This blogaround brought to you by Faggotown Sundries: Official supplier of the finest leather harnesses to his Excellency, Mayor Gashleycrumb. Now with matching hats!
stuff white people do: quotation of the week (w.e.b. du bois)
— macon d has an excerpt from Du Bois' essay The Souls of White Folk
Body Love Wellness: A Dose of Reality: My Exclusive Interview With Biggest Loser Finalist, Kai Hibbard (Part 2 of 3)
— Golda Poretsky interviews a finalist from the reality show. TW for discussion of eating disorders, and also for fat hatred.
Last week's Part 1 of the interview is here, with Part 3 to come. Poretsky has posted both audio of the interview and a transcript.
Womanist Musings: Why I Won't Be Your Resource
— Renee explains it. Again. Book mark this one; sooner or later, you're going to want to send it to someone. And while you're there, you can check out her handsome new blog design.
FWD/Forward: Disability in Pop Culture: I know where the Black Stork Comes From
— Time for a fresh approach, Pop Culture makers 'cause, along with Anna, we're all tired of playing Disability Cliché Bingo.
Towleroad: German Court To Recognize Gay 'Partnership' But Not 'Marriage'
— Andy brings us news from Germany. Half a homoloaf — not all that tasty.
The Mongoose Chronicles: Newsclips and Quotes [Strange New Phenomena]
— Mar discovers a huge heap o' fail in a small newspaper item.
Family Inequality: Lifestyles of the 4X-poverty set
— Phil Cohen charts, by financial class, behaviors which some say are linked to character, with explanatory illustrations.
ETA: All together now, Shakers: Maud! Fer fuck's sake, remember to encourage people to drop links in comments!!!!eleventy!! (Yes, knitmeapony, this is a fine place for your info, and thanks for the inadvertent reminder :)
Wednesday Blogaround
Perfect. Excellent Improvement on a Classic.
You know that old childhood chestnut invoked while making Very Important Promises, "Cross your heart and hope to die"...? Well, it's new and improved, bitchez!—care of an awesome new Kate Hudson vehicle about a lady who fucks her BFF's fiancé, the script for which the Jezebels got their hot little hands on:
"We'll still be best friends, right?"Awesome. A fate even worse than death!
"Of course!"
"Cross your heart, hope to get fat?"
[Related Reading: Today in Fat Hatin'.]
Dueling Quotes of the Day
"It is an example that markets, cultures are very different around the world. I've never shied away from the fact that I'm a Christian. I have my own personal beliefs, and I don't impose those on anybody else. I've been in countries where the majority of the people in the country don't believe in a deity, or they may be atheist. Or the majority of the country is Muslim. Or it may be the majority is much younger skewed. So, when you look at all these differences, it's not that I'm to be the judge or the jury relative to right or wrong. Having said that, at McDonald's, there are core values we stand for, and the world is getting much closer. So, we have a lot of conversations. We're going to make some mistakes at times. [We talk] about things that may have an implication in one part of the world and may be the cultural norm in another part of the world. And those are things that, yes, we're going to learn from. But you're right, that commercial won't show in the United States." — Don Thompson, Chief of Operations for McDonald's on the French ad featuring a young gay man, about which Misty posted here.
"Perfect. It's weird this genius isn't Operations Chief of the World!" — Gabe, on that dude's totes bullshit.
Cobbler!
About a week ago I was craving something sweet but, alas, there was nothing much in the house by way of snack food. Then I remembered we had blueberries but I didn't want just blueberries. Then, even though it was eight at night, I thought "hey, I could make a blueberry cobbler!"...but that seemed somewhat dull. So, after a bit of thought, this is what I eventually made:
It turned out really good, if I do say so myself, so I thought I'd share with you all. It's also really, really easy (and this a really easy recipe to alter to whatever fruit you want--I make it with peaches (and no zest) quite often).Blueberry-Date Cobbler
1 cup unbleached flour
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup milk
6 T unsalted butter, melted
1 tsp fresh lemon zest
1.5 tsp fresh orange zest
1 cup blueberries
1/2 cup chopped, pitted dates--divided
3 T sparkling sugar (optional)
--Generously butter a 9 inch pie dish. Heat oven to 350 degrees (F).
--In large mixing bowl, whisk flour, salt, baking powder, and sugar together. Gently mix in half of the dates. Whisk in milk and both zests. Whisk in melted butter.
--Pour into prepared dish. Drop berries and other half of dates into dish, spreading them out all over. Sprinkle sparkling sugar on top, if using (makes a nice crunch on top).
--Bake for 45 - 50 minutes, or until golden brown. Let cool slightly before serving.
Now, for some, "cobbler" = "lots of fruit on the bottom with some sort of crunchy or crumbly topping" (and not cake-like, such as the above recipe). I haven't done it (yet!), but I figure one could take a few cups of blueberries with a cup of chopped dates, some zest, a bit of ClearJel (or cornstarch), and some sugar and put all that in a baking dish and top it with some granola that's been mixed with cinnamon, melted butter, and brown sugar (or a crumble topping of butter/brown sugar/cinnamon/flour).
Yay, Liss!
News of a Shakesville feature we all know and love is spreading! In a comment to today's edition of Conniving and Sinister, Zendegi linked to this item at Ms. magazine's blog.
I'm excited that <3ing of Shakesville's much-loved comic strip is amplifying. I am constantly amazed at the evolution of something that Liss first did as a one-time commentary on the usual cultural assumptions. It's a feature I look forward to daily, and I know an awful lot of other people do, too.
Kevin Wolf, commenting on yesterday's fine edition of the strip, "with no authority whatever" awarded Conniving and Sinister the comic world's Reuben. That may have been a strictly unofficial impulse, but it's one I think a lot of us — including Ms. blogger Kate Whittle — share.
All Kinds of Fucked Up
[Trigger warning for violence/police brutality.]
In Seattle, a white male police officer is being investigated after punching a young black woman in the face, who was intervening while he was trying to cuff another young black woman, who was resisting, and whom he was repeatedly pushing against the hood of his patrol car. The details, including video of the incident, which was shot by a bystander, is here. The video is upsetting to watch, but it's an important piece of our culture, rarely seen, caught on tape—so I think it's also important to watch, for those who are able.
There's a lot going on in the exchange. Leading up to it, the officer reportedly saw the girls, along with two others, jaywalking and asked them to step over to his patrol car. At the time, he was detaining another man he'd caught jaywalking. The girls allegedly mouthed off and tried to leave, and that's when things escalated.
The comments at the link are largely of the same tenor—empathy with the poor policeman just trying to do his job, outnumbered by snarling teen girls who refused to submit to his authority.
Suffice it to say, I disagree.
I am not axiomatically anti-police by any stretch of the imagination; I am the granddaughter of an NYPD cop, whose job was hard and dangerous and necessary. But I am also completely floored by a police officer trying to single-handedly detain five people for two separate incidents of jaywalking all at the same time and allowing the situation to escalate like it did.
Who's being "served and protected" by a cop manhandling and punching two young women whose crime was crossing the street in the wrong place? Who's the real public menace in that scenario?
As ever, there is a seemingly endless supply of people willing to condemn the two young women for "resisting," hanging the blame exclusively around their necks, as if both their race and their gender—and the cop's race and gender—are irrelevant.
They are, of course, anything but.
In broad daylight, in front of a group of onlookers, several of whom were recording the event, a white male police officer roughly handled one young black woman, throwing her against his car hood and tearing her clothes, and punched another young black woman in the face.
That should give anyone with a rudimentary ability to reason some indication of what women and/or people of color have experienced at the hands of police alone, in the dark, with no witnesses—experiences that are shared among their community.
People resist for a reason. One of those reasons is being scared, and some of us have more to fear than others from bad police officers.
The conventional wisdom will almost certainly be that he "snapped," that he didn't have an inherently bad nature as a cop but did a bad thing because of those young women's resistance.
The suggestion that they resisted because they sensed the very nature that resulted in the violence against them will be dismissed as absurd.
And so it goes.
Men Are From Crampon, Women Are From Talon
Shaker Audrey sends from France this advertisement for Sex and the City 2:
[If you can't view the image, it's a movie poster featuring a picture of a disembodied female leg from mid-shin down, the foot clad in a stiletto heel, underneath which is being crushed a soccer ball. Above the image are the words "Talons vs. Crampons," which translates in context to "High Heels vs. Cleats."]
Audrey writes (which I am sharing with her permission):
I saw the ad enclosed on my way to work this morning. The headline reads "High heels vs Cleats".There's not a shit ton of this in the US right now, but only because soccer isn't the obsession in the States (yet) that it is pretty much everywhere else in the world.
The rhetoric of the "war of the sexes" is very strong nowadays, with the World Cup. You can't turn on the TV without either watching a match or a "comedian" explaining how he had to gag / send away / lock away his wife for a month, so that he could watch his beloved football (har har har!).
There has, however, been some pretty obnoxiously sexist commentary during the broadcasts, perhaps none so infuriating as the repeatedly intoned assertion leading up to Saturday's match between England the US that there has never been as eagerly anticipated match "in the history of US soccer." A history which includes both World Cup wins by the US women's soccer team, including their win in 1999, when the US was hosting and the entire country was going wild for that team of women, whom Sports Illustrated made their '99 Sportspeople of the Year.
And then there has been the discussion of notable US soccer players, which has not contained a single mention of any of those women, not even Mia Hamm, despite the fact that she is the most well-known US national team soccer player of all time, and probably the most popular female soccer player in the world. She is the only female athlete after whom I've ever heard a male friend actively petition to name his daughter.
She's a big fucking deal. But she doesn't warrant a mention at the Men's World Cup.
Oh, excuse me. The World Cup.
One of Iain's male friends recently had a daughter, and has been asking Iain a lot of questions about soccer during the World Cup. When Iain expressed being pleased that he was getting into soccer, his friend said (approximately), "Well, my daughter's not going to play football, and she's not going to play hockey, and she's not going to play baseball, although she might play softball, but she might play soccer. So I want to learn the game." Blub.
It's thrilling to know that there is a young generation of USian men who view soccer as a sport they can play with their daughters, in which there is institutional and organizational support for girls in the sport, from the youngest peewee leagues. That's due in no small part to the success of the US women's soccer team, which has already won two World Cups.
Something the US announcers seem to have forgotten.
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
[Background.]
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 (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Great News, Shakers!
My Email ID has been awarded £750,000.00 in the British Toyota Promo! I don't know the precise conversion rate, but that sounds like a whole lot of pounds sterling! Some other lucky folk appear to have won also, but none of them as much as I did!
The funny thing is that I only recently set up this particular email account, exclusively for correspondence to/from/about Shakesville. So, if not for Shakesville, I would be £750,000.00 poorer!
So it's drinks all round on me! Just as soon as I get that check.
Ugh
In an interesting, ahem, article about Rwanda's national health insurance system, this was certainly one of the more remarkable parentheticals:
(In another contrast with the United States, obesity and its medical complications are almost a nonissue. Visitors to Rwanda are quickly struck by how thin everyone on the street is. And it is not necessarily from malnutrition; even the president, Paul Kagame, a teetotaling ascetic, is spectral.)Wow.
One of the facts obfuscated by that interesting, ahem, observation is that some of the most dangerously malnourished people in the United States are also fat. There aren't a lot of vitamins in the boxed and canned foods that are the staples of corner stores serving grocery deserts, foods that are also the cheapest thing on grocery store shelves for poor people with low food security.
But there are a lot of calories.
While I'm sure it's accurate that "obesity and its medical complications are almost a nonissue" in Rwanda, the implication—provided by the note that even Rwanda's president isn't fat, because, despite having access to stuff to make him fat, he has the sense to reject it, unlike all those blubbery Americans!—that the "contrast" is down primarily to personal choices is incomplete at best.
In an article in which one of the central points is the irony that there are USians living in the wealthiest country in the world who nonetheless have reason to envy Rwandans because of their access to basic healthcare, one would hope to find some shred of awareness that there are malnourished USians who have reason to envy nourished Rwandans, too.
And whether the rumbling, empty bellies of those envious USians are in fat bodies is really, truly beside the point.
[H/T to Shaker Karen.]
Queer History Qorner
[I'm assuming today's protagonist didn't/doesn't identify as queer, but I think this story is relevant to a lot of us. Plus, all the cool qids are into faux-alliteration these days.]
I first encountered Agnes in early 2007, a time when co-incidentally, I was struggling to find a doctor who would write prescriptions to allow me to have a hormonal balance (and in turn, life) society considered plausible for a person of my gender.
A chapter in Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle's excellent Transgender Studies Reader reprinted a book chapter by sociologist Dr. Harold Garfinkel on Agnes.
I've since found out that poor Agnes is the stuff of queer studies legend. I certainly haven't gotten through many of the wordy academic texts on this young woman. However, I can relate my initial reaction to her story, as told through the eyes of Dr. Garfinkel.
In October 1958, 19-year old Agnes showed up at UCLA's Department of Psychiatry, having been referred there by a series of physicians. Dr. Garfinkel noted her “convincingly female appearance”, her “peaches-and-cream” complexion and so on. Her demeanor was that of what Dr. Garfinkel and colleagues referred to as a “120 per cent female”; painstakingly and stereotypically female in all regards.
The root of Agnes' difficulties stemmed from her genitals, which Dr. Garfinkel repeatedly assures readers are completely normal and functional, or so they would have been had they appeared on a male. Because of these organs, Agnes was forced to spend the first 17 years of her life attempting to “pass” as a boy. This, despite the fact that at age 12, according to Agnes, her body began to spontaneously feminize, resulting in the “convincing” appearance Dr. Garfinkel noted.
Needless to say, Garfinkel, who specialized in studying the social construction of identity (as well as Dr. Robert Stoller, a psychiatrist who would later be a part of UCLA's gender clinic, and psychologist Dr. Alexander Rosen) found this all very interesting.
The three UCLA professors conducted over 30 hours of interviews, with Dr. Garfinkel presenting certain observations in said book chapter.
To me, Garfinkel's text is one of the more heartbreaking, painful, and yet subtly inspirational things I've ever read. Garfinkel goes on and on (and on) about construction of gender categories by social actors, and about the manifest need that individuals (including Agnes) have for other people to perceive them as “normal” (e.g., cissexual).
Agnes talks of her boyfriend (himself a “120 per cent male”), people who knew her in the first 17 years of her life, and the paramount need to protect herself from her secret. Garfinkel, IMO, appears to understand the stressful (and crucial) importance of all of this, and goes on and on (and on) about practical mechanisms for “passing” within a constructed sociological framework.
The homophobic (and transphobic) side of Agnes certainly makes me cringe. Garfinkel gives her ample opportunity to express her views on folks who aren't “normal”, on homosexuals, transvestites, and “transsexualists,” three groups that Garfinkel doesn't always appear (on my reading) to distinguish between. In all cases, Agnes is careful to proclaim her distaste for and avoidance of those people.
Agnes clearly and repeatedly proclaims herself to be a real woman with a horrible biological condition. Soon, doctors at UCLA agree with this assessment, proclaiming that Agnes suffered from an extraordinarily rare (she is, as far as I know, the only person to be so diagnosed) intersex condition know as testicular feminization syndrome, whereby her testes spontaneously began producing estrogen at puberty. In March 1959 (six months after she first appeared at UCLA), surgeons performed SRS/GRS on the young woman.
Eight years later, long after leaving UCLA, Agnes admitted the truth. Her mother had had a hysterectomy, after which she was prescribed estrogen therapy. Since the age of 12, Agnes had been secretly taking her mother's pills, and filling her prescriptions.
As far as I know, Agnes is still a controversial figure. She lied to doctors, said homophobic and transphobic things, and misappropriated an intersex identity in order to receive adequate health care (which she received, as far as I know for free within a matter of months). There's lots to say there, and a lot of it has been said, usually multiple times.
I'm frustrated by the text, particularly the fact that Dr. Garfinkel seems to be a fairly thoughtful, caring, intelligent person who can't seem to wrap his mind around the fact that transsexual people are who we say we are, and that the people who disregard our identities are, at best, severely misguided. This fundamental idea reduces much of his text to what I might call a masturbatory exercise in social theory that has little to no bearing on understanding or improving the life of his subject. While much has changed since Garfinkel's work first appeared in 1967, it's depressing to consider what hasn't.
For me, the key point in the text, where I feel that Garfinkel captures the real essence of Agnes and her situation is here:[Agnes] wanted to know as well whether [further research] would help “the doctors” to get to the “true facts.” I [Dr. Garfinkel] asked Agnes, “what do you figure the facts are?” She answered, “What do I figure the facts are, or what do I think everyone else thinks the facts are?” emphasis original
Agnes' question, in a nutshell, summarizes the key dilemma that I think LGBTQ people have faced, (that I have faced) for generations. I know very well that I'm a woman, but I have to manage myself very carefully, as other people are prone to think otherwise. I know very well that the woman I often venture out with in public is my wife, my partner, my sweetie, but there are plenty of times when I have to be aware that other people may not think this is the case. Furthermore, there are often seriously good reasons why I may not want them to understand the facts as I do.
We have spent generation after generation “passing”, painstakingly manipulating and carefully disclosing bits and pieces of the way we “really” are. A lot of time, people don't see us, and sometimes, that's because we know it's not safe for us to be seen. This is a particularly troublesome proposition for transsexual people-- to the extent that we're out as such, cissexual society often views us as somehow “not really” the men and women we claim to be.
Dr. Garfinkel appears to have been acutely aware of the strain of passing as it applied to Agnes. Passing is stressful. Passing was (and is) sadly necessary.
My dream, for Pride month and beyond, is for all of us to envision a world where passing isn't necessary. I can't imagine living in a world where simply being one's self is sufficient grounds for full membership in society. That said, I can't imagine a more beautiful goal.
Compare and Contrast - Part 2
I read several articles at the NY Times site Monday which resonated together in my mind for a couple of reasons. I here continue the exploration of those reasons which I began in Part 1.
For those USians enjoying an extended youth, this Times article links their extended financial support by their parents to their extended schooling. It says, "Adults between 18 and 34 received an average of $38,000 in cash and two years' worth of full-time labor from their parents, or about 10 percent of their income". The article notes that about one-quarter of 25-year-old white men lived with their parents in 2007, before the current recession began.
Oh, yes — the recession. The wise heads who confer among themselves as to what national course of action would be most wise agree of late that the U.S. government must cut spending, despite the recession. The chief concern, they insist, is not government services being cut while millions are out of work and/or losing their homes, and state governments are bleeding red ink; the real peril is the threat that the stock market will at some unspecified future point become alarmed by the imaginary prospect of inflation.
To avoid the painful — to them — need to contemplate this non-existent threat, these wise heads insist that the government must inflict real pain on the real economy which the rest of us inhabit, as Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman has been discussing in his recent column and blog posts.
There is obviously more than a world of difference between the lives of the child soldiers the U.S. is funding in Somalia and U.S. residents looking to begin their adult careers in their late twenties or even early thirties. But there is a relatively small class of people in the U.S. who are making both the decisions which will keep those privileged USians dependent on their parents indefinitely while the jobs all that education was to prepare them for remain elusive, and the decisions which make available to the Somali government funding which allows them to hire and train the children of that country as soldiers.
That funding is available because it comes out of the U.S. military budget — the only area of the non-fixed federal budget which the Obama administration did not propose freezing for the next several years.
This small class of Very Serious Persons think the U.S. economy needs pain — for other people — to create the appearance most pleasing to their Market deity. Another branch of that Academy of Very Serious Persons wants to wage war abroad on many fronts — not in their own dignified persons, of course, but through the persons of USians whose only refuge from that painful economy may be in the armed forces, through the persons of the hundreds of thousands of private military contractors (.pdf) employed by the U.S. government, and through the millions of persons who are at war, or who must try to live their lives in the midst of war, because the U.S. government has chosen to hold a war, or support a war, in their country.
Our small U.S. class of Very Serious Persons is at present fighting a war in Somalia through the persons of about-12-year-old Alwil and the 10-year-old and 13-year-old fellow soldiers Alwil shares a bed with.
These two articles in the Times collided in my mind because of the bitter irony that the very long road to full independence and responsibility for some middle-class U.S. young people results from their having access to the education the Somali child soldiers lack, and then some, and then some more. But these wildly divergent circumstances are connected, too.
Within the oasis of privilege that is U.S. society relative to much of the world, there is a growing disparity between the very wealthy and everyone else. African-Americans are at the bottom of that cavernous gap.
So, as always, there is a hierarchy of sacrifice here — but it's sacrifices all the way down from that circle of Very Serious Persons at the top. They will sacrifice their fellow USians' economic well-being because they wish to appear tough to the god of the Market. They will sacrifice the brown-skinned children of many countries because they wish to appear tough to terrorists, as well as to anyone who comes between the corporate priesthood of the Market god and the wealth it feeds on.
It's the End of the World as We Know It (or At Least It Should Be)
[Trigger warning for sexual exploitation.]
My first thought upon reading that there are reportedly Betty White sex pictures is that the internet had jumped the shark, Betty White and sex pictures being two of the internet's favorite things. But, upon reflection, I believe our entire popular culture has jumped the shark.
We really just need to erase everything, shake the entire culture like a big Etch-a-Sketch until everything that was there has vanished, and start over again.
-------------------------------------
For the record, I am not horrified by "Betty White" and "sex pictures" being together in the same sentence because she is old. I am horrified because, unless it is Ms. White herself who obliquely makes these photos available, I believe their release to be a sexual assault.
So, the President Gave a Speech Last Night
Last night, President Obama gave an Oval Office address on the BP oil spill. To call it a missed opportunity is to grievously insult missed opportunities.
This should have been the moment in which Obama laid out a Kennedyesque we're-going-to-the-moon vision for a green transition away from our foolish, short-sighted, national security compromising, environmentally destructive, and unsustainable dependency on oil. Instead, he gave us mushy and uninspired promises totally disconnected from even the most nebulous outlines of actual policy, no less anything resembling a timeline:
The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash America's innovation and seize control of our own destiny.Oh yay. Bipartisanship. Goody.
…Now, there are costs associated with this transition. And there are some who believe that we can't afford those costs right now. I say we can't afford not to change how we produce and use energy – because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.
So I'm happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party – as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels.
This is weak sauce from the leader of a nation that will crumble sooner rather than later under the weight of its obdurate unwillingness to stop guzzling oil as if it's not going out of style. His big plan is, apparently, "We've got to do something!" Yikes. Drum says, and rightfully so, "This gives pablum a bad name." Ouch.
It gets worse.
Because what would a hopey-changey-barfy-farty speech from Obama be without six fucking paragraphs about faith and prayer?
It's a faith in the future that sustains us as a people. It is that same faith that sustains our neighbors in the Gulf right now.Were I a praying person, I'd be praying for a president who had a better goddamn plan than praying for shit to get better!
Each year, at the beginning of shrimping season, the region's fishermen take part in a tradition that was brought to America long ago by fishing immigrants from Europe. It's called "The Blessing of the Fleet," and today it's a celebration where clergy from different religions gather to say a prayer for the safety and success of the men and women who will soon head out to sea – some for weeks at a time.
The ceremony goes on in good times and in bad. It took place after Katrina, and it took place a few weeks ago – at the beginning of the most difficult season these fishermen have ever faced.
And still, they came and they prayed. For as a priest and former fisherman once said of the tradition, "The blessing is not that God has promised to remove all obstacles and dangers. The blessing is that He is with us always," a blessing that's granted "even in the midst of the storm."
The oil spill is not the last crisis America will face. This nation has known hard times before and we will surely know them again. What sees us through – what has always seen us through – is our strength, our resilience, and our unyielding faith that something better awaits us if we summon the courage to reach for it.
Tonight, we pray for that courage. We pray for the people of the Gulf. And we pray that a hand may guide us through the storm towards a brighter day. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.
I just don't even know what to say anymore. What we have here is a failure to lead. And after eight years of an administration whose guiding principle of leadership on every major domestic issue was "Kick the Can Down the Road for the Next Guy," we needed a president who was going to steer us out of this fucking mess we're in, who had the vision and the backbone to do it.
That is not the leader we have, unfortunately.
I'd be thrilled if Obama would prove me wrong in that assessment.
Question of the Day
With regard to my earlier post about Cageflix, "the internet's leading Nicolas-Cage-centric, batch queue management tool" which adds all available Nic Cage Cage movies to one's Netflix queue, for what actress/actor (or director, or screenwriter, etc.) would you like to have a ________flix?
(Naturally, you don't have to actually subscribe to Netflix to answer the question.)
Bonus points if you can work some of their film titles into your answer in the silliest way possible!
For example: I am in some "Hot Pursuit" of a Cusackflix, so that I can spend the entirety of "One Crazy Summer" watching "1408," or possibly even "2012," John Cusack films with my good friends "Max" and "Bob Roberts," who are a real coupla "Tapeheads." (Con Air.)
Save Your Emails
The Star is reporting that Al Gore was having an affair with environmentalist (and former spouse of Larry "Curb Your Enthusiasm" David) Laurie David.
Don't know if it's true. And it's none of my business if it is, particularly since Gore is no longer in public office and can't even be called a hypocrite since he publicly supports marriage equality.
Wevs.
ETA. Laurie David says it's not true.
Daily Dose o' Cute
[Also at Daily Motion here.]
Footage of Dudley racing all over the dog park the last two weekends, set to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now."
Dudz + Freddie Mercury = WIN!
Quote of the Day
"What [Miley Cyrus] wears has been put under the spotlight recently. Some thought the video for Can't Be Tamed was too provocative, and others have criticized her for revealing too much skin in her outfits." — Hilary Fox, writer for the Associated Press.
Well, so long as that's what some say, who are we to argue?
