February 28, 2006

"Thanks so much" for wasting my time

As if we needed another reason to despise Elizabeth Vargas, look who just received the highest honor a flake reporter can receive: an invitation to the White House for a "conversation" with President Bush.

And hey, no way could this be a PR move–let's go right ahead and devote two-thirds of our evening news broadcast to it! After all, we wouldn't want to deprive a wider audience of such gems as "I got ample capital, and I'm usin' it to spread freedom" in response to a question about Bush's new all-time-low approval rating of 34 percent.

Watching the dueling phony smiles and blathering banter was bad enough, but when the president yammered on for several minutes about home, family and unconditional love, I was beginning to seriously regret deciding to eat dinner while watching the news.

Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh–I know it's been keeping me up at night wondering of our poor, fragile little vice president, in the aftermath of his "quail incident," "Is he doing OK?" Well, thanks to you and your pathetically exaggerated sympathy, Ms. Vargas, now we know he's surviving.

And I wasn't aware of this, but apparently, a foreign policy of waging frivolous, perpetual war is actually a coherent, visionary strategy of acting "as an agent of peace in the world," "laying the foundations for peace." According to future historians according to President Bush, at least.

Oh yes, and the important thing to know about Iraq is not that it appears to be descending into sectarian civil war, or that American soldiers revealed in a survey out today that the vast majority want to be out within a year regardless of whether the mission is accomplished, but that the president's policy regarding it has not changed, and therefore everything is fine.

Plus, as Ms. Vargas so astutely observed, we got to see that Dubya's desk in the Oval Office is really clean–and oh so very shiny! Why do I even watch this freak show any more?

To top it all off, they slap Charlie Gibson up on a balcony over Bourbon Street wearing a pink button-down shirt (and totally ripping off the black-scarf-around-the-neck my hot celebrity manservant started last month) to cover Mardi Gras, apparently the only other event of consequence going on in the world at present.

All it was missing were some fat, drunken revelers in the background waving beads and audibly shouting for him to take it off (or doing so themselves), and it would have been local news.

Somewhere, I would like to believe, Peter Jennings is giving that "what a load of crap, you fucking losers" smirk he smirked so very well.

A sign from humans playing god

Sometimes, it seems, certain ideas just won't let you abandon them.

It all started with a little cartoon character I invented on a psychology quiz in high school. (Yes, I had extra time and drew him in the margin - shut up, you can only wish you were ever half that cool.) His name was Sparky the Slow-Learning Lab Rat, for, in comic and tragic symbolism of so many facets of the human condition, he just couldn't stop pushing the proverbial lever despite the unceasing shocks. Here's a shoddy yet evocative re-imagining:



He was soon followed by Lumpy the Morbidly Obese Lab Rat, who lumbered along in a textbook for that very same course. Here's a scan:



Charming fellow, isn't he? These two misfits were going to be the beginnings of a children's (or warped adults') book series about a pack of lab rodents with bizarre "superpowers." Their adventures would be not only hilarious and oh-so-witty in their biting interspecies social commentary, but would also be delightfully offensive enough that PETA wouldn't usurp the texts as treatises against animal testing.

Unfortunately, my gallows humor Muse must have been occupied with other projects at the time, for nothing ever came of this one.

Flash ahead several years, and enter a story off the AP news wire, bearing the intriguing slug "mouse ranching," all about the strange, exotic and highly amusing world of genetically engineering custom mice for use in medical research:
BAR HARBOR, Maine (AP) – When it comes to the price of mice, you pay more for defects.
A mouse with arthritis runs close to $200; two pairs of epileptic mice can cost 10 times that. You want three blind mice? That'll run you about $250. And for your own custom mouse, with the genetic modification of your choosing, expect to pay as much as $100,000.
Always a mainstay of scientific research, mice have become a critical tool in the quest for new drugs and medical treatments.
It turns out that a mouse's genes are so similar to a person's that with proper manipulation – either by man or nature – they can produce an animal with an ailment akin to virtually any human medical condition. Mice with Alzheimer's disease, obesity, diabetes, cancer and countless other ailments are being used to study both the illnesses themselves and potential treatments.
Arthritic mice, cancerous mice, epileptic mice, demented mice–add a mouse with Tourette's, and you've got yourself some high class comedy right there. But wait...
Mice were the obvious choice for breeding experiments. Small, docile and more than willing to reproduce, they were also readily available from the collections of Victorian mouse fanciers who bred the animals to have interesting coat colors and patterns. Many of today's most popular lab mouse strains are direct descendants of those original "fancy mice."
It just keeps getting better: Sir Reginald Von Pelt III, Esquire, the Dandy Fancy Mouse!

To complete my rodentian tableau of contemporary mankind, I would also need a doomsday cultist mouse with a Messiah complex, a mouse exhibiting Stockholm Syndrome that becomes attached to its captors, a Leibnizian/Panglossian "best of all possible worlds" mouse that keeps its chronic and irrational optimism throughout its sick and sadistic suffering and, of course, the resistant nihilist mouse that spends all its time self-mutilating and writing melodramatic poetry in what it deep down knows to be a futile search for meaning in the entire affair.

I think this enterprise has some true potential–plus, current discourse on bioethical issues and human rights issues like torture would provide cultural resonance. Not to mention...
And the award for sheer weirdness goes to Xenogen, an Alameda, Calif., outfit that can hitch the gene of interest to one that codes for the protein that makes fireflies glow. The result: Whenever and wherever the gene being studied switches on inside the mouse, it glows.
Luminescent mice to boot? That means one sure guarantor of coolness is also in the bag: shininess.

Publishers, you know how to reach me.

February 27, 2006

They're not unwanted, they're just experiencing periods of deferred adoration

South Dakota's Republican Gov. Mike Rounds is expected any day now to sign or, less likely, veto the bill passed in that state's Legislature Friday banning abortion, and the pro-lifers out there are already pledging donations to fight its inevitable court challenges.

One fine anonymous soul, who apparently can't find any gestated lives in need of his financial help, has pledged $1 million to help eradicate the abortion clinics that are spread as thick as missile silos throughout the state–all one of them–and punish doctors with up to five years in prison for violating the ban.

The South Dakota bill is about as restrictive as they come, with no exceptions for rape, incest or best promoting health–abortion would be allowed only if necessary to save a woman's life.

South Dakota legislators, led by a woman, are thumbing their righteous red-state noses at the many courts that have in the past followed some incarnation of the "undue burden" rule and struck down laws far more laissez faire than this one for violating it. The Supreme Court, in its most recent abortion ruling, overturned a Kansas law banning "partial-birth abortion" because it did not include an exemption for cases in which the procedure's allowance would protect a woman's health.

Basically, this ban is a stunt. If by some small miracle it makes it to the Supreme Court, the Court would first have to decide to take it. If it did, despite the addition of Justices Roberts and Alito, it is far from certain it would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

And this is just a personal conspiracy theory, but I think whether the Court will take it up and when it would rule will be influenced if not dictated by concordant timing with the legislative and executive election cycles.

Can you imagine if Roe was overturned and the abortion matter was passed over to the states? For at least the following two elections for just about every office less than president and greater than city councilman, this country would see maniacal single-issue voting of the likes only the extremest of extremists have experienced.

On the one hand, it might actually lessen the chronic political-correctness obsession so many candidates are captive to and make for some more humanized, entertaining campaigning. On the other hand, it might just increase the PC-ism while still doing likewise. If you think attaching personal "pork" provisions to bills is rampant now, just wait...

"Abortion is an abomination and I will see it driven from this scrupled state at the points of pitchforks if necessary! And not only that, if you send me to Washington, I will also fight for the people of this state who have been born!

"To protect this and every corner of the homeland, I will propose the 'Blazing Barrels of Freedom Act,' which would allow any man, woman or 8-year-old child exercising the God-given right to bear arms to shoot on sight anyone they have the slightest reason to suspect is engaged in activities that could in any way be conceived of as aiding, abetting, sympathizing with or not explicitly and actively opposing abortion, terrorism or anything at all Maureen Dowd might support, not merely without fear of prosecution, but with monetary reward!

"To create jobs, I will immediately propose legislation to ban women from holding professional occupations. They'll need to stay at home to nurture all the potentially wanted children my principled stance against the abortion evil will bless with a flowering of the life endowed upon them by the Creator.

"I will also get to work right away scrapping every social entitlement program that allows the lazy to leech off those of us bestowed with the divine grace to succeed in the free market. Why waste resources on universal health care or secular public education when we could be inventing and stockpiling new weaponry to use in the upcoming End Time holy war against Islam?

"Indeed, here's what I have to say to all the anxiously waiting abortion survivors out there: I promise I will keep you from being murdered in the womb–after that, it's your turn! Take ownership of your lives and the opportunities all around you–you can thank us later. We have to get busy ridding your new home of gays, hippies, infidels, cripples and ethnic minorities. Sieg Heil! SIEG HEIL!

"Oh, and God bless America."

February 24, 2006

Window-shopping the marketplace of ideas

It's time for more weaving together of seemingly disparate events into a pseudo-entertaining and quasi-rational exploration, so sit back and enjoy, or endure. (They really need to make a game show out of this–I would, quite plainly, dominate.)

There have been all sorts of news reports in recent weeks on the supposed dangers of social networking sites like MySpace, which have become endemic time-wasters for the young'ns among us. Our good, moralizing (and not at all a douchebag) pal David Brooks was among the first to sound the alarmist bells in his New York Times column–apparently (and disturbingly), he either spotted or started a trend.

Soon "experts" were warning teens using these sites were putting themselves at risk. For instance:
Police in Middletown, Conn., are investigating recent reports that as many as seven local girls were sexually assaulted by men in their 20s who contacted them through MySpace pretending to be teenagers.
My first thought was, oh man, if that were Middleton, Wis., I would have to pause and seriously wonder whether I knew who a few of those guys were. Then I read on:
Many schools have responded by restricting Internet access from school computers. One private school in Newark, N.J., ordered students to remove all personal blogs from the Internet, even if accessed from home, to protect them from online predators.
Well, isn't that nice of them. Those silly things called "individual rights" are overrated, anyway. I then spotted an AP Wire story carrying this lead:
DOVER, Del. (AP) – A reporter and copy editor for a weekly newspaper was fired after his editor objected to comments posted by the reporter on his personal Web log, or blog.
Apparently this fellow, on the blog on his MySpace page, made "many sexual references, along with a complaint about [his] black neighbors partying late into the night Jan. 15 because they didn't have to get up for work the following day: Martin Luther King Jr. Day."

His editor said such entries were "extremely offensive and just contrary to what we believe here," and "just so beyond the pale he could not possibly represent us."

That, of course, is profoundly disturbing and perhaps mildly insane. We've all heard of bloggers being fired for publishing insults about their employers, but this is a new one: Apparently, personal views we express in our personal lives now have to "represent" any organizations we work for. What next, they'll have to funnel through the corporate PR office before they can leave an individual's mind?

If they're not affecting how someone does his job, what right does an employer have to even pay attention to an employee's personal views, much less fire him for them? It's not only unfair but illegal for employers to factor in gender, religion, marital status and all sorts of things that are supposed to remain behind some philosophical veil of ignorance in the ideal working world–how is this possibly OK?

When people start suffering sanctions in certain arenas of their lives for statements they make in what are reasonably held to be separate others, that's just creepy.

Now, let me preface this next jaunt by saying I am not endorsing or making excuses for a Holocaust denier–but the recent conviction in Austria of "historian" David Irving, famous for arguing gas chambers never killed people in Auschwitz, to three years in prison for Holocaust denial is also unsettling.

To me, Holocaust denial is much like "intelligent design:" it is an ideological agenda that contains no substance of its own and merely antagonizes legitimate thinkers in the field to drum up "evidence" of a controversy and rile up its proselytizers.

And as much as I'd enjoy it if we started tossing creationists behind bars as well, isn't incarceration for idiocy a tad harsh? Sure, it might set an example, but couldn't it also merely martyr the message and the source, further energizing its carriers?

And what will locking this man up accomplish? Irving does not pose a substantive threat. His ideas were never given credence to begin with, and he admitted during his well-publicized trial that he came to be convinced they were wrong, and that he was wrong to have broadcast them.

Looking at this country's leadership, isn't that something human beings should be encouraging instead of punishing with loss of liberty?

We've currently got an administration that is so averse to admitting wrongs that it is re-classifying documents that have been sitting on public shelves for years and don't endanger national security but do reveal that–I apologize if I'm shattering anybody's ideals here, but it had to happen eventually–sometimes, officials in past administrations were... mistaken.

Silencing private citizens' irrational or trivial chatter is just that much more irrational, reactionary and unnecessary itself.

Still, the free speech banner can only be waved so vigorously before it starts to fray. To see why, one need only return to MySpace.

If you've never seen a typical MySpace page, it's sort of like this blog, but instead of the focus being on the writing, or any originally produced content of substance or interest to a remotely general audience, it attempts to overload the viewer with a bunch of self-aggrandizing tidbits of various forms of sensory offense, from drunken and debauched pictures of one's many "friends" to tasteless animated graphics and sickeningly busy backgrounds reminiscent of migraine visions–all set to lame, hipster emo music that has probably been featured on "The O.C."

(And because this is a fair and balanced space, if you are acquainted with MySpace, here's something you may not know: It's owned and operated by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which brings us the fine clearinghouse of reporting, analysis and action that is Fox News. It also claims to devote "significant resources" to policing its hosted profiles for "inappropriate content." To decode post-Sept.-11-institutionspeak, that might just mean that's where the "domestic eavesdropping" is going down. And in that case, if the next mortal threat to national security is coming from exhibitionist high schoolers and coed lushes with low self-esteem and the losers who troll for them, we can all rest comfortably assured it's as good as thwarted.)

People have an empirically demonstrated tendency to greatly overestimate the extent to which others, even strangers, pay attention to them and want to consume every dull detail that aggregates to from their dull lives.

People also have a tendency, as to which anyone who has ever had to deal with the city Parking Division can attest, to exercise any capricious authority they wield to make themselves feel important and validate their otherwise unfulfilling vocations.

These two tendencies can, quite obviously, cause problems when they converge. It is just plain dumb to slander your employer, teacher or other authority figure you somehow depend on for basic elements of your livelihood in a public forum where you can reasonably assume they could see it, identify themselves, take offense and take corresponding action against you. That is not "free speech" worthy of protection, it is practical stupidity. You can say it, but because its only apparent purpose is irrational or malicious, no one else is obligated to accept or respect it.

If someone ever tried to fire me for this collection of binary prose, I would be proud and duty-bound to stand up for my First Amendment rights to comment on the political and social conditions around me. (And I would also whore my tale of injustice and woe out to any media outlet that would have it and use the ensuing uproar and my photogenic physiognomy to land a position getting paid to keep commenting, but that 's beside the point.)

Somehow, if the content I was transmitting took the form of a MySpace page full of trashy self-portraits and inane, un-funny, acronym-infested chronicles of everything that happens to me and my entire circle of acquaintances on each given day, I just couldn't turn around and argue that without feeling like a phony little lump of whining scum.

Free speech is a lot like clearance shopping–many of the offerings are discounted for a reason. If you're going to don the mantle, you'd best be saying something you can justify as something, if only to yourself.

And honestly, if you have to live through life's daily micro-dramas once, isn't that enough? If not for yourself, think of your audience, even if it is hypothetical.

February 22, 2006

Is it really so bad to die alone?

Which is worse:

A) "Lonely deaths of elderly shock nation"
In the past 10 days, the bodies of five elderly Australians have been found in their loungeroom or bedroom -- one a mere skeleton after dying an estimated eight months ago. ...

"What sort of a heartless society can it be in which elderly are so irrelevant and unimportant that they can die alone and unnoticed, unmissed for months on end?," asked Sydney's The Daily Telegraph newspaper in its editorial on Wednesday. "A society like ours, obviously."
B) "Fla. man kills roommate over toilet paper"
A man accused of fatally beating his roommate with a sledgehammer and a claw hammer because there was no toilet paper in their home has been arrested.

Franklin Paul Crow, 56, was charged Monday with homicide in the death of Kenneth Matthews, 58, according to the Marion County Sheriff's Office. ...

Crow told investigators that the men were fighting about the toilet paper over the weekend when Matthews pulled out a rifle. Crow said he then began beating Matthews with the sledgehammer and claw hammer, according to an affidavit.

Matthews was beaten so badly he had to be identified through his fingerprints, detectives said.
I have to say I would prefer putrefying unloved and unnoticed until the stench sickens the neighbors–it has a bit more dignity. In fact, it might even qualify as modern art.

February 21, 2006

I'm a walking cautionary tale

Just when I had started thinking the midterm election season might be quiet on the rightward culture war front, the social conservatives have a new and especially offensive battle cry: Having supposedly vanquished gay marriage by passing bans in 11 states to date with more on the docket, our fine holy warriors and protectors of virtue are now fighting to preserve the purity of "traditional family makeup."

And how will they actualize this fine, condescending ideal? By banning gays and lesbians from adopting children. (Florida's already done it, so it must be good policy.) It's not necessarily because they're gay, either–it's because they're not married.
"Now that we've defined what marriage is, we need to take that further and say children deserve to be in that relationship," says Greg Quinlan of Ohio's Pro-Family Network, a conservative Christian group.
Now, I do speak from an "undeserved" position as a child of a single parent family so feel free to write me off as piteously intellectually and morally deprived, but this one has a real chance of blowing up in their smug, righteous faces.

Less than one fourth of the households in this country are made up of married couples with children, and their lot is declining each year.

Everyone knows someone whose parents are not married. Are we all really so irrevocably fucked up by that that the masses can be mobilized to demand the family structures that spawned us be legislatively abolished?

When they can't have children of their own, married couples toss aside the biological hint and spend tens of thousands of dollars on elective medical procedures to conceive genetically "authentic" progeny.

These are the same people who tell us we're supposed to outlaw medical research on their excess embryos, and always choose adoption over abortion out of respect for life.

Yet according 2004 government data, one third of the children adopted from foster care were adopted by unmarried couples or singles. Estimates are that 500,000 children are in foster care at any given time in this country, with a fourth of them waiting to be adopted. Why narrow the pool even further?

Oh, right–because no family at all is better than a family headed by anything other than married parents. I mean, just look what it's done to me.

February 20, 2006

Going for the gold star

Don't tell the "moral values" crowd, but when it comes to the parade of hot foreign man-candy that is the winter Olympics, apparently President Bush is a fan of men's curling. He apparently watched a match Friday on Air Force One, surely putting your tax dollars and his attention as commander in chief to the best possible use.

According to reports, Dubya has also been partaking of his own winter sport of choice: widing his wittle bwike thwew thnow and ithe!
It was even colder on Sunday when the president, after church, braved temperatures in the low-20s. Dressed in leggings, shorts and layered shirts for warmth, Bush rode about two hours Sunday at a Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., south of Washington.
Well, what a trouper. I can pick out three separate concepts in that sentence that induce mild nausea (I simply cannot believe leggings are back in style), but seriously–what's the point of reporting on this? I get the need to be "balanced," and yes, I suppose it is a positive thing that at least Dubya's not out shooting people in his weekend downtime–but what does he want, a cookie?

And before this quail thing just isn't funny any more, just for you, Grandpa, here's a rather vulgar parody of Dick Cheney covering Johnny Cash, of whom the VP is apparently a rather large fan.

And here's what former President Clinton had to say Sunday on "Good Morning America" regarding the fowl affair: "We have people quite often who are shot in quail incidents, so I didn't feel the need to get into the pile-on."

Way to take the high road, Bubba, and really elevate that national discourse to something of substance. I can just see this turning into a public service announcement or something - "Odds are, someone you know has survived the trauma of a 'quail incident.' Don't force them to suffer any longer in silence and shame." And would it be horribly crass to make a "Quail Incident Survivor" ribbon magnet for my car?

Good god. Here's to hoping this is a more gripping news week, for the sake of us all.

February 16, 2006

Confection contention! (Oh, yeah!)

If you thought wounding of group pride produced useless, petty things like "freedom fries" only among domestic patriots fanatical about their foodstuffs, as usual, think again: In Iranian bakeries, Danish pastries am become "Roses of the Prophet Muhammad" to solidify opposition in the noble medium of dough to cartoons originating in Denmark that blasphemously depicted the patron of Islam.

I think we can all agree that when a cultural, ideological, political or religious "debate" devolves to the point where it's being instantiated in a squabble over what to call a particular puff pastry, humanity has extracted everything of even nominal use from the discussion it's going to extract.

Peoples of the world, it's over. Just move on already.

Wait, what's that? Oh, no, bitch, you di'int just disrespect my popover...

February 15, 2006

Survival of the self-appointedly fittest

I found myself reading an article this morning about new cancer drugs and how pharmaceutical companies are pricing a year's worth in the tens of thousands of dollars, even with insurance–effectively pricing out many patients drawing salaries under six figures.
Until now, drug makers have typically defended high prices by noting the cost of developing new medicines. But executives at Genentech and its majority owner, Roche, are now using a separate argument – citing the inherent value of life-sustaining therapies.

If society wants the benefits, they say, it must be ready to spend more for treatments like Avastin and another of the company's cancer drugs, Herceptin, which sells for $40,000 a year.
Well, if the high costs of drugs are now being justified in terms of "life-sustaining" value, why not start custom pricing them based on the value of each particular life they're attempting to sustain?

Instead of trying to use "ownership" to thin out the lazy undesirables by getting them to rightly conclude that trying to survive cancer just isn't a smart use of their health care (and food, and housing and everything else) dollars, this could be the basis for reworking the entire flagging health care system:

The more your life is worth, in terms of financial assets and what I'll call "Whitey capital," meaning you exemplify more of the values held in esteem by the relevant leadership and vocal popular opinion, the more you should pay for its healthy continuance.

If you're white, wealthy, part of a (preferably churchgoing) family and possessed of the preferred reproductive anatomy, you should quite simply be honored and overjoyed to be given the opportunity to invest more in your continued, superior existence.

February 14, 2006

Roses are red, violets are blue; Cupid carries avian flu

As everyone's favorite holiday of sub-par chocolate, ugly flowers and lame plush toys (the dreaded Trifecta of Thoughtless-Gift Tackiness) descends to spread its candy-coated, doily-draped unease upon the solo and accompanied alike, here are a few words of perspective from my wise, wise mother:

"No one loves me any other day of the year, either–why should this one be any worse?"

So very true. Besides, in a new survey from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 55 percent of single adults polled said they were not looking for a partner, including 51 percent of singles ages 18 to 29.

So, even if you do manage to find someone you're interested in, odds are they don't want you. Even before they get to know you and the intensity with which you probably suck. Why even bother?

It's not that much of a loss, anyway. All other people are really good for is incubating and transmitting contagion–so much so that a new PC euphemism (known henceforth in this space as "neuphemisms"–I make up words because I can), "social distancing," has popped up to serve in stead for for the ugly "quarantine" in talk of bird flu pandemic preparedness.

So, if anyone dares to pity you to your face for being single this Valentine's Day, just tell them you're such a committed altruist, you're martyring your personal desires for companionship and intimacy to do your part to thwart a vicious virus in its indiscriminate attempts to wantonly ravage innocent hosts. And then ask them just what they've done for their collective human brethren lately. Yeah, that's what you thought.

Oh, you are so alone. But at least you're relatively unmolested by malicious microbes. Or, for that matter, vice presidential birdshot.

February 13, 2006

Really, occifer, I was aiming at a covey of quail!

If that isn't the oldest line in the book.

Apparently Vice President "Trigger-happy Dick" Cheney emerged from his undisclosed location over the weekend to "accidentally" blast a blaze orange-wearing geriatric quail hunter/campaign contributor with a spray of shotgun pellets, then have his office stay conveniently silent about it for nearly 24 hours.

So let's see, just recently we've had Wikipedia blocking U.S. Senate ISP addresses because too many senators are having staffers do more flattering "edits" to their biographies. We've got a media race to publish incriminating photos of President Bush schmoozing with Jack Abramoff. We've had NASA scientists saying their findings were altered before being made public to be more in-step with Bush administration talking points, CIA leaks detailing more missteps in the 'war on terror,' a spurned and disgruntled Brownie slinging barbs at Bush's inner circle about the Hurricane Katrina debacle, an attorney general who doesn't seem to have a very resolute grasp on the law being publicly questioned and allegations U.S. forces are force-feeding hunger-striking detainees at Guantanamo, lest they kill themselves and ruin their indefinite, delightfully indisputable incarcerations.

When, I ask you, is a scandal going to stick to this administration? I swear, even if it was revealed that Cheney was using his always-on-call personal ambulance to kidnap and carve up illegal immigrants to procure human organs to feed Karl Rove, they would still somehow emerge with hands clean and waving their flag of righteous patriotism.

About all that's left is a high-tier sex scandal of some sort–but apparently (and oddly comfortingly) there is still not enough money, power or Lysol in the world to make that worth anyone's while.

February 11, 2006

Look at me, I'm so pretty!

And regardless of whether I "deserve" to be, I have it on high authority.

For it has just come to my attention that I apparently had the fashion news editor of W Magazine/Women's Wear Daily liken my look to that of a fiery, highest-order angel. That's a level of fabulousity so divine, mere mortals are not supposed to so much as look upon it (which really explains quite a lot).

I've also got some wicked chic. Just ask Women's Wear Daily, which interviewed me as one of the single most stylish creatures peopling this visual wasteland of a campus last spring. This is from an April 2005 issue I just tracked down today that included a bit on my lovely closet:
BACK TO BLACK

"I've always been slightly unusual," says Holly Noe, 21, a junior journalism major at the University of Wisconsin. "Coming to college, you think there's finally going to be some interesting people here, but it's more of the same, so it's motivation to be even more unusual."

The North Face and sweatpant-wearing crowd may be a disappointment to the Wisconsin native, but chances are Noe would stand out on any campus, given her "seraph look" of reddish hair, extremely pale skin and graphic fashion sense.

Noe, who finances her wardrobe with summer jobs and weekly freelancing for a local paper, tends to limit herself to mostly black outfits punctuated by one or two colorful items for maximum drama. (A recent ensemble mixed black pants and a cardigan with an army green pinstripe bustier.)

Her closet reveals a current predilection for blue and green items, such as a pair of chartreuse square-toed slingbacks with a crocodile print and silver buckle.

However, Noe's restrained palette does not preclude whimsy, as a pair of Irregular Choice turquoise shoes printed with music notes suggest. "One of my friends is starting up a rock band that I'm going to play violin with, and they'll be perfect for that," she says.

The shoes would be equally at home with the feminine silhouette of pencil skirts and cardigans that Noe prefers for her "rock-chick-meets-vintage-secretary look."

But lest she get too feminine, girly colors will not be making an appearance anytime soon. "When I was little, I wore exclusively pink and purple, and now I can't stand either one," Noe says. "I'm sort of working a tiny bit of pink back in, but, like, very mauve, grayish pink."

Inventory:
7 pairs of jeans
27 pairs of high-heels
3 pairs of boots
1 pair of sneakers
33 skirts
90 items of black clothing
The counts are out of date, I've aged, my frivolous fashion funds have dried up and the rock band never happened, but hey–talk of my chartreuse slingback babies and my signature deathly pallor has been immortalized in fashion magazine print, so it's all good.

And thanks to that "seraph" line, not only am I reveling in the glow of superfluous, superficial praise from someone who gets paid to have good taste, but more importantly, I can now rightfully say, "I'm so hot right now, you'd burn yourself if you touched me."

February 09, 2006

If the spirit moves you (in a fuel-efficient hybrid)

It seems a coalition of evangelical Christian leaders is looking to expanded its repertoire of causes beyond just protecting the pre-born and the pre-divorced to include thwarting global warming, both to care for the planet their kind believes they were entrusted with and its inhabitants whose livelihoods are threatened by changing climate conditions.

Good for them (and good for us if this means we get to see entertaining advertising campaigns–I'm thinking a cartoon instantiation of the Holy Ghost asking people to cut carbon dioxide emissions, saying, "Take it from me: Just because you can't see something doesn't mean it can't wreak vengeance upon you and your entire wayward kind!"), but since when do American evangelicals care about the welfare of their global "neighbors," who starve, die of preventable diseases and kill, rape and maim each other all the time?

And since when do the same people who insist the earth is a few thousand years old, emergency contraception is the devil in a capsule and the Grand Canyon was carved by the biblical flood listen to scientists?

This, of course, is causing a bit of a rift with "traditionalists" in their league who hold global warming either doesn't exist or has nothing to do with humans–and that their priorities shouldn't include saving the earth while there are so many sinners on their own soil to rain righteous, codified disapproval upon. (And so many animated sea creatures to out.)

More importantly, many evangelical political players still waiting to cash in on that 2004 "mandate" they think they delivered Bush are nervous that if some fracture their flock and break with the administration's agenda on such a crucial point, they'll squander any piddling bit of power their contingent commands. (I'm sure lawmakers are just taking their time on that Federal Marriage Amendment–no way was it just an election-time gimmick, for we hear about it so very often.)

Indeed, if evangelicals keep up with this talk about going green, battling AIDS and ending poverty–and then actually act on it or compel others to act on it–if they're not careful, they might accidentally help somebody.

February 07, 2006

It's pretty bad if Rummy's a role model

Further supporting the notion that inability to react appropriately to opinionated speech is truly multi-cultural, U.S. military leaders are calling this cartoon by Tom Toles for the Washington Post "beyond tasteless" and "a callous depiction of those who have volunteered to defend this nation and as a result have suffered traumatic and life-altering wounds."

Actually, it's a critical depiction of the jackoffs in charge who put them in that position, specifically highlighting the dissonance of one of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's recent comments about how stretching the Army so thin that soldiers are returning for several tours in Iraq makes them "battle hardened," and therefore a better fighting force collectively.

When a reporter asked Rumsfeld for comment, he sucked it up and martyred himself alongside past leaders who suffered similar abuse at political cartoonists' pens, saying, "That's the way it is here. It comes with the territory, I guess is all I can say."

Notice that even Donald "Have you hugged a bomb today?" Rumsfeld can look at a cartoon portraying himself in a less than laudatory light and not call for dropping a daisy-cutter on the Post or lopping off a couple of Mr. Toles' limbs.

Andrew Sullivan has a great piece in this week's Time Magazine about this whole cartoon debacle, and made the apt and elegant point that "Freedom means learning to deal with being offended."

(And when it's in the same issue as an argument rationalizing the violent reaction because "Western politics" have caused more Muslim deaths than Muslims are responsible for causing, as if lower numbers are somehow less wrong, we need all the voices of maturity we can get.)

There are far, far worse things in the world than to be offended by something, because–assuming you don't pre-empt it by going out on a violent quest for mindless vengeance–it gets you thinking about who you are and what's important to you.

Take a lesson from Rumsfeld: If you're truly secure in your religion or political philosophy or self or what-have-you, let the heretics yap away in the peanut gallery. You don't have to care, respond, or even listen–it's not like you're accountable to them or anything. Oh, wait...

Now, boys, does Jon Stewart have to intervene?

Nicholas Kristof's ongoing media playground fight with Bill O'Reilly is again the subject of his Times column today, and now Kristof is asking people to e-mail hypothetical offers of how much they would pay to send O'Reilly to cover the Darfur genocide to sponsorbill@gmail.com. Kristof thinks that if O'Reilly directed his hopped-up-ferret on-air diatribes toward the genocide (which he writes today received just 18 minutes of network evening news time in all of 2005, with ABC accounting for 11 of those), he could affect some actual change.

Perhaps, but I think he overestimates Bill O'Reilly's actual mobilizing power. If I had his column, I'd tell people to deluge someone in a position of greater practical command with e-mails calling for action: Oprah. Sure, she'd just use it as self-aggrandizing PR spectacle as well, but at least she's got money and hordes of wealthy followers who might actually donate their easily earned, under-taxed money if the right sob story moves them.

February 06, 2006

See, mom, graphic designers aren't completely useless

New York Times Op-Art: "31 days in Iraq"

And I'm sure 'twas all for the very noblest of causes.

February 05, 2006

On a jollier note...

... I've noticed as of late a distinct decrease in the number of those pointless "support the troops" ribbon magnets on vehicle bumpers. I'm sure they were all just "accidentally" lost in car washes, or fell off somewhere because of the cold and snow. There couldn't be a bunch of people out there suffering bandwagon patriot remorse and physically, deliberately taking them off their cars to do something less public with them. (You know, kind of like they've done with all the 'awareness-raising' wristbands–apparently cancer, AIDS and world hunger have all been eradicated while no one was paying attention. Gee, great work, everybody!) The ribbons must have disappeared due to random, natural causes, or perhaps they're just being protected in a place of honor from the winter elements. Because otherwise, that would make for a whole bunch of disingenuous and horrible people out there who must be feeling très ashamed for personally lowering military morale and giving aid and comfort to the enemy by rescinding their visual statements.

"I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind."

By popular request from my best friend, who, though talking to her is also akin to performing community service (god), always manages like none other to say the perfect things:

Did you ever have one of those one, two week spans of time when just about every little thing in your life, one after another, turns to ass? Your only friend in your current city moves away, but you feel bad for feeling bad because you're genuinely happy for her success. Your only trifling source of income and publishing for your quasi-professional yet still stylish writing dries up without warning. You find out painfully late that someone you unwisely let yourself care about is utterly ordinary and doesn't give half a shit about you. You're stressed out about a new job and having to find a real one panic-inducingly soon in a field that appears to be disintegrating before your eyes, while the losers running your government announce they're hiking student loan interest rates again just as you're graduating. Your attempts at retail therapy all prove fruitless. You, copy editor extraordinaire, get cut off by a car with "BE HAPPI" on its license plates, quite plainly mocking your very being. You discover the only makeup you've found that matches your fine deathly pallor is on clearance because it's being discontinued. You get a random migraine out of nowhere. You run out of printer ink the night before a paper is due and have to scramble like a madwoman to the store before it closes. Random sorority whores clomping behind you like linebackers in their pastel Ugg boots insult your awesome backpack buttons as you walk down the street (squirrels do indeed rock, bitches–and they rock infinitely more than you). The grocery store is out of coffee truffle ice cream. Your usually reliable simpleton president disappoints you with a lackluster State of the Union. Someone takes your laundry out of the machine because you weren't there immediately when it finished, and you have to either wash everything again or live knowing some damn dirty hippie has fingered your underwear. And to top it all off, your favorite shoes decide to give you horrible heel blisters every other pair of shoes you own aggravates so they refuse to heal, contributing to your slipping on a patch of ice on a relatively busy sidewalk and scraping up your knee. And does anyone stop, or so much as ask in passing if you're OK? Nope, some asshole just laughs at you. Why, I ask you, do people even live in a society? Just fuck you all.

Ah, how cathartic. I am a hollow reed.

p.s. Anyone looking to finance a cutting edge children's television show about a wacky doomsday cult–complete with hand puppets–produced by yours truly and a demented art major, do drop me an e-mail.

edit: p.p.s. And the cherry on top to finish off my Monday? A $30 parking ticket. Oh, I laugh because I am now officially dead inside.

"'Cuz I'm a space cowboy!"

More federal budget news today, and that's that while President Bush is proposing cutting funding to several health agencies to battle chronic diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes–which the document states account for 70 percent of all deaths in this country, he's tossing a few more billion toward fighting bird flu–a disease 86 people have died from, worldwide, ever. As part of his plan, he hopes to vaccinate every American against the looming avian microbial menace, which will be just dandy if there happens to be a pandemic of the precise strain the vaccine protects against. I know I'll be first in line to get poked by one of Uncle Sam's nefarious needles regardless, hoo boy.

And of course, no Bush budget would be complete without tossing more money into the self-aggrandizings sinkhole of phony international prestige that is the space program. Yes, let's privatize health care on the double, but let's use public money to blast shiny rockets into space and perhaps come up with new innovations we can adapt for terrestrial warfare–yee haw!

Now, children, dismemberment never solved anything

While the Bush administration is trying to have it both ways by supporting Muslims offended by cartoons published in a Danish newspaper blasphemously depicting their prophet and also supporting the freedom of speech and press of the countries that printed them, I'm going to, as usual, be a vile infidel.

I'm tired of hearing people trying to turn this "Islamophobia" thing into some kind of crude, arrogant bigotry based on race or ethnicity and lacking any sense of cultural empathy.

Actually, it's because Islam's vocal representatives are violent, scary, irrational religious fanatics who appear to be set on starting up a global holy war, and see setting embassies on fire and demonstrating holding signs warning Europe "their" Sept. 11 is on the way as viable responses to insensitive cartoons.

If you're offended by something, that's your right, and you have a right to respond. But you don't do anything to help your own image as rational beings deserving of respect and understanding when you respond with things like this:
"We will not accept less than severing the heads of those responsible," one preacher at Al Omari mosque in Gaza told worshipers during Friday Prayer, according to Reuters. Other demonstrators called for amputating the hands of the cartoonists who drew the pictures.
I don't care which sect they belong to, religious fanatics are fucking terrifying. But at least many of them just tell you you're going to Hell if you offend them–they don't brandish weaponry and threaten to immediately send you and there.

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Addendum: Not just religious extremists are scary

My mother informed me she heard on the radio that the wife of one of the two Democratic legislators who changed his support of the concealed carry bill and helped uphold the governor's veto in the state Assembly has received two telephoned death threats.

Yes, from the same people who seek to persuade us that we should let them carry concealed weapons. Charming.

February 03, 2006

Pink post-it notes strike again

It's incidents like this one that make me marvel at the fact that I've made it to this point still allowed to scribe from free society, and unobstructed by a haze of anti-psychotic chemicals:

Teen investigated for homework threat to Bush
[School Committee chair Daniel] Burns, who was briefed by the West Warwick school superintendent on the essay but had not read it, described it as bitter. "Obviously, this individual needs some kind of help," he said.

He questioned whether the boy had help composing it.

"Someone in the 7th grade just doesn't gather this information by themselves," he said. "I was concerned where that came from."

The student is undergoing counseling, Burns said.
Well, I should hope. We can't have troublemakers like that observing the world around them, evaluating what they see and writing down their reasoned (though, granted, perhaps not the most impeccably, practically or diplomatically reasoned) deductions in this supposed democracy-and in a classroom no less! With any luck, they'll get him on some drugs soon and he won't think such thoughts at all any more. Damned hooligan kids and their free speech, don't they know they're being unpatriotic?

Shock the monkeys, heckle the grieving and blow stuff up – this is America!

In local news, our dear friends at PETA have called UW-Madison’s primate research lab an "Abu Ghraib" for animals, and one of our fine student papers indulged them with coverage Thursday. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: As soon as humans stop propagating things like Abu Ghraib against other humans, maybe-maybe-I’ll give half a crap and think these people deserve even a fragment of the press they get.

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At the state Capitol, both houses of the Wisconsin legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill Thursday banning protesters from demonstrating within 500 feet of military funerals. This was in response to a group of religious nutjobs who have taken to popping up at soldiers’ services with signs celebrating their deaths and declaring them bound for Hell, because they claim the carnage of the Iraq war is divine retribution for this country’s "tolerance" of homosexuality.

Now, I think most scrupled, sane individuals would concur that is a cruel, idiotic and disgusting thing to do. But America as a nation (supposedly) values free speech, even if it is all those things or worse. When we start requiring that certain forms or even topics of speech be less free than others, we’re already compromising that value.

Realists know such a bill never stood a chance of defeat ("Yes, sir, I support hate-mongering religious kooks taunting mourners at a funeral-not only that, I think they should do it more often and with more venom!"), but it’s still disappointing to hear that only three lawmakers voted against it, especially when many who voted for it acknowledged it faces a serious challenge in court for being unconstitutional. Just because someone, somewhere says it doesn’t mean elected officials thereby endorse it. Why waste everyone’s time codifying already-existing moral and social opposition?

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On the national scale, Paul Krugman has a great column in today’s New York Times about how Bush flat out lied about the energy initiatives at the center of his State of the Union speech-he’s actually cutting back the precise alternative fuel programs he touted. The pre-address chatter was that the speech would center on health care, but still struggling with political PTSD from the Social Security "reform" debacle, speechwriters slapped together a bunch of feel-good blather about energy because they needed something, anything positive for the fearless leader to proclaim.

It’s also 2007 federal budget announcement time, which makes for all sorts of delightful story juxtapositions. For instance, let’s cut $39.5 billion in namby-pamby "entitlement programs" for such frivolities as health and education (including student loans, while we simultaneously opine that the income gap all the lazy people whine about is really an education gap), but let’s be sure to give President Bush another $120 billion to add to the $320 billion the Congressional Budget Office estimates he’s already sunk into his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.

It’s interesting how this proposal has even Republicans running scared, because this November is one of those magical Novembers that reminds many congressmen they are not, in fact, cloistered in a cozy little carapace of one-party rule. Real people not in the top few income percentiles-known in a bygone, perhaps fabled political era as "constituents"-might notice and care when programs they depend and the few they actually benefit from are cut. And then they might wonder and, god forbid, question why "defense" spending continues to get an automatic blank check.

The Pentagon also conducted an internal review proposing several cost-trimming measures. But if they’re not derailed internally, observers anticipate they’ll be thwarted in Congress by lawmakers skittish about wracking up "pro-terrorism" marks on their records by voting to in any way hinder the flow of funds to the military. Because what true, innovative, forward-thinking patriot wants to help his own needy citizens who could benefit now when he could be helping the hawks build up for an eventual, hypothetical war of the superpowers against China?
When Mr. Rumsfeld's aides did try to pare down the services' wish lists, they were often outmaneuvered, analysts said. The Air Force was able to defeat a proposal to require it and the Navy to buy the same basic version of the Pentagon's next-generation fighter plane, an idea proposed as a cost-savings measure.

But of course, we can’t really expect the Air Force and Navy boys to share their high-tech, high-priced killing toys just to save a few million bucks, can we? That would be downright un-American.

February 02, 2006

Jesus won't be bringing the Milk Duds

Apparently the religious conservatives have finally decided to vocally come out against "Brokeback Mountain," now that it's leading the lot in Oscar nominations.

Why did it take them so long? Recall their earlier reasoning: They seriously purported that if they didn't talk about their opposition to the movie to the press, there would be no controversy, no buzz and thus no reason for anyone to report on the film or want to go see it.

Karl Rove is obviously occupied elsewhere, because that one bombed and but good. But now, like the proverbial cockroaches who survive the culture war fallout just to spite us all, they're back and hissing.

There was a member of "Concerned Women for America" on "World News Tonight" yesterday talking about how the movie industry, being so horribly out of touch with the "mainstream America" her kind represents, must have a "death wish" to be making gay-themed movies and nominating them for awards.

Well, if anyone should know about pushing for things utterly contrary to one's own interests, it's a member of Concerned Women for America, but come on: Religious right, only in your most sordidly prurient, sick, wrong and impious dreams do you command that much power.

You're not going to bring down the entire industry by deciding to skip a few movies. If anything, you're going to give it a boost, because you're probably the same people who treat public movie theatres as your private living rooms and make the experience painful for the rest of us.

If more of you are staying home, going to a movie just looks that much more appealing to those of us who do so precisely to escape your lame, ordinary "mainstream America" for a couple of hours via popcorn and pretty pictures.

February 01, 2006

The state of our union is more of the same old crap

We’re still “on the offensive” against the “enemies of freedom,” which is itself still “on the march” against “tyranny,” bitches, so clear a path before we clear one for you. Blah blah blah.

What a lame speech–if not for multitasking and my Bingo game (I create my own fun, because lord knows nobody’s doing it for me), it would have been a resounding waste of my precious, precious time.

I myself had Bingo at 8:47 p.m. He didn’t say “ownership” or “twenty-first century,” but I called it disturbingly well otherwise (there was even an Iraqi woman voter in the audience). And a correction is in order, I forgot this speech had a lectern, not a desk. I’m a terrible person. I apologize, and I’ll go kill myself shortly.

Even Bush’s transparent distortions are getting old: how domestic spying could have prevented Sept. 11 and how he has clear constitutional authority to enact such a program; tying a shortage of OB-GYN’s to the cost of medical malpractice insurance like his idiotic social policies and veritable lynch mobs of “pro-life” supporters have nothing to do with that; praising other nations with a straight face for adopting institutions and checks to withstand a single administration’s wiles. Yawn. Give us something new, George.

Oh yes, but America should also pat itself on the back for having liberated World War II death camps–never mind we could have bombed them or the railroads leading to them much earlier, or that the Russians liberated many of the worst ones that were nearer the eastern front. But I digress.

The speech coverage I watched didn’t include any shots of the Air Force woman injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq with her bomb-sniffing dog, Rex (how clever) featured earlier on the news. Congress and the Air Force bent the rules so the dog could be “discharged” early and become hers. Aww.

But of course, this injured woman was quite attractive, and looked absolutely perfect and whole. Why didn’t Bush have a few amputees or quadriplegics or people missing eyes sitting up next to the first lady? We all know why, but still. She would only have looked better by comparison.

Similarly, I’ve been quite disappointed with how the coverage of Bob Woodruff’s injury has been playing out. It would be the perfect opportunity to follow and truly, visually show what happens to the dozens of soldiers injured in such attacks every day in Iraq–the New York Times reported the plane Woodruff was on to a German military hospital was also carrying 31 injured soldiers, about the daily average.

Print media have been doing a decent job, but TV is the only one that makes anything resembling a mass impact. I hate to keep bringing him back up, but damn it, I like to think Peter Jennings would have been all over that. Somehow I don’t trust Elizabeth “if she’s Hispanic, I’m albino” Vargas and the morning show ponies to do it justice.

Especially with Cindy Sheehan definitively making herself look like a lunatic at this point, what with getting tossed out of the Capitol and cavorting with Hugo Chavez and all, we could use a bit of “objective” coverage any intelligent person would have to concede is anti-war.