the New York tri-state area population to fight your battles. This bullshit standoff between the two of you will only hurt you in the long run. I know that corporations think they never have enough money, but the reality is that you have more than enough to solve our health care crisis five times over.
Cablevision: Get your shit together and figure out how to not have constant drama with networks threatening to cancel their broadcast. Heck, you are the only provider who can't even broker a deal to carry BBC America, so maybe there is something up with your company that gives networks reason to get pissed off. Perhaps FiOS is an alternative worth looking into.
ABC/Disney: After 10 more weeks, Lost will be done for good and I will have no further reason to watch your network, or any of your advertisers' shitty commercials. There's nothing more pathetic to me than a filthy rich company throwing a tantrum about how much more money they should be making than any other network. If the entire tri-state area dumped Cablevision and got a digital converter, you wouldn't be making dime one since you're already broadcasting for free. Stop being such a greedy piece of shit.
Now, both of you stop this immature nonsense or else it's Volcanus Eruptus time.
Love,
Space Cowboy
I Write Letters
Hollywood Announces It's Officially Given Up*
New Line reviving 'Police Academy':
New Line is looking for recruits for a relaunched "Police Academy" movie. Original producer Paul Maslansky is back for the new iteration, which has no writer or director attached.In case you've not had the, ahem, pleasure of viewing any of the Police Academy canon, "lowbrow" means: overtly sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, disablist, ageist, xenophobic, fat-hating, and exploitative, with gratuitous naked titty shots.
"Academy" was a seven-film lowbrow comedy series from Warner Bros. that saw a city throw open the doors of its police force to any recruit, much to the chagrin of its serious officers. The misfit officers band together and, of course, save the city.
..."It's going to be very worthwhile to the people who remember it and to those who saw it on TV," Maslansky said. "It's going to be a new class. We hope to discover new talent and season it with great comedians. It'll be anything but another movie with a numeral next to it. And we'll most probably retain the wonderful musical theme."
Have I mentioned in the last six seconds that we're in the middle of a heinous backlash against anything that doesn't conform to the kyriarchy's rigid standards...?
* Again.
"Hilarious Detail"
[Trigger warning.]
Isn't it just HILARIOUS for children to be talking about all the different kinds of "bitches" there are in the world?!
Fuck.
This cheesy bread will fuel the rebellion.
A photo of the positively scrumptuous cheesy bread Shaker RedSonja and I were eating on Monday while plotting the Feminazi Cooter Revolution during our hang-out day at Shakes Manor:
Made by RedSonja's lovely husband, Shaker KarateMonkey, who kindly provided a link to the recipe.
Friday Blogaround
This blogaround is brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Murderphat Denim Jumpsuits. Available in I Am Spartacus Indigo, Steampunk Abortion Robot Rose, Testerical Taupe, and Brown.
Women's Voices for Change: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Author Rebecca Skloot on Race, Medical Research, and Ethics
meloukhia: I Critique Because I Care
The Medical Small Business Blog, via Prof-like Substance: 15 Female Scientists Who Changed the World
Dr. Isis: The Mythical Sunshine and Unicorns of University-Based Childcare
Samia: overpersonal rant, ACTIVATE
But you're going to be hard-pressed to make me feel guilty about genuinely not finding something entertaining. I mean, not laughing-- that's pretty passive, as far as criticism goes. What's the big deal? People tell me I shouldn't be taking offense at shit, but they're offended at my non-reaction? Interesting.
[snip]
I want to ask people sometimes: if I'm such an oversensitive, hysterical snob, why do you care what I think or feel about anything at all? Why are you so upset?
abby jean at FWD/Forward: How to Frame the Accommodations Debate
The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia: Life at Zaytuna: Closing the Loop
NeuroLogica Blog: Treating Migraine with Magnetic Stimulation
The Band Next Door: The Night Terrors
When a band pulls out a theremin, you start paying attention, and that’s exactly what I did when I saw the The Night Terrors in Melbourne in June last year.
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[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.]
Utah Abortion Bill Update
The Utah abortion bill, which would have sentenced women to up to life in prison if the caused "the death" of a fetus by "intentional or reckless behavior," has been withdrawn, but only so its sponsor, Republican State Representative Carl D. Wimmer, can rewrite it.
Wimmer, a Republican, said he had removed a key clause that would have allowed prosecution under Utah's criminal homicide laws for a "reckless act of the woman" that resulted in death to a fetus. Language will remain, he said, that makes a woman's "intentional" actions, if resulting in the death of her fetus in an illegal abortion, a felony.Basically, Wimmer is seeking to address the concerns raised that "the language about 'reckless' acts could open the door to a witch hunt where every miscarriage was potentially subject to police questioning."
Which will leave a bill criminalizing illegal abortion in a state that increasingly discourages legal abortions.
Today in Rape Culture
[Trigger warning.]
Shaker Amanda sends one of the most cynical, exploitative articles I've read in a long damn time, in which columnist Logan Jenkins uses the gruesome rape-murder of Chelsea King, a high school student who was killed while running on a local trail, to victim-blame women: Female runners who run alone, female runners who aren't trained in self-defense, female survivors of attacks who don't "follow up" sufficiently with police...
Should women, especially young women and girls, ever venture out on trails alone? Is the spiritual reward worth the bodily risk? To be perfectly safe, no. But I can understand how women bridle at the prohibition. Isn't it one's right to run through fear?Mr. Jenkins ends his column with: "How grateful would we be if it were all a bad dream, Chelsea is still running in the open field, and sitting in jail today is an evil man with a missing eye," thus tacitly blaming Chelsea herself for getting murdered, instead of taking out her assailant's eye, and causing Jenkins the temporary discomfort of feeling bad.
With bravery, however, comes relentless responsibility.
If a woman goes for a lone run, she must be a warrior, too.
Ears and eyes always tuned to danger. No spacing out to music, either recorded or internal. (Chelsea reportedly was a "purist," eschewing an iPod.)
The lone runner must keep her head on a swivel. The slightest abnormality should trigger an adrenaline rush to flight or fight.
She must be willing to make noise, lots of it, if she feels in the least threatened. Blow a whistle, scream. (Who cares if she's wrong and hurts an innocent's feelings?)
Perhaps she should carry a weapon — Mace? pepper spray? — and know how to use it. If she can't flee, she must be willing to do serious harm.
...Last December, in the same general area of Lake Hodges, a 22-year-old college student was roughed up by a man with a football players's build whom authorities believe was John Albert Gardner III, Chelsea's suspected killer.
The college student fought off her attacker, injuring him and escaping. In what appears to be a tragic failure to follow up, the woman left for college before a composite sketch of her attacker could be drawn and circulated by San Diego police.
I'm not sure I can adequately express the profundity of my contempt for a man who sits in judgment of a raped and murdered girl, who sighs wistfully that she wasn't better prepared or able to protect herself and save us all the inconvenience of mourning her death.
Who is so thoroughly ignorant and impenetrably arrogant that he thinks writing a column admonishing women to stop getting themselves attacked, raped, and killed is fucking helpful.
Where is his advice for men who hurt women? Nowhere to be found, naturally, because Jenkins is just another passive recipient of rape culture narratives who lazily accepts that there will always be monsters in the world, oh well whaddaya gonna do?, and thus regards the only solution as exclusively tasking victims with rape prevention.
Look how helpful he is, lecturing women on keeping themselves safe.
I just positively adore how Jenkins gormlessly puts forth his ideas about how women should be more responsible for their own safety, as if no one's ever fucking said that before, as if no one has ever suggested that the burden of rape prevention should be on women. (And as if women aren't socialized from birth to be intimately familiar with rape prevention, from their behavior to their clothing choices to their attitude, etc. etc. etc.) Hardly a week goes by that I don't read an article saying the same goddamned thing, whether women are being admonished to "learn common sense" or "be more responsible" or "be aware of barroom risks" or "avoid these places" or "don't dress this way" or whatfuckingever.
If Jenkins wants to make a serious contribution to a conversation about rape prevention, he could try writing something that answers this question: Why is it always more important to lecture women on what they should be doing to avoid rape than to talk to men about the fact that they do not have the right to women's bodies without express consent?
But of course he doesn't want to make a serious contribution. He wants to lecture female runners about taking responsibility for their own safety, and then pat himself on the back for caring about victims of sexual violence, despite not making the merest effort to understand the first thing about its perpetrators.
Here's the thing about perpetrators of sexual violence: They hurt people. They hurt people who are strong and people who are weak, people who are smart and people who are dumb, people who fight back and people who submit just to get it over with, people who are sluts and people who are prudes, people who rich and people who are poor, people who are tall and people who are short, people who are fat and people who are thin, people who are blind and people who are sighted, people who are deaf and people who can hear, people of every race and shape and size and ability and circumstance. The only thing that the victim of every rapist shares in common is the bad fucking luck of being in the presence of a rapist.
Rapists are determined to rape. And if Chelsea King hadn't crossed John Albert Gardner's path, someone else would have.
Victim-blaming is based on the damnably fucked-up notion that people (and women in particular) allow themselves to be victimized by virtue of carelessness or stupidity, and they need to be warned and educated and lectured and hectored and cajoled and shamed into never being victims (again).
No.
No one has ever been a victim of sexual violence without someone determined to do it to them.
Enough victim blaming. Enough.
[Related Reading: Five Reasons Why "Teach Women Self-Defense" Isn't a Comprehensive Solution to Rape.]
Shooting at Pentagon; Gunman Killed
Luckily he didn't manage to kill anyone:
A California man killed in a shootout with Pentagon police drove cross-country and arrived at the military headquarters' subway entrance armed with two semiautomatic weapons, authorities said Friday. The shooter apparently left behind Internet postings resentful of the government and airing suspicions about the 9/11 attacks.Online postings made by someone with a similar name to the shooter, which have not yet been confirmed to be the same person, were about 9/11 conspiracy theories and Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991 and his death ruled a suicide, though "Sabow's family has maintained that he was murdered because he was about to expose covert military operations in Central America involving drug smuggling."
John Patrick Bedell, 36, of Hollister, Calif., was named as the gunman in the Thursday evening attack. Authorities said he'd had previous run-ins with the law.
Investigators have found no immediate connection to terrorism, and the attack that superficially wounded two police officers at the massive Defense Department headquarters appears to be a case of "a single individual who had issues," Richard Keevill, chief of Pentagon police, said in an early morning press conference Friday.
Keevill described Bedell as "very well-educated" and well-dressed, saying Bedell was wearing a suit when he showed up at the secure Pentagon entrance about 6:40 p.m. and blended in with workers. He was concealing two 9 millimeter semiautomatic weapons and "many magazines" of ammunition.
When Bedell seemed to reach into his pocket for worker identification, he instead pulled out a gun, Keevill said.
"He just reached in his pocket, pulled out a gun and started shooting" at point-blank range, Keevill said. "He walked up very cool. He had no real emotion on his face."
Bedell died Thursday night from head wounds received when the two injured officers and another officer returned fire, Keevill said.
The exchange of fire at the subway entrance in Arlington, Va., lasted less than a minute but numerous shots were fired, Keevill said, adding that investigators were "still counting." Bedell was not wearing body armor, he added.
The two officers injured have been released from the hospital. One suffered a thigh wound and the other was hit in the shoulder. Keevill said both were superficial injuries.
Keevill said he did not know what motivated the shooting: "I have no idea what his intentions were."
It quite genuinely does appear like Bedell was acting on his own. We'll have, nationally, the "terrorism?" debate again, but, at a certain point, trying to discern whether X number of lone gunmen (or kamikaze pilots, or whatever) is just going to be a way to avoid talking about the fact that extremist groups have grown 244% in the last year and we're in the middle of scary-ass backlash.
This shit doesn't happen in a void.
UPDATE: Think Progress has more. Thanks to Spudsy for sending that along.
Question of the Day
Suggested by Shaker aproustian: If you could live the life of a fictional character, which would it be?
This is a real thing in the world.
Rocket Dog's Bello clog, in "Tribal Brown."
There is apparently a fabric in existence called tribal-brown, but, just to be clear, this selection does not refer to a fabric; the color of the shoe is "tribal brown."
Today in Lazy Fatasses
Gut Bacteria May Spur Obesity, Research Suggests:
Intestinal bacteria may contribute to obesity and metabolic syndrome, a new study in mice suggests.B-b-but...CALORIES IN! CALORIES OUT! CALORIES IN! CALORIES OUT! CAL! O! RIES! IN! CAL! O! RIES! OUT! AIEEEEEEEEEE!
"It has been assumed that the obesity epidemic in the developed world is driven by an increasingly sedentary lifestyle and the abundance of low-cost, high-calorie foods. However, our results suggest that excess caloric consumption is not only a result of undisciplined eating but that intestinal bacteria contribute to changes in appetite and metabolism," senior study author Andrew Gewirtz, an associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Emory University School of Medicine, said in a university news release.
He and his colleagues found that increased appetite and insulin resistance can be transferred from one mouse to another via intestinal bacteria.
It seems to me I read a similar study years ago about intestinal chemistry, if not specifically bacteria, affecting the absorption of fats.
It's almost like there's natural variation among humans or something.
Blub Alert: "The impossible is only the untried."
Jordan Verner, a blind gamer in Ontario, completed Zelda in November after a two-year project led by fellow gamer (but total stranger) Roy Williams, who saw Verner's request for help online:
[Full transcript below.]
[Video of young white man being blindfolded; he says, "Leave my ears open so I can hear." Video segues into man playing the video game The Legend of Zelda while blindfolded.]
Voiceover: Roy Williams will be the first to admit that playing a video game blindfolded seems, well—
Williams: Ultra-nerdy. [laughs]
Voiceover. Yes. It is unique. In fact, he's probably the only guy in Camden with this level of dedication.
Williams: When I was little, I played this game hours on end.
Voiceover: But on the internet, he's just one of many. And over the years, he's become pretty close friends with other gamers from around North America, all of them fanatic about Zelda, a fantasy adventure game. On YouTube, you'll find tons of fan videos; in some, players try to speed run, or beat the game as fast as they can. But it was another feat that stood out to Roy and his friends.
Williams: It was basically like a call for help to people online.
[Video of another young white man speaking on a YouTube video.]
Voiceover: It was a video like this one, by Jordan Verner of Ontario, Canada. He was playing small parts of the game—blind.
Verner: I was never encouraged, or even permitted, for that matter, to see blindness as a total roadblock.
Voiceover: Through Skype, Jordan says that he asked for help in completing the entire game—help that he didn't seriously expect.
Verner: I thought, "That's far from reality. That's more fantasy than the game itself."
Williams: When I was younger, a doctor told me that I was gonna go blind, which turned out not to be so, but [laughs]—and it scared me, and I was like, "I wanna be able to help this person get past, get through his disability.
Voiceover: So Williams and three other diehard gamers each took different parts and copied down every…single…move.
Williams: Every time we make a move—we roll, we jump, we do anything—we type down in the computer exactly what we're doing. [Williams reads from detailed script on computer screen.] Turn one hundred and eighty degrees; one back-flip; you'll hear the noise of a skulltula hitting the ground—
Voiceover: Verner would then take the script and have his computer read it to him as he played. An average gamer will take about a week to play through the entire thing, but this project took almost two years—and more than one hundred thousand keystrokes. Finally, in November of last year, Jordan beat the entire thing.
Verner: It felt great. It—I felt strong. I felt, you know, sky's the limit.
Williams: I'm glad that everyone can see and learn from this that just because a person has a disability doesn't mean that they can't do a normal thing, like play a video game.
Voiceover: So despite the fact that this [video of Williams playing blindfolded again] might look just a little weird, try and see things the way Jordan does.
Verner: Our school's motto, and I live by it, is: "The impossible is only the untried."
Voiceover: And suddenly this [video of Williams playing blindfolded again] seems pretty cool.
16 Senators Ask FDA to Lift Ban on Gay Men Donating Blood
Senators John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), Kirstin Gillibrand (D-New York), Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), Rolland Burris (D-Illinois), Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Frank Lautenberg (D-New Jersey), Bob Casey (D-Pennsylvania), Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin), Mark Udall (D-Colorado), Michael Bennet (D-Colorado), Al Franken (D-Minnesota), Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), Carl Levin (D-Michigan), Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), and Mark Begich (D-Alaska) have all signed a letter asking Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg to rescind the ban, in place since 1983, which prohibits gay men from donating blood.
We write today to express our concerns regarding outdated, medically and scientifically unsound deferral criteria for prospective blood donors. With hospitals and emergency rooms across the country in constant and urgent need of blood products, we believe certain blood donor deferral policies should be reviewed and appropriately modified and modernized while ensuring the blood supply meets the highest possible standards that we all expect in America.The Senators go on to address the double-standard that defers for only one year prospective straight donors "who have engaged in heterosexual sexual activity with a person known to have HIV" but bans male donors who have engaged in protected sexual activity with health partners for life. And they make note of how the blood supply could be made safer by revising the current policies, in addition to reversing the existing discriminatory policy.
The American Red Cross, America's Blood Centers, and AABB reported before an FDA-sponsored workshop on March 9, 2006 that the ban on men who have had sex with other men (MSM), even once, since 1977 from ever donating blood "is medically and scientifically unwarranted." Then in 2008, the Council on Science and Public Health at the American Medical Association also advocated modifying the lifetime deferral requirement for MSM.
The safety, availability, and integrity of our nation's blood supply are vital. For these reasons, we agree with the American Red Cross, America's Blood Centers, AABB, and others that the time has come for the FDA to modify the lifetime deferral for MSM to be consistent with sensible health and safety policy and with FDA deferral guidelines for high-risk heterosexual behavior. We request that you initiate a review of the lifetime deferral requirement for men who have sex with men wishing to donate blood and that you reexamine the deferral criteria for all blood donors to ensure all high-risk behaviors are appropriately addressed.Thank you, Democratic/Independent (and only Democratic/Independent) Senators.
