March 16, 2008

InstaPunk on WhiteGate

I don't know whether the Democratic Party can or will nominate someone for whom their members will actually vote.

I just don't think Barack Obama is that person, though Senator Clinton still could be.

Whom does this benefit? Well, it starts with a "John," and it ends with a "McCain."


Via InstaPUNDIT.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 05:28 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 58 words, total size 1 kb.

Rusty's Got Some Cute Pix Up of "Kristen."

They're safe for work, too—just her and her friends, goofing off.

Of course, I thought her legs were so muscular, it was a total turnoff.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 04:47 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
Post contains 41 words, total size 1 kb.

Creepiest Thing I've Read in a While

There's a time and a place for everything, Buddy.

The woman slept most of the flight, but awoke about 20 minutes before landing when the pilot announced the plane was on decent into Los Angeles. When the woman opened her eyes, she saw that an unknown man had moved into the seat next to her and was staring at her as he masturbated, the suit states.

The woman turned toward the window in embarrassment and in an act of nervousness began to run her fingers through her hair where she noticed “a substantial amount of an extremely sticky substance in her hair,” the suit states.
The woman began to cry and tried to get the attention of a flight attendant, but was unsuccessful, the suit states. Finally a passenger in the row in front of the woman comforted her and verified the semen in her hair, the suit states.

Where the hell were the flight attendants?

Posted by: Attila Girl at 04:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 170 words, total size 1 kb.

March 15, 2008

Okay. I Don't Get It.

The new MacBook has two gigs of memory. Never mind that I remember when a single meg was a big deal—and for disk space, not memory. What I want to know is why the new machine is slower than my husband's PowerBook, with its own two gigs of RAM. It even underperforms my own old PB, with its 512 megs or whatever (that is, when the thing wasn't crashing every five minutes; but it could bring up Gmail consistently, and it didn't get upset when I had more than two windows open).

My great-great-grandfather, bringing people along the Oregon Trail to the West Coast, used to counsel them that laptops were never s reliable as desktop machines, and that they were hard on one's posture. He said that the handiness of being able to call up the Internet while at the reins of the covered wagon was far offset by having to do extra T'ai Chi to bring one's spine back into alignment.

Right again, old man.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 05:25 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 177 words, total size 1 kb.

March 14, 2008

If Only the Democrats

. . . could be as nice as we are:

So remember: the next time you learn that your opponent's staff is spreading stories about your candidate's involvement with a satanic LSD murder cult, take a deep breath, count to ten, and let it go. Sure, you could probably respond by distributing the well-documented evidence of your opponent's long history of serial necrophilia. Sure, it might temporarily feel good, and maybe it might swing a few million votes. But you have to ask yourself: to what end? Is some cushy 6-figure job in the next presidential administration -- with a probable $5 million-per-year K Street lobbying career waiting on the back end -- really worth losing your dignity and self respect over? Trust me, when your candidate's campaign is finally destroyed by some unanswered charges, and you're back waiting tables and filling out grad school applications, you'll at least have the deep personal satisfaction of knowing that you took the high road -- even when the game was on the line, even when the other team was playing dirty, and even when a well-timed "March surprise" would have easily made all the difference.

Remember, in the Bible Jesus counsels us to "turn the other cheek." This is sound advice for all Democrats and progressives, even if it comes straight out of the right wing fundies' favorite "science" book. It's time for cooler heads to prevail, and that's why I'm calling for both camps in this squabble to pledge to bring an immediate end to this self-destructive cannibalism. And by "cannibalism" I of course mean figurative cannibalism, because I would never dignify by repeating those lurid charges of actual, literal cannibalism currently being shopped around to the media by your opponent's flaks.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:54 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 299 words, total size 2 kb.

Night of the Living . . .

Dead.

Always. Trust content. From Ace.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:16 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 20 words, total size 1 kb.

Mike: Another Mean, Insensitive Guy at The Jawa Report.

Of course having a headache from bright lighting in your cell is torture.

I don't understand those guys over at Jawa.

I mean, I've been victimized in a similar way: for instance, every time someone either (1) goes a full 24 hours without visiting my website, or (2) reads my blog without hitting my tipjar, I die just a little bit inside.

I'm a victim, I tell you. And I'm a human being.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:59 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 91 words, total size 1 kb.

It Turns Out . . .

that sometimes journalists only skim the summaries in the reports they are supposed to be reading.

Shockingly, that means they get it wrong sometimes.

Even more shockingly, those with axes to grind often write the summaries, to spin the reports in one direction or another. And the media generally buy what the bureaucrats are selling.

"First, we kill all the reporters . . ."

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:46 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 76 words, total size 1 kb.

The House

. . . is voting on the FISA bill today; it doesn't look good, even after last night's sooper-secrud session.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:21 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 24 words, total size 1 kb.

March 13, 2008

"It's Christ Himself, Buddy. It's Christ Himself."

I never finished Catcher in the Rye, though I started it at least twice. And I never finished Nine Stories, either: I panicked after the bananafish. It was a tender age for me. But I could read Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters; and Seymour: An Introduction all day long.

As a matter of fact, I just did. At least, I re-read Franny and Zooey over the past week—first just snippets here and there, and finally the whole thing, once more, in sequence. I can't believe that Salinger conceived the Glass family in such detail. I can't believe how true-to-life it is, in terms of chronicaling the lives of intellectual misfits. (Yes, yes: I realize there is some exaggeration here and there. There's a cartoonish element. But the essentials ring true.)

And I'm now concerned that I may not have anything left to live for: I'd forgotten that all of the action in the Zooey part of the book takes place as the Glass family's apartment in New York is being painted. But it was a transcendent experience to re-read it as my own house was covered in plastic and tarps. I went from room to room, trying to find a good spot to perch and finish the book, as Franny was reaching under the dropcloth for a cigarette and lighter. The same smell was in the air. (And, yeah: I realize this is beyond silly. I'm not an imbecile.)

Of course, the first time I read the book it was only because I thought "Zooey" was such an interesting name. I'd been up all night, and there was nothing in my room, so I raided the brick-and-board "bookcases" in the living room at our old house in Santa Monica. (Yes. The one my mother rents out now. That very place—the two-milllion-dollar teardown.)

In those days before marriages and day jobs and houses and equity and phones to be answered and calls to be made and blogs to be maintained, there was nothing more wonderful than to drink black tea in the morning and enjoy a good book as the light got bluer and bluer, sitting out in the chilly air on the porch, facing out toward 17th Street as the neighbors took their walks and went jogging and headed to work. I think the Goldfarbs walked by in their khaki London Fog raincoats to catch the Carlyle bus, and I nodded at them rather absently. They took morning classes at Santa Monica High School, so they tended to walk by my house and catch the bus around the time I was going to bed.

Now, looking at the book itself, I see that I re-bought it in 1982, and signed it with my maiden name. I didn't dog-ear the pages, though: just made notations on the 3 x 5-inch card inside as to which passages seemed most witty and insightful.

And now the pages are all yellowed, and I've finally dog-eared the leaves with wanton abandon, just drunk with the language and the imagery and the sheer literary ballsiness of this volume.

Like I said: nothing left to live for. Except, maybe, the day this house sells, and I'll have money again. Or the day I sell my first book. Or . . . well, there may be a few more cards I can play, after all.

. . . You raved and you bitched when you came home about the stupidity of audiences. The goddamn "unskilled laughter" coming from the fifth row. And that's right, that's right—God knows it's depressing. I'm not saying it isn't. But that's none of your business, really. That's none of your business, Franny. An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's. You have no right to think about those things, I swear to you. Not in any real sense, anyway.

And that is the thing to remember. Sweet dreams: another day of fixing up the house awaits in the morning.


Darrell: I am not hinting. Don't send me a new copy of F and Z. At least, don't do it until we're settled in the new place! We're considering a high-rise, with a pool. Which might just cheer me up about leaving the hills, you know. Also, there are, as I understand it, fewer rats in Glendale than there are out here in the wilds.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:41 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 752 words, total size 5 kb.

Sean Wants To Be Wrong About Money Again.

The problem with the Euro is not that it uses color, but that it uses color badly.

And the problem, Sean, with our new U.S. currency has nothing to do with introducing spot color, but the fact that it's ugly. It was ugly without the purple "5," and it's ugly with it. Furthermore, the new designs are even uglier than the old ones, though I was never a fan of the "green only" color scheme.

Nor am I into the "every bill is one size" dealio; it makes things harder for (1) the blind, and (2) the rest of us.

What is it with you real conservatives? Change isn't bad in and of itself. Bad change is bad. Good change is good.

And who gets to decide? Well . . . me. I'll handle this. I know how.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:55 PM | Comments (20) | Add Comment
Post contains 154 words, total size 1 kb.

Look. If He Was Involved in a Scandal That Had a Sexual Component to It,

then he must be a Republican. Maybe he just didn't know it. Like, he was a closet Republican or something. I mean, you have to come out to yourself before you can come out to the rest of the world.

Right?

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:04 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 71 words, total size 1 kb.

Come on, Rusty.

We know what the reporters for The New York Times are. We're just haggling over price.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 22 words, total size 1 kb.

"Chicks Aren't Funny, Man!"

. . . "Er, if they are, they're funny in a masculine way. Or maybe a Jewey way."

Okey-doke, Chrissy. Nothing more butch than a Jewess.

Fausta's looking for comments on the latest kerfuffle between Christopher Hitchens and the comediennes of our day. My comment at her site:

I know maybe a dozen truly funny people, and I'd say about 40% of them are women. What Hitchens is getting at is that humor is an aggressive act, and therefore comedy is a sandbox that men have preferred to play in.

But it's silly to argue as he does that most funny women are "masculine" in some way. After all, most female astronauts are "masculine" by some measure. So are most female hunters. And female race car drivers. Even female doctors. We're not made of sugar water.

Is there a "feminine" sense of humor that women have abandoned for the more "masculine" variety practiced by Sarah Silverman, Amy Sedaris, et al.? Well, maybe: Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett come to mind—there's a gentler form of humor that women engaged in in the 20th Century.

One can go back a few hundred years to Jane Austen, however, and see that chicks have been funny for a long time.

But whether one does it gently, a la Austen, sardonically, a la Virginia Woof, or brutally, a la Sarah Silverman, to make a joke is to poke someone in the ribs. It may not come from genuine "animus," in the sense of it emerging from a real grudge—but it certainly doesn't come from anima.

The answer is, so what? Hitchens is trying to be provocative. But I'd like to see him try to get me to laugh . . . It isn't that easy.

Acually, I'm not parsimonious with my laughter—I don't play it like a studio executive who's scared that if he/she laughs at the pitch, the writer or producer will think he/she made the sale. (Or, to put it in Hitchens' terms, I'm not afraid that a guy will equate a laugh with sexual availability.)

And I'm not a humorist, though I know a few of 'em.

I never read Hitchens' original article on the subject, though I suspect I will now. I wonder if it'll get a rise out of me, or if I'll just think it's darling of him—like his antagonism to religion, his sentimental attachment to Marxism, and his genuine vanity. I adore Hitch, but I can't take any of that stuff seriously.

"If you can't make 'em laugh, you don't have a chance." Hm. By that measure, I've only had sex with two or three men in my life, and no women. (The real figures are, um, a smidge north of there.)

Like I said—I'm not a funny woman, so I don't think I have a real dog in this fight. But I do know that the debate has been raging for a long time. (Read that book, if you can find it. The "How to Seduce a Feminist" essay is worth the price, all on its own.)

Ace (funny guy and secret defender of women-who-haven't-gotten-on-his-bad-side) has this to say about Hitch:

Whether you agree with his point or not (and I don't—he's just making shit up as he goes to be provocative, but there's no crime in that), it isn't the offhandedly brutal bit of antisemitism (and anti-lesbianism, and No Fat Chickery) it seems to be at first. He's just rescuing his point by setting those three categories apart and branding them a sub-type of male humor.

Anyway, more ammo for the gender war, I guess.

Man, is Kirstin Wiig cute. I would hit that like the cannonball hitting the fat guy's belly in slow motion.

By the way, I'm not really kissing up to women again in saying Hitchens is just making shit up. Of course man are more frequently funny than women, and of course men are funnier than women on average, and all the rest of it. I mean, duh.

But his original article claimed there were no funny women (except those male-ish dykes, Jews, and fatties), which is obviously just stupid.

But it is getting the boy—Hitchens—some ink—and female attention. Which is what he was after in the first place, by his own admission.

UPDATE: Someone want me to play hardball? I can do that now, without even reading Hitch's original article. (And I'm not sure I want to do that, unless he wants to read it aloud to me while sucking down some Johnny Walker Blue and telling me how fabulous my white American teeth look, while keeping his dirty Limey paws to himself.

Are you ready?

Dorothy. Freakin'. Parker.

So, deal.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 12:49 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 788 words, total size 5 kb.

Waxing Poetic

. . . on the Spitzer scandal.

(So far, there are takeoffs on T.S. Eliot, S.T. Coleridge, and Lewis Carroll. Join the fun!)

Posted by: Attila Girl at 12:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 27 words, total size 1 kb.

Random Line from Planes, Trains, and Automobiles:

"You're going the wrong way! You're going the wrong way!"

To which John Candy replies, "how do they know which way we're going? They must be drunk."

Steve Martin: "Yeah; how would they know?"

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:40 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 48 words, total size 1 kb.

Et Tu, Larry?

Larry Elder writes a positive article about Obama that stops just short of endorsing the divine "Mr. Cloudo."*

barackrollingstone2.jpg


(Well. In a Swiftian way.)

He keeps getting richer, and he finally got his picture
On the cover of the Rolling Stone . . .

* More nicknames for the transcendent Senator O.—inspired by the Rolling Stone cover—are available here, courtesy of Amelie Gilette, whom I got turned onto yesterday by Professor Reynolds.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:49 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 77 words, total size 1 kb.

March 12, 2008

A Little Touch of Harry in the Night.

[Yeah; I know I've already used that headline for posts related to the Harry Potter franchise. But I like it. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Think how this reduces my carbon footprint . . .]

Warner Brothers will be splitting the final installment of the Harry Potter book into two halves, which means that mathematicians may be displeased by the final result: the seven-book series will yield an eight-film series.

It could be that they should have been splitting all the books after the first one, which would mean that there would be a total of 15 movies, and that a lot less meat would have been hacked off the last few.

Yeah, I'm joking. Sort of. I know that the filmmakers try to err on the side of pleasing me! me! me! (all of us, really) rather than catering to the muggles, but there's always a cut (or three) that upsets me.

And, of course, I realize that those kids they cast are growing up too quickly. But couldn't they have given them drugs or something, to stunt their growth?

I'm just trying to think outside the box, here.

The movie version of The Half-Blood Prince is due out this fall. I don't usually read up before another movie comes out, but I'm considering ripping through the entire series one more time sometime soon, in preparation for (only) my second reading of Deathly Hallows. That one was so structurally different from the others that it absolutely should be chopped into two movies. It was a tough nut to crack, and I knew it would be. I generally try to read a murder mystery—or a Potter book—all the way through in one sitting. But those MFs are so long.


Finally, there I was in San Diego, at Siggraph, reading Hallows at the Holiday Inn two freeway stops away from downtown. What a great book. What an amazing fucking book. I had to somewhat reduce my partying at the convention, but it was for a good cause.

This year—Calloo, Callay!—Siggraph is in Los Angeles again. Which means that unless I get a windfall that allows me to crash downtown for a few nights, I'll be commuting from home (probably a condo in Glendale, by then). If I do have a few extra bucks, and I can stay downtown for a night or two, I shall definitely be taking some primo reading material. And I'm not talking about the fuckin' internet.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 390 words, total size 2 kb.

Dr. Helen on Male-Bashing.

I generally agree with the good doctor on these issues: not only is there way too much male-bashing out there for my taste, but I'm sure there's a lot more than I actually see, because I self-select against it; I don't much care for sexism in either direction.

I'm not an authority on gender relations, since I haven't seen any healthy marriages up close in real life.

There are, of course, four leading men in my life: my father, who loves it when I pick on him, because what is bullying behavior from his wives is just cunning when it's his older daughter tearing him down (yes—I don't do it often any more; I know it isn't healthy); my older brother and real father figure, who withdraws from me, judges the hell out of me, and loves me secretly far more than he will ever let on; my husband, whom I tend to either cater to or take for granted—but love desperately, all the same (and if only that were enough to sustain a relationship—it's "necessary, but not sufficient"); and my best friend Count Linguist, who is often accused of being "gay-like" because he's a die-hard nonviolent intellectual—though he is as brutal verbally as any serial killer is in the blood-and-guts realm—and, oddly enough, he is the strongest person physically I've ever met, if one were simply measuring raw upper-body power.

All that said, I do think people need to let off steam, particularly when they feel dominated by their spouses—which, let's face it, everyone is. Marriage is never easy, and it certainly isn't for wimps.

But there is a point beyond which one shouldn't go. If you're blowing off steam, you can make a couple of pointed remarks about your spouse the way one might talk about upper management (or the Board of Directors, or the stockholders, or any "ball and chain") at a company for which you work, and at which you largely like to work: "God love 'em; they aren't perfect—much as I sometimes wish they were. I do, however, respect the good in what they are accomplishing."

There are certain things that are simply beyond the pale: suggesting that your husband or boyfriend isn't a "real man" (which, of course, he would be if he only did what you want him to do, all the damned time), suggesting he's a little boy for having any human emotions, or holding against him whatever intellectual limitations he might incur as a result of being male. (This is often combined with taking advantages of the areas wherein his brain provides benefits to the household or partnership: "You're so absent-minded, Honey; here's the map, by the way. You navigate." Not cricket, people.)

I wouldn't know about the last, precisely. My mapping and spatial relationship skills run, as withmy-anything-mathematical, to either very good, or very bad. (Like my parallel parking, or my restaurant arithmetic/tip calculations. I'm either on, or completely off.)

But between two people each person will always have strengths and weaknesses, and it's just as well to acknowledge one's weaknesses on those occasions when one is trumpeting one's strengths.

Otherwise, male or female, one risks turning into a monster.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:22 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 538 words, total size 3 kb.

Marine Insurance*

Via The Anchoress, a nice little Comedy Central segment on Code Pink vs. the U.S.M.C.:

David Linden and I had a discussion in the early 1980s about Berkeley vs. Boston. He had just got back from a trip to Massachusetts, and thought Boston was sort of a "snotty" city. "I mean," he remarked, "that entire place could use a very large Kleenex."

"But isn't Berkeley just as snotty in its own way?" I enquired.

"Well," he responded, "I've never got the impression in Berkeley that it wasn't okay to be an academic. But I certainly had that feeling in Boston."

I do love Berkeley, but part of its charm is its willingness to degenerate into self-caricature. It is a place devoid of irony. Very earnest. And, yes: the crepes are very good there.

My brother The Panther, a muti-decade denizen of the SF Bay Area, has accused me of being "very Los Angeles," and I imagine that's supposed to be a putdown. And yet, one would never hear an Angeleno sigh and remark, upon contemplating a menu in a cute little cafe, that she is "always torn between the sweet and the savory," as David's ex-girlfriend did with me some years ago. I stifled a smile. Torn. Torn.

Because Bay Area folks are every bit as Bay as I am an Angeleno. (Or Angelena. I never can decide whether to feminize that word; most Spanish speakers tell me not to bother, that it can function like the German mann.)

I was never able to get mad at the Berzerkleyites over the Marine recruiting issue; the whole thing just made me giggle. Berkeley is Berkeley, as obligated to act out its role as keeper of the 1960s flame as any picturesque little town along the Rhine, with its people traipsing around in traditional costumes of their own sort. Caught in the past, dependent upon its tourist traps. Living the dream. Have some wine, Man.


* Title stolen from a comedy skit written by my favorite former Marine.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 04:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 340 words, total size 2 kb.

<< Page 8 of 12 >>
82kb generated in CPU 0.0986, elapsed 0.2786 seconds.
216 queries taking 0.2533 seconds, 537 records returned.
Powered by Minx 1.1.6c-pink.

Search Thingy



Recent Comments

Categories

Archives

Blogroll

Sample link

Monthly Traffic

  • Pages: 35285
  • Files: 448
  • Bytes: 308.7M
  • CPU Time: 80:30
  • Queries: 6862135

Content

  • Posts: 5241
  • Comments: 12905

Feeds


RSS 2.0 Atom 1.0