Remembering

The  morning of September 11, 2001, I was at a friend’s house in Las Vegas.  Around 8 am, I stumbled out of bed, expecting to find my friends huddled over coffee mugs at the kitchen table. Instead I found them gathered in silence around the television.

Through blinking, bleary eyes, we watched the Twin Towers come down, over and over and over.

“Nothing will ever be the same again,” someone said.

In the aftermath, I read very few of the many articles about the attacks because I just didn’t have it in me. But I could not avoid seeing images, and two of them were so moving they’ve stuck with me for eight years.

One of them was a snapshot someone took of an offering left in front of the American Embassy in Denmark. It was a candle surrounded by flowers and a hand-lettered sign that read in English: “All of us today are USA.”

The other image was the one below.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget how these pictures made me feel, just as I will never forget that day.

Guardian Angel Ice Sculpture by artist Darlene Racicote of Ontario, Canada, originally uploaded to Flickr by jvc_scout_mom.

And on the seventh day, God created Hell

and called it Google Feeds.

Just so you fully appreciate what I go through for you: this week’s tour of Hell was made even more torturous than usual by the roughly thirty-six thousand articles about a certain third-rate entertainer who beat up his girlfriend and then took his crocodile tears to Larry King. I would rather be lashed to a hot slab and have my innards pulled out, roasted over an open fire and masticated slowly by a scaly, b.o.-reeking demon than read one more word about that asshat.

• Oh, snap:  Barney Frank handles the dining room table from Planet Moron who compares Obama’s plan for health care with Nazi policy.
• Article Title of the Week:  You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream for (Gay Marriage) Ice Cream! Sweet.
• Badass: What woman “blew the minds of the entire intellectual community like an unstoppable mushroom cloud of face-melting science” back when women were still considered to be TSTL?¹
• RIP Ted Kennedy: So many icons dead this summer. Is the apocalypse coming or what?
• Fierce:  Did you know that Beyonce is possessed by the devil? It’s totally true.
• Ain’t to proud to squat:  DO NOT WANT more shit to drag around.
• Today in Creative Rationalizations for Sexism: Pimps are people, too.
• Kiddie porn: Apparently there are a bunch of supposed adults who think Pole Dance toys are a harmless reflection of little girls’ desire to emulate adults. The chicken-shit, deliberate cluelessness of these people makes me want to ground them in their rooms for the rest of their lives.
• Ack, after that, I need funny: How about these guys. BTW, what is it with the English and cross-dressing?
• Speaking of going girlie: I am an unapologetically girlie girl. So if anyone were to put any of these gorgeous things under my tree this Christmas, particularly the bra, I would not turn such a gift rudely away.
• Fear of a Black President:  Some parents don’t want Obama talking to their kids because the Nazis told their kids to stay in school, too.
• Sick and wrong (but so damn funny):  The Teaches of Piggy.
• It’s baaaaack:  School starts with swine flu. Did you know this virus can be traced back to one adorable little towheaded pig-licker? Figures.

1. TSTL = Too Stupid To Live. I had to look it up. [↩]

Word.

Found here.

Hell is other people

…and neglected Google feeds. Welcome to this week’s interesting news according to Uppity.

• Today in Creative Rationalizations for Sexism:  Thanks to the University of the West of Scotland for exposing the terrible truth: using condoms negates the mental health benefits of  “evolutionarily relevant sex.” In other words, the more sexually transmitted diseases you share, unwanted children you spawn, and burden you put on the female for birth control, the happier you are! (Did you know they have universities in Scotland?)
• Always forward, never straight: Thirty-four years after declassifying homosexuality as a mental disorder, the American Psychiatric Association officially concludes that “reparative therapy” for gays is, to put it scientifically, bullpucky.
• Does this mean traffic will get better? Sometimes it pays to read the comments… It’s how I learned that Seattle is #11 on Forbes’ list of “abandoned cities.” Whoohoo!
• Dowry Wars: Chelsea Clinton is worth an impressive 40 goats and 20 cows, according to some guy in Kenya. I guess that must have beat the investment banker’s offer.
• Penises at the Pier:  Last weekend, this protest pissed off  a puritanical prude who’s peculiarly protective of her daughter’s prepubescent purity. Party pooper!
• The Last Monster:  Terry Pratchett’s statement about an individual’s right to die is brief but moving. I hope there are still a lot of brandies left to come for him.
• But that’s different: So the raping of men is a “symbol of unhealed Congo.” What was the raping of women a symbol of? Business as usual?
• Bill saves Laura and Euna. He always did have a soft spot for pretty girls. Seriously though, it’s awesome. I’m sorta hoping Bill will eventually take over for Jimmy Carter as the USA’s Human Rights and Diplomacy Advocate Extraordinaire.
• Speaking of human rights: Carter has left the Southern Baptist building and its sexism. Bless his uppity heart.
• This sucks: Not the breastfeeding doll itself, but the halter top it comes with. It has euphemistic daisies instead of nipple-exposing flaps. I mean, what is this teaching our little pre-pregnant tykes about flowers?!
• Gillian, Whitney, Melanie and me:  It’s our birthday today and we’re going to spend it the Sex & the City way: “tackling socially relevant issues such as sexually transmitted diseases, safe sex, and promiscuity.” And drinking.

Sound and fury, signifying very little in the grand scheme of things

aka the highlights of another Sunday morning in Feed Hell. Not a lot them this week, but most of the news was boring, the battery icon on my laptop is red, and I have to pee.  Enjoy.

• Today is International Friendship Day and the world’s silliest old bear is the Ambassador. Aww.
• We’ve survived this week’s record-breaking SUNami but not without a record-breaking amount of whining. Seriously, you have not heard whining until hear Seattle during a heat wave.  At least we got some good photos out of it.
• All the feminist blogs are posting furiously about the most recent corporate-sponsored female body image crisis: cankles.  I should be joining in the outrage but I can’t stop giggling. It’s the word, I guess. “Cankles.” Heh.
• Because marriage is sacred except when that’s no longer convenient, Sarah Palin is getting divorced.
• Apparently cussing can help alleviate pain.  See? Science is proving that we potty-mouthed folks are in touch with our inner mutherfucking healer.
• Speaking of mutherfucking, this Colbert Report video is also in heavy blog rotation these days. Nobody mocks fatherfuckers better than le Colbert.
• It’s beginning to look a lot like Summer of Death, and I’m getting tired of it. There’s only so much losing of icons in a single season that one can take. RIP Walter Cronkite.
• A friend of mine turned me on to this craft (and I use the term loosely) blog. I did the whole snort-coffee-up-nose thing when I saw this post.  If your sense of humor is even slightly warped, check out this blog immediately.

Image borrowed from Craftastrophe.net.

This Week in Hell

I subscribe to a lot of feeds on a variety of different subjects. I have almost as many feeds as favorites on Flickr. Don’t cost nuthin’, as Bluto would say.

Alas, so many feeds, so little time. I’ve had to actually work at work (geez) and we’ve already been over how much I loathe to spend my non-writing off-time sitting at a computer.  Thus my Google Reader has become the cloggy, smoggy information highway to Hell.

Luckily Hell is why god made Sunday mornings.

Out of the buttloads of news articles I skimmed, here’s a list of those that made me go hmmm, awww, LOL, or WTF? Enjoy.

• Obama Watch:  Accusations that Obama supports banning gay marriage disturbed me greatly…until I searched the net for more info and couldn’t find any. Virtually every article about this cited this one article. If what it says is true, how come no one is talking about it? Is it true and its a big cover-up? Is it a lie and I’ve been punkd? Or am I just the worst Googler evar?
• Confusing:  One article says the fashion options for plus-sized women are dwindling, the other says they’re expanding (yuk yuk). Well, which is it? Are we embracing fatness, or the shaming of it? Other than these articles, can’t find evidence that we are doing either more than usual. All I know is that if I could design/sew, I’d specialize in plus-size fashion. If the average woman is a size 16 (which is considered plus size), that translates to a big fat bank account. I can’t believe more people haven’t figured that out.
• Speaking of fat: Bacardi has taken the “fat, ugly girlfriend” ads down, but the damage to their rep has already been done. Morons. I don’t even know any men who would think this was funny.
• Depressing:  Female art directors appear to discriminate against female playwrites more than male art directors do (at least in this one study). I don’t know why I’m still surprised to find that women are products of their environment, too.
• Gay:  Credo has a sweet new graphic which they’ve conveniently made into a bumpersticker for me. I’ve needed something new with which to enrage right-wing commuters since we got rid of the Saturn and my beloved “Republicans for Voldemort” decal…
• Dumbest person EVAR: Look, I have a tattoo and I know that there is no freaking way anyone could fall asleep while a needle is being pressed into their skin over and over and over. On their face. This chick must be either incredibly dumb to think anyone would buy that story for long, or really desperate for her 15 seconds of internet fame.
• Traffic: Selling humans, especially women, is big business all over the world, and if you want to expose the thugs, you risk a lot. Like 12 years of your life. How many of us would? There’s a lot of cowardly journalists in the world, but some heroes, too.
• Hot flash: I’m so happy someone’s finally asked whether men in the throes of mid-life should hold office. After all, as we know from the various recent melt-downs of high-profile politicians, some men simply can’t keep their shit together after age 40.  Is that statement offensive to men? Good. Maybe they’ll shut up already about women, politics and menopause.
• And in men-talking-about-abortion-as-if-they-can-have-one department… a video about bribing women into giving up their rights, starring two uterus-less people, inluding - guess who? - the Asshat from Slate.
• This is getting weird:  A state government paying women to do what others want them to do with their twats? Sounds a lot like a certain illegal activity.
• It’s not just for corporations any more: My parents are getting up there in years. It’s only a matter of time before I have to buy them a one-way ticket to elder care. I hope they like curry.
• lolfeminism: Who says we don’t have a sense of humor?

Oh yeah:

• RIP: Michael and Farrah. No links for this one because you seen one celeb eulogy, you seen ‘em all. But it’s a sad time for their families and friends. And fans, of which I was one.

Image by Barry King/Getty Images, from eonline.

Banning burqas is stupid

The spokesman for the group of lawmakers behind banning burqas in France says that “wearing the burka is a submissive act, and that… is contrary to republican principles.”  Clearly they hope we’ll interpret this to mean the ban is about gender equality.

Je ne le pense pas.

I do not see anything in their statement about supporting women. At best, it is just ego, a la “What will the neighbors think?”

At worst, its a non-too-subtle attempt to oppress and intimidate a subculture.

Yes, we all know Islam has sects that treat women as inferior to men (kinda like Roman Catholicism, the primary religion in France).  But the burqa is a symptom, not a cause. That’s what makes this so transparent.

If the French were really worried about upholding their “republican principles,” they’d work on fixing the legendary sexism in their dominant culture.

Technorati Tags: France, sexism, Islam, xenophobia