Happy Birthday to Xrlq

Filed under:Cool — posted by Anwyn on June 29, 2009 @ 8:14 pm

A bit late in the day, but with warmest birthday good wishes.

Allah Getting Huge Kick Out of Baiting at Least Two-Thirds of His Readers

Filed under:Ew,Jerks,Not Cool,Politics,Uncategorized — posted by Anwyn on June 24, 2009 @ 5:24 pm

The third that hates Huckabee with a fiery passion and the third that loves him with a … fiery white passion. Don’t mess with me, punk.

Get Divorced First, Idiots

Filed under:Good Grief,Not Cool,Politics,Priorities — posted by Anwyn @ 3:11 pm

How hard is this crap? Get divorced before you send love emails to the new chick. Get divorced before you fly off for four days and turn off your state cell phone. This man had a few thoughts of running for president? We can take a divorced president, champ. We can’t take a stupid one–even though for a lot of voters, it takes a lot to prove stupidity. You chose the fastest route. Congratulations, Mark Sanford, you get–new love. Hope it was worth it.

One Wonders How He Really Feels about the Revolutionary War

Filed under:Church of Liberalism,History,Jerks,Language Barrier,Politics,Priorities,Sad — posted by Anwyn on June 23, 2009 @ 8:47 am

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs spouts what keeps recurring as an especially jarring note in Obama’s mealy-mouthed nothings over the fraud and violence in Iran:

“He’ll continue to speak out in support of those that are seeking to demonstrate and do so in a way peacefully,” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs told FOX News.

Obama said this himself a few days ago:

What you’re seeing in Iran are hundreds of thousands of people who believe their voices were not heard and who are peacefully protesting and – and seeking justice. And the world is watching. And we stand behind those who are seeking justice in a peaceful way.

We “stand behind” and “speak out” only for those seeking to topple their violent, repressive, tyrannical government in a “peaceful” way. Because that’ll probably work, no?

Only two explanations occur to me for this particular idiocy. Either Obama really is of the no-exceptions “peace at any price” camp, an enemy of the freedom we enjoy in this country, which was bought with blood, or else he simply is too dim to understand that in Iran and places like it, fradulent elections don’t simply mean that one party yelps about it for a while and then it’s back to business as usual, complete with a peaceful transition. They mean that a party that has no qualms about ordering its thugs to kill its own people will stay in power with their thumbs, bootheels, and various other metaphorical appendages planted squarely on the metaphorical throats of the very real people. And while I think he’s dim, I don’t think he’s quite that dim. Which just makes him, potentially, very wicked. There’s nothing like protesting protests in the name of “peace” to confuse well-intentioned people into believing that what they want isn’t important enough to break the peace. And then, to quote one of C.S. Lewis’s less savory characters, one would have carte blanche.

Via Xrlq.

But He Tries to Be a Good Person in Other Aspects of His Life

Filed under:Authors,Jerks,Priorities,Wacky Oregon — posted by Anwyn on June 19, 2009 @ 10:03 am

So that gives him a pass on calling soccer moms “brainless” and claiming people who live in the suburbs have “little to do and everywhere to drive.” Guess those soccer moms should’ve gotten off the highway and let him pass on his important business of, one hopes, leaving the state as quickly as possible.

His most recent story follows 17-year-old James Hoff through his troubling junior year of high school. He rants and raves about environmentalism and how we are all killing ourselves with our rolling smog machines. As he rages against society and capitalism, he yearns for the love of his ex-girlfriend Sadie. James’ soft side is slowly revealed in between his humorous rants.

One day after a mall visit he writes, “I love the rumor that the air in the malls is oxygen enriched to make you stupid and make you buy stuff. Why are you there if you’re not stupid and going to buy stuff?”

Soccer moms: Brainless. Mall shoppers: Stupid. Check-check.

As Nelson worked to craft the character and came up with the book’s unique narrative style (it is told as a series of journal entries, school essays and internet postings) he began to relate to his angry teenage character.

“The kind of stuff the guy does in the book is the stuff I did in high school,” he said. “I really felt like I was that kid. I was really in his brain.”

You mean, the author who thinks people who don’t live as he does are stupid can relate to a fictional teenager who thinks people who live the way he doesn’t want to are stupid? Pretty profound, you pretentious L.A. jerk.

What Are You Talking About?

Filed under:Language Barrier,Priorities,WTF? — posted by Anwyn on June 18, 2009 @ 10:04 pm

Mr. Jonathan V. Last, here, seems very opposed to and disgusted by the idea of men in the delivery room during the births of their children. Other than that, and the fact that I too despise the expression “we’re pregnant,” I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

It wasn’t until the late 1960s that men began taking the last step. Urged on by books such as Robert Bradley’s “Husband-Coached Childbirth,” men started going the distance. By 1970, the delivery room had been pried open.

All manner of idiocy followed: tape recorders, cameras, video. Husbands huffing and puffing with the mothers. The expression “we’re pregnant.” Various fads have cajoled fathers into cutting the umbilical cord or playing catcher as the baby exits the birth canal or stripping off their shirts and clutching the newborn “skin-to-skin.” By the late 1970s, a man was considered something of a monster if he didn’t at least stand north of the equator during the delivery of his child.

He spends the first nine paragraphs loathingly reciting the history of how fathers went from off the scene entirely into the delivery room, and then spends the last three chapters wailing about society’s tolerance for absent or deadbeat fathers. While I sympathize on the last score, I wish he would explain to me what the hell one has to do with the other.

Yet today it is socially acceptable to father a child without marrying the mother or to divorce her later on if mother and father actually do bother to get hitched. And at the same time there is zero tolerance for a husband who says: “No thanks, I’ll be in the waiting room with cigars.” Ms. Leavitt’s fascinating history suggests that childbirth is just one more area where our narcissism has swamped our seriousness.

Whose narcissism, exactly? A birthing mother’s narcissism in wanting the person who, theoretically, is her companion and partner in all of life’s big decisions and events, in the room with her when a drastic, potentially uncontrolled event occurs resulting in the birth of his own child? A father’s narcissism in thinking his presence is necessary for this event? Who and what? And who cares? The idea seems to be that social norms now require the father present at the birth but let him off scot-free for the rest of the child’s raising. Does Mr. Last seriously believe that a father who stands ready to abandon his child and the child’s mother is going to feel constrained by customs requiring him to cut the umbilical cord? Does he really think the majority of the country both a) derides a man as less than a man if he fails to be present in the delivery room AND b) thinks it’s okay for him to then step out of his child’s life? Of course not. The bigger question is, just how does he propose “society” control the latter? The former, according to him, was brought about by an influential book that caught on into a trend and evolved into a norm. Great. If that method is so powerful, let’s use it on the deadbeats! Oh … you mean it won’t work on irresponsible trash like them? Huh. I thought Mr. Last said they could be found dutifully at the bedsides during the delivery. Weird.

Via Hot Air headlines.

Okay, I Admit It, My Jaw Dropped

Filed under:Good Grief — posted by Anwyn on June 17, 2009 @ 8:08 pm

Billy and third wife, 33-years-younger Katie Lee, are splitting. Why am I even surprised?

Sigh. Why do I sigh? Is it the continued bad news from the camp of the artist loved not wisely but too well during all of my high school and college years? Or because it’s actually been five years since he married her–when she was 22–and one of my college roommates said, “She looks like his daughter” and his wife, my other roommate, said “That IS his daughter. This one’s his wife.” Where is MY life going, that five years have gone by in a blink? Or do I sigh simply because I always thought of Christie Brinkley as the problem in his previous marriage, but now that the Piano Man’s got three strikes I have to wonder what’s going on with *him* in these marriages?

Whatever. Sigh.

Dude

Filed under:People in Court — posted by Anwyn @ 7:24 am

Want to punish your ex’s new spouse? Move to North Carolina, where apparently they still have “alienation of affection” laws on the books:

Raeford, N.C. — A Hoke County woman owes her husband’s former wife $500,000 after a jury ruled that she broke up a 50-year marriage.

Laura Patterson sued Herlinda Basurto in December 2007, alleging alienation of affection and criminal conversation, a legal term for adultery.

Patterson blamed Basurto, 30, for seducing her husband, Alford Patterson, 69. The couple married in 1957 and divorced last year, and Alford Patterson and Basurto subsequently married.

“I don’t think that the jury knew what they were doing,” Alford Patterson said. “I mean, think about it. Half a million dollars, and Laura’s sitting at the beach now as if she’s going to get that, which she won’t. I mean, you don’t get something that isn’t there.”

He said the 50 years they spent together was anything but marital bliss.

“(We) had problems from Day 1,” he said. “Laura tried to portray this as being the most lovable marriage that ever hit the United States.”

Laura Patterson had several affairs of her own through the years, her ex-husband said.

She denied that allegation.

I actually started reading the comments, which I usually avoid on news stories. (Incidentally, the “Go Local” service that provides WRAL’s comments may have stumbled on a fitting name for most comment sections with its abbreviation: GoLo.) There’s everything in there from “if you’re going to cheat, move out of NC first” through “why blame the new wife? blame the husband” to “a woman on the jury has a cheating husband, so the verdict should be tossed.”

Via Overlawyered.

“The idea is you can’t inflict a fatal wound. Nobody could just grab one out of the kitchen drawer and kill someone.”

Filed under:Good Grief — posted by Anwyn on June 16, 2009 @ 7:44 pm

The Brits bring out a “pointless” knife in response to the wailing over kitchen knives in a country where stabbing seems to be the major means of homicide. I’m not sure the notch in the blade makes it “pointless” rather than actually sort of “double-pointed”–and as Lowering the Bar points out, that “skin-snagging” effect is probably a bug rather than a feature. But what cracks me up the most is that these are obviously meant to be real kitchen knives in every other respect–i.e. an edge sharp enough to dice carrots on the fly. Which makes the title quote, from the knife’s designer, ludicrous. Can’t kill anybody with a pointless knife, eh? Even though it’s sharp enough to slice a tomato, it won’t slice open somebody’s larynx and carotid artery? Okay, then.

How to Retard Your Teenager’s Growth Into a Responsible Adult

Filed under:It's My Life,Priorities,Rants — posted by Anwyn on June 13, 2009 @ 8:36 pm

1) Allow her to attend functions at a church you yourself do not seem particularly involved in.

2) Allow her to make her own commitments to that church, such as, for example, participation in an especially codependent music group.

3) Plan a surprise slumber party for her birthday on a Saturday night, before a big performance at church the next morning; suddenly realize, on the night of the party, that your daughter’s commitment to the previously mentioned music group will, GASP, ensure that there are three or four teenagers not of your own family lying around your house on Sunday morning without your daughter to keep charge of them, and phone the director of said music group to imply that her expectation that your daughter appear at both dress rehearsal (at a moderately early hour on Sunday morning) AND the performance (an hour after the rehearsal due to competition for rehearsal time in the sanctuary) is a bit extreme and inform her that she “may or may not see” your daughter at rehearsal, though she will be at the performance, because you don’t want to let the music group down “one hundred percent.” Only fifty percent; that’s acceptable, since of course this is YOUR convenience we’re talking about, and never mind giving your sixteen-year-old daughter the option of keeping or breaking her own commitments by the lights of HER priorities and good judgment.

And some people wonder why the director has bad dreams.

Dear Oregon, You Are Not Unilateral

Filed under:Heh,It's My Life,Wacky Oregon — posted by Anwyn @ 11:04 am

I have a voice in this too, you know. You are not Darth Vader–you can’t say “I’m altering the deal” with total impunity. You know what I’m talking about. Don’t pretend innocence. I can’t stand it in a guy and I won’t tolerate it in my state, either. We had a deal. Don’t act like your total control over the weather gives you the right to alter the provisions at any time.

Listen up: The deal was that you will provide me with warm, sometimes hot, dry summers that, while increasingly bad for my skin, are terrific for my hair. Not muggy, wet summers, either warm or cool. Consistent humidity, great for my skin and lousy for my hair, I could have in any of my more homelike states back east. You want to make it that much easier for me to depart for one of them? Keep this up.

Oh, you want to make nice now? Don’t want me taking my diversity-enhancing Republican self out of your left-wing-infested evergreen woods? You can start by NOT raining when my friend’s son is getting married outdoors tonight. From there, we’ll see.



image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace