Text Onscreen: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…
Voiceover (done by a little kid speaking very quickly over a stop-motion montage of images of Lego figurines and landscapes reflecting what's being said): Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in the desert. The desert was very boring, but he longed to have a big adventure one day. Then he met a couple of robots and decided to go save the galaxy—and a pretty girl. So they all went to look for the crazy old man that lives in the desert. He told the boy his dad was a Jedi Knight, and he gave him a magic sword. Then it was time to go to space, but first they needed a ship—and a captain. That guy seemed good. Plus, he had a big, hairy sidekick. So they all went to Alderaan, but it exploded. So they went to the Death Star instead. They got chased by some guys, saved the pretty girl, lost the crazy old man, and got away. Then they came back and blew it up. And they all lived happily ever after. Until the bad guys found the secret base and messed everything up. The captain and the pretty girl and the hairy sidekick hid in some space routes, while the boy went to learn to be a real Jedi Knight, just like his dad. But a big monster ate the ship, and the boy wasn't very good at it, so they went to Cloud City, where the captain ran into his best friend in the whole entire galaxy—sorry, second best—who betrayed them! Then the boy arrived to save the day. But he was a little bit late. And a whole lot in trouble. Maybe he should have practiced. That was when the boy got some very surprising news about his dad. He didn't take it very well. This time, they didn't live so happily ever after—especially the captain. So his friends went to rescue him. It didn't go so well. So they tried a different plan. That one didn't go so well, either. Fortunately, it all worked out in the end. Unfortunately, the bad guys were building a new Death Star. So the boy and his friends went on a secret mission to go blow it up. Again. Until they caught by man-eating teddy bears. Who became their new friends. The boy spent the day with his dad, and got to meet his dad's boss. Meanwhile, in space, it was a trap! But their new friends fixed things. And the boy's dad saved the day! And the Death Star exploded again! And they all lived happily ever after. Except for that guy. The end.
I was delighted to find that right out of the box at #1 is a charming bit of advice that reinforces the old "Sexual Assault Is Totes a Compliment!" chestnut:
1. When we get whistled at in the street, we feel uncomfortable and we'll always tut and roll our eyes. But we're awesomely flattered and we'd be gutted if it stopped.
It's difficult to decide which is my favorite of this spectacular collection, but for sheer whatthefuckery, this is right at the top of the list of contenders:
41. We're really scared that you'll feel our back zits.
WHUT? No.
One of the most compelling reasons for anyone of any gender or sexual persuasion to maintain a serious relationship is so there's someone to take care of the back zits you can't reach yourself.
"I thought one of the benefits of that new beast you've dragged into our territory was that you wouldn't be sticking that fucking camera in our faces anymore. ... Oh, all right. CHEEEEEEEESE."
Jennifer Aniston is joining two studio comedies. She signed on to join the cast of the Seth Gordon-directed New Line comedy Horrible Bosses. At the same time, Universal Pictures has just acquired Wanderlust, a comic vehicle for Aniston to star in with Paul Rudd.
Hippie-bashing is such a totally hip and fresh concept that it can truly only be improved-upon by the cunning use of animal reaction shots. So I hope there are LOTS OF THEM.
Otherwise I may begin to doubt the creeping suspicion that this movie was conceived expressly to annoy me.
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.]
Below is the trailer for the new film Easy A. Which looks GREAT. Just great. It's about an unpopular girl who does this awesome favor for the bullied gay dudes in her school by fake-fucking them at parties, only to discover that everyone totes hates SLUTS as much as they hate QUEERS. Except for the hot and popular dude who's secretly on to her, and if she'll totes make out with him, he won't spill her secret—which is definitely not coercion and is quite obviously romantic, because he is cute. And other things happen, too. I can't tell how it ends from the trailer, but I SURE THINK IT WOULD BE SWELL if everyone learned a lesson about Being Yourself and Not Judging Other People—and also super if that bitchy blond girl got horribly humiliated, preferably by getting dumped very publicly and/or having something spilled on her.
[Transcript below.]
As always, I am not discussing the filmper se; I'm discussing the trailer, and what I perceive the film to be based on how it is being represented by its own marketing.
White Redheaded Teenage Girl (speaking directly to camera): Let me just begin by saying that there are two sides to every story, and this is my side. The right one.
[Wacky music begins; cut to ax exterior shot of "Ojai North High School: A California Distinguished School," followed by a shot of lockers, followed by a scene of White Redheaded Teenage Girl getting knocked over and her books spilling, to indicate she is a TOTES NERD, even though she conforms totally to the Beauty Standard and there is nothing remotely nerdy about her.]
White Redheaded Teenage Girl (in voiceover): I used to be anonymous, nothing, non-entity.
White Blond Teenage Girl: Olive—that's your name, right?
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: Yeah, uh, we've had nine classes together since kindergarten.
White Blond Teenage Girl: Mmm.
White Redheaded Teenage Girl (to camera): So here it is—Part One.
[Wacky music escalates; cut to White Teenage Dude #1 pulling up to a house on a scooter, then cut to White Teenage Dude #1 talking to White Redheaded Teenage Girl in her bedroom.]
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: Brandon, just a couple of hours ago you told me you were gay.
White Teenage Dude #1: You said I should pretend to be straight, so—
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: I didn't mean with me!
[Cut to White Redheaded Teenage Girl seeing Brandon at school with a bloody nose; cut back to conversation in bedroom.]
White Teenage Dude #1: I am tormented every day at school. Just one good imaginary fling.
White Redheaded Teenage Girl (to camera): Which brings us to Part Two.
[Cut to White Redheaded Teenage Girl and White Teenage Dude #1 strolling into a house party arm in arm; everyone looks SO CONFUSED!]
White Teenage Dude #2: Is that Olive…with Brandon?!
[Cut to White Redheaded Teenage Girl and White Teenage Dude #1 going into a bedroom and shutting the door; they sit on the bed.]
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: Now grunt—and make it convincing. [White Teenage Dude #1 grunts and makes a funny face. Cut to them jumping on the bed and screaming. Cut to White Redheaded Teenage Girl grabbing White Teenage Dude #1's shoulders and looking into his face gravely.] You ready for the grand finale?
White Teenage Dude #1: Yeah. What? [White Redheaded Teenage Girl punches him in the genitals.] AHHHHHHH!
[Cut to a bunch of teenagers congregated outside the bedroom door, listening.]
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: YEAHHHHHH!
White Teenage Dude #1: Thank you. [He opens the bedroom door, revealing the surprised faces of their classmates.] WHAAAAZUUUUUP?!
[The dudes cheer and high-five him. Cut to White Redheaded Teenage Girl walking alone at school; everyone is looking at her.]
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: I always thought that pretending to lose my virginity would be a little more special. (to camera) Judy Blume should have prepared me for that.
[Cut to White Redheaded Teenage Girl in gym clothes; White Teenage Dude #3 approaches her.]
White Teenage Dude #3: Brandon told me what you did for him. [White Redheaded Teenage Girl purrs like a lioness.] No—he told me the truth. I was just hoping that maybe you could do the same for me.
[Cut to montage of apparently gay teen dudes looking at White Redheaded Teenage Girl hopefully.]
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: So, whether I liked it or not, I was open for business. [Cut to her holding up a coupon while talking to Brown-Skinned Teenage Dude #1.] Twenty percent off to Bath and Body Works. Is that how much our imaginary tryst meant to you? I fake-rocked your world.
[Cut to White Blond Teenage Girl sitting in a prayer circle with other mostly-white teens.]
White Blond Teenage Girl: We need to pray for her. But—we also need to pray to get her the hell outta here.
Other Mostly-White Teens (in unison): Amen!
[Cut to students protesting (?) her (?) with signs reading "Trash" and "Expel Olive" and "Jezebel," etc.]
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: On Monday, things took a turn for the scandalous.
White Teenage Dude #HotandPopular: Screw all these people, Olive.
[Olive looks blushy. Cut to the interior of a classroom, followed by a montage of scenes from an old film version of The Scarlet Letter.]
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: Ironically [editor's note: this is not irony.] we were studying The Scarlet Letter. This girl named Hester Prynne has an affair with a minister, is besmirched, and made to wear a red "A" for adulterer.
Brown-Skinned Teenage Girl #1: Perhaps you should embroider a red "A" on your wardrobe.
White Redheaded Teenage Girl (to camera): I'm not proud of this.
[Cut to White Redheaded Teenage Girl strutting down the hall at school wearing dark sunglasses and a red letter "A" on her sexy black outfit, as "Poker Face" begins to play. The sea of students part to watch her walk by. Cut to White Redheaded Teenage Girl at home with her parents.]
Mom: No judgment, but you kind of look like a stripper.
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: Mom!
Dad: A high-end stripper. [Mom gestures agreement.] For governors or athletes.
[Cut to White Redheaded Teenage Girl standing alone in gym clothes. Cut to two random people (teachers?) having a conversation in a classroom.]
White Blond Woman: Is she the one everyone's talking about?
White Blond Man: Yes.
[Cut to White Redheaded Teenage Girl and White Teenage Dude #HotandPopular pulling up to the curb outside her (?) house in a car he is driving.]
White Teenage Dude #HotandPopular: I know exactly what you're doing. If I promise not to tell anyone, could I kiss you right now?
[White Redheaded Teenage Girl smiles and laughs. Cut to montage of random one-second scenes from the movie of White Redheaded Teenage Girl interacting with various characters. Cut to White Redheaded Teenage Girl talking with her mom.]
Mom: I had a similar situation when I was your age. I had a horrible reputation.
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: Why?
Mom: Because I slept with a whole bunch of people. [White Redheaded Teenage Girl looks consternated.] Mostly guys!
White Redheaded Teenage Girl: Mom!
Text Onscreen: EASY A.
White Blond Teenage Girl: There's a higher power that will judge you for your indecency.
Mr. Helpy Q. Helpington wants to help fat people with his awesome powers of helptastic helpfulness:
Some people are racists, some are elitists. Some people are fattists.
While you've never considered yourself a person who discriminates against others, you might be in danger of becoming a "fattist."
...So fattists make fat people feel bad about their extra weight by pointing, snickering, sneering and laughing about other people's appearance.
Unfortunately, it's counterproductive. It only makes overweight people feel worse about themselves and they instinctively do what fat people do best -- eat.
"Americans have a right to know if their Supreme Court justice has an orientation that may or may not dictate which way she votes on a vital issue. … Don't Americans have a right to know, on something as important as gay marriage, all right, if there is a Supreme Court justice nominee who is in that world?"—Bill O'Reilly, on the Very Important Subject of whether SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan is a resident of LesbianWorld.
Guess what, Bill, you ludicrous dipshit? Even if Elena Kagan is a lesbian, and we all knew about it, that doesn't tell us anything about the way she'd vote on a same-sex marriage case. Even if we knew, irrespective of her sexual orientation, what her views on same-sex marriage are, that doesn't tell us anything about the way she'd vote on a same-sex marriage case, either—because Supreme Court cases aren't the equivalent of "Do you like same-sex marriage? Check this box."
Any case that comes before SCOTUS has very specific circumstances and details; even if legalizing same-sex marriage is a cause she personally supports and even if ruling a particular way on a case may have the effect of legalizing same-sex marriage, the nuance of that particular case may mean that she votes another way for reasons unrelated to her personal support for same-sex marriage.
Roe was decided on the Constitutional guarantee of privacy and due process. We've no idea under what auspices a same-sex marriage challenge may make its way to the Supreme Court. And even if we did, one's sexual orientation isn't a crystal ball into which one can gaze to accurate predict their future rulings.
I am shocked—SHOCKED, I tell you—at the discovery of yet more evidence that Bill O'Reilly is just as ignorant about queer people as he is about black people.
The whole world of people who are not male, not white, not straight, not cisgender, not able-bodied, not neurotypical, not BILL O'REILLY is just one big fucking mystery to this guy.
Or, at least, to his despicable persona, avatar to the chronically insular.
The Los Angeles City Council, protesting Arizona's tough crackdown on illegal immigration, voted Wednesday to ban most city travel to Arizona and future contracts with companies in that state.
...The council also called on the city attorney's office to review all of the city's $58 million in existing contracts with Arizona companies to determine which can be canceled.
The resolution, which now heads to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, would still allow city officials to travel to Arizona under "special circumstances" that are in the city's interests. Also, existing contracts with Arizona firms would be exempt from the ban if canceling them would lead to "significant additional cost" to the city.
The council members who supported the ban, which was approved 13 to 1, asserted that Arizona's new law criminalizing being without proof of legal status "would lead to racial profiling and discrimination," a contention with which I certainly agree.
"Los Angeles is the second-largest city in this country, an immigrant city, an international city. It needs to have its voice heard," said Councilman Ed Reyes, one of the resolution's sponsors. "As an American, I cannot go to Arizona today without a passport. If I come across an officer who's having a bad day and feels that the picture on my ID is not me, I can be … deported, no questions asked. That is not American."
Tough to argue with that.
San Francisco's Board of Supervisors approved a similar resolution earlier this week.
Bonnie Sweeten, Ashley Todd, Jennifer Wilbanks, Susan Smith, and Charles Stuart are a few of the more well-known names in a long history of "racial hoaxes," in which a white person hurts themselves or someone else (usually a family member) and blames an imaginary person of color (most frequently a black man) for their crime, hoping that institutional racism, its narratives and stereotypes, their own privilege, and the prejudices of other whites will allow them to successfully deflect suspicion onto a nonspecific person of color. In the worst-case scenarios, real people matching conjured police sketches are detained—and innocent people have been punished because of these elaborate, racist lies.
It's bad enough when it's just some random asshole pulling this shit. It's even worse when it's a cop.
[Transcript below.]
Thank Maude he was stupid enough to get caught. I hope the department will immediately launch a comprehensive review of his cases—complainants should be contacted to see if they were helped as they should have been; suspects should be interviewed to see if they were mistreated; especially black complainants and suspects—because any white cop who's fucked up enough to shoot himself and blame it on a black man should strongly be suspected of having scapegoated or in other ways inappropriately targeted and/or unfairly treated people of color on the job.
Randi Kaye, CNN Correspondent (in voiceover): It was 4 in the morning when Philadelphia when the radio call came in: cop shot. A white police sergeant said he'd been shot by a black man. Officers responded in force—an all-out search of the African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia's 19th Precinct, where Sergeant Robert Ralston said it all went down.
Kaye (on camera): The sergeant told the story this way: He'd come across two black men along the railroad tracks on the morning of April 5. One ran away, he said; the other pointed a silver revolver at his head. He knocked it away, he said, but it fired anyway, and the bullet grazed his left shoulder. He also said he fired one shot, but wasn't sure if he'd struck the suspect.
Kaye (in voiceover): Police gave thanks their man had survived. Tragedy averted, they said. The white cop described the shooter this way: Dark skin, braided hair, and a tattoo next to his eye. But police never found the black shooter or anyone matching that description. And now, more than a month later, we know why. The real story? The two black men the cop said he encountered never existed. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey says Sergeant Ralston made the whole thing up.
Charles Ramsey, Philadelphia Police Commissioner: It was clear to us soon after it took place that this simply was just not true. Just the evidence just didn't support the story he was giving.
Kaye (in voiceover): But wait: what about the sergeant's shoulder wound? The commissioner says Sergeant Ralston actually shot himself, which may be why, he said, he got off one shot at the suspect—an explanation as to why his gun had been fired.
Ramsey: A test was run on his shirt. The powder on the shirt matched the same kind of ammunition we use in the department.
Kaye (in voiceover): That's right—the gunpowder on the sergeant's shirt was the same kind his own weapon used. And there's more. The angle at which the bullet struck him didn't square with his story either, says the commissioner. We tried to ask Sergeant Ralston to explain, but, outside his home, he dodged our cameras and ducked inside.
Unidentified male (offscreen, as Ralston walks by into his house): Can you tell us why you did that, sir?
Kaye (in voiceover): Neighbors called the sergeant's actions a sad statement.
Brawly Joseph, neighbor: I can't believe he would really do something like that. That's really uncalled for. He—ever since I've been living here, he's really been, like, antisocial around this area.
Kaye (on camera): What's still unclear is why Sergeant Ralston, a 21-year veteran of the force, would make up such a wild tale. Only after hours of interrogation, police said, did he finally admit he shot himself on purpose. The police commissioner says he may have done it for a job transfer or maybe for attention, but that the sergeant didn't give a reason.
Kaye (in voiceover) The police commissioner calls this a, quote, "terrible and embarrassing chapter in the department's history."
Ramsey: The fact that he stated that two African-Americans were involved in this, again, just, I think, inflames tensions in our community—something that we certainly do not need.
Kaye (in voiceover): Sergeant Ralston has been suspended with pay. The commissioner says he will be fired. He was given immunity in exchange for his confession, so he doesn't face criminal charges. But he'll have to pay for the massive manhunt to find his phantom suspects. Cops are still adding up the cost. The days of calling Sergeant Robert Ralston a hero and crediting his quick actions for saving his own life, long gone. Randi Kaye, CNN, New York.
So, Disqus did another upgrade overnight, and it appears that some Firefox users lost the ability to comment for awhile, though functionality now seems to be back. My apologies for the inconvenience.
I know the threads look weird; they got rid of our old theme during the update, about which I wasn't notified in advance. I'm working on trying to figure out how to increase the font size for better readability now.
One new feature of note: If you "reply" to a comment in a thread, it will now indicate it on your comment. Example here. (Although, at the moment, the "jump to original comment" link doesn't seem to be working properly, which I'll mention to Disqus.)
I'll also take a moment to mention (since every time they're mentioned in comments there are people who are surprised to discover them!) a couple of other Disqus features: At the top of each thread, there's a dropdown menu that allows you to sort the order of comments to your preference. (It defaults to Oldest First.) Beside it, there are links which allow you to subscribe to an individual thread by email or RSS. And at the bottom of the thread, there is a "sharing" option, which enables you to share the thread on Twitter, Facebook, and Yahoo.
What erroneous assumption do people most frequently make about you?
Aside from "bad faith," to which I'm considering legally changing my middle name, an assumption that has dogged me for as long as I can remember in real life is the supposition that I'm aloof or arrogant, because I am criminally shy.
If I were a dude, I'd be mysterious. But because I'm a woman, I'm a bitch.
The deer, named Theen, was cared for by mlcarriker's family after he was discovered alone and malnourished. The family bottle-fed Theen until he began to eat on his own, and although he's now free to wander and mingle with his wild brethren, he "frequently comes back to the house to eat some [cat food] and play with our dog, Buddy," mlcarriker explains. "He doesn't care much for deer corn."
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a bill targeting a school district's ethnic studies program, hours after a report by United Nations human rights experts condemned the measure.
State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the bill for years, said he believes the Tucson school district's Mexican-American studies program teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.
Public schools should not be encouraging students to resent a particular race, he said.
"It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it," Horne said.
Welcome to Shakesville, a progressive feminist blog about politics, culture, social justice, cute things, and all that is in between. Please note that the commenting policy and the Feminism 101 section, conveniently linked at the top of the page, are required reading before commenting.
