Oh boo fucking who for you, my dear.

Let me play my teeny tiny violin.

You’re struggling with reduced finances. Your hubby’s portfolio is down 95%. You think you understand why we poor plebeians are so mad that some of us are picketing the homes of banksters.

You haven’t faintest idea. Your shame about not being able to spend like you used to is not the same as our desperation. We cannot feed or clothe, or house, or educate our children. You eat macaroni and cheese and think it’s virtuous. We eat ramen noodles because macaroni requires milk and butter, ramen just needs water.

You’re worried about your husband’s health. I bet that if he started having chest pains, you have the health insurance to take him to the hospital. We don’t have the luxury. Instead we use homemade remedies for alleviating an abscessed tooth while hoping and praying that it doesn’t lead to death, like it did for that poor boy in Baltimore.

You snipe about unworthy borrowers, but don’t have the brain power required to consider where they come from. 30 years of stagnant wages while men like your husband rail against minimum wage increases plus the loss of traditional pensions and skyrocketing education costs mean that the only way for average Americans to get ahead and send their kids to college and retire in some form of comfort was through home ownership and equity. Those who you call unworthy were doing the only thing they could to give their kids a chance at a better life. They were doing exactly what they have been told to do by society, by the government, and by people like you. And when that fails (and fails in a way which this semi-educated poor person had been predicting for years) you have the gall to say “no one saw it coming”. Everyone saw it coming, but the rosier-viewed among us thought it could be put off a bit longer.

So pardon me if I don’t find the details of how tastefully you choose to celebrate your husband’s birthday or how you duck into society events after the cameras are gone, humanizing. Forgive me for not having an ounce of empathy while you shop in your own closet, as I had to buy my kid thrift store shoes when his last pair become more aerated than a colander. And excuse me for my absolute lack of pity. You are the worst of America. And those poor people now populating the Hoovervilles (or Nicholsvilles as we call them here) would gladly trade their problems for your anyday.

watching PBS’ version of Dickens’ Little Dorrit (damn that seems like a shit ton of apostrophes)

There are only a few methods the rich use to fuck over the poor, but we keep falling for them. Over and over and over and over. In Little Dorrit’s case, I smell a Victorian ponzi scheme in the making.

Also, Victorians like Dickens and Gaskell use the term “speculation” with a snear, the same way southern women use the word “cute”. At one point the main character wants to invest in a bank that is doubling people’s money in a year. His partner snears “Isn’t that speculation?”. Main character assures him that it’s not, it’s “investment”. Same thing, new word. Not unlike “mortgage backed securities”.

I’m in a horrible mood lately. The kind of mood where you give up drinking cause you’ve just become a sad drunk. The kind of mood where living in a shack ala the Unibomber starts to sound attractive. So I’m not writing much (obvs) because my normally charming and erudite self has decided that endless reruns of cops shows with tough chicks are preferable to being just another poor sad slob on the internets.

But…….

In my botomless pit of negativity I’ve decided to do a new meme. There is nothing nice about it. I want to hate loudly. So here are a few things I hate sooooooooo much that I’d rather tear my eyes out and puncture my eardrums with an icepick rather than ever have to see or hear about them again.

1. The idea of “honor”. Honor gets other people killed, usually women. Honor is this outdated and stupid idea that another person has the ability to diminish you through actions that have nothing to do with you. Better to be diginified, to have integrity, to be ethical or loyal or kind. We don’t need to end honor killings, we need to end the idea of honor all together. Honor they mother and thy father? Fuck that if your parents are horrible horrible people. The idea that a young woman or girl can dishonor her family simply by leaving the house. Fuck that.

2. If god helps those who help themselves, then either god is an asshole or it’s just an idea that the selfish and greedy use to justify their success. I don’t want to believe in a god who isn’t there for the helpless. I think that would be the sole reason to believe in god if there was one, some omnipotent being there to help the lowest and most harmed. But everytime I read the news I get further proof that either god doesn’t exist or if he does, he’s not a god I want anything to do with.

3. Trite and boring art showcasing women as objects. You think that advertising and fashion are horrible, then you haven’t ventured into the artworld my friends. I like drawing from sculptues. It’s a good cheap way to practice abstracting figures. So I’ve been crusing modern art websites checking out their sculptures for intersting things. It goes something like this: headless female torso, headless female torso, female reclining in submissive position, boring mother and child sculpture, headless female torso, headless female torso with back view, reclining female, horse head, headless torso, female dancer, blah blah blah. It is very rare to come across just a female bust (clothed) or a male nude. I think I’ve seen 2 nude male sculptures out of hundreds (and I am not counting the one that was male except for his missing penis. Seriously artists- it’s just an appendage, like a finger or a toe). At least the Greeks gave their women heads and let them stand. At least the Romans weren’t afraid of a little male nudity. I’m going to go dig through my photographs and go back to drawing from ancient sculptures rather than try anything new.

4. I hate that moms in commercials always have families full of assholes. I thinking of you, Roll over minutes mom with your dipshit son. And the mom in that fancy home phone commercial who is making pallella and your son is a complete ass about it. Maybe it’s just moms and sons in commercials? Do daughters get to be assholes in commercials? I dont think I’ve ever seen that.

So dear readers- if you are still out there, what do you hate hate hate? Vent away!

between Carl’s Jr

and PETA

Not a god dammned thing when both of them treat women like pieces of meat.

(BTW- every time I see a “I’d rather go naked” ad I want to wrap myself in chinchilla and knee high crocodile boots and eat a heaping plate of veal and fois gras. PETA message fail!)

Today at the Seattle Public Library there is an actual, old fashioned debate about which is better- Harry Potter or Twilight.

As I said at Random Babble a few days ago- Harry Potter may have its issues, but no one ever almost died of a fucking papercut in the Potter series. And papercuts should NEVER be a serious plot point.

Besides, if it wasn’t for Harry Potter we wouldn’t have this thing of beauty.

(Yes I’ve posted this before. No I don’t care that it annoys you.)

Here be spoilers for the series finale

WTF was that load of tripe? Seriously? A show that has been complex and and never trite winds up with such a fucking cliche of an ending that I am still pissed. I will give the BSG guys some credit though, they managed to make me thoroughly uninterested in anything the characters might have done once the credits rolled. Shit, even Friends made me kinda curious about the lives of the people on the show, but not BSG. I am pretty sure that with the first bout of cholera because they’ve given up on actual plumbing they will be wiped out.

I’m pissed. I am pissed that a show that took so much care at showing how difficult and complicated choices are took the easy way out. It was like an “ah fuck it” moment. I was jokingly saying that Starbuck was going to disappear in a poof of angel dust, and then she did! I was hoping when they showed Earth II there would be some comment about the difficulties in blending into a pre-verbal, pre-pastoral native society and maybe some allusion from a show that has used historical moments as plot fodder to the fact that a technologically advanced society was descending on a less advanced society and the complications that might involve. Instead they decided that the whole of the Colonial fleet was gonna give up technology and go native as some fucked up way of avoiding repeating past history. We’re tired of fighting with our own creations, so now we’re all gonna shit in the woods and die of influenza or childbirth or chicken pox.

There was exactly one moment that I liked, well loved. Baltar, divine instrument of “All this has happened before and will happen again” gets stuck being the thing he never wanted. The dude who did everything he could to run away from his roots, and in that running set off the chain of event that destroys the human race (over and over again), gets stuck being a farmer. Just like dear old dad.

But what does a trillion dollars look like?

Is it bigger than a bread box but smaller than a car?

Turns out it looks a lot like a football field stacked 6 feet high in hundred dollar bills. Who knew?

(H/t to Corrente)

Cracked.com has this list of 5 horrifying tales of 911 call incompetence.

Now while the average reader may just see stories of incredible failure on the part of the 911 operators to do their jobs, when seen through feminist lenses it looks a lot different.

Every single caller in these stories is female. Two of the women callers were in the middle of being beaten or possibly stabbed to death by their male partners (domestic violence apparently bores 911 operators). One was a teenage girl dropping f-bombs cause her dad was having a seizure (nice girls don’t cuss, watch your language ladies). One was a women who was having her window tapped by a stranger (perhaps the police would like to prevent a crime instead of waiting for one to happen) and one the 911 operator made jokes about shooting a woman’s out of control child.

Girl talk people. When women talk, we aren’t supposed to be taken seriously, even (or especially) in an emergency.

Sorry, but I cracked Ouyangdan up with a Yoda pic yesterday and now I can’t stop writing in Yoda speak.

It’s my birthday and my blogiversary, though i can no longer remember how long I’ve been blogging (3 years, probably longer but my brain is all melty from the old age, there was a blog here before this one, and another one before that. Oh well)

I’m planning on Thai food with Ruth and the Kid tonight and Battlestar and cocktails tomorrow. There is a channel on cable here of pets that you can adopt. I told Ruth that I want a dog, but only if it’s missing an eye and looks and acts like Saul Tigh. Since the Kid is deathly allergic to pets, I think I am safe from having my b-day wish full filled anytime soon.

If only because Alison Janey is awesome. And Maya Rudolf is awesome.