[Explanations: lol your fat. pathetic anger bread. hey your gay.]
TFIF, Shakers!
Belly up to the bar,
and name your poison!
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!
Citizen Iain: The Movie
Background...
[Or at DailyMotion here.]
[Fade into photo of the seal of the Unites States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana. Edit. Video of Iain walking into the courtroom and being shown where to sit; he looks for Liss and then grins and waves. Edit.]
Judge: This will be a day to remember for everyone here. A naturalization ceremony is an important event in the life of the country, and this community, as well as in the life of a new citizen.
[Edit.]
DHS Officer: Your Honor, may it please the court: My name is Frank [Inaudible]; I am an immigration services officer with the Chicago District Office of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and the United States Department of Homeland Security. It is my privilege today to present before the court 46 applicants for United States citizenship from 21 different countries. [Edit.] Your Honor, I respectfully move that this court confer United States citizenship on each of these applicants for naturalization, upon their taking of the oath of allegiance, as is required by law.
Judge: Thank you, Mr. [Inaudible]. Your motion will be granted. [Edit.] And in just a little bit, you will become Americans—citizens of the United States of America. [Edit.] This country, the United States, is made up of people from every place on the globe. Not just people who were born here, citizens by birth, but people like you—citizens by choice, who bring to this country the gift of variety, the gift of the richness of backgrounds, many things that were good about the culture, the arts, the [inaudible], the religions of the countries from which they came. By bringing these gifts, they created, they helped create, the beautiful mosaic that is America today. [Edit.] But those people who came to our shores brought more than that to make America great, because the people who come to America to become citizens are not ordinary people. They are not timid, or fearful. They are among the bravest and most positive-thinking people on earth. [Edit.] What an act of courage that is. What a statement of hope that is. What a demonstration of determination that is. America is a much greater country because every month, new citizens bring us more courage, more hope, more determination than we had before.
[Edit. Iain is seen, along with other people, from behind, raising their right hands.]
Group of applicants, in unison: I will swear to defend…the Constitution and laws…of the United States of America…against all enemies foreign and domestic…
[Edit. Everyone in the room is standing while the Star Spangled Banner plays.]
Judge: —to those of us who are already citizens before we came into this room this morning, because we leave this room today as citizens of a nation with more hope, more courage, more determination than when we started. So congratulations not just to our new citizens, and congratulations to you, but congratulations to all of us. Thank you. [Applause; edit. Picture of Iain with judge.]
Citizen Iain
On March 15, 2001, Iain and I met online, totally by chance, because of an Oscar Wilde quote. Today, nine years later, almost to the day, and after quite the journey in between, Iain became a United States citizen.
At 9:00am, we walked into the Unites States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, and one naturalization ceremony, one last mountain of paperwork, and several hours later, we walked back out onto the sidewalk, and I turned to Iain and said, "You can totes get arrested now!" And he laughed and high-fived me.
Iain was one of 46 people from 21 different countries who became citizens today. It was a beautifully diverse group; I spoke with people from Asia, Africa, and South America. Before the ceremony started, as friends and family waited in the courtroom while the applicants trickled in slowly after being processed, a white man behind me remarked, "Some of these people don't even look like foreigners!" I laughed into my sleeve.
The judge gave a lovely speech (parts of which are excerpted in the video here), reminding all of us observing that we had something to celebrate, too—because our country is better today than it was yesterday for all the brave and determined and hopeful people who have chosen to make this place their home.
He encouraged the new citizens to vote, to write to their congresspersons, to run for office themselves—and noted that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm are naturalized citizens.
I felt very patriotic. And very much in love with Citizen Iain.
Congratulations, Citizen.
Iain and I both also want to say thank-you, from the bottom of our hearts, to a group of current and former contributors and Shakers who made donations to a Citizenship Fund, to help pay the cost of Iain's citizenship application. Our most profound thanks to Deeky, Misty, Mustang Bobby, Portly, Space Cowboy, Petulant, Oddjob, Chet Scoville, Jeff Fecke, and Litbrit, all of whom were in our thoughts today.
More Discrimination Against Johnny Weir
Via Towleroad, we learn that
Johnny Weir has been "deemed too gay for [a] 'Stars on Ice Tour' Invitation":
Sponsors of the 'Stars on Ice Tour' are refusing to invite Olympian and three-time National Champion figure skater Johnny Weir to perform because he's not "family friendly" enough.
Read: Too gay.
Towleroad links to a report from GLAAD. The GLAAD blog post links a petition to include Weir in the Stars On Ice Tour.
Previous posts about Weir: Johnny Weir Responds to Gender-Conformity Police; Important Announcement
Friday Blogaround
This Blogaround is brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Kraken Krispies cereal. RELEASE THE KRAKEN with new Kraken Krispies!
(Comes with a Ray Harryhausen action figure in every box--only while supplies last!)
Recommended reading:
MissPrism: Compare and Contrast
Scott Bryan Wilson: Mass-market paperback postmodernism (via Scott Esposito)
Elif Batuman will be reading from her new book The Possessed, at McNally Jackson Books in New York City on Monday, March 15. She will also be at Brookline Booksmith in Boston on the 17th. I have not yet read The Possessed, though I have read a couple of the essays collected therein. The first essay in the book, "Babel in California", originally appeared in N+1 magazine back when I used to buy N+1. The piece is poignant, hilarious, and just generally astounding. You can read an interview about the book with Alexandra Alter at The Wall Street Journal online. Batuman's "The murder of Leo Tolstoy: A forensic investigation" appeared in Harper's in February 2009. You can even read it for free!
The Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin: See the inside of some of [David Foster] Wallace's books (via Oxford University Press USA blog)
[Trigger Warning] Historiann: The Line: a film by Nancy Schwartzman (This post has an excellent comments thread)
National Patient Advocate Foundation: Patient Advocate Foundation Launches National Underinsured Resource Directory
Two from Sociological Images: The Walmart Barbie Scandal and Welcome, Women, To Your Special Section
Making Latex Clothing: How to make latex ruffles (via Petulant)
The Runaways
The Runaways tells the tale of Joan Jett and Cherie Currie as they rise to stardom, and "chronicles Joan and Cherie's tumultuous relationship on and off stage," whatever that means.
The film stars Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett, Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie, Stella Maeve as Sandy West, Scout Taylor-Compton as Lita Ford and Michael Shannon as Kim Fowley.
Based on Cherie Currie's book Neon Angel. In theaters March 19th.
[Cross-posted.]
Woman Attacked After Rejecting Man At Bar
[Trigger Warning.]
I don't have anything insightful to say about this story out of New York, so I'll just open it up to discussion.
A stranger followed a woman into a New York City bar restroom after she rejected his advances early Thursday, savagely beat her in a toilet stall and perhaps tried to sexually assault her, police said.The assailant was captured on video after the attack. Police have released the footage. Here's to hoping justice finds him, and his victim makes a full recovery.
The attack occurred around 2 a.m. at Social, a three-story bar and lounge on Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan where the 29-year-old victim, a nurse, had gone with a friend, authorities said.
The woman told police that she had rebuffed attempts by the man to dance with her, said police spokesman Paul Browne. When she went to the women's restroom on the second floor, he followed her and burst into a stall.
The man beat the victim until she was unconscious. Her friend later found her in the stall and called 911, believing she might have fallen.
The woman was hospitalized with a broken eye socket, broken jaw and other injuries. When she regained consciousness, she told hospital workers she had been attacked.
Blog Note
I've got some personal stuff to do this morning, so I won't be around until later today. Happy Friday!
Question of the Day
The logical follow-up to last night's QotD: What's the best TV series of all time?
If you don't already know my answer to this question, you really haven't been paying attention, lol.
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOST!!!11!1!!eleventy!!
[From the 4.16.09 open thread.
News from Shakes Manor
Email edition…
Liss: Can you view this video?
Iain: Uh-huh. I think Sophie would have fun with that.
Liss: You missed the fact that the three cats in the video looked uncannily like our three cats, didn't you?
Iain: No!
Liss: Wevs. You totally had no idea why I sent that to you, lololol!
Iain: Never — I totes knew why you were sending it before you did.
Liss: LOL! I'm blogging that.
Iain: Blog dis:
[Image of digital flip-off.]
Liss: LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!! Oh, I'm really blogging THAT!
[Thanks to Shaker DesertRose for dropping the link to the video into comments.]
Healthcare, Public Option, Blah
I can't be mustered to write anything about healthcare this week. Here's a good example of why:
Senator Bernie Sanders, in a brief interview in the Capitol just now, confirmed to me that he's willing to commit to introducing an amendment that would add the public option to the Senate bill’s reconciliation fix.So the public option could get an up-or-down vote in the Senate...only for liberal Dems to vote against it. Depressing.
This is important, because as far fetched as this seems, if this amendment is introduced, a vote on it would be very hard for the Senate Dem leadership to block. The only thing that could stop it from happening, according to Senate expert Robert Dove, is for the parliamentarian to rule that it's not germane to the Senate bill somehow — something that seems unlikely.
"I think somebody should do that, and I'd certainly be prepared to do that," Sanders told me when I asked him if he'd be willing to commit to introducing a public option amendment. This is, in effect, a commitment to introduce the amendment if no one else does.
The possiblity that a single Senator will introduce a public option amendment — which would get a straight majority vote — is actually worrying to Senate Dem leaders. Indeed, Dick Durbin, the number two Senate Dem, yesterday told reporters that this would create headaches and even conceded that the leadership might be forced to ask liberal Senators to vote against it to ensure smooth passage for the overall bill.
It's not like I don't care about health
I'm just waiting to see what happens now. Like everyone else.
O NOES!
Minority babies set to become majority in 2010; year could be tipping point when non-white newborns outnumber white: "Minorities make up nearly half the children born in the U.S., part of a historic trend in which minorities are expected to become the U.S. majority over the next 40 years. In fact, demographers say this year could be the 'tipping point' when the number of babies born to minorities outnumbers that of babies born to whites."
NOT THE TIPPING POINT!!! Save us, Maude!
Cue yet another round of conservatives wailing about "racial suicide" and the onslaught of the radical brown hordes. You know who I mean—the white assholes who are worried that a brown majority might treat a white minority as shitty as a white minority has treated people of color.
Anyway... Of course you know who's to blame for this, right? WHITE WOMEN! For not having enough BABIES!
[Kenneth Johnson, a sociology professor at the University of New Hampshire] explained there are now more Hispanic women of prime childbearing age who tend to have more children than women of other races.
So you'd better get CRACKING on the babymaking, white ladies! JUST IN CASE!
More white women are waiting until they are older to have children, but it is not yet known whether that will have a noticeable effect on the current trend of increasing minority newborns.
Right now, roughly 1 in 10 of the nation's 3,142 counties already have minority populations greater than 50 percent.
This is all feminism's fault, I tell you.
But 1 in 4 communities have more minority children than white children or are nearing that point, according to the study, which Johnson co-published.
That is because Hispanic women on average have three children, while other women on average have two.
...The numbers are 2.99 children for Hispanics, 1.87 for whites, 2.13 for blacks and 2.04 for Asians in the U.S.
And the number of white women of prime childbearing age is on the decline, dropping 19 percent from 1990.
I love the inclusion of this tidbit at the end of the article: "In Lake County, Ind., a suburb of Chicago, the minority population grew from 43 percent in 1990 to 53 percent in 2008 as the number of white children declined, the number of blacks stayed stable and the number of Hispanics increased."
*waves from the border of Lake County, Indiana*
Okay, so, first of all, Lake County is not a suburb—because it's not a town. It's a county, as its name suggests. And it includes Gary, which is the "blackest" 100,000+ resident city in America with a per capita average income of under $15,000 a year, from which whites have been flighting since the 1960s when Gary got itself a popular black mayor, a migration that reached a crescendo when the steel industry of Northwest Indiana collapsed in the '80s.
White people have been moving out of this area, and people of color—especially Latin@s—moving into this area, for my entire life. The population shift has fuck-all to do with how many babies white ladies are having, and everything to do with racism and economic depression.
All of which I share just to illustrate the sort of bullshit that gets inserted into news stories as "facts" and "evidence" that are demonstrably neither, in order to further the narratives of the kyriarchy.
[H/T to Shaker Kristin.]
On Punk
[Trigger warning]
I was strolling through the news today when I came across this curious headline: "Author assumes guise of 10-year-old to punk famous." I wasn't sure what it meant, since the word "punk" was evoking for me this sort of thing. So I read the story, most of it anyway, and it turned out to be about adult author Bill Geerhart's new book about pranks he'd pulled as "Little Billy," like getting a Secretary of State to write back about "how to settle a treehouse dispute with his sister." Geerhart, explains the article, was "punking the famous and infamous by writing letters to them asking questions out of the mouths of babes."
Now, I could write a whole post on what I think about giving a book deal to some yo-yo who duped famous people by pretending to be a kid, but at the moment I'm more interested in the fact that the use of "punk" as a verb has moved into the national lexicon.
Because the etymology of "punk" is slang for prison rape. Yeah, to "punk someone out" means to "make them your bitch" — and a "punk-ass bitch" is not someone with a pink mohawk, but someone who's been anally raped.
The most widespread [prison slang term] is punk, used as a noun to mean a submissive homosexual, and a verb for coital relations with a submissive homosexual. It [was] first cited in a memoir of New York State’s Sing Sing prison in 1904. Punk is still in use, cited in every resource the present author has had access to. Punks are usually dominated by wolves, another common term...See also these definitions:
a. Slang A young man who is the sexual partner of an older man.I don't think that the above connotations were at all lost on Ashton Kutcher and MTV when they created the show Punk'd, from where I will safely assume this term pushed its way into the public consciousness. When you've been pranked by Ashton, when he tells you you've been "punk'd," it's clearly just another way of saying, "I made you my bitch."
b. Archaic A prostitute.
5. Obsolete a young male homosexual; catamite
6. Obsolete a prostitute
Welcome to the rape culture, where a slang word for rape can make its way through the language to a major news story in which it's used without any hint of its etymology, to sound "cool."
I Write Letters
[This was originally published one year ago today. In the interim, Bea Arthur has died, Rue McClanahan has had a stroke, and Betty White has been recruited to host Saturday Night Live. I decided to republish it in honor of these wonderful ladies I still love so dearly.]
Dear Dorothy, Blanche, Rose, and Sophia:
This letter is long overdue. As you know, we have spent many joyful hours together over the last two-and-a-half decades, laughing warmly about all kinds of kooky highjinks, and I've never properly thanked you for everything you've given me.
Thank you for being a part of my childhood. Thank you for hanging out with me, in four-hour blocks on Saturday mornings, when I was in college; there has been and never will be any better hangover cure than you ladies. Thank you for always being there on some obscure cable channel or other in the middle of the night when I have insomnia.
Thank you for being feminists. Thank you for showing me that divorce isn't shameful, that being a widow doesn't mean your life is over, that love and sex are different things, that sex can be fun and frivolous and not always fraught with meaning (and judgment). Thank you for showing me women are cool. And smart. And funny as hell. Thank you for showing me that female friendships are awesome.
Thank you for being sassy. Thank you for being subversive. Thank you for being bawdy. Thank you for teaching me words like lanai and caftan. Thank you for being what I suspect is a big part of the reason I have never really feared getting old.
And finally, to each of you: Thank you for being a friend, traveled down the road and back again. Your heart is true; you're a pal and a confidant. And if you threw a party, invited everyone you knew, you would see the biggest gift would be from me, and the card attached would say, "Thank you for being a friend."
No one really understood why an 11-year-old loved you so much, nor an 18-year-old, nor a 25-year-old, and there are probably some people who wonder why a 35-year-old loves you still. But looking over that list, it seems to me the question isn't why I have always adored you, but how it is possible that anyone couldn't.
With admiration and gratitude,
Liss
P.S. Thank you in particular, Dorothy Zbornak, for making me love my voice.
AAAAAHHHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
[Paraphrase: Video of Jabba the Hutt (and related characters) cut in the style of the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation opening, with people singing the words "Jabba the Hutt" over and over to the theme music.]
The maker of this mash-up explains: "The reason this exists is because every time we watch Parks and Recreation we sing 'Jabba the Hutt' along with the theme. So naturally we had to make this video."
I love you, internetz.
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
[Trigger warning.]
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.]
