squidbag

Senior Egyptian Gen. Fuckhead

I remember hearing about this once back in the early Spring - apparently in early March, according the multitude of sources - and, I am sad to say, it fell by the wayside in my mind.  There was a lot for me to do, and a wave of other human atrocities and challenges that overwhelmed it, I guess.  Naturally, I'm offended and appalled by a large number of things about this.  Where to start?

Let's begin with General Anonymous Douchebag, a very good place to start.  We have a "senior Egyptian general" admitting that humilating and violating "virginity checks" were done on female protestors back during the Egyptian troubles, basically to cover his own ass, and because these women, in his snake-like eyes, are a bunch of cheap sluts, sleeping in tents with men, "not like your daughter or mine."  I hope that my daughter someday is inspired by the example of these women you tried to humiliate, you pompous fucksnot, because they fought for what they believed in and even now will not be silenced.  Make up what passes for your mind, you piece of scurrilous filth; were you checking for hymens or drugs and bombs?  Get your fucking excuses straight before you parade around in your bullshit suit, prick.

"We didn't want them to say that we sexually assaulted them," so we sexually assaulted them.  George Orwell just spun 1,984 times in his grave, General Cowardly Sexist Testicle.  Let's see - you tasered her and beat her up, called her a whore, and all so she wouldn't say you sexually assaulted her.  And then you topped all that off with an invasive examination by a male doctor in front of armed witnesses.  Somebody found a leftover Nazi interrogation guide, yeah?  "No, no - chapter four, that's the one with the "Virginity Exam."  Do that one."  All this so that no one would say that you sexually assaulted them.

And it didn't work.  Salwa Hosseini has more guts than one thousand of your armed thugs, General Jackhole, because here she is, on the world stage, telling everyone what the fuck you did in a secluded holding cell where no one could see.  She hopes, and I hope, that since human decency is so far beyond your capabilities, that you, and monsters like you, will pull the one jewel of fact out of this: Intimidation is not foolproof.  People stand up for themselves and what they know is right, to point the finger at what is wrong.  And while we know that General Shit-for-Brains makes no distinction, perhaps he will abandon this practice if it does not work.

Maybe it's time to re-evaluate Egyptian attitudes towards women entirely.

Lazy Day With Leonard

This pretty much captures my Memorial Day. The sentiment, anyway. Leonard Nimoy is my new hero.

50 People, 1 Question

This is the best thing I've seen so far today. I absolutely ache for some of these people as they ponder this question, and the guy in the knit hat has the same look I see in my own eyes sometimes. Lots of the word "not" in this video, too.  Santa Claus there is full of shit, and the old lady with the pearl earrings and the guy from Syria make the best faces.  That couple from Boston needs to bust up right now, too.  The level of honesty here is touching, though the lies are almost more revealing than the truth.  Nevertheless, there should be more stuff like this.

via Wade Dye, who perhaps did not know I watching.

Five

My daughter Abby is five today, and none too soon at that.  She's been wishing her life away since late last year when the promise of Kindergarten reared its head and became the focus of her small universe.  That, and getting some kind of lizard to take care of.  For the last fourteen days, I have been asked every day - often more than once - how many more days 'til her birthday.  Yesterday was a particular burden for her, as she just couldn't wait for it to be over and nighttime so she could go to sleep, wake up, and have it be her birthday.  And now it is.

We plan a pancake breakfast out somewhere, and then perhaps a park.  At 1, we have to go over to Max's school and watch a video of him and his classmates doing commercials for stuff they made up.  Then we're picking up a pink cake with polka dots, making pizza from scratch, and having presents.  Quite different from the last couple of years.  This weekend there will be a pizza/games visit with friends, and in between I'm going to do the best I can to extend the birthday magic all week.

Abby at five talks constantly and has zero attention span if you're boring.  She can read well but often doesn't, preferring instead to be read to.  She is shy when she decides to be, but often strikes up conversations with total random strangers.  He sense of humor is weird, and once tipped, her giggles are unstoppable and infectious.  She has the attitude born of trying to be heard in a family where everyone is bigger and talks a lot, and she managed to inherit my temper to go along with it, unfortunately.  She's all legs, and they are often bruised.  The left knee is ripped out of half of her pants and tights.  She likes pink frilly things, but prefers Max's old hoodies and T-shirts to her own.  She's often filthy, covered in mud, dirt, sweat, chocolate, juice, pizza, clay, paint - whatever she's been into.

She's excited about the pool this Summer, planting white squash and eggplant and digging up worms.  More than anything though, it's about Kindergarten, making friends and being at school.

Here's birth, one, two, three and four.

I made this mix disk for her recently - these are all songs she likes, picked and that make her dance happy.  Enjoy.

1. Fireflies - Owl City  (because it makes her think of her brother, who brought this song into our house)

2. Down To Earth - Peter Gabriel (because it's in Wall-E, I think)

3. Music For A Found Harmoniu - Penguin Cafe Orchestra

4. Cheesecake Truck - King Missile (sings along with this one, easily the most requested)

5. Cat Came Back - Wally Pleasant (makes her laugh)

6. Upside Down - Jack Johnson

7. Crazy - Gnarls Barkley (it's one of Max's 2 favorite songs, so I think that's why it's here)

8. Robot Rock - Daft Punk (does a little girl version of "the robot")

9. True Skool - Coldcut

10. America  - Knaan, Mos Def and Chali 2na (sings along, kind of)

11. Run's House - Run D.M.C. (not going away anytime soon)

12. Despicable Me - Pharrell Williams (again, because of the movie)

13. Spider-Man Theme (Junkie XL Remix) - Michael Buble (I think just because it's got Spidey in it)

14. Stylo - Gorillaz, Bobby Womack and Mos Def (we listen to a lot of Gorillaz - I don't know why this one, especially)

15. Uprising - Muse

16. Hail Umberto - Eric P. (because of cheese sandwiches, duh)

17. Where's Your Head At - Basement Jaxx

18. Hymn of the Big Wheel - Massive Attack

19. Fireflies (Adam Young Remix)

Open Letter to TN Governor Haslam

Gov. Haslam,

My name is Garrett Crowell, and I am the husband of a Rutherford County educator, the father of two school age children come the Fall, and an admitted student at MTSU, also starting in the Fall.  Many of my friends and family are career teachers, some retired, and some active in this state and others.  My connections to the practice of education are numerous and meaningful.

I am writing to strongly object to both the purpose and tone of the so-called "Professional Educators Collaborative Conferencing Act of 2011," a preposterous strike against the collective bargaining rights of those who most need them, teachers.  Pushed through committee in the late hours of Friday when exhausted educators would mostly be in bed asleep, this bill is exactly the opposite of what Sumner County Rep. Maggart says it would be.  She stands on the floor of the legislature and contends that this act will strip the confrontation out of the negotiations while shouting above the angry voices of teachers and TEA representatives who feel short-changed by the process.  She wants to allow more voices at the table to debate the rights and futures of Tennessee educators, while excluding those same voices from the act's development; instead writing and creating a completely partisan situation where contentiousness is at the heart of every dispute.

In short, Governor, I am writing to urge you not to sign this debilitating act into law, and instead to take up the cause of educators in your state who need to have their rights protected.  The age of the demonized educator, it seems, is on the rise, and it would be truly shameful for you to be an active part of a process that cripples the ability of Tennessee educators to effectively educate.  The long-reaching results of this act will likely include less teacher satisfaction, as salaries and benefits decrease, they are yoked with rules and standards that make the classroom experience inefficient and ineffective.  That in turn could lead to fewer teachers, as fewer people enter an unstable field with fewer benefits, which in turn leads to an uncertain future for Tennessee's children.

Please listen to the voices of the 3000 that congregated in Nashville on March 5th, and the hundreds that will gather in the Convention Center at 9:15 this morning.  Please pay heed to the emails and calls and protestations that should be flooding your office - this is the collective voice of democracy, an under-represented phalanx of teachers and their supporters telling you that this act will create conflict and contention, abuse and abasement of rights and responsibilities, and will hurt teachers, schools, and children all across Tennessee for the foreseeable future.  

Please do not sign this act into law.  Still your pen and allow teachers to retain their hard-earned right to collectively bargain with the forces that would seek to deprive them of their rights.

Sincerely,
The Squidbag

Weekend Weather Update

WEATHER CONDITIONS UPDATE - STAY TUNED TO THIS BLOG FOR FURTHER UPDATES!

Squidbag Satellite Weather Radar is updating its predictions for the three-day period beginning on May 20th, and ending May 22nd, 2011.  On Friday, expect temperatures to be low in the morning, with a slight chance of rain, highs in the upper 70s around midday, wind coming out of the Northeast at five miles per hour with gusts of 20 miles per hour blowing religious tracts from the hands of nutcases wandering the streets on this bright sunny day.  On Friday night, there is a 60% chance of doubt, with continued doubt prevailing into the morning of what is expected at this time not to be Judgment Day.

Saturday's weather will be bright and sunny with minimal cloud cover and a profound absence of horn-blowing messiahs.  The skies are set to be clear and free of obstructions caused by ascending Christians being raptured.  The high will be again in the upper 70s with a slight chance of more afternoon showers of the normal, Earth-turning-on-its-axis variety, and not containing fire, blood, thunder, miracles, or extremely upwardly mobile righteous people going up to Heaven.  Other reports of this activity in Saturday's weather should be from henceforth ignored, as this report contains the most up to date data we have.  There is also some scattered doubt in the forecast left over from Friday.

Sunday after Not Judgment Day is set to bring a hangover-like storm of regret, lamentation and a deep feeling of ridiculousness, with a scattering of embarrassment and periodic outbreaks of doubt now becoming a large front of self-loathing.  In some places, this is set to continue for the foreseeable future.  Some insulting vitriol is also in the forecast for Sunday, with a high of 9000 degrees of sarcasm breaking out where most deserved.  Continued misplaced faith and irrational belief are also predicted in the forecast, but the effects of these will be negligible where it counts.

WEATHER CONDITIONS UPDATE - STAY TUNED TO THIS BLOG FOR FURTHER UPDATES!

The Crapture

It seems redundant in the extreme for me to even have an opinion on this.  I write about this (though not always lucidly or well) all the time.

The rapture is supposed to be this weekend (after having been previously scheduled for 1988 and 1992, and those are just ones I remember), and I kind of wish it actually was, so all of these dumb motherfuckers who have taken to the streets with signs, given away their property, and filled the air with even more useless noise would go away and we could have quiet.  But that's not going to happen, because this is another bullshit story perpetuated in this instance by Harold "Hell Car" Camping and the Family Radio Network.

Part of the reason these things irk me so badly is because I can't help but think of them as fire drills - Jim Jones used to do it in Jonestown all the time.  He'd call a "White Night" and everyone'd run out in the jungle, ready to die.  Once they got to the actual dying, they'd practiced, and they were emtionally wrung out and psychologically manipulated.  It's evangelical fishermen trying different kinds of bait, "Let's see if they'll believe this."

So Instead of going on and on about it, I won't.  I'm going to use this space to answer (again) a question one of my haters put to me recently in an email: Why should an atheist do anything good?  The answer to this is quite simple, and posing the question seems to imply that people of faith are somewhat terrible on the inside, since they need a book to tell them not to be shitheads all the time.  I don't think that's necessarily true, just the implication advanced by the question, you understand.  The impetus for doing good without faith is that I hate living in a shitty place.  I'd rather live in a nice place, a quiet place where people treat one another with respect and don't fuck with each other's lives all the time.  It's the Butterfly Effect applied to human interaction.

Once you grasp the idea that EVERYTHING YOU DO has repercussions you can't see, then you can advance hypotheticals.  Say you steal something from one guy and sell it to another.  You create rage in the stolen-from party, and let's say that guy goes home and chews out his wife, who in turn ignores her kid because she's upset, and the kid grows up neglected, or just has hurt feelings, or gets into a gun or medicine cabinet.  The guy you sold it to?  What if he turns around and sells it to an innocent party, who pays good money for it only to have it confiscated by cops later because it's stolen?  Begin again.  You are kind and decent to people because of this - not just to prevent wholesale chaos, but to make this kind of unintended Butterfly happen in a more positive way, thus creating more happiness and satisfaction in the world.

How do you know you've done right?  The same way some people claim that they know they have a relationship with God: You can feel it.  If I make a controversial decision and my internal Asshole-O-Meter ® doesn't go off, I'm solid.  If it does, then apologies may be in order, and I'll try harder next time.  No Hell and Damnation required.  It also means that people can retain their individuality (since everyone's internal AOM is different) and not everyone's conforming to a list of rules in a book somewhere.  If you don't like the way Bob responds to his AOM and his subsequent decisions, don't fucking hang out with Bob anymore.

So yeah - an atheist preaching.  Enjoy.  Friday might be a good day to hit a Christian yard sale, since I guess everything will be on the cheap.  I also plan to check Camping's website on the 22nd to see how he rationalizes this latest prediction failure (it will be his fault, not the Bible's) and perhaps to take to the streets carrying my new sign.  Maybe in front of churches and Wal-Marts.

FF & Xombi

For my friend who needed her "geek translator" during the Thor review last week: you can just skip this one entirely.

These are the best comics I'm reading right now, and based upon a cursory inspection of what's on the racks right now, some of the most interesting stuff going.  I'm going to tell you about both of them while you can still get on board, encourage you to actually pick these up and read them, and stop sitting your ass not reading comics.  Those of you regularly reading comics or who wait for trades are excused from my invective and can now sit there feeling superior.  More power to you.  Smug bastards.

From Marvel: FF, or Future Foundation, no longer the Fantastic Four in the wake of the apparent death of Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, in the Negative Zone.  Marvel's First Family has experienced a tragedy, and they are moving on by becoming the change they wish to see in the world.  You can see from the cover pic that they've brought in Spider-Man to fill the gap in the line-up, per Johnny's suggestion, but there's also a lot more showcasing of the Richards' children, Valeria and Franklin, and the Foundation itself features Moloids, a clone, an android dragon, two or three mutants, Reed's father, and Dr. Doom.  In the first three issues alone we've seen time and dimensional travel, brain transference, AIM, Kristoff, the Wizard, Annihilus, The High Evolutionary, Diablo, and lots of weird science and cool character development.  Also, this one's got an A rating so I'm letting Max read it, and I'm good with the rating so far except for one scene with the Dire Wraiths.  They should warn a 9-year-old about that shit.

From DC: Xombi, one of the old Milestone titles from back in the 90s, and something Dwayne McDuffie worked on, revitalized and updated with sense of humor completely intact.  Deliciously twisted and totally fucked up, this is NOT one for the kids - in the vein of Twilight Zone and X-Files, the main character, David Kim, is the Xombi, a reconstituted man run by nanomachines that ate his old lab assistant.  Now he's a weirdness magnet, surrounded by monsters, mayhem, and men who talk to coins.  And the coins talk back.  With a supporting cast in this first arc that includes Catholic Girl, who projects light and flies because of her faith, and Nun of the Above and Nun the Less, the silliness is a perfect counterpoint to all the horror and death.  I loved it.

So yeah: go out and read comics.

Teaching Intolerance

While I was cleaning up my kitchen this morning in the wake of last night's dinner and this morning's four breakfasts, two lunches and a morning dog-stravaganza, I was thinking about children's programming, since it was being beamed to me from the next room while my daughter struggled not to feed her toast to the dog.

The state of children's programming, for the most part, has become pretty diverse and tolerant: as parents of the consumers, we insist on it.  Dora speaks Spanish, one of the kids that the Cat in the Hat creepily hangs out with is black now, Martha Speaks is part of an ethnically mixed family.  The Imagination Movers only have the one female character, but she's Hawaiian and smarter than they are, so I'm calling that one good.  Lots of shows have such an ethnically mixed crew you'd swear Benetton was involved.  Oh, and before you leap in with the paucity of gay people on kids' TV, I think we can all agree that Bert, Ernie, Murray, Rosita, Baby Bear, The Count and Big Bird are all gay, and by going over quota, Sesame Street's got everybody else covered.

It's clear that, if not bending over backwards, kid TV is trying hard to create a diverse and tolerant landscape where everyone is accepted, but I was wondering - sort of in the vein of this previously mentioned weird-as-all-get-out Jehovah's Witness propaganda - whether fundie conservative racist homophobic teabagger narrow-minds let their kids watch this kind of thing, since it seems counter to everything they stand for, and if not, is there any hate-making children's television out there?  I mean, I know about the strictly religious programming that would fall into that category, but what about something less mainstream?

The Cat in the Hate?  Segregation Street where the Muppets hold an Aprtheid-like dominion over the obviously minority humans who choose to live there?  Super White, where Whyatt and his friends change the story by burning the books?  Martha Speaks when Spoken To, Like a Woman should sponsored by the Mormon church?  Imagine a kids cartoon from the Westboro Baptist Church, or even just Glenn Beck.  Curious George would be black-bagged and taken away for asking too many questions, the bad guys in shows would always be Zionist Jews, sneaky liberals, gay people and intellectuals.  Every character would assert their right to bear arms, and the heroes would empty soulless mouthpieces who spew jingoistic garbage devioid of thought at anyone who will listen.  Animated Sarah Palin: Sarah's Rogue Riders, powering into your town in an American-made truck full of flags and platitudes!  Orange John, whipping the people into a delicious smoothie of ineffectual leadership!  The UnionBusters!  

C'mon - how much of a leap is it from FOX to Foxy, the red-hot animated female host of Fox and Kids NewsHour?  I think you want to donate to your PBS affiliate right now.

I Still Want Rush Limbaugh to Die

I can't imagine how many kinds of simultaneous brain damage a person - well, not a person, a conservative - would have to have to listen to this obnoxious blowhard's "show" every day. I thought a show was supposed to be entertaining.  This clip, which I got from Reader Supported News and Media Matters is as mind-numbingly weird as it is annoying: it starts with Rush talking about what he's going to do next, and then filling what would otherwise be dead air with what I can only assume are Rush's own sex noises while he hunts for something on his desk which he says he wants to play "in fairness."  He's been in broadcasting since 1984, folks: what's with the dead air?  The clip is part of a conversation between Al Hunt and Mitch Daniels about taxes and revenue.  Rush caps off the clip by asserting that it's not that America doesn't have enough revenue to pay for things, it's that we have too much spending, the classic sin of Democrats in the beady eyes of fuckers like Limbaugh.  He rounds that off with:

"I still want Obama to fail!  Lest there be any doubt." 

This is after this soft piece of shit caved and changed his last Obama failure quote to "I want his policies to fail."  Uh-huh.  Rush is doing this show on a day when Obama's numbers are at 60% and more people think he needs a second term than don't, so why he says this is pretty transparent - he's a vile, spiteful, shuck-and-jive carny-level hack who will spout whatever pops into the dim lightbulb of his brain if he thinks it will hurt those with whom he disagrees.  He's a mouthpiece for our intellectual lowest common denominator.  That's why I hope he dies.  I hope they find that repugnant blob of human waste clogging the blades of a wheat thresher tomorrow morning, his drug-thinned blood glinting and cooling in a sun coming up over a cleaner America because of his death.  I hope he ODs in a whorehouse, or is crushed under an SUV - how isn't really important as long as the last tastes his flapping weasel tongue registers are his own bile and venom, because I have had enough of both.

Lest there be any doubt.