. . . that I haven't pissed off my social conservative readers in a while. So, here goes.

I agree with the current meme to the effect that the circus surrounding Cindy Sheehan resembles the one that encircled Terri Schiavo. And that there were/are supporters of both the Schiavo parents and Ms. Sheehan taking the stance that "our emotion trumps your appeal to reason, so we are immune to any criticism. So shut the fuck up."

And that it's not very nice to put words into the mouths of those who cannot speak, whether it's because they are in a PVS or because they are dead. (Though in fairness, I'll admit that Terri Schiavo's wishes were far more ambiguous than Casey Sheehan's: the man made his desire to serve his country very, very clear. There is something especially unattractive about a woman infantalizing her adult son once he has died and cannot speak up to remind her that he is a man, not a boy.)

Posted by: Attila at 03:12 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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This is hilarious: Joal Ryan points out that all celebrity bloggers aren't really equal. In fact, he hints rather delicately that there are actors out there who cannot write at all.

My favorite celebrity web site? Easy: Pierce Brosnan's.

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Evan Coyne Maloney has a nice summary of the various technologies available for travelling web junkies. I'm still hoping that my new bitchin' T-Mobile phone will solve this problem for me without my having to lug the PowerBook around everywhere I go: I should at least be able to check my mail with it, and I should have some web access using it directly (as a matter of fact, the phone does have bluetooth, so I should be able to use it to tap in through my computer in the manner Even describes).

But I'm just not willing to shell out the kind of money Evan's talking about, and I don't travel nearly as much as he does. For instance, I didn't even try to use the internet while I was on the plane during my last trip, because I was going "gypsy-style," trying to keep my expenses down as much as possible. Of course, when I got to the Newark airport and discovered that my connecting flight to Hartford had been delayed by three hours, I broke down and paid the 6.95 the Port Authority charges for web access from NY/New Jersey airports. Happily. (Do most airports offer this pay-for-use WiFi deal?)

And it's nice to know that most Holiday Inns offer free WiFi; it's just the cheaper motels I favor when I travelling sans husband that don't. I also know that more and more public squares and parks are now featuring free hot spots. And while Siggraph was going on, the L.A. Convention Center was one big free hot spot: it was lovely, though if they hadn't done that I think there might have been blood running in the streets.

But that Bluetooth option: now that Even's mentioned it, I might try that in order to live-blog the Liberty Film Festival this October. (The Beverly Center may offer cutting-edge design, but it doesn't have WiFi, as the convention center does. Last year I was cut off, and had to do nightly summaries from home. Very primitive.)

Posted by: Attila at 10:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I'm just working on this book query thingie, so I'll be in fiction-land most of the day today.

See you tonight/tomorrow!

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1 That's OK. You right-wing nutjobs are in fiction-land all the time as far as the rest of the country is concerned!

Posted by: Prof. Purkinje at August 17, 2005 10:33 AM (imA2j)

2 I'm assuming "the rest of the country" means LA, SF, NYC, and academic circles . . . You're back in the country! Yay! How's it feel?

Posted by: Attila Girl at August 17, 2005 10:37 AM (Ud5Hh)

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. . . who the people are behind Cindy Sheehan "anti-war" campaign, you might start here.

[h/t Lair]

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In her own words.

UPDATE: Enough with the name-calling in the comments section; I'll handle the immature behavior around here. If you have a view, state it clearly without attacking private citizens (Sheehan's placed herself in the public spotlight, so you can call her names—though I'd rather you didn't).

If you support her—why? If you feel she's dishonoring her son, how?

Thanks.

Posted by: Attila at 02:59 AM | Comments (49) | Add Comment
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. . . I could read Eggagog all day.

UPDATE: Has anyone else ever noticed that substituting a hyphen for the equal sign in the html for a link is completely ineffective?

Posted by: Attila at 01:59 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 That's nice. Now how do we get there? (a little OC goes a long way

Posted by: Desert Cat at August 15, 2005 09:28 PM (xdX36)

2 I'd say it's high time someone write a "tagchecker" program, similar to spellchecker--it could highlight broken tags or unrecognized html with wavy green or red lines, similar to the spelling and grammar check in Word. Or for more serious html, (like fiddling with a template), one could click on a starting tag, and the program would highlight everything up to the corresponding closing tag, for example--sort of like Excel does when you click on the components of a formula.

Posted by: Desert Cat at August 16, 2005 08:29 AM (xdX36)

3 Alternatively, I could learn to type

Posted by: Attila Girl at August 16, 2005 01:35 PM (Ud5Hh)

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I spot my husband in the hallways, but I don't look at him. I keep my head down, and pretend not to see him. He's engaged in the same game, and starts whistling.

As I brush by, I "accidentally" graze my arm along his butt. I know retaliation will be an attempt to tickle me, so I draw back and my hands come up into the defensive position I learned in jujitsu (which has been refined by two years of T'ai Chi). Attila the Hub uses both, along with Okinawan Karate, his hand-to-hand combat training, some Push Hands (a Tai Chi offshoot) and good old-fashioned street fighting from his teenaged years.

"Oh, hey, Honey. I didn't see you there," I exclaim.

"Are you all right, Babe? You seem a little jumpy."

"Me? Jumpy? I'm just trying to get into the bathroom there."

"Well, go ahead."

"I'm tired. You can move past me first. Because you trust me, right?"

"Right." Immediately, his right hand comes down toward the ticklish part of my ribs, but I know his moves and offer only a token defense against that hand. The real assault, I know, is going to come from his left one, and I'm ready to block it hard.

I break free, untickled, from his attempt at grasping my two hands together in one of his (it is, of course, fatal to let him accomplish this). I walk quickly to the dining room, the husband in hot pursuit, coaxing me all the time to let my guard down. "Honey, why are you running?"

"I'm not running. I'm walking briskly. I just remembered something I had to get out here," and I roll under the table. I always go low when I can; it's one of my best weapons.

Suddenly, he straightens up and says, "Babe, and you sure there's nothing wrong? I mean, you seem to be crawling around under the dining room table."

"Well, you know. I dropped an earring under there this morning, so I was just retreiving it."

I emerge from the other side of the table, but he's around to that side in an instant. He moves on me then, pinning my arms and tickling that spot between my ribs that makes me squirm. I let him, but when he's done I lead him to the spot at the top of the stairs, place him one stair down from me (so we're closer to the same height) and kiss him long and slow.

"Kato Kato! Not now!" he murmurs in his Peter Sellers/Pink Panther voice, and I give him one more peck on the lips. Then I go off to the bathroom, and he goes downstairs to his den.

When I was in my jujitsu class they always marvelled at my ability to "think on my feet" and perform maneuvers that weren't official jujitsu moves at all.

I wonder how I got good at that.

Posted by: Attila at 01:42 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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cuts the NYT a new one for its [lack of] war reporting.

Via Photon Courier, the world's most underappreciated blog.

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. . . because Ilyka suggests that human beings should try to distinguish between thinking and feeling.

And, you know, try to use the former more than the latter when they attempt to comment on policy issues.

I think she's been co-opted into the patriarchy; don't you? I mean, she's practically turning into a man before our very eyes!

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1 Hahaha! Wild--did the trackback not go through for this or something? Thanks for pointing this out. It's just, y'know, that they're, well, cuter in the patriarchy. It's like a hemp-free zone over here!

Posted by: ilyka at August 18, 2005 01:05 AM (z+oQt)

2 They do bathe more, which is nice. Yeah, I don't know what's up with the trackbacks. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't.

Posted by: Attila Girl at August 18, 2005 01:10 PM (Ud5Hh)

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There's a great (and somewhat disgusting) article by David Sedaris in the current issue of GQ. Go out and read it in print: steal it from your dentist's office or something. (I don't believe in rewarding magazines that don't provide full articles online, so try not to pay for the damned thing. How are your shoplifting skills?)

Or, if you're just too busy, there's an excerpt here, but the original is better. And there's not too much of it.

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This is an ooky girl stuff post. Reading it constitutes consent to hear about the female reproductive system, and not in that somewhat arousing chick-blogger's-lesbian-fantasies way, either.

Having been through fertility treatments and assorted other examinations, I'm starting to consider myself a Sonogram Veteran.

This last time it was because I had some kind of strange occasional pain in my right ovary. "If we want to be safe," the OB-GYN had cautioned, "we should have an ultrasound."

"I'll check to see if the insurance will cover it," I replied. I was assured that it would, so we went merrily ahead.

I can never help asking them to identify my organs, but have you ever looked at those little screens they use?—the shapes that are pointed out don't look like anything on those charts the grade school teachers show us when they want to explain how our menstrual cycles will work. The images on the screen aren't even shapes, exactly: they're lines and little bits of light, harder to see than a spider's web in a dark hallway.

As the doctor works the probe around he points out the uterus (one curved silvery line) and the bladder (a dark speck) and the ovaries in turn (they look like tiny little round spots of television static, as if you were watching TV in the old days and turned to a channel that didn't exist: just white-and-black "snow").

Every time I go in wanting to believe that I'll see real reproductive organs, and every time I feel as if I'm trying to see the animals someone else envisions in random cloud patterns. But the guy who imagines he can see my uterus and ovaries is wearing a white coat, and I don't want to seem like an idiot. So he says, "here's the uterus, here's your right ovary," and I exclaim, "how fascinating" and sort of nod.

There's nothing there. There's never anything really there. The emperor is wearing less than I am, lying on that table.

This time, he suggests that they need an "overall view," so of course they put some more lube below my belly button and he rubs the wand around on my lower abdomen to appease whatever spirits live in the machine behind the little dark screen.

"See? The images are less distinct, but you can see them in relationship to each other."

"Isn't that interesting?" I respond, hoping that the Sonogram Spirits are now happy and I can put on my clothes. And, yes, of course: The images were so clear when the wand was inside me.

Finally, he pronounces my reproductive system "perfect," and I tell him I always knew it was, deep down. And then he lets me know that ultrasound doesn't always spot ovarian cancer. Naturally, I want to shriek that there's no point in undergoing this silly exercise if he can't promise, Scout's Honor, that there aren't any icky yucky cells inside me. But I'm in my 40s and know things don't work like that: even the professionals who talk to the Sonogram Spirits are fallible sometimes. So I thank him, wait for him and his assistant to leave, and put my clothes back on.

Before I leave I look one more time at the machine. I'm severe with it. I raise one eyebrow ever-so-slightly. "Don't fuck with me, Spirits," I warn. And I sweep out the door.

I feel that I was fairly clear.

So now I'm safe. I faced the Ovarian Cancer Spirits down, and they blinked.

Posted by: Attila at 11:46 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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. . . these days. This is a cheery little piece about multiculturalism taken too far. Some Europeans will find it strangely . . . familiar.

But also take the time to scroll down Iowahawk's main page. Is it possible he's getting even weirder lately? (And I mean that it the good way.)

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. . . he used to share his two rules for survival if I suddenly found myself in a horror movie:

1) Do not shower or bathe;

2) Do not have sex.

Here are a few more.

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Lair is an evil-freakin'-genius.

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And is that a tatt on his right front hip?

But I do like a little upper-body mass, too. Perhaps MK has more pix for us?

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. . . speculates about what Martha's catchphrase (the equivalent to "you're fired") will be in the next Apprentice series. I happen to find that subject endlessly fascinating, as that sentence will be a trademark for the show (just as Trump's is for his version).

Posted by: Attila at 02:32 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 "It's a good thing" comes to mind.

Posted by: Sissy Willis at August 13, 2005 10:49 AM (N6LnR)

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Sometimes when I read Lair my jaw just drops open for a moment. Then I start to laugh. There's generally something appalling-yet-hilarious going on. Like this.

Via Desert Cat.

UPDATE: You know, I thought I should check that link. For some reason I just thought I should verify that it worked. But then I figured, "hey, if I screwed up, someone will let me know. They always do. And it ain't like I'm getting paid."

Anyway, it's fixed now. At least I think it is. I didn't check it, of course.

Posted by: Attila at 11:08 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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1 Most importantly, Deskmerc provided the coinage... I mean exercise equipment.

Posted by: Laurence Simon at August 12, 2005 05:26 AM (uBCxH)

2 You people think of everything

Posted by: Attila Girl at August 12, 2005 01:11 PM (Ud5Hh)

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Goldstein has the definitive roundup/debate.

Posted by: Attila at 05:16 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Right-of-center bloggers pick their favorite public figures on the right.

Of course, if John would confine himself to asking me, these polls would be less representative—but somehow more correct.

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