Hillary Rodham Clinton is a "wild wood elf."

TRUFAX (via, once again, the excellent palinpumawatch):

I don’t know. I think [HRC] could get a lot of work done as SOS, should she accept the position. I wouldn’t like her being under his thumb, but she’s a wild wood elf. No one can control her, only the winds and the rains.

All though I worry that it’s just a way for him to have her in his cabinet a couple of years so he can dump her and then ruin her political career.

It’s funny, because the other night I was thinking about Palin’s interview and how if she runs in 2012 and wins, Hillary could be her SOS. I would like THAT.

...It suddenly hits me that I have no words right now: I am rendered momentarily speechless by this...uhmmm...

...

O.K.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is by way of a sincere apology to Hillary Clinton for any frustrated venting I had made in your general direction during the primaries (and was I think largely colored by the early stirrings of these people, although at that stage I truly had no idea of the depth of...this). I think you'd make a fine Secretary of State--although it'd be really nice if you , along with the entire new administration could drop any residual hawkish-on-Iraq (to say nothing of Iran) posturing and get us the hell out of there, k?

..Or any other position of power, really, much as you, like indeed Obama with whom you shared very similar positions on many issues, are not my idea of the perfect candidate. Because, you know, a) who is, really b) consider some of the alternatives. At least you're smart. And y'know, lucid. Unlike, ummmm, some people.

Please try not to choke laughing at the idea of yourself serving under (gasp, wheeze) President Palin, and, well, as for your new fanclub here...dude, I -am- sorry. Even my worst enemy, I would not wish this kind of following. Probably. Anyway, you were never that, whatever else.

And no, need it be said, I don't think you're a frigging elf. I mean, I really -hope- not.

Although I WILL admit that I have always harbored a suspicion that McCain is, in fact, a particularly irascible species of garden gnome.

ETA: And the twee goes on. Via YesToDemocracy:

Hello mountainsong. I just really like your name. it sounds so fresh and revitalizing. it always reminds me of a cool clear stream flowing down the side of the mountain, spraying its crystal drops of nectar on every lucky blade of grass and all the plants within it’s emcompassing reach. Cool, refreshing, clear–washing away all the grime and dirtiness of this election year.

and

All is within…as the great Goddess always whispered in our hearts, reminding us that we are women of Earth Wind and Fire-light of the moon and fire of the sun! We are lovers of men, as well, caretakers of our children, our family ties, and beings of multifaceted gifts and talents. Everywhere we go “the Goddess” is…and Dame Hillary, through the travail of this election has carved a legacy of light and fire…indeed!

I...don't know. I just...don't. Look, I like fanfic as much as the next geek, don't get me wrong, but it's like...if you want to go to Ren Faire, then frigging just go to Ren Faire. Trying to go via electoral politics is just a -really- fucking circuitous route, you know? I nearly said "tortuous." I refrained. Just.

Because, okay, making real people into your personal Mary Sue? Particularly someone as blatantly -not- elfin or damsel-y as HRC? Especially in (I take it) the name of -feminism-? Kind of creepy and weird, I mean once past the general ZOMG -boggle- hilarity of it all. Just saying.

And yes, I think the Obama-as-backlit-Messiah shit is cringey and failtastic, also. They're politicians, people. They're SUPPOSED to be wily and tough and self-serving and full of doublespeak and ultimately disappointing ratbastards. That's their JOB. What one is looking for is the one who is going to be a) sufficiently less of an overall ratbastard than the other ratbastard b) -your- ratbastard, at least a majority of the time. Sorry.

Quote of the day, 6/18/08

I got in a fight one time with a really big guy, and he said, "I'm going to mop the floor with your face." I said, "You'll be sorry." He said, "Oh, yeah? Why?" I said, "Well, you won't be able to get into the corners very well."

--Emo Philips

(thanks, Evil Bobby)

i am wearing brown with black today

i am just THAT edgy 'n' cool *urp* also, i need to do laundry.


just thought i'd share.

phone conversation just now

dude on other end of phone: Hello. May I please speak to the youngest
adult male in the household who's over eighteen and registered to
vote?

me: (pause, ignoring the second clause) You could, but he's busy in
his litter box right now.

dude: (pause, same dull telemarketer drone) Are you referring to the
cat?

me: Yes.

dude: Well, I meant a human.

me: Sorry, can't help you. -click-

I'm such an asshole...

all i have to say at this point

is this:



Well, no, that's not totally true; I have a couple of comments down at the end of this post at RE's. If it's saying anything new to anyone who has ears to hear, well, Maud speed and Maud bless.

meanwhile, well, the Great Work continues, don't she.

"and life goes on."

"Well, it's certainly uncontaminated by phones."

At the local Radio Shack, we learn: the phones that are on display without a price marker are thus displayed because they don't actually have any of those models in stock. This includes the model that I wanted, of the options that were presented, which were already not many.

So, okay: what phones DO they have. Guy checks in back. Emerges with two very basic models. I pick one. Guy disappears into the back again. Re-emerges a few moments later and explains that he'd been going to exchange the model he was showing me, which was defective, for a good one; but oops, looks like the recent flooding in the basement has ruined all the phones that were down there, sorry.

I'm sure there is a profound moral to this story, but I'm sure I don't know what.

So, without further ado: the Cheese Shop sketch.



Here is another post about cheese. No phones there either, though.

yep, that's the name-O, all right

or one of 'em. (BINGO's name is Legion). "Feminist" discussions about transpeople version.


"Vagina=woman & penis=man!"

"Being trans reinforces the gender binary!"

"Transwomen have male energy!"

"There's no such thing as gender; you're buying into a construct!"

The word the Jewish psychologists have for this is "dreck." That will be $150 please.

Alicublog uncovers this toadstone in the rough:

The long history of marriage is of an institution that raises the next generation and transmits the community’s values. Arranged marriages, loveless marriages – those were marriages. But, now, this transmission is less important; indeed, in most western culture the replacement rate has dropped well below 2.1; on the other hand, surrogate mothers and test tube babies, in vitro fertilization and sperm donors – the babies we do have seem less connected to those old definitions of marriage. That many gays don’t see this as remarkable & ahistorical means they don’t really understand marriage, but, we all tend to see the world through the prism of our own time.

Ta ever so for popping in and explaining it to us, really. And here we all
thought marriage started in 1954 when they started giving it away in the bottom of cereal boxes instead of decoder rings. No wonder there's so much confusion and hostility!

But wait! There's more! Some of her best friends...don't get it either:

These thoughts have been brought on by one of those chance confluences: a letter from an old friend and a newer friend’s loan of Bruce Bawer’s book, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within.

The letter arrived from a friend from freshman English, forty-four years ago; he was my closest confidante through a series of disastrous love affairs but also because we could discuss literature and character and the ethical questions Henry James posed until dawn lightened the windows. He remarked in a letter as we slowly reach out to one another after so many years apart, that he, as a gay man, can only find acceptance in an anarchic socialist world, but of course, he says, I’ve become conservative, matronly, a suburban wife and mother. He isn’t critical but rather accepts that we’ve become different people than we were. I pause at his remark and recognize its truth. On the one hand, I understand that some & some customs of the world through which I move would make him uneasy, make him feel an outsider. Still, he enjoys his quiet life, having mated and stayed with his “significant other” for well over forty years, buying a house on a quiet street. I can’t, of course, imagine him finding peace in a world that is truly anarchic; certainly, he could not find the peace he has found in American capitalism in the practices that the Muslim minorities practice (and encourage) in socialist Europe.

-screeeee- a who?

the practices that the Muslim minorities practice (and encourage) in socialist Europe.

Maybe I'm missing something here. Apparently "socialist Europe" is responsible for...um, which practices, exactly? Oh, wait, you mean the reactionary rage of the disaffected fanatic minority, channelled into vociferous hatred and oppression of women and gay folk, aided and abetted by the supposedly democratic countries' Powers That Be? Yes; thank goodness we don't have any of that here.

Anyhoo, alicublog sums up the gist of the rest pretty well with this:

The author's real point, made somewhere in the first hundred paragraphs, is that homosexuals should shut up about Bush because he protects them from Muslims. But she finds it at least as important to explain -- with endless slabs of convoluted prose as evidence -- that she is well-read and even a bit artistic. This is meant to signal that she is not a mouth-breathing faggot-hater, but someone who is tolerant -- which is to say, she tolerates both her gay friends' continued existence and her colleagues' continued discrimination against them.

This is usually the case with conservative converts of the sort described by Michael Berube with the phrase "I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick." They like to think that, because they broke away (assisted by stark fear) from an old orthodoxy, they have become true free-thinkers. But when issues of discrimination come up, they find themselves compelled to defend their new wingnut friends and their bone-deep prejudices.

In reality they haven't broken free, they've just switched gangs -- and have to live by the new one's code, including the by-law about No Poofters. If they want to face their old friends, they have three options (besides sanity, of course, which is out of the question):

They can swallow whole their new friends' lunacy and bravely assert it to all comers;

They can try a it's-for-your-own-good defense, pleading the necessity to accomodate moderate Muslims or red-state voters until such time as we can afford luxuries like civil rights;

Or they can plead the ties of friendship and remind their old friends of how they used to discuss Henry James until "dawn lightened the windows."

That, and the "Christian" part of our Judeo-Christian heritage, (along with our general rootin' tootin' spunkiness) makes us better than the Europeans, who, unlike us, are in danger of falling into the Dark Ages.

--oh yeah, but just so we're clear: she's got -no problem- with the Judeo part, despite the implications of how much better the switch to New Testament values (which we all -totally- embody, especially the bit where the quirky dude in the sandals suggested that hoarding up material wealth and shunning of Those People wasn't such a hot road to the Kingdom):

It is easier to believe others tempt us than within us are desires we must (and with difficulty) control. To many, the shift from the Old Testament to the New may be theologically one of grace, but is also from the tribal to the universal, from the external to the internal. Whether this is the lesson of the Bible or of the slowly modernizing world, it is clearly one that restrains us in ways that those who see temptation in a right angle can not understand and leads to quite different understandings of guilt. The man’s lust, we believe, not the woman’s clothing, causes rape. This and so much else is the mark of a value system internalized and assumed universal. We think it is right. Sure this assumption of a certain universality may impose upon others, but it is more practical than narrow: it is also the only way that people with varying beliefs can easily live beside one another.

And thanks to Jewish psychologists, we began to find words for this internalization...

See, even though you haven't quite evolved to the universal, Christlike place that's what -really- makes this nation great, -you- tribal, Old Testament people have something to contribute, too, you smartypantses, you.

Back to the other People She Respects And Cares About, Really, you know, I'm not even sure this was self-aware/ironic:

Some of my best employees were gay

I'm sure she has lots of other friends, too.

Don't let the door hit ya where the Patriarchy split ya

Heart: I mean, when a LESBIAN can’t perform at a Dyke march because male-born people are pissed because she plays at Michfest? That is male supremacy happening right there. That is patriarchy, right there.

Pretty good, right, LESBIANS & others? But small beer compared to the response it evokes:

Louisa May Alcott: Yup. And with “lesbians” as the eager handmaidens. Bitterness. This is why I no longer consider myself a “lesbian” separatist, just a separatist.

--kh porting over from yep still the same damn thread, finishing with this observation:

Let it end here, God, 19 short of 500. The undead author of Little Women abandons LESBIANISM because some LESBIANS won't hate transsexuals. I guess this makes her a non-cuddly post-LESBIAN.

WooHoo! I'm a Handmaiden! Hey, bfp and BA, can I join you in the Oppressor Morph Dance?

EDIT!!! to THIS SONG!! my FAVORITE THEME TUNE FOR PARANOIACS EVER!! which, because i am slow, i did NOT realize until now was sung by one of my favorite bloggers! I love you, Miss Prism! get that jam out of your leg soon so you can get back to singing and posting!

It will all make perfect sense shortly, part -5.frog, SQUAWK!

(a nod to this other post here, the title)

So, now, pluck'd from its context where i'm sure it makes a fuck of a lot more sense really (yes, same damn thread), we have this explanation of the sex/gender thing, from erm another perspective:

This again is why it’s important to distinguish between “male” and “man.” A man who is subordinated for being not manly enough is not a male woman and we should say so. He’s still a man and still male. He is actually participating in the deconstruction of manhood and masculinity, to the degree that he continues to acknowledge he is part of the category “male.” If he is recognized as a woman, then patriarchy has had its way. It has subordinated the unmasculine and made the unmasculine “women” just as it subordinates female persons and makes us women. For that to change, we have to *be* women/female and man/male and reject gender.

...


I'm going to just allow some space so that those of y'all who can and want to parse that out as is, can. Feel free to share your findings.

...

Okay. but, me, i read that three times and i'm still getting this awful feeling of vertigo. But, I want to engage it; so, I'm just gonna make it a little easier on my eyes.

Thees egeeen is vhy it’s impurtunt tu deestingooish betveee “mele-a” und “mun.” A mun vhu is sooburdeeneted fur beeeng nut munly inuoogh is nut a mele-a vumun und ve-a shuoold sey su. He-a’s steell a mun und steell mele-a. He-a is ectooelly perteecipeting in zee decunstroocshun ooff munhuud und mescooleenity, tu zee degree-a thet he-a cunteenooes tu ecknooledge-a he-a is pert ooff zee cetegury “mele-a.” Iff he-a is recugneezed es a vumun, zeen petreeerchy hes hed its vey. Bork bork bork! It hes sooburdeeneted zee unmescooleene-a und mede-a zee unmescooleene-a “vumee” joost es it sooburdeenetes femele-a persuns und mekes us vumee. Fur thet tu chunge-a, ve-a hefe-a tu *be-a* vumee/femele-a und mun/mele-a und reject gender. Hurty flurty schnipp schnipp!

Ah. That's much better. Still not totally sure I agree, but i can see her point, sort of, especially that last bit.