I'm amazed that she can avoid repeating herself too much, considering all the interviews she's giving lately. This one is pretty good, if you can get past the paternalistic schmoo that the Google dude comes off as.



And it must be "strong female role model day" on the Internetz, because this was kind of awesome, too. Exact same cheerleader uniforms as at my old high school. We probably had more white kids, though.

By the Official Rules of Gender Stereotyping, this post is for MEN ONLY.

The ladies can read it if they like, but they should really go make cookies afterwards to balance out things in their pretty little heads if they do. One tray of chocolate chips, or cupcakes, for part of the post; two trays for the whole thing; and you really should prepare a five-course meal which includes a creme brule if you, as a woman, would be so impertinent as to actually read entirely and then COMMENT on the thing. I mean, COME ON now...

Are they gone? Okay, now that it's just us guys, let's get on with it.

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW YEAH!

Just heard on the news that Astroland is supposedly coming back again for at least one more year.

WOO-HOO!

Weirdest thing I've seen so far this morning: Walking by the W Hotel on Lex while heading down to 47th, as I pass the hotel I see a human form on the ground out of the corner of my eye, and assume it's a homeless person. As I turn to look, I realize it's a 40-ish woman sitting/laying on the ground, barefoot, wearing nothing at all but a white W Hotel bathrobe; and holding a lit cigarette and what looks like a martini. On the sidewalk. In front of the hotel. In the rain.

I love this town.


[ FYI: I'm gonna be upstate for about 12 hours on Thursday, starting around 8am. Internet incommunicado, but my cell phone will be on. You kids behave while I'm gone! And stay off the goddamn lawn. ]

Now, Hate Lists and finding political insanity are easy, but as I've said, McLovin's hard. Which is why it's time for a list of all the good stuff. So here's what's making me happy at the moment, or guaranteed to in the future:

The Long List of Junk That Makes Me Smile and Whatnot:

• When your friends take over the DJ booth after the club you're at gets thinned out around midnight on a weekday, and you get to play nothing but fucking awesome songs for the rest of the night on the dance floor, drunk? Do you have ANY IDEA HOW 80's THAT SHIT WAS???


• The following phrase -- "Dennis Kucinich , House Elf"


• The first 3 chords to "Boys Don't Cry"


• Walking through open film sets across the street from where you work and spotting someone nobody else seems to have noticed.


• Finding money you hid on yourself months ago. Alternatively -- finding other people's money.


• Tina Fey being on Conan tonight. Predictable you say? HELL YES. Don't like it? Eat Me. 'Cause there's more predictable to come!


• That's right! Like, what about...Babies? Fuck you, THEY'RE CUTE. Most of them. Toddlers, anyway. It's the way they walk, right? I saw one today that proceeded to snatch a muffin from the hands of her baby sister, begin to wolf it down, but then think better of it and give half back. SWEETEST. KID SCENE. EVER.


• Taking two old hard drives out of my machine and replacing them with a 1TB Hitachi and a 10,000 rpm WD Raptor. So this meant that after I erased one of the old drives, I was free to take the other one -- which had been giving me trouble -- and DEMOLISH IT WITH A CROWBAR. Brutally and with much glee. Then once I had it in dozens of pieces on my desk, I pried out the drive platters and hung them up to make wind chimes out of their bones. TO WARN THE OTHER COMPUTER EQUIPMENT WHAT WILL HAPPEN. Next up on the Office Space batter-up printer scene re-enactment? "Tickle Me Elmo EXTREME". If I SEE him, he DIES.


• Seeing a traffic cop pull a guy's car out of line for honking obnoxiously at an intersection and make him sit there waiting for five minutes. Hey man, all that honking sure helped a lot, didn't it? Asshole = lose.


• Someone brings food into work -- and it's ACTUALLY GOOD! Like, none of that nasty, grainy, butter-cream frosting on the cupcakes or anything!


• Blade Runner: The Final Cut is showing for three days at the Ziegfeld this weekend. MUST SEE IT AGAIN. For the first time. BTW, has anyone seen Eastern Promises yet? Was it any good? (I have my fingers crossed for Lions for Lambs, despite the casting of Tom Cruise...)


• Rain. We are INCREDIBLY short on thunderstorms this season. I'm gonna have to take this up with that fucker Zeus at the next pantheon clam bake. Egotistical asshole, that guy. And what's up with those SANDALS? Am I right?!


• Watching really old couples on the street holding hands. Or interracial couples. Or a gay or lesbian couple. I'm a sucker for odds-challenged lurvin', I guess. They just make me grin like an idiot.


• Running into someone you know in line at an expensive event -- and they get you in for FREE. Sah-haweet. Ka-CHING! I loves me some free shit.


• Seeing a video of a ten-year-old kid staring down a full-grown bull, and then chasing it away. I honestly thought the kid was gonna die, yet it ended up being funny as hell. Reminds me of that family Chihuahua that killed a rattlesnake that was threatening the toddler it was playing with. It just goes to show that almost any animal has a predator/prey switch that you can flip.


• Holy shit people, Goodburger on Lex has the BEST FUCKING BLACK COW MILKSHAKES. And SALTY ASS FRIES. And Turkeyburgers you'd beat up your grandmother for. Well okay, your grandfather, maybe. Try them, you'll be a believer.


• Real-life meet-cutes:
  
  I was rushing to meet my boyfriend at the time in Chinatown one afternoon. There was an old lady holding onto a fence on the side of a building. She looked tired and completely helpless so I offered her my help. The little old lady told me she lives in the nursing home across the street and is trying to make it to the bank. The bank was only on the next block but her walking condition was so bad, it took us about half an hour to get there. Well, I couldn't just leave her at the bank then expect her to make it home herself! So after meeting up the boyfriend, we walked out to hail her a cab - to go down the block! dang fucking cab cost us $4. well anyway, I ran into her this weekend and she introduced me to her grandson who is about my age - harhar. This reminds me of the wedding scene in HITCH where the old, choking granny introduces the girl to her dashing grandson.
  Conclusion: I took her oranges, got a boy's number, and won her affection. HOORAY. a good deed never goes bad.


• Barack Obama. Seriously. Motherfucker is FEARLESS. Or at least as fearless as anyone with a chance of winning the Presidency CAN be. And if you're his opponents or threatened by his actions, do you know how you deal with a maverick candidate who wants to change the status quo, who comes along with new ideas to clean up corruption, and who defies conventional stereotypes? You say "well, he's just inexperienced". Which is the most polite way left of saying he's an ignorant Negro that has no place in the Oval Office. That will get you front page headlines and the meme will stick to him for good. Even if everything he said that you ridiculed is later evaluated to be sound -- because the correction will be buried on page 32. Did anyone know he's the overwhelming choice of the LGBT community? In a recent LOGO survey, he beat out not just Hillary and all the other candidates, but Dennis Kucinich too. Wow. Maybe it has something to do with him being the only leading candidate with a special section on his web page for gay issues -- or maybe it's just because he doesn't speak in platitudes towards them. In fact, he seems to have a solid position on almost every policy issue the rest of the candidates excel at dodging. How many people do you think know that, though? Or know that he was the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review and a Constitutional Law professor for years, before serving in the State legislature and then becoming only the third African-American in the modern history of the U.S. Senate? Basically he's fucking awesome on almost all levels.
  
  Well now you know. And knowing as half the battle. YOU'RE WELCOME.











So what's making you happy right now? Damn straight, give it up. It's a Love-In, y'all!

mood: PSYCHED

Okay, clearly I am either going to get hit by a bus later today, or picked up by aliens. Or possibly this is just gonna be a strange week.
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As many of you women reading already know, this Tuesday afternoon is once again my highly-anticipated, much-imitated, never-surpassed, Annual Kiss-A-Thon! (Seems like it's been so much longer than 12 months since last time, doesn't it? Hell, this time of year never comes quickly enough for y'all, I'm sure.) Now -- those ladies who sent their info directly in to my Tuscon, AZ home-office have probably already received your entry package and itinerary in the mail. For those who haven't, I'll now briefly go over the day's main event right here, in broad strokes, just to explain to you what's going to be different this year and what will remain the same:

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I'm interested in what everyone else thinks about this subject, which was brought up in a question during the Democratic debates Monday night. Usually when I'm asking for opinions on something, I don't reveal my own view first, because I know it's going to bias the responses, but I really do want people's honest opinions on it!

My words are from an unintentional debate I'm having on another blog (You'll have to excuse the snark, the person I was responding to was being obtuse. His comments are italicized):


-------------


SG: I thought it was so stupid that a question about reparations for slavery was brought up in a serious political debate Monday night, btw.

>>> "Why?"


SG: Because it's an asinine issue, in my opinion.

It's offensive and insultingly stupid to people on both sides of the issue. One side just doesn't understand that yet; but they would if they got their way, and by then it would be too late.


>>> "I'm curious to how you reconcile that with the fact that reparations for past transgressions is not without historical precedent in this country. Blacks would definitely not be the first.

>>> South Africa had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to deal with it's history and the end of it's apartheid, but we've had nothing of the sort for ours. I fail to see how reparations like that would be insulting and offensive to anyone."


SG: The people receiving reparations in South Africa were receiving them because apartheid had just ended. People who lived under the system were still alive, and reparations were literal instead of symbolic. In fact, that is the case in most of the situations where reparations are undertaken.

In America, we already have "reparations" for the systemic disenfranchisement of African Americans throughout our history which results in unequal societal placement because of entrenched racism and a class-systems that favors keeping the families of the historically rich richer and the poor poorer. Those reparations are called "Affirmative Action" and are, generally-speaking, appropriate -- until society changes to a degree that they're no longer necessary.

But those aren't the reparations people who talk about that are referring to. They're talking about getting a goddamn check in the fuckin' mail. This ignorant belief is incredibly insulting to me on several levels:

First of all, the actual people who were wronged are NO LONGER ALIVE. If any of them were, then of course they should be compensated. BUT THEY AREN'T. What the nation did during the era of slavery was inarguably wrong and horrific. But there's nothing that can be done about that now except to make sure history never forgets it, to educate the young about it, and to address systemic inequities which have resulted from it and not yet been corrected (see above). It makes no sense, however, to just cut a check for people who are only dubiously related to those who were wronged. Not only because of the time remove, but also -- how are you going to determine who gets a check and who doesn't??? Do you have any idea how many black folks there are in this country who AREN'T descendants of slaves? How are you going to sort one person's ancestry from the other? Ask them? And does their percentage of remove and of African blood determine the payout?

Secondly, even if you could do so, this would end up being an empty and ultimately destructive gesture. Once the checks were cut, white people would say, "THERE. We're done with this crap now. FINALLY we can rid ourselves of this 'white guilt'!" and they would then feel free to forget all about this history, since they'd already been compensated! Future generations who might otherwise benefit from the study of such a dark period in American history, or from programs like affirmative action would now be told, "Sorry, your Dad got a check for slavery, bub. Not our fault if he didn't have the proper 'old money' business connections to invest that cash properly to pass it on to you!" Also, cutting a one-time check and handing it to someone is useless without the cultural tools, history, and resources to maximize the opportunity to do something with that windfall.

In other words: Education and/or Affirmative Action is buying someone a fishing rod and teaching them how to catch their own dinner. Reparations is handing them a couple fish and saying, "Good luck! Later, sucker!"


Finally, the biggest reason I find the idea of reparations the MOST offensive, as (half-) a black man, is because of the idea that there is some amount of cash reward that could somehow COMPENSATE FOR YOUR ANCESTORS BEING ENSLAVED. That's a totally repulsive and inhuman idea. What amount would possibly make up for that? Twenty grand each? Fifty? A hundred grand per family line? The idea that a PRICE TAG can be put on taking away a person's rights & essential humanity, and treating entire generations of that race as animals, thereby using them as free labor to construct a country of white privilege and amass wealth for yourself and your own race, is so offensive I don't even know where to start. It boggles my mind that there are actually people out there, both black and white, who believe that there is some dollar amount that would make slavery "paid for". Reparations are a farce because such a thing cannot be repaired or compensated for.


To illustrate: If I build a time machine tomorrow, and go back and make slaves of your ancestors (you meaning anyone reading this), not just enslaving and dehumanizing them, but thereby changing the history and lives of everyone descended from them, which would in turn change not only your standard of living and your family life so far, but also WHO YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF AS A PERSON.......what amount of money would you agree I could give to you when I get back from my trip through time, that would somehow make it okay? What's YOUR price tag for your race's dignity?

The answer is, of course, that THERE IS NONE. There is no amount of money given for "reparations" that would make slavery compensated for. Therefore to suggest that such can and should be done is an insult to an entire race of people, and most importantly to the memory of their ancestors.

(I won't even get into the practical considerations of what undertaking that kind of giveaway would entail and result in, due to market forces, people being idiots, etc. That much should be obvious. But isn't, apparently.)

This post will be of interest to about 3 people on my friends list. Apologies to everyone else.

(Pretty ladies, be sure and replace every instance of the word "computer" in this post with "Hole Hog", "chopper", or something similarly muy macho. Gold star for anyone who gets the Stephenson reference.)

Today was computer day. And by "today", I mean selected parts of the time between 1am and 4am last night, when I was feeling energetic and mentally undaunted -- in the mood to mess around with a lot of PC stuff I had been putting off, because of some problems I was anticipating.
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Bear with me, folks -- this is going to be sickening. But how often do I post about being in a REALLY good mood, though? I mean, usually I post from work (bleh), and if I'm home and in a really good mood, I'm probably having sex err, I mean, away from the computer and out doing fun stuff. Therefore, today's good mood home computer time = this post.

Stuff that made me happy today:

"Uhhhh...remember when we said all that stuff about not knowing anything about that treasonous CIA leak, and that the White House had nothing to do with it? Scratch that, what we MEANT to say was that the President's top political advisor, the man known as "Bush's Brain," the prince of darkness himself, Karl Rove, was actually behind the whole thing. Now please immediately forget this ever happened and go about your patriotic duty. This has been a message from the Ministry of Information. Good day."



"The president knows that Karl Rove is not involved, and it's a ridiculous suggestion. I have spoken to Karl Rove, and there is simply no truth to that suggestion. And the President is aware of that." -- Scott McClellan, White House Press Secretary, Sept 2003


Can you imagine if a top figure in the Clinton Administration (like say Hillary) had outed a CIA agent working on Weapons of Mass Destruction, in order to exact political revenge? The press would have a field day! Think this will work in a similar manner, becoming a front-page story for months? Don't bet on it...



[Update: I predict the GOP will conveniently forget their previous outrage over Clinton's parsing of "That depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is" in their desperation to try and squirm Rove out of what he's clearly done. I expect they will also try and re-slime Wilson in the middle of all this, in an attempt to make Rove look like he was "in the right" regardless of what happens legally, in order to control public opinion in case they might lose on the facts. Right-wing extremist blogs are already employing revisionist history insofar as attacking Wilson, his character, and his "lies".

The real question is, how did Rove get access to this information before he leaked it? Might this investigation eventually tie into the Bolton fiasco, or Rumsfeld's OSP? Might it even threaten Cheney? That would explain why the special prosecutor seems to be making a big deal of this...hmmmm.]

Is there anything this man won't put his name on?

I thought it had reached the pinnacle of self-parody when he made "Trump Ice" bottled water,
but it appears I was premature.

I fully believe he will start putting his name on dental floss, kumquats, and tampons, next.


And such fabulous taste in design! What doesn't look better gold plated, I ask you? Even gold looks better gold plated, in Trump's opinion.

"Trump said that the idea for a university had been at the back of his mind for years and that the project could develop into a brick-and-mortar school."

Can you imagine the halls of this horrible monstrosity of a university, if were ever to be built, and not just an pathetically contrived online course? The trophy case near the gym would be the most tasteful and subdued display of gold in the building.


I'm sure a degree from Trump University will be worth it's weight in.....um, pixels.

February 23, 2005: Keanu Reeves reacts to the news of me starting another blog.


The general consensus among critics is that this shot represents Keanu's best work since Bill & Ted.


...I agree.





p.s. -- Right now the title is Worst Blog Ever, but once I have some content up, that may change (the title, not the suckage). Feel free to suggest alternatives. I'm easy.


[E.t.A. -- Note that the rest of the blog entries after the first have been set to almost entirely private/friends-only. Ask to be added to see the full range.]

mood: busy