"If I found myself face-to-face with the Smoke Monster I would activate my laser eyes and we would have an epic battle to the death. Who would win? Yet another unanswerable question."—Carlton Cuse, one half of Team Darlton, the masterminds behind Lost.
Reminder! For USians (and Canadians, I think?)...ABC is re-airing the two-hour pilot episode of Lost tonight at 8E/7C.
And, yes, there will be a Lost Open Thread during the finale tomorrow, by request. There will also be the usual postmortem thread on Monday.
Quote of the Day
Dudz at Home
A montage of Dudley chilling at home, set to "Kooks," by David Bowie.
(Also at DailyMotion here.)
Bowie wrote "Kooks" for his son when he was born; we won't be providing Dudz with a crib or enrolling him in school, but if the analogy isn't perfect, the sentiment is nonetheless appropriate: Welcome to our kooky family; we hope you like us and want to stay awhile.
The scene spliced throughout the piece, of Dudz sniffing at a milkbone I've got on offer, then backing up, then coming forward, which eventually ends with his "sitting" to get the treat, took place in our small downstairs bathroom. Although many greyhounds aren't great sitters, because their large thigh muscles make it a rather unnatural position for them, Dudz was a very quick learner with the command. But he'd back up a lot to "sit," sort of backward-walking into a sitting position, and sometimes bump something and startle himself.
So I went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet, where the hallway wall blocked any real opportunity to backward-walk and necessitated his having to "sit" in place. After we practiced that a few times, he had learned to "sit" on the spot without any backing up or startling himself at all.
Now, whenever he wants anything, he "sits" and looks at us with his most adorable face, and if it's treat-, walk-, or dinnertime, and we present him with a treat, leash, or bowl of food, he collapses from his "sit" into a play-bow, with the hugest grin I have ever seen on a dog.
Such a good boy!
[Related: Dudz at the Dog Park.]
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!
Teaspoons
We started the day on a bright note and I thought it would be absolutely lovely to end the day (Virtual Pub notwithstanding) with another swell story:
For Gary Oppenheimer, 2007 was a year of plenty.Blub.
His backyard garden produced a bountiful harvest with a surplus of spaghetti squash, melons, pumpkins, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers for his family. At the end of the season, Oppenheimer had 40 pounds of excess fresh produce -- and nowhere to take it.
…Oppenheimer took the produce to a local food pantry at a battered-women's shelter. When he dropped off the food, he was struck by the response he got from the shelter worker.
"[She] thanked me profusely, and as I left she said, 'Now we can have something fresh to eat,' " Oppenheimer recalled. "That stuck with me because I remember walking away thinking, 'What? They have canned stuff only all the time?' "
…In 2008, Oppenheimer became the director of the West Milford Community Garden in West Milford, New Jersey. He learned that toward the end of the summer, plots were often abandoned and good food was sometimes left to rot.
He tried to find a list of his town's local food pantries online where the extra produce could be donated. A Google search showed the nearest food pantry was in another town, 25 miles away -- when in fact there were six food pantries in Oppenheimer's town of West Milford.
Oppenheimer knew he had stumbled upon a gap in information that could rescue fresh produce from a wasteful end and potentially save lives.
"I realized that if I'm having this problem as a gardener, then other people across the country must be having the exact same problem," he said. "I got up the next morning, and I went on the internet, and I grabbed the domain of AmpleHarvest.org."
…The free online resource enables food pantries to register and be listed in a central nationwide directory, and makes it possible for American gardeners to easily find the local pantries where they can donate extra produce.
You know, there are a lot of people who think that social justice work is futile, because people are fundamentally bad, or ruthlessly selfish, or incorrigibly apathetic. Or all of the above. I don't believe that. I believe that the vast majority of people are good—or would be, given the opportunity and the inspiration and the expectation that they aspire to kindness.
I frequently say of ugly things that nothing happens in a void. But decency doesn't happen in a void, either. There are good people doing good things all over the place, and that goodness has the capacity to be infectious every bit as much as hatred does.
Have a wonderful weekend, Shakers—and try to put a little bit of something good out there. I shall endeavor to do the same.
Hmm
Care of CNN: Various faith leaders explain what makes people happy.
I don't know what makes people happy, but I do know that you have to be a dude to be considered a faith leader worthy of quotation at CNN on the subject of what makes people happy.
ETA. And it turns out you have to be a dude to be considered a Lost fan worthy of predicting the show's ending, too.
Daily Dose of Not-Cute
Remember our beautiful, elegant, gorgeous Kitteh?
She has a secret vice. She adores deer-poo.
Actually, adores might not be strong enough -- she wallows in deer-poo, whenever we're not quick enough to get it out of the yard.
So, today, she looks like this:
Quote of the Day
[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]
"If you use big words like Thanatos and refer to old-time sadomasochistic porn you can discuss a snuff movie as art, something to do with the desire for sex and the desire for death. Except that it's only women who get beaten to pulp, not men."—Echidne, being brilliant as usual.
Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime
Dionne Warwick, Elton John, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder:
"That's What Friends Are For"
Surprise!
Bret Easton Ellis is a misogynist.
Okay, that's not a surprise at all, but I never figured he'd be so nakedly and uncreatively misogynist:
What are your thoughts on women directors? After you saw Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank, you tweeted that you might have to reevaluate your preconceived notions about them.Yawn.
I did. And after I saw [Floria Sigismondi's] The Runaways, too.
Really?
I loved it.
I wish I'd loved it.
Well, I wasn't looking forward to it. I avoided it, and then I was with some people and they said, "It starts soon at the Arclight. Let's go." So yeah, I do have to reevaluate that, but for the most part I'm not totally convinced, [except for] Andrea Arnold, Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola…
Not Mary Harron?
Mary Harron to a degree. There's something about the medium of film itself that I think requires the male gaze.
What would that be?
We're watching, and we're aroused by looking, whereas I don't think women respond that way to films, just because of how they're built.
You don't think they have an overt level of arousal?
[They have one] that's not so stimulated by the visual. I think, to a degree, all the women I named aren't particularly visual directors. You could argue that Lost in Translation is beautiful, but is that [cinematographer Lance Acord]? I don't know. Regardless of the business aspect of things, is there a reason that there isn't a female Hitchcock or a female Scorsese or a female Spielberg? I don't know. I think it's a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility. I mean, the best art is made under not an indifference to, but a neutrality [toward] the kind of emotionalism that I think can be a trap for women directors.
I can't even muster the energy to get angry when I read someone saying something as blatantly stupid as "[Film] is a medium that really is built for the male gaze and for a male sensibility." All I've got in response is a low chuckle of reverberating contempt.
[Via Melissa.]
Friday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by Shaxco, makers of Liss' Trigger Warnings. Now sold in convenience packs of 20.
Recommended Reading:
Shaker Lisa: Casey Needs a Home
[TW] Marcella: Men Who Batter Overestimate Rate at Which Men Abuse
[TW] Cara: Insufficient Evidence
Mannion: What hath Reagan wrought? Part One
Angry Asian Man: Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home by Laura Ling & Lisa Ling
Andy: 13 Chicago Gay Rights Activists Arrested in ENDA Sit-In
Bri: Fat Fairies Are Lovely
Leave your links in comments...
Britain Proposes Granting Rape Defendants Anonymity
[Trigger warning for sexual assault law.]
As one of its first orders of business, Britain's new Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government has proposed a policy that would ban the public identification of people accused of rape. Victims advocates in the UK have reacted negatively to the proposed ban, noting that there is potential to discourage survivors from coming forward and that the ban tacitly reinforces the erroneous narrative about the prevalence of false rape allegations.
Paul Mendelle QC, a prominent defense attorney and chair of the Criminal Bar Association, also quite rightly noted that a failure to publicly identify defendants undermines transparency: "In general, trials should be open to public scrutiny, so that justice may not only be done but be seen to be done. Anonymous trials run counter to that principle."
So there are the primary arguments against the proposed ban, which are wholly compelling.
But… I nonetheless have mixed feelings about granting anonymity to rape defendants—because there is some inherent value to survivors of rape in their alleged attackers not being publicly identified. It will help protect victims' identities, for a start, which is no small thing, especially to accusers who desperately want to remain anonymous. Women who are assaulted by men who are famous, for example, will not have the crushing weight of an international media bearing down on them as they try to protect their privacy. They will be insulated from the usual disgusting charges of fame- and fortune-seeking.
That has the capacity to actually encourage victims to come forward.
But… Back on the other hand again, it's easy to imagine how the guarantee of anonymity works in the favor of serial assaulters in particular. Consider the case of Ben Roethlisberger, for instance, who has been thrice accused of sexual assault with no charges yet filed. It is, in my estimation, important that information is public, for a variety of reasons.
And then there is this: What support I have for the proposed ban by virtue of its potential to work in survivors' favor, is struck through with a steely bolt of regret based on the knowledge that the policy was designed to shield accused rapists, rather than their victims.
What I'm left with is this: Britain has a 6.5% conviction rate for rape. Surely there are more urgent reforms that need to be made with regard to sex crimes than shielding the accused.
[H/T to Shakers Gegi, Fox in the Snow, and RG.]
Still
[Trigger warning for sexual assault, death threats, fat hatred, disablist language, and probably some other heinous stuff.]
Some history: In 2007, I tried to take Shakesville onto its own server. For reasons and by means I don't pretend to know, we attracted the attention of some very determined (and rather notable, if you read about this sort of thing) spammers who registered their objection to Shakesville's very existence by slamming us from here to Helsinki and back again. With the assistance of an extremely tech-savvy, talented, and generous gentleman, CW—who is also the lovely Mustang Bobby's brother (and whose résumé, suffice it to say, shows decidedly more impressive things than donating time as Shakesville's webmaster)—we finally blocked the spam.
Our self-appointed nemeses responded by hacking the fuck out of the site.
CW tried valiantly to stop the onslaught, to no avail. He said he'd never seen anything like it, particularly because of the way in which they were targeting the site.
It was, evidently, something about the combination of a fat woman who does fat acceptance and anti-rape advocacy that had piqued their ire—because every post about fat acceptance or sexual assault brought a new round of "Fuck, the site's down again." This post, of all things, an innocuous post about fat and beauty, was truly the beginning of the end. The site crumbled under the strength of the attack.
I don't know what put me, in particular, on their radar—or, perhaps more accurately, in their virtual crosshairs. I'm hardly the only fat survivor who produces this type of content, but, whatever the mysterious reason for the assault on the site, I retreated behind Google's massive firewall, where Shakesville remains.
All of which I share to explain, for the benefit of Shakers who have recently arrived, why this thread (to which I direct you with a strong trigger warning) is not in the standard archives, but instead in what is the weird three-month record of that drama.
That thread, ugh that thread, is what we refer to as the Unmoderated Rape Thread, where every comment of any tenor left was allowed to appear on the page, in response to my post criticizing "shock jocks" Opie and Anthony for a bit in which one of their guests "hilariously" talks about "fucking to death" former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former First Lady Laura Bush.
The Unmoderated Rape Thread is a collection of some of the most vicious misogyny, fat hatred, disablism, rape threats, and death threats you will hopefully ever have the displeasure to encounter.
And the reason I bring it up again today is because it got a new comment this morning.
Get a sense of humor… enjoy life…. learn to laugh…. or get out of our way. We have a GOOD life to live. Turn it off retards
Three years later.
Three years later, and there are still people who feel the irresistible need to exhort me to "get a sense of humor," despite my having written, right in the post: "Naturally, I'll be called a humorless feminist. Fine. If not laughing at a bunch of men sitting around talking about fucking women to death makes me a humorless feminist, then I wear the badge proudly—because I'm not just a humorless feminist; I'm a bitch who was nearly fucked to death. Isn't that just fucking hilarious?"
(It's Fat Princess on steroids.)
"Get out of our way," urges the commenter, proudly aligning hirself with the clamoring horde whose defining ideology is "People Who Object to Rape Deserve to Be Raped" and whose intellectual capacity for expressing said philosophy ranges from
The only tragedy is that a bullet didn't rip through your brainstem after you were used for your one and only purpose in this world. You should consider yourself lucky that some man finds a hideous troll like yourself rape-able.
—to
YOU ARE A STUPID WHORE, that WAS LUCKY TO GET FUCKED UP THE ASS!!!! STOP COMPLAINING, FAT WHORE!!!! YOU'RE PROBABLY TOO UGLY TO GET RAPED!!!! YOU DESERVE TO BE ABUSED, YOU FAT FUCKING CUNT WHORE!!!!!! SPREAD YOUR LEGS, AND TAKE MY HARD COCK IN YOUR HAIRY VAGINA!!!!!!!!!!! YOU NEED SOME DISCIPLINE, WHORE!!!!!! SMACK!!!! WHACK!!!!!!! OWWWWW!!!!!!!!!! ME TARZAN, YOU JANE!!!!!!!!!
It's difficult to imagine the profound corruption of empathy and decency that creates in a person the unshakable compulsion to try to silence an anti-rape advocate three years after the fact.
Easier to understand is this: Such obligatory displays of menacing tribalism—get out of our way—are a creation of the rape culture, which depends on its monstrous progeny for its continued survival.
The rape culture creates the narratives which sustains it, then sends its horrible little memes out into the world, where they insinuate themselves into every last nook and cranny of the larger culture, disguising themselves as conventional wisdom and jokes and other deceptively reasonable things. And anti-rape advocates hunt them down, teasing them out of the various strands of the culture, wrenching them from the shadows where they lurk or revealing them hiding in plain sight, deconstructing them, picking them apart, exposing them to anyone standing nearby.
That's when the jack-booted enforcers of the rape culture show up to silence us. Even three years after the fact.
And so it goes. Tidal wave against teaspoon.
I am tempted, momentarily, to be discouraged by a comment left on a three-year-old post, reiterating the same tired bullshit, so tiresome, so predictable, as if the comment were left not by an actual human being, but instead some demonic ventriloquist's dummy being worked by the rape culture itself (or maybe just Bernard-Henri Lévy).
But then I see the comment for what it is: Desperate, pathetic, flailing, insecure, weak. They may be strong in number, but I have the strength of rectitude.
Tidal wave against teaspoon.
The author wrings out her shirtfront and gets back to work.
Senate Passes Financial Reform Bill
Last night, the Senate passed a financial reform bill which creates/restores financial rules and regulations ostensibly designed to prevent another economic clusterfucktastrophe triggered by irresponsible lending, unchecked greed, and other chicanery on Wall Street.
In providing for the most profound remaking of financial regulations since the Great Depression, the legislation would create a new consumer-protection watchdog housed at the Federal Reserve to prevent abuse in mortgage, auto and credit card lending. It also would give the government power to wind down large failing financial firms and set up a council of federal overseers to police the financial landscape for risks to the global economy. Moreover, the legislation would establish oversight of the vast market in financial instruments known as derivatives, impose new restrictions on credit rating agencies and give shareholders a say in corporate affairs.Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said: "When this bill becomes law, the joy ride on Wall Street will come to a screeching halt" (if only!) while Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), "the GOP's top financial reform negotiator," said the bill is "a liberal activist's dream come true" (if only!).
Democratic Senators Maria Cantwell and Russ Feingold voted against the bill because it did not go far enough. Four Republican Senators—Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Chuck Grassley, and Scott Brown—voted with the Democrats to pass the bill.
The US Chamber of Commerce hates it, which means it's pretty good, even if imperfect.
And some Senate Democrats showed shocking evidence of spine-ownership during the process: The original draft of the bill introduced by Senator Chris Dodd, chairman of the banking committee—who marshaled the bill through the Senate, navigating a Republican filibuster and dozens of amendments in the process—was more liberal, but Dodd had to water it down after lobbyists and the Obama administration attacked the bill for being too far-reaching. But many of those aforementioned amendments reinfused the bill with liberal ideals:
For instance, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), chairman of the Senate agriculture committee, proposed dramatic restrictions on trading in derivatives, including a provision that could force big banks to spin off the lucrative business altogether. Her language was added to Dodd's bill and endured, despite efforts by the administration, lobbyists and Dodd himself to temper it.The bill now goes into conference so that the House and Senate versions can be resolved before the final bill is sent to the President. In a weird and unusual twist, the Senate version is now actually more liberal than the House version, despite the Senate being the more conservative of the two houses, so resolution should be pretty swift.
In the meantime, other senators added tough amendments that, for example, would place new restrictions on credit rating agencies, force big banks to meet higher capital requirements and limit the fees that merchants have to pay banks when a customer uses a credit or debit card.
Good Morning!
[Trigger warning for discussions of human trafficking at the link.]
Please start your day by reading what is one of the best uses of the internet that any of us will likely ever witness.
Serious blub warning.
The other day, I took a picture of this Cromcrast show description, the first line of which Kenny Blogginz and I found amusing:
I was going to use it as a punchline in some post or other at some point, but instead I think it belongs here. "The Internet is not just for emails and Googling fun facts anymore." Indeed not.
And thank Maude for that.
[H/T to Shaker puellasolis.]
Question of the Day
What was the first album you ever owned? I'm talking real, grown up record. Something you purchased or were given that made you feel like you'd finally outgrown Disney or Kidz Bop or whatever.
Mine was The Stray Cats' US debut Built For Speed. My favourite aunt gave it to me as a Christmas gift in 1982. I'm listening to it now. I still love it.
