Bells On wonders...

I think the only sector of the market that Ed Hardy has not penetrated is women's hygiene products. Is that because an Ed Hardy douchebag would be redundant?

Don't be callin out mercy

I have to admit I am a little relieved Michael Jackson is dead. He was messed up beyond all measure, but he was too famous and powerful to ever be helped by anyone. He only ever made the news when he did something appalling, and come on, he was never actually going to make that comeback or make another good piece of music, so all the "how ironic that he died just as he was about to reclaim his status" stuff is bullshit, and we all know it.

He was the quintessential imploding star, yes, although he took that paradigm to a stupefying level. He was incapable of distinguishing reality from the narrative that he paid people to perpetuate. Whatever it was that had scarred him, he was so frightened of it that he retreated from the responsibilities of adulthood entirely, and that's beyond sad. It's sickening.

He was used by everyone around him, from his parents, to his siblings, to his stunt wife Lisa Marie, who I think took off as soon as she figured out she couldn't secure a nice paycheck for Scientology. The failures of those who purported to care about him were colossal.

I find it hard to even be sad for his devoted fans, because they seem so deluded. He wasn't "innocent," he's not "the prince" anymore, and he only seemed to care about his fans to the extent that they reinforced his self-aggrandizing and self-damaging world view.

When I watch one of his old videos, back before he Frankensteined himself, I just feel sad. What a waste of talent. What a waste of a fortune. What a big fucking waste.

Never did far away charge so close

You know, I find it really touching that the Republicans care so much about the stolen election in Iran. I mean, they care enough that they are demanding that President Obama issue threats against the government of Iran, even though those threats could very well escalate hostilities between us, and cause their government to clamp down on protesters even more. That is a hell of a lot of caring. Good for them. I’m impressed.

I guess they have finally learned their lesson from 2000 - that stolen elections and illegitimate leaders mean dire consequences for the country that allows such crimes to take place. I mean, I'm grateful that they finally have learned, but I just wish they had let us know before BushCo ransacked the fucking country for 8 years, but, you know, whatever. Kudos.

Who'll stop the rain?

I always tend to feel a bit like Goldilocks when I’m away from home. All the different beds. Some too soft. Some too hard. Sometimes, the elusive “just right.”

Spooney and I started out our tour of the East Coast having a pretty good time. Sure, United demonstrated that they really don’t understand the “confirmed” part of confirmed seat assignments, and they seem to be of the opinion that eight rows away is really close enough to sit to my boyfriend on a six hour flight, but we managed a trade and the flight attendant skated us some free drinks and an apology. I love the flight attendants and the cockpit personnel on United. Everyone else who works for that airline can go fuck themselves as far as I’m concerned, especially those completely useless twats on their reservation line. United used to have great phone reps, but they’ve recently outsourced to someplace where poorly enunciated English, and the ability to read words off a screen, seem to be their only marketable skills.

So it was great seeing relatives in New Jersey, and my dear friend Kate in NYC, but once we got to Boston, the wheels started to come off. Yes, we had some great dinners with old friends at first, and everything seemed to be going swell, but then we hit a real losing streak near the end. First, due to my own dumb error, we showed up one night too late for our much-anticipated Red Sox game, and then, after I shelled out additional dollars to a scalper for 2 more tickets, the game got rained out after five crappily played innings.

Then, the seas were so stormy and rough during our whale watch that not only did we not see any whales, but half the passengers were freely spewing chunks. It was a five hour lesson in endurance and self-control. Forget waterboarding, man, if you want to torture a detainee, put them on the Boston Aquarium Whale Watch Cruise with six foot swells and a poop deck full of barfing schoolchildren.

On the morning of our 6 a.m. flight home, we got lost trying to find the car rental return. And then, just to up the anxiety ante, we got pulled over by a cop in Revere, because at 3 a.m., it is apparently difficult to distinguish the way lost people drive from the way drunk people drive. The cop berated us for our infraction, wondered aloud (and definitely rhetorically) as to whether we might be humans of the moron variety, gave us some very rapidly and impatiently delivered directions to our destination, and then walked away without saying a word of farewell, shaking his head in disgust.

And then United lost my luggage.

I was so relieved to be home at that point that I didn’t mind the thought of going to work the next day with my au naturale curly poodle bangs. What I did mind, is that I knew I would have to spend the day telling people that they no longer had a job.

Yeah, I found out right before I left what I was going to be doing the day I got back. And I’m ashamed to admit that it hung over me like a thundercloud the entire time I was gone. No matter how many times I told Spooney that I was definitely not thinking about it the whole time…I was definitely thinking about it the whole time. I was lying awake nights and stewing, constantly stewing and fretting.

I’m even more ashamed to admit that after a day of laying off talented and dedicated employees, I feel sorry for myself, and it’s not because I know that the clock has started ticking on my own job. It’s because it shouldn’t be this way. I shouldn’t be here, doing this bullshit thing. This incredible company, with its brilliant technology, should survive. It’s the new economy! So why does it feel so much like the 1980s?

Actually, now that I think about it, it feels like Carter’s first term. If you were alive and coherent in the ‘70s, you might remember that Carter tried to turn this country around during the fuel crisis. He proposed a plan for energy independence, practically invented industry and consumer conservation, funded alternative power sources, and even put solar panels on the White House.

Then came Reagan, who proceeded to, in one of his first acts as president, very publicly remove those solar panels. His second act was to take all the money for solar and other fuel technologies, and give it to the oil companies so that they could find more freakin oil. They did, they got richer, the price of gas went down, and Americans promptly forgot why they cared about fuel efficiency in the first place. They decided that Saint Ronnie knew best, and if he told us that the man standing behind us with his cock in our ass was Big Government, and not Big Oil, then by god that was good enough for us.

What kills me, is that if we had followed through on Carter’s plan, we’d be energy independent today. Yes, it would’ve been a major expenditure. Solar power is expensive, but you know what? It goddamn works. So does wind power. Think about it - we’d be off the Mideast grid by now, motherfuckers. I mean, can you imagine where we’d be right now, if we didn’t need OPEC? 5000 American veterans and millions of civilians from both Gulf Wars would be alive. There’d be less oil money to support Islamic terrorism all over the world. Also, with no need for a U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia, we’d miss being branded as the Great Satan by Osama bin Laden. 3000 people get to go home to their families at the end of the day on September 11, 2001. The war in Afghanistan never happens, but it’s okay because without the US meddling in the Mideast, the USSR never invades Afghanistan, the US never funds the Afghani warlords, and the Taliban never takes hold. So the next time someone is droning on and on about what a terrible president Jimmy Carter was, shove that in their pipe and tell them to fucking choke on it.

And while you’re at it, tell them to shut the fuck up about socialism and the stimulus bill and their fucking goddamn tea parties. In case you haven’t noticed, American capitalist ingenuity ain’t shit right now, people. The profit for the technologies that will save our lives will always be too far away for those greedy fucks and their stupid, stupid short-sighted goddamn Wall Street crybaby investors. The only place where real innovation is taking place around the world is in places where the government is biting the bullet and funding it. Wake the fuck up. Wake the fuck up, people, and join me. Because I tell you, lately, I cannot sleep at all.

Hang on

Sorry. I've been gone, and I've been real gone.

Events developing. Issues mulling.

xoxox
v

Bizarro Jerry

Holy cow, readers, what kind of bizarro world are we living in these days, anyways?

Darth Cheney is supporting gay marriage.

President Obama is refusing to release detainee photos

Michael Moore is a millionaire. GM is bankrupt.

Eminem has a sense of humor. (Seriously, I mean, wow, who’s next? Sean Penn?)

And white men are the victims of racist Latina women.

You know, I remember when the CTA finally put wheelchair lifts on the city buses in Chicago. At the same time, they also tore out several rows of seats in order to make a sort of wheelchair cubby – they’re everywhere now so you know what I’m talking about. But I remember, many years ago now, the first time I saw the new arrangement put to use. Many other riders that day were transfixed by the sight of the man being lifted in his chair by what I must admit was a very slow mechanism. Everyone was kind of staring. And this middle-aged businesswoman standing beside me made a point of looking at me and rolling her eyes. “I don’t understand why they can’t have their own buses like before,” she said. “They slow everyone else down, and if they hadn’t torn out all those seats for them, then we could be sitting down right now.” She paused, and then narrowed her eyes at me. “Don’t you think so?” she said, rather aggressively.

“I think,” I said “we should get down on our knees and thank our lucky fucking stars that we can walk onto this bus on our perfectly functioning legs.”

Okay, maybe I didn’t really say that. Maybe I’ve only spent the last twenty years formulating the ultimate trepverte response. Maybe at the time I only glared back in a sullen twenty-something way. But even back in my sneering, snotty, black-clad, self-absorbed salad days, readers, I knew she was an asshole. Even I knew that.

And I feel similarly about the LEGIONS of white dudes who are complaining about the “racism” of SCOTUS nominee Sonya Sotomayor. It’s just so unseemly. It’s just…so fucking obscene that a white man, or a white woman for that matter, would hear the following quote:

“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

and would have the gall, the unmitigated fucking gall, to call it “racism,” instead of – hey, I’ll say it – instead of…truth.

Because isn’t it true? Isn’t it?

If you’re having trouble with her statement, perhaps it might help if you consider that she might very well have had someone like our current chief justice, John Roberts, in mind when she spoke about that nameless white male. Jeffrey Toobin recently wrote in The New Yorker:

“In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.”

Yes, it’s quite a record. No doubt influenced by his background and his heritage as a proud white male Bush campaign supporter and general legal toady for the right. That kind of influence is apparently okay, however, the influence of an upbringing that takes you from the Bronx projects to the Ivy League to the federal bench – fuckin’ Latina fuckin’ racist, y’all.

And if you buy that, then I got a La-Raza-is-the-Hispanic-KKK to sell you, cheap.

Also, I would just like to state once and for all, for the record, that no matter how many times the yammering idiots on TV say otherwise, you cannot substitute “white” for “Latina” or “black” and prove racism. It just don’t work that way. There are, as I noted previously, LEGIONS of bitter white dudes out there who desperately, desperately want it to work that way. But it don’t. It ain’t so black & white, white dudes. “It’s a white thing, you wouldn’t understand” is not okay. “White power” is not okay. The National Association for the Advancement of White People is not okay. And if there were one, and you called it “The Race” (La Raza), it would be SO not okay that I’m pretty sure the Feds would be knocking down your fortress walls and blasting your compound with Jay-Z (with special guest Ciara) in order to make you and your similarly brainwashed comrades come out with your hands behind your heads, you fucking redneck racist AK-7 totin' motherfuckers.

Deal with it. And while you’re at it, get down on your knees and thank your lucky fucking stars that you were born white and male in a time and place where it remains, by far, the easiest thing to be.