Untitled Thought

My enjoyment of the Highlander series is tempered by the knowledge that it inspired a fair few pretentious gits to claim to be Scottish and collect swords for pretentious-git purposes (as opposed to collecting them because swords are cool, which is separate from collecting them because you want to swear up and down that the jewelry you got at Spencer’s and the blades you bought at a flea market are mystical). Similar things have happened with Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

I've come to the conclusion that basing a major life philosophy or the bulk of your religion on fantasy movies is like saying that ill-thought-out beliefs are a competition, and by God you're going to beat EVERYONE.

I know all parents mess their kids up to a degree, but it's not supposed to be this intentional

So I've discovered several things today.

1. The revamp of Beavis and Butthead wherein they pan shows like Jersey Shore, et al, is probably something that I will watch. I don't know why. Raincoat Jed likes to send me links to things that spark my interest, like anything that involves the quote, “If they did this chart long enough, they could find out how herpes began.”

2. I don't know if it's because I'm getting older, but apparently my body hates corn chips like Godzilla movies hate continuity.

3. I noticed that someone posted a link to this gem:

"Two classic fairytales have been re-imagined or “sweetened” rather for today’s tots: , “Rapunzel,” by Sarah Gibb and “Twelve Dancing Princesses” by Brigette Barrager. According to The New York Times, these authors have assumed a “gentler” narrative for these gorgeously-illustrated picture books. Yet, despite tactics to make these stories more kid-accessible, sexist attitudes about women and passivity remain.

Pamela Paul at The Times observes:
'As Gibb would have it, the princesses are passive innocents and unaware of the spell – sleepdancing, as it were. They can be rescued only by the handsome young cobbler, Pip, who toils away mending their worn-out shoes. This ends — can you guess? – in a joyous wedding between Pip and the princess Poppy. “And, of course, they all lived happily ever after.” Very attractively, though inactively, so.'

I find it quite telling that sex and violence have been removed from these tales but stereotypes about women remain a kosher part of storytelling. There may no graphic scenes in these picture books but children learning that “passive” princesses can only be rescued from spells by a “handsome young cobbler” is just as damaging. Revamp indeed. Reads like the same old trajectory to me."

First of all, I’ve read the original “Twelve Dancing Princesses.” It is quite possible that it’s been “softened” because there’s not many parents who want to read a story to their daughters about a bunch of chicks who sneak out to party every night. This does not bespeak sexism.

In fact, it looks an awful lot like:

Yeah, that stamp? It may show up a lot.

As another (female) commenter put it:

“So…you wanted them to actually tell a different story? Should only the aggressive princesses have been saved? Should they have scorned the man, and belittled him, before declaring him worthless and then rescuing themselves? Perhaps the prince should have been nerdy and sensitive and passive to his ball-busting career princess, maybe even changing HIS last name this time around? Don’t you think you’re reaching a little to find the insult in this? What kind of damage does this cause again? Let me get this straight: you believe this encourages little girls to believe that passivity is required in order to win the affections of a handsome man…which is wrong…but you wouldn’t assume that this story teaches little girls that magic spells are real, right?? Why does it teach one concept, but not the other? Why not assume that little girls would learn that dancing is bad because you have to be rescued from it? Why wouldn’t they assume that the story is telling them that dancing is fun, and handsome men are lame for interrupting?? Its just so arbitrary to assume that ALL little girls will discern THAT particular message from a story.
Let’s just re-write all books. That way no one’s feelings will be hurt. Like the Third Reict (sp). Any and all stories and books that portray the women as anything less than demi-gods worthy of only the highest respect must be altered or destroyed, along with the authors. Let’s start with the Bible. Then we’ll move on to Shakespeare. After that we’ll change all the history books.”

Second, I love Grimm Fairytales (the originals) because they're so dark and frankly weird. The original Rapunzel, for instance, has Rapunzel getting knocked up by the prince (mazel tov, it's twins). The witch comes back, throws Rapunzel out and blinds the prince. They're separated for a while, but Rapunzel is the one who finds him later (along with their kids) and restores his sight. Then they live happily ever after.
If there's a moral to that story, it's that you have to go through a lot of bullshit in order to get your share of happiness; and let's face it, if you tell your kids that when they're young, it'll come as much less of a surprise later.

If the author of articles like this and the one at the Times is going to cherrypick just one story here and there that they think depicts a princess or two as too "passive" as being sexist, then it's not just reaching, it's bad reporting. If there's a parent out there who really finds the more modern, sanitized fairy tales to be so offensive, then just read your kids the originals.

By the way, the original Grimm's Brothers version of the Pied Piper has the townspeople refusing to pay the piper after he rids the town of rats. So he plays a different tune and leads all their children dancing away into a mountain, whereupon they are never seen again. Vengeance complete, the piper presumably goes on his merry way while the parents wail in grief.

Now, I'd probably read a toddler something about dancing princesses simply because small children just don't analyze things the way adults do. You know why? 'Cause anything that poops itself and likes Barney is not, I repeat not, going to be lecturing in Oxford about the intricacies of literature any time soon.

But I guess if you prefer fairy tales to teach your kids the fine principles of "an eye for an eye and possibly also a leg just to be thorough," then, you know, you have options. Original fairy tales, Rambo movies, religion.

When the children hear about Jesus and how lovin' and carin' he was . . . how he gave his all to God's children and how it got him nailed to a tree, it will be amazin' to see whose eyes light up with hope and whose burn with newfound survival instincts.
--Fred MacIntire, Something Positive

Speaking of S*P, Milholland also did this awesome take on Sleeping Beauty. Also, by quoting his characters and linking to stuff he’s done that I think is cool, I’m not saying that he shares any of my opinions or that I actually know him in any way. Do not pester the Randy just ‘cause of this blog, OK thank you.
Though he replied to me once on Twitter and it totally made my day ‘cause he’s awesome.

Note: If anyone gives a crap about what the rapunzel plant is, it’s an old name for Rampion (Campanula rapunculus), which is apparently a sort of salad green.

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And I spake thusly unto the refrigerator: Bring forth much pork and chili and beans, and puddings, and there shalt be A Great Eatening in All The Land

So hello! Today I have a little helping of WTF for you. As opposed to all the other ones dealing with WTF and WTF byproducts. And I have been told recently that my tendency to be longwinded is “cute,” so this post has got to be adorable.

"Do you find yourself attracted again and again to troubled, distant, moody men -- while "nice guys" seem boring?
Do you obsess over men who are emotionally unavailable, addicted to work, hobbies, alcohol, or other women?
Do you neglect your friends and your own interests to be immediately available to him?
Do you feel empty without him, even though being with him is torment?"

This is from the Amazon.com description of a book titled, “Women Who Love Too Much.” They recommended this to me, theoretically because they have discovered that I do tend to go for the dark, moody/otherwise stable nice guy type.
Then again, they also used to recommend me vibrators, knives, and books on taxidermy, so clearly they know what I do on Friday nights.*
This is a joke. If you did not think it was a joke, then I weep for you.*
*Lie.

First of all, if you need a book to tell you that your emotionally unavailable work addicted alcoholic cheating boyfriend/husband/whatever should perhaps not cause you to neglect your friends and interests in favor of being around for him all the time and that you are also dangerously emotionally codependent, stop reading.
Go kill yourself.
Do it now.
For Jesus. Because he is disgusted with you.
If Jesus were here right now, he would slap you across the face and call you a dumbass.*
*Blatant lie. Theoretically. I mean, it’s not like he didn’t raise his most holy pimp hand to those little punk money-lenders in the temple. There’s a precedent here.
(Upon reading the draft of this blog, my friend Dustin remarked, “Then they'd fall madly in love with him because there's nothing crazy bitches like more than a husband who beats them.”)

How in the hell are there still women (and men) that do this? I grant you, we all got raised with the Beauty & the Beast archetype, and not the relatively cool one with Ron Perlman.

This guy made fantasy soap operas cool for like 3 years,
which is longer than anyone else has done ever.

But the whole underlying plot of the original Beauty and the Beast is that there’s basically this prince who was a huge prick, so he got turned into a beast--essentially, that whole “now the outside matches the inside, muwhahaha” thing. You’d think that would be sort of a warning to Belle, but noooo. No, she goes through the initial “Oh my God why are you keeping me prisoner here” thing (totally her father’s fault), at which point the Beast makes a couple token attempts to not be a dick.
In the original story, these attempts were not aided by talking cutlery.
Then Belle decides that there’s more to the Beast that she initially thought, and then it becomes this whole episode of her being patient and kind in the hopes that he will change.
Luckily, he does; which theoretically means that he also decided that she didn’t look like a tasty little meat snack, what with him being a beast and all. As a result, he falls madly in love with her and all her patience and kindness is rewarded by him turning into a handsome prince. It is presumed that they lived out the rest of their days in his castle, very much in love and probably traumatizing Chip by doing the freaky in every room.

He’s trying to smile but he’s seen too much and now he's dead inside.
SO CUTE

How often does that play out in real life, though? In real life, the guy who is consistently an asshole to you is, provided he’s not just having a streak of consecutive bad days, actually an asshole.
Shocking, I know. Yet there is someone somewhere who decided, much like the other eleven billion self-help book authors like them, that women really can’t figure this out on their own and they need help.

Are enough women really that blind that they need a book?

...Yes.

Dammit.

And if you're feeling really adventurous:
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Dear obnoxious self-appointed food police: eat me.

Today my post is about the food police. Not necessarily the same idiots who want/wanted to ban Happy Meals in San Francisco, as opposed to say, not eating that kind of crap. The ban got vetoed, by the way--probably right around the time people started realizing that it was stupid.
By the way, the attitude that it’s “too hard” to buy healthy food and cook it for your kids is not a valid excuse for demanding that local legislation be passed to ban whatever you think is making them fat. Disagree? Ok, riddle me this:
1. Who is buying the junk food for the chubby bebes, O ye concerned parents of the year?

2. Eating healthy is difficult--the finding, the buying, and the cooking. I speak from experience. If you want to stick with it, then you suck it up and find a way. If you don’t, then get used to buying your toddler clothes from the hefty kids’ store. Very simple.

No, this blog post is about the members of the organically-minded community who feel the need to instill their values in others--by insulting them.
Granted, this isn’t far removed from what I myself do, except that I’m not necessarily trying to convert people. Rather, I am being my usual snarky self.
You’re welcome. Truly, I have smiled upon you this day.

Now, one of my lengthy fore-forewords:
I was raised by my grandma and my mother. These two women were convinced that any non-organic anything that passed the lips of anyone anywhere was going to give the person cancer or some other terrible disease. I have, at the time of writing this, lived a bit over two decades on this little mud ball and have never had a doughnut or a Big Mac, and I have only used commercial food coloring once. I eat whole wheat. I eat organic food in general about 96% of the time. I’m about a dress size 4 or 6.
But I’m not a damn food Nazi. A grammar Nazi yes, but food, nein.

The whole thing got kicked off when I saw these:


Are they not beautiful, readers? Are they not the most adorable rainbow pancakes you have ever seen? Damn right they are.

Then I saw this post later, titled “Things Successful Bloggers Do.”
Now, one of her quoted comments from a hate-commenter comes from who I can only imagine is an extremely phobic person involved the words, “I am screaming in fear [because of the food coloring].”

Darling. M’dear.
If you have ever used cheddar cheese that is yellow-orange, it has a colorant in it. If you have ever eaten a food that has any sort of color in it at all, you are eating a colorant. Your toothpaste, if it is other than pure chalky white, has a colorant in it. Granted, the phobic fruitcake who left the aforementioned comment was referring specifically to chemical colorings, which are indeed linked to things like ADD, etc, in children.
However, if you have lived long enough to reproduce and officially be a organic-minded parent yourself and you still don’t know about the growing amount of natural food colorings out there--that have been out there for at least the last 10 frickin' years--go right ahead and hand over your “Self-Appointed Total Food Awareness Guru” card. Yep, pass it forward.
And seriously, “screaming in fear”? From rainbow pancakes? Let’s hope you’re never confronted with some kind of minor catastrophe, or your head might explode from the sheer terror of it all.

I’d also like to point out that a lot of kiddies who are raised by these fear-mongering obsessives (what I like to call the “crazy” side of the community) leave the nest and immediately gorge themselves on junk food.

Most interesting (read: made me want to slap them) comment on her original pancake post?

“Gre-e-e-a-a-at. Trick the little tykes into consuming as much of this worthless nonfood as possible. Bunches of sugar and other empty carbs, cholesterol, etc. Gotta get a jump start on that diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and stroke.
Gee - you oughta be nominated as be Mother of the Year.”

Ahem.
Dear self absorbed jackass that goes by the screen-name-of-”wizard”:

Firstly, it’s buttermilk pancakes. Not something you should gorge yourself on, but still.
She states she puts one or two drops in the recipe. She also provides a link to the recipe that she used, which contains...
Wait for it...
A whole tablespoon of sugar! YE GODS!
Why, with children eating pancakes (with flax seeds in them) roughly the size of my fist (seriously, that's around how big they look compared to the fork in this photo), perhaps as often as once a month, that is a sure track to diabetes and woe! There will be cancer! Wailing! Gnashing of teeth! Possibly sad musical montages!
Or not.
Granted, children are much more sensitive to chemicals than adults are, which would be why food colorings would affect them so much. But the key thing to bear in mind is that not much coloring was used in the recipe and they aren’t eating it that often.
More importantly, if Rachel’s anyone to go by, kids with ADD may well grow up to be goddamn geniuses. So snarf those pancakes, kiddies.
I kid. Mostly.
Also, kids that are fit (and evidently they are) are reducing their risk of stroke, etc, just by not sitting on their butts all day.
Plus, it’s been argued that eating a (moderately sized) breakfast of carb-a-riffic goodness may actually prevent:

“...many of the dangerous symptoms of metabolic syndrome.
Metabolic syndrome is a constellation of symptoms that includes abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, insulin resistance and high triglycerides. It frequently leads to full-blown diabetes, and even when it doesn't, it puts you at significant risk for heart disease.”

Sure, it’s mostly based around mice, but we’re talking about active children here. Going by the descriptions and the picture on the left side of the blog, you can put them on a wheel out in the yard and they run around like they’re on speed happy little monsters angels.
In closing, Amanda isn’t a bad mother. Her kids look happy and healthy in their pictures, she obviously loves them with every cell in her body, and frankly, it’s none of your damn business if she wants to give her kids rainbow buttermilk pancakes once in a multi-colored moon or not.
Overly judgmental ass.

Smooches,
Mary

Murder By Bully: The Hot New Trend

Sladjana Vidovic.
If you don’t recognize the name, don’t wrack your brain too hard; she isn’t a spray-tanned bimbo toting a 2 ounce dog and she isn’t singing about burning a picture. Nonetheless, it turns out that it’s pretty important that you know her name. You see, she was a perfectly normal girl, one of thousands of nameless and faceless bullying victims, but her story is making headlines.
For now.

Sladjana Vidovic was 16-years-old in 2008 when she hung herself by tying one end of a rope to her bed, the other around her neck and then jumped out her bedroom window. This came after she endured a fatally full day of bullying at Mentor High School. Students reportedly mocked her Croatian accent, and called her names like 'Slutty Jana' or 'Slut-Jana-Vagina'. One boy reportedly pushed her down the stairs and another girl hit her in the face with a water bottle.

Now, I admit that sometimes I dismiss accounts of high school bullying with the words, “That’s life.” In this case, and quite a few more like it, it just pisses me off. Because in these cases, it’s the exact opposite of just life. And it’s not just that this poor girl felt that suicide was her only option. It was her murderers’ reactions:

Even at her funeral her family said they saw the girls who had tormented her, walk up to Sladjana's casket and laugh at her dead body.

In another version of this article, it revealed that not only was her little sister the one to have found her body, but can you imagine the entire grieving family having to endure their child’s tormentors walk up to the casket and laugh at her?
I make plenty of jokes here and there about violence, but I also only mean them maybe 8% of the time. This is one of those times. I can say with all honesty that if I had been that kid sister, I would have taken those arrogant, smug, worthless self-absorbed little bitches apart. With a hairbrush and my teeth. And people, it would entirely be worth being locked up for life--or possibly taken out by a SWAT team. Whichever.
Granted, I have a mildly psychotic reaction to people I care about being hurt. And by “mildly psychotic,” I mean my face turns red and I start looking around for all manner of objects to lodge in their spleen. Also perhaps something to set them afire with, just to break up the tedium of my attempts to wrench their head from their body and break all the major bones. So because I am a little sister myself (extended family counts), this story grinds on a nerve for me.

I don’t consider there to be any excuse for driving someone to suicide. For one thing, high school is rough. Bullies are everywhere. But the fact that it has come to this point, where the schools can not handle the situations, and repeated instances of parents not seeming to care, that points a spotlight on these tragedies. It has come to the point where advocacy groups are calling attention to these situations more than the parents--who, by the way, are the people who are supposed have the best interests of the kids at heart--and the kicker is that the advocacy groups are seeming to get more done and make a bigger impact. Parents, please. Stop fiddling while Rome burns.

Now, it's not really far-fetched to say that the bully-girls ought to be prosecuted. Protective parents extolling what limited virtues their little monsters have be damned--these little sociopaths killed someone and then displayed an alarming amount of glee about it.

So, what is the definition of Involuntary Manslaughter? Read on:

There are two types of involuntary manslaughter statutes: criminally negligent manslaughter and unlawful act manslaughter. Criminally negligent manslaughter occurs when death results from a high degree of negligence or recklessness. Modern criminal codes generally require a consciousness of risk and under some codes the absence of this element makes the offense a less serious Homicide.

And:

Unlawful act manslaughter occurs when someone causes a death while committing or attempting to commit an unlawful act, usually a misdemeanor. Some states distinguish between conduct that is malum in se (bad in itself) and conduct that is malum prohibitum (bad because it is prohibited by law). Conduct that is malum in se is based on common-law definitions of crime; for example, an Assault and Battery could be classified as malum in se.

While Wikipedia is not the best source, I include this quote for the argument:

Constructive manslaughter is also referred to as ‘unlawful act’ manslaughter. It is based on the doctrine of constructive malice, whereby the malicious intent inherent in the commission of a crime is considered to apply to the consequences of that crime. It occurs when someone kills, without intent, in the course of committing an unlawful act. The malice involved in the crime is transferred to the killing, resulting in a charge of manslaughter.

Rachel (the future law student who can make sense of all this) remarks that the unlawful act was emotional torture, which resulted in this poor girl's death.

In addition, Criminally negligent manslaughter is another option:

Criminally Negligent manslaughter is variously referred to as criminally negligent homicide in the United States, gross negligence manslaughter in England and Wales. In Scotland and some Commonwealth of Nations jurisdictions the offense of culpable homicide might apply.
It occurs where death results from serious negligence, or, in some jurisdictions, serious recklessness. A high degree of negligence is required to warrant criminal liability. A related concept is that of willful blindness, which is where a defendant intentionally puts himself in a position where he will be unaware of facts which would render him liable.

Rachel remarks that Criminally Negligent Manslaughter appears to fit because mental, verbal and sometimes physical abuse should be classed as reckless. She goes on to say that if they can find corroboration for any physical abuse, that is assault, which is of course another unlawful act.

NOTE: Neither of us are legal experts or hold legal degrees. We are, however, concerned citizens that are more than a little pissed of that justice is being ignored. Rachel also points out that we found these two legal opportunities researching on the web for maybe 30 minutes, and it is probable that a legal professional could find other opportunities.

It’s not a secret that teens generally begin to consider their parents to be some kind of strange, totally lame oddments right around 13. They don’t tell them about their problems for a variety of reasons. They deal with peer pressure about everything under the sun--and I hate to be the one to tell you this, especially if you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade (welcome to the Internet, by the way): Mean Girls are trendy.
I could ramble on about how much I think Lindsay Lohan is a worthless twat, but I’m trying to stick to the point here. Mean Girls was shocking...to the parents. I’m pretty sure every teenage girl out there has had to deal with their own version of The Plastics at some point, which is probably part of what made the movie so popular.
And now we have a new TV series called Pretty Little Liars.
Interestingly, it’s based around the concept of a small group of girls and one dead mutual friend. The kicker? Her death may have been their fault. Somehow, it’s a hit.

For every bullied girl, it’s great to have a media escape where you can imagine being airbrushed perfection in itty bitty clothes. You get the guy, you ruin the Bitch Girl’s life...all in great fun set to a fabulous soundtrack. Self-esteem rises, you refuse to believe the trash people talk about you, blah blah blah, roll credits.

Here’s how it is in real life. The bullied girl probably won’t ever achieve airbrushed perfection because, hello, she’s human. The guy will end up being gay or a jerk. Or a gay jerk, you can never tell. The Bitch Girl will contract herpes and will either end up in a trailer park or in an upper middle class home with an upper middle class husband. It’s a pretty good bet that she won’t remember the bullied girl in 20 years. If she does, it’s because she showed up at the reunion with money, a tiny ass, and a raving desire to prove to everyone who could care less that she’s still wicked awesome.

And if you’re the Bitch Girl in real life, that high self-esteem is more like an over-inflated ego. Refusing to believe the “trash” people talk about you is denial about reality. Dismissing them as “haters” is so much easier than pausing and trying to objectively decide whether, say, driving another girl to suicide for the fun of it makes you a bad person or not.
Oh, and you’re probably not a size 00. And if you are, have fun with your eating disorder.* I’m sure that eroding your teeth with stomach acid definitely sets you aside from all the total losers who aren’t too lazy to actually work out...or just allow themselves to eat more than 300 calories a day so that they don’t collapse.

My point is, Mean Girls have been glorified. Sure, the Plastic Queen Bee is eventually derailed--but dang, didn’t Regina look cool the whole time? Oh, and the power she wielded! And she had lackeys! And in Pretty Little Liars, aren’t the Queen Bees so pretty! Much like how The Simpsons makes having little money and much stupidity seem charming, glorifying Mean Girls and their ilk makes bullying seem like a fun lark, filled with trendy clothes and totally awesome comebacks.

Every teenage girl’s dream: accolades, attention and minions.

And you know what makes the bullied girls watch these things in the media? Because in Scripted-Life Land, revenge is sweet--and justifiable, because the Bitch Girls always lose.
In real life, they just step it up.

Unfortunately, Sladjana paid a very big price for her tormentors’ ego-maniacal shenanigans. Her memory and the memories of all the others that share her story, including every gay student who has committed suicide because of being harassed endlessly, ought to be remembered by taking more of a stand against this kind of BS.

Because there is no excuse. So get up, do something. You might save a life.
And if you know of someone who is or may be a victim of bullying, please pass this on to them:

HopeLine

1-800 SUICIDE

SAFE (Self Abuse Finally Ends)

1-800 DONT CUT

PFLAG (Parents Families Friends of Lesbians and Gays)

RAINN (Rape Abuse & Incest National Network)

1-800-656-HOPE

And finally, if you are a victim of bullying, please do not harm yourself or take your life in response to the actions of petty morons. They are not worth it and there is help out there from people who have either been in your situation or will do their best to move heaven and earth for you.

♥♥And last but not least, please remember you are loved.♥♥

*I am aware that some people are naturally skinny. I am not referring to them in this post. I am referring to the girls who starve themselves or vomit in order to maintain a stick-thin little figure.

O'Donnell isn't a witch, but apparently people don't care

Bill Maher is someone I don't give a crap about usually, and I'll tell you why. Because until recently, I didn't really place him as being unique among the plethora of weasel-faced little idiots that reign over the airwaves. Once you've been revolted by one, you've been revolted by 'em all.

Now, our own lovely Malkin raises a good point: the blogs losing their minds over Christine O'Donnell's "witchcraft" comments neglect to take into account the actual context, which Michelle so helpfully provides.
Malkin further clarifies for anyone who can't make out exactly what's going on in the video, since apparently "having a discussion" in the world of TV involves talking over the other person as much as possible:

At 1:03 in the video, one of the panelists on the show criticizes O’Donnell for criticizing Halloween — “Wait a minute, I love this, you’re a witch, you go ‘Halloween is bad,’ I’m not the witch, I mean wait a minute.” She responds by explaining that she opposes witchcraft because she has had first-hand experience with what they do.

So, she tried it. She rejected it. And she learned from it.

So, once and for all: NO DAMMIT, O'DONNELL IS NOT A WITCH.

Maher making a big deal about her supposed witchitude is pretty hilarious considering that the left generally claims that they are the ones who are all about religious freedom. I have news for you: Neo-Paganism is accepted as a valid religion now--certainly not by everyone, but it is by no means persecuted on the level that most people, including many Neo-Pagans themselves, believe. No one gets burned at the stake or put to death for being Pagan, Satanic, or even a Scientologist. You can actually declare yourself to be a Jedi in the good ol' US of A and it gets friggin' recognized.

I'm certainly not a fan of O'Donnell saying she opposes Halloween because of what "they" do. You know what, she's allowed her opinion. And I'm allowed to think that she's unfairly lumping the non-crazy people in with the regular old crazy people. For one thing, you always get that one "Satanist" coven or whatever that actually uses some kind of blood. You know why? Because in every group, there is a douchebag. And usually, he's got friends.

The honest truth is that most Pagans and Wiccans nowadays celebrate Halloween with a bit of wine, maybe a little prayer, and some loving meditation focused on the memories and spirits of loved ones that have passed over. No blood is involved unless that's just how your menstrual cycle works this year.

What does she have to do to convince less-than-observant morons that she's not a witch? Maybe she should prove herself to be lighter than a duck.

Just sayin'.

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Listening to: Practical Magic - Alan Silvestri

Lisa Murkowski: Moron of the Day

Ladies, gentlemen, and whatever that is in the corner with the godawful shirt:

This is a RINO.

Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has decided that because she lost her bid for re-election to Joe Miller, she is going to run as a write-in candidate. Chicks On The Right has a great entry about this.

Lisa, honey. Can we talk?

Not only do you look like Nancy Pelosi's brain-damaged twin, but you're a really bad loser. In this case, practice does not make perfect. Trying to throw off the race after you've been booted out is like stalking your ex after he's dumped you. Sure, he might take you back for a week--but he'll regret it. Especially after you set fire to his car. Metaphorically speaking, you've set a couple fires and the voters are trying to put out the flames. Also, you're nuts. That isn't a metaphor.

Thing is, if the voters have basically said that they prefer Miller, you need to accept that. Now be a good girl and quit embarrassing the rest of the Republican women. I can understand that goshdarnit, you really want that election to go your way because you need it and Daddy never did get you that pony and your therapist says you shouldn't mix Prozac with alcohol because it makes you wear gold-plated vagina weights as earrings, but...no. Oh honey, just no.

And for another thing, if you really feel the need to throw a pity party do one of those Lifetime Movie musical montage things where you pretend to be the Little Engine that could(ish), then you need an appropriate song.



Just my two cents, lady.



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Listening to: Dip - THC