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Syria, Blowback & Orange Moron

Our Resident Chump is profoundly stupid. I say this not to insult him, but simply to point out simple facts. Our government is being run by a child, and not even a very smart or precocious one; we have traded purple for orange and elected Veruca Salt. As much as I hate the President - and I do, going back to the 1980s - I hate even more what he represents in terms of my fellow citizens, this blind and ridiculous anti-intellectual bullying turn for the worse, the need to wade into the shit and live there, and the continuous participation in our own distractions as we needle and dissect the reactions of a chimp wearing a rug. (Yes, I made 600 things with his quotes in them; what of it?) Mostly, the things he does are designed to get our attention, to pull focus. When they're designed. Sometimes, though, sometimes they're just reactions, like reflexive moves on his part that maybe he doesn't even realize he's done until he's already done them. The thought is the action.

Case in point: Syria. You could make the argument that we've not had really strong foreign policy now from the executive branch since the end of the Cold War, but we've all had long enough to familiarize ourselves with blowback that I thought we all understood it. It's now clear to me that this is not the case. Please go away and read Chalmers Johnson's excellent book, Blowback, and then come back and finish reading this.

I know, right?

So, we're going to get involved in Syria, begin by proffering non-military aid, then get involved militarily against the Syrian government, then kill a bunch of citizens in "surgical strikes" (just what we do) and then, after ramping up our on the ground efforts and seemingly formulating a military plan for going forward and perhaps providing a little bit of a bulwark against the Turks, completely bail out while government forces still hold most of the country and while humanitarian crises are ongoing. And why?Because "We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency." Oh, well, that's all right, then. But wait, Orange Moron, didn't you also just get caught bitching and complaining about European countries decrying our pullout and say that it's their turn to fight ISIS? I thought they were defeated? Maybe they're just Trumpfeated, where you lie about beating someone. Much more expedient than actually beating them. (For the sake of the Resident, "expedient" means "quicker." Okay, "faster." ) Also, didn't we, like a week ago, say that this was a terrible idea, this pullout? And that it would lead to the "slaughter" of many of our allies? I mean, granted, we drone bomb civilians, but doing the numbers, that might be better than a "slaughter." Does anyone remember 1980s Afghanistan, where we trained guys, got their hopes up and then left, and it took them half a generation to raze the World Trade Center to the ground? You know, on 7-11? The Resident knows where he was on 7-11, I can tell you that much. More than anything, I think it's good that we're pulling 2000+ soldiers out of a land in crisis, but leaving more than 5000 at our border with Mexico. That seems important, especially in this time after midterms when the Caravan has ceased to exist and Sessions' prohibitions being contested and so on.

Or we're wagging the fucking dog again. The government shutdown, the new developments in the various investigations and every goddamn rat that bails from this dysfunctional ship of fools, we need to be looking the other way, and a nice fat foreign policy fuckup'll do it every time.

The Mall in Your Mind

"I'd like to be a mall."

"Really? And have people going in and out of you all day?"

This is the scintillating back and forth that can ensue when you're on your 6th day together, with very few breaks away, lots (for us) snow on the ground, no school, and minds wandering deprived across landscapes of disconnected weirdness. So, if you were a mall - what would you have in your Food Court?

I would have a Petro's. I can only say this now because I have spent a fucking half hour looking up various permutations of "Chili Cup Mall" and thinking that they were a defunct chain. They aren't, and I am happy. I was describing this to my kids, everything from the "you could carry this thing around the mall like a street taco" to the diagram you see at left, to the magical slurry of chili goodness and saturated corn chips that was left over at the bottom of the cup when you got close to done - man, that is a vivid childhood sense memory. I can only assume (based upon where they are located) that this was a field trip gastronomic adventure experience.

Next to Petro's, I would have an Orange Julius. Orange fucking Julius, man, with powdered egg whites, and they mixed that shit right in front of you, and there were little ice crystals on top of the drink that bumped up against the lid and crackled in the foam. And I hope that they put powdered egg whites in there, but I bet they don't, I bet it's EGG CHEATERS or something like that, just like they didn't used to advertise "GF" on the Petro's sign, and I don't think they used to have pasta/macaroni, either. Yankee tourists.

Near that would undoubtedly be a soft pretzel place, a Chinese restaurant with fucked up name owned by Chinese people, and a Noodles & Co., because we don't really have that where I live, either.

So, carbs. Carb up, motherfucker, and walk my goddamn mall. The mall in my mind plays the Commodores' on endless repeat in a dark hallway with a carpeted ceiling that runs between the Food Court and the fully-functional arcade, where nothing costs more than 50 cents to play, and there's Smash TV and Narc right out front, and lots of shooting and driving games and real pinball machines (mostly ones that have movie and rock band stuff on them) and an endless line (but really it's just a mirror with gold leaf in it) of Skee-Ball machines with plenty of shoulder room between each one. Also? Skill cranes and a couple of awesome driving games that didn't exist when I was a kid.

There's a kiosk where you can have your name inexpertly applied to anything, and an actual music store. Out front of the music store, there's a display with dinosaurs in a tarpit, and it says "EXTINCT TUNEAGE" and there's 8-tracks and minidiscs and cassingles and shit all in it. And a video display on repeat of the Parental Advisory logo going in flames on a loop. That's right - repeat AND on a loop. Shaddup. There's a bunch of technology stores, and the anchor stores? The big bastards that the mall is ostensibly for? They're just mock-ups. We occasionally drive our 4-wheelers through them and knock everything down. Then we go back out into the mall proper and play glow-in-the-dark mini golf and eat big cookies and buy Chucks from Journeys and books from everywhere and try not to get VD from Spenser's, where it feels like everything has VD on it. There are no nail places, no underwear emporiums, no blouseterias, and no FUCKING JEWELRY STORES, and you can extend a line of credit everywhere, because it's that kind of place.

There's a theatre, and they fucking spell it like that. It's called the Six-Shooter Theatre, and they have six screens and the kids who work it love film and talk like bartenders. Frozen coke comes with free refills, and there's always something playing that's decent and also always something you can walk out of if you don't want to make fun of it. A walk-out will have their money happily refunded if they can say why they walked out. In complete sentences. Don't fuck about - tell us what you didn't like.

It goes without saying that outside of the dark, carpeted, Commodores hallway, that the rest of mall plays 90s rock interspersed with 80s hip-hop and anything else I like, and that there's football and old movies broadcast on monitors around the interior, and roving bands of teenagers find themselves mute when they hit the SnarkMeter® limits. (SnarkMeters® are subcutaneously installed on every teen upon entering. Old people, too. Everybody.) Finally, there are game stores and comic stores fully functioning and raking in profit, an Irish pub at every junction, and cigar dispensaries throughout. The interior aisles are dotted with tables for sitting and smoking and drinking and talking and eating goddamn magical bowls of layered chili stuff that I thought had ceased to exist.

Demons

Reading a book about Kurt Cobain's legacy right now, and I have happened upon a part of it that deals with the recurrent fact that Aberdeen (where he's from) and surrounding small burgs have not wanted to erect statues or name anything after him because "won't somebody think of the children" and "what kind of message does that send about drugs?"

You know, guys - he made music, too.

Why this is relevant right now? Why THIS, of all things (okay, there was also a copyright thing I had to deal with) pulled me out of a three-year break from blogging? Because I feel like there's an obvious parallel to our current series of escalating (or swirling) situations. Should Kurt Cobain's drug use and suicide and poor-decision-making skills fuck up our relationship with his music? I would land in the "decidedly not" camp, where I would prepare Pennyroyal Tea and for any other recent camp arrivals. But is it that easy?

People don't want to watch the Netflix House of Cards because Kevin Spacey's recently been outed as a career Uncle Touchy Rapist Dickhead. Granted, he's a sexual predator, and while his victims have every right and responsibility to speak out, shouldn't his other actions be able to stand on their own? Does this have more to do with what we imagine (him diddling unwilling guys off camera during the production of Se7en) than his actual performances? I think it does. I think he pissed in the pool of his own performances, and now we don't want to get in any more. I don't know if that's fair, and I don't really care if it is or not. Everyone's going to have to deal with this in their own way.

I do NOT think that it is an endorsement of someone's past behaviors to experience their art, though. Unless their behavior kind of fucks up the whole basis upon which you were evaluating them and their output, the two should be able to be separated. Not every act carries every other act with it. Know how I know? Hitler is worse than Jeff Dahmer. You can look it up. He is. Stalin, for some reason, is only worse than Hitler depending upon who you talk to, but at least there's a metric in place there. So, yes - for matters of egregious and inarguable evil, we have matters of degree. We just do. Otherwise, "worst shooting in American history" would be a meaningless fucking phrase. By that same token, it is not necessary to evaluate someone's whole life based on one event.

Let me clarify: Spacey and Weinstein and O'Reilly and the President are obviously sexual predators. They keep doing the same things, over and over again, forcing themselves on others as part of a sexual power dynamic - so, yeah, defining their entire output through gross-tinted glasses is certainly fair, and probably logical. Do that if you see fit. And if you're a victim? Well, you know better than anyone else, so no one's going to tell you what to do. Also - the zeitgeist of people coming forward (blogs say "zeitgeist," it's a thing) to force what one can only hope is a paradigm shift (also "paradigm shift") in the patriarchy (that one's not funny anymore) is ultimately a good thing, so whatever pushes that up the mountain, good on it.

However. One act does not define a person. If it did, Mother Teresa would be only a racist, while Dr. King would be only a philanderer. Gandhi would be only a misogynist, and most American soldiers would simply be hired murderers. By contrast, Charlie Manson would be a musician, Jim Jones a preacher, and Hitler a landscape painter. You could pick one single act of any other kind committed by any of those people and define them by that. "That Gandhi, what a cloth-maker," is simply not a thing that people say. People are all the sum total of all of the things that they do, and we all have to weigh that out. Context is hugely motherfucking important. People who meet me now think I'm both better & worse than people who have known me for a while, because they're working off of a limited data set.

I say all of that to say this: Don't let actors (or anyone else) fuck up your enjoyment of their output. They did a job, that job is done, and it's a separate act from all the other stuff they've done. Learn to ruefully shake your head and appreciate and/or judge things in a full context. This is a part of growing older. You can enjoy NFL football and hate criminality, concussions and morons. You can like Heinlein's writing and acknowledge that he was a fucking terrible human. Everyone's got a hard-on for Agatha Christie again right now, but WOW at the racism in her books. Her mysteries are awesome, but I can see how black people and Indians would categorically turned off by them. I don't let Tim Allen's cocaine-dealing and Republicanism fuck up the Toy Story movies for me, and you shouldn't either. If you can't get around something, fine. We can sympathize. But if someone else can, you probably ought not judge.

Wonder Woman Unbound: Review

A bad thing is always worse when your expectations are high.

I had been looking forward to Wonder Woman Unbound for a couple of weeks before I got my hands on it pretty much for the same reason any fanperson looks forward to anything with Wonder Woman in it; she can be a great character and she's often underutilized and we should be talking about her more. We should have reasons to talk about her more.

But not like this.

This review will apparently be a minority report: most of the rest of the web is taken with this book, and gives it four stars, giving it high marks for revealing information heretofore unrevealed and dealing with the subject matter in a frank and open way, often incorporating some humor. I do not understand why this is: I found this book to be repetitive, ponderous, pedantic, repetitive, easily distracted (something like 30% of the book is about other heroes and villains used in a kind of failed compare-and-contrast), and while it was filled with a raft of research findings and presentations (and charts and diagrams and goddamn graphs), on almost every occasion, the conclusion drawn from the research was wrong, bad, or too simplistic.

The first part of the book, dealing with WW's origins in the mind of William Moulton Marston goes into details about his life that are not, by any stretch, revelations to either comics readers or students of modern psychology. Everything in the book about Marston can be found in this Wikipedia entry, this Comic Book Resources article, and this background piece on the Personality Profile Solutions website. In short: Marston was one of those brilliant people who hover on the edges of quirky weirdness, so in addition to giving the world Wonder Woman, DISC theory, and the polygraph, he also lived in a successful polyamorous relationship with two women, liked to be tied up, and thought women were not equal with men - he thought they were superior. So he's a controversial guy. None of what can be found in this book is new information - this is all out there, and has been. The only "new" argument that Hanley makes (and possibly the last useful thing in the book) is that Wonder Woman cannot simply be viewed (in her early years) as a feminist icon without taking all the bondage (which is proliferate) into account - to Marston, bondage was about trust, and relinquishing control, and he was personally into it, so it's in a high percentage of stories. However, WW always breaks free, breaks her bonds, and saves the day, so - what was your argument again, Tim?

Tim seems not to grasp that fictional characters with any staying power - Sherlock Holmes, Beowulf, Dracula, Wonder Woman, Batman, shit - even the fucking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - are fodder for re-appropriation and reinterpretation. Was Tinky Winky gay? That big puffy bastard didn't even have genitals, but that didn't stop the Pride movement from having some Tinky after Falwell opened his useless yap. Likewise, WW is (or can be) what her fans want her to be. If you read a Batman story you don't like, no one's forcing you to incorporate that story into your conception of Batman. I, for one, think that the Killing Joke and Arkham Asylum are prettier than they are good, and neither is a good representation of how I think of Batman. The same is true of any character - if you don't think Coppola makes a good Dracula, then skip that one. If Gloria Steinem wants to take Women's Lib as an opportunity to re-create and reinterpret Wonder Woman for a new generation, then as long as DC's in on the game, who the fuck is Tim to tell them they did it wrong? Everyone will have their own mind's-eye Wonder Woman, and most of her modern adult fans think of her as Lynda Carter, a strong woman with a lasso on TV fighting for good.

Lynda Carter is mentioned on exactly seven pages of this book. Seven. Seven in like, 220-something. I actually stopped and said, "That's it?!?" out loud. Luckily, I often read when no one's around.

Hanley spends far more time bitching and complaining about various people's lensed interpretations of Wonder Woman, saving an especially vicious fork for Robert Kanigher, who wrote the title for longer than - I think - anyone, and whose worst actual sins are probably that he didn't take writing comic books very seriously and that he had a terrible temper. While not particularly enlightened, these are not original fuck-ups in the world of comics - and Tim knows this. He's a "comics historian," whatever the hell that means now.

Probably the trolliest part of the book is when Hanley exhorts us to step back collectively and re-examine Dr. Fredric Wertham. Wertham, due to his book, Seduction of the Innocent, and his subsequent testimony before congress about the ills and dangers of comics, is vilified by most modern-day comics readers, as well he should be, because he went over the top. Hanley needles us, reminding us that Wertham also did some good stuff - testified as to the harms of segregation, argued against the solitary confinement of Ethel Rosenberg - and that he had done a lot of research, so he might have had a point or two in Seduction. It doesn't surprise me that Hanley is blind to research bias, and can't see how some points of view - homophobia - might chip away at a person's overall credibility, since he later in the book asserts that some women "chose to be lesbians" during the women's lib movement. Tim, Tim, Timmy, Timothy. No, no. Some women may have chosen to experiment with sex or relationships with other women, but they didn't choose to be lesbians because they woke up one tired of the patriarchy. They may have wished that they could do that, but - well, Tim, maybe you haven't been paying attention over the last 20 years or so. It's also possible that you missed this entirely.

So yeah - at the beginning of this pointless murder of trees, Hanley dedicates it to his parents - my advice would be to let them have it. You have better things to do with your life.

Jury Redux

The Estes Kefauver federal building in downtown Nashville was probably a pretty swank edifice in the 1990s. The interiors are all vintage from that period – lots of chromes and heavy wood paneling in light colors displayed in anonymous and cloned windowless corridors. I know this because during my day of jury “service,” I was relentlessly pinballed down them half a dozen times and the overall feeling one has at the end of this is of being harassed. 

I don't inherently resent jury duty, and thought, once again, that it would provide an opportunity to learn a little bit about the system while discharging my duties as a citizen. I don't feel like I did any of that. After a week of thinking about it, it is hard to come away from the process with anything other than a profound feeling of waste; alleged criminals who waste time by allegedly committing alleged criminal deeds, wasted time, wasted money paid out to potential, rejected and serving jurors for wasted effort, attorneys who waste time and breath on ham-handed attempts to manipulate, who ask the same questions, time and again, wasting more and more time and effort and money. 

What is it all for? 

Twelve Angry Men is my favorite movie of all time. I watch it once a year, I own the play and I believe in the speechifying about duty and rights under the Constitution. Nothing about the process for reporting for federal jury selection is designed to maintain a sense of dutifully reporting for sacred honor detail, however. It begins with a letter and an online registration, then there is a series of phone calls every Monday for a month which can only be made after 5pm and tell you where to go the following day, if you are needed at all. This is annoying. Just tell me when to show up and I'll do it, but this “I can't make any plans for Tuesday, or indeed, the rest of the fucking week until after I make a phone call to a robot” bullshit is ridiculous. Of course, they waited until my 5^th phone call to tell me to report. Just when I thought I might miss it and started making plans again. 

Due to traffic on Interstate 24, it took me an hour and 20 minutes to travel approximately 35 miles. The bus down Murfreesboro Road would likely have been quicker. I paid nine dollars (reimbursed) for parking, and then had to take off my jacket, shoes, belt & keys and put them in a bucket while I ran the gauntlet of security. (The security guys were actually pretty nice, just not terribly helpful.) I then shared an elevator for eight floors with a non-uniformed Metro cop, two ladies who smelled like a perfume counter, and a nervous man sweating aluminum. I checked in at the desk and was asked how much I paid for parking (I would imagine some people lie and pad this number) and issued my all-important button. 

Sitting in a large room (big long Brain Candy conference tables, proliferate magazines, great view of Union Station, half-comfortable chairs) we were then subjected to daytime television from 8ish until about 9:30. The programming, if anything, fell off at this point while we stared at a DVD with various Justices and former jurors instilling us with importance and creating unrealistic expectations about what we were to endure. There was a lot of talk about solemnity and emotion and and the small deliberations room, and how “scary” things might become for us. Perhaps not the most effective rah-rah speech ever. Sometime after 10 we were escorted to actual court, a room so tall you'd get a nosebleed climbing it. This was filled with pews and pictures of old white men in black dresses. On the way there, a bailiff reminded me “You can't read in court,” and pointed at the book under my arm, Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. He scowled when I took it in with me anyway.

Over the next seven hours, the same questions were asked of us in a variety of ways, and I was once again disqualified as a juror, I believe because of one or all of these three responses:

Do you have strong opinions about guns and gun control? Yes, I believe that handguns, rifles, assault weapons and extended magazines should have more restrictions on their proliferation and that licensing should be more restrictive, with more oversight.

Do you feel strongly that some drugs which are currently illegal should be legal? Yes, I think that marijuana's illegality is an anachronism and Colorado and Washington are good experiments to be watched closely.

Would it affect your assessment of witness testimony if you knew that the witness would be getting something in return for their testimony? That depends upon what they're getting and who they are. (This one actually turned into a three-minute back and forth between me and one of the defense attorneys, during which he scribbled something on paper.)

Shortly thereafter, I was released (actually what it is called) and went home, feeling as though the system was slightly broken. Everything is done to mechanize our "duty," attorneys manipulate juries until they get the most boring, homogenized group you can imagine, and endless time and money are spent trying to punish people for what they've allegedly gotten up to.

Bah.

2014 100 Book Challenge

Today is January 7th, and this is not usually a good day. 20 years ago, a big thing happened. I feel an emotional impact all day on 1/7 that I can't rightly describe using any of the words you people have come up with, so I've decided to channel this feeling, this year, into something interesting and hopefully productive.

I try to read 100 books a year. Last year I fell short, often I make it, sometimes I exceed it. This year, I'm on my third book on the seventh day, so that seems pretty good, and I thought that I would invite other people to join me on this endeavor. If you're interested, we could find some way to track our progress as a group. Or you could set some other goal: 50, or 75. You could track pages. Whatever.

Rules? I read a lot of graphic novels, but/and many of them contain adult literary material that's unmatched by some of the straight prose I read. I also read a lot of fiction and YA books. I typically intersperse this with history, sociology and current events nonfiction, crime stuff, music history, books about art, biographies, and anything else that takes my fancy. Page counts of what I read tend to range as an average from 100 to 600. My basic rules for counting are these: I don't count children's books (which I still read occasionally, and sometimes even to my kids) I don't count anything devoid of literary merit (I didn't count the Twilight books the month I read them, for example) in my ex post facto assessment thereof, and I don't count anything without a proper readable spine. No comics and magazines, articles, studies, tracts or pamphlets. I read those, I just don't put them in the count. If you read on a digital reader or listen to books on whatever, I'd say count it if would have had a spine. You are free, obviously, to count however you'd like.

Mostly, I feel like this would be a good way for smart people I know to be encouraged to read more, and might make better synergistic (yep) use of our independent Goodreads lists, blogs, and assorted reading activity measurements. Also, I hope to collect some straight up recommendations and discussions out of this, like a virtual book club. Mostly, though, it's about reading goals and challenges.

Anybody with me on this?

Duck Disappointment

Over the course of this recently passed holiday season, I espoused the point of view - more than once - that if you were hanging out with your friends and family and discussing Phil Robertson's relatively recent remarks, then you had already lost, succumbed to the trap the Robertson family (and maybe A&E) wanted you in from the very beginning - talking about the stars of Duck Dynasty during the off-season, just after the Christmas special had run, and in the break before the show comes back on the air with new episodes mid-January. Think that's paranoid? Do you imagine it far-fetched that this is a plan? These people are hunters and trappers by primary vocation, and they run a media empire that breaks records AND you had never even heard of them two years ago. Not even two: the show started in March of 2012. So you got spanked by a bunch of rednecks if you spent the holidays posting and arguing and spouting off about Phil. You're prey, a mark. Congratulations: you got suckered.

Probably not as badly as I did, though. I watch this show. Pretty regularly. I wrote a paper comparing it favorably with "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo." I read the books that came out last year (took me about four hours in total to read all three), and I had 40 of the episodes built up on my DVR for decompression time after I graduated. Granted, they were there with the specific intent of killing brain cells: the re-runs have a relaxing kind of rhythm to them. I like the show and think Uncle Si and Jase are funny. I think Willie's probably a business genius. I don't have the "killing animals and eating them" objection that a lot of my friends have, and there's been nothing on the show I haven't been more or less comfortable letting my kids watch. There are far fewer adult words and ideas than on the sit-coms and dramas we sometimes watch together. The show also doesn't follow the format of other reality shows with the endlessly repeated scenes, long cuts, sensationalism and degradation, and it evokes, emotionally, people I grew up around as a Southerner. That includes jackass people like Phil Robertson.

Every left-of-center person I know who watches Duck Dynasty has put forth, in some form or another, the idea that the more we watch, the less we like Phil. You cannot watch the show for any length of time and not get a pretty good bead on the fact that he's an old-fashioned, intolerant titan of arrogance. From his casual sexism to his assertion that an effeminate photographer has "mommy issues," Phil's an unabashed dick, but he's only one person on the show. Herein lies my second point (the first being that this kerfuffle is just twerking naked for rednecks) - PHIL'S NOT THE ONLY PERSON ON THE SHOW. Fine, he's the patriarch, he's the "Duck Commander," whatever - but what do YOU do when someone in your family's a fuckwit? How many chances do you give your Uncle Douchebag, racist grandpop, or old dog cousin? And before you answer, I'd invite you to measure your excised number of family members against mine. Most people in families don't just kick people out - I'd also invite you to remember that. There's a bunch of other Robertsons, and $$$ aside, it's none of our fucking business how they proceed from here unless they make it so. Some would argue that they have - I'm not as sure.

Next: There is the "what did you expect from a pig from a grunt" argument. Phil's old, white Church of Christ and not terribly bright - he has made his success from working hard, often a Southern or broke people's substitute for being smart. His unenlightened views on homosexuality are widely shared here in the American southeast, disgusting and wrongheaded as they are. Sounds like an opportunity to talk about that, yes? His remarks on black people are so profoundly stupid and blinkered, they sound like where White Guilt intersects with White Privilege, so it's kind of easy to see where that comes from, too. None of this excuses the dumb shit that he said, and continues to say, and likely believes, but one has to wonder where the outrage and surprise comes from. It rings hollow. (If he weren't rich, he'd be another dumb motherfucker I ignore at a truck stop, failing a teachable moment.) Really, Media America? You didn't see this coming? As a group, the Robertsons know who their audience is - they just put their name on a line of guns, and made nice with 'Murica everywhere from Baba Wawa to Fox News. The fucking Christmas show pointedly opens actually inside a Wal-Mart. 

So, "Free" Speech: Phil has oodles of free speech. Anyone who says different is desperately trying to latch onto the controversy for their own gain, SARAH FUCKING PALIN. Or they're mixed up about the concept. Phil's employer disciplined him (barely) for some shit that he may even have been contractually obligated to shut the fuck up about - and we don't know anything about that. Find me a contract if you'd like to fight about that. What we do know is that his comments were printed in a magazine, and are still available on the Internet with "the 25 greatest breasts in movie history" right next to them. Free speech, people. Free speech is not saying whatever you want without repercussion - there are limits and laws restricting it, as well there should be. The private entities involved in this further complicate what is, in this case, a nonexistent issue.

Maybe reacting to this at all was pretty stupid of us as a group, yeah? Maybe a nice, measured action after the fact would be something to do? Unfortunately, this is where I find myself now. I made the mistake of saving the Xmas special until yesterday - I didn't want to watch it during the flap - and now I find that the thrill is gone. I knew the car guzzled gas, but now I know it takes jobs overseas, too? That might just be too much. I'm pissed and disappointed with Phil Robertson's hypocritical ass and wish that he could have kept his fool mouth shut and not ruined his family's show for me, even though I kind of already knew he was an intolerant gasbag, but I think now that if I watched it, I would not want my kids in the room, would not be able to face my gay friends or anyone else, and might find it inconsistent with what I think is good in the world.

Which is a shame. But we'll always have this.

How to Make Someone Cry

I like to provide answers for these things so that my readership can shortcut all of the trial and error and get straight to the real.

So - It's Wednesday morning, and I have arrived early for my Math class. Before my second period class begins, I have to read four sections of the abhorrent F.A. Hayek, the unholy and wiggly filth-sperm that pierced the toothed Cronenbergian ovum of Ayn Rand to create the scourge of modern-day Libertarianism. This is not reading I will enjoy, but it must be done. I am trying to read.

I have moved, in the KOM (a loud echoey building on the campus of MTSU) from a comfortable table because it is loud, the normal loudness of crowds moving. I have moved to an empty hallway outside of our classroom, for the quiet. Mmmm. Morning quiet. Me and my coffee and assigned reading. Good things, yes? No.

Classmate arrives. I do not know classmate's name, but it is well-established by previous "interactions" with her that she will talk to a fucking brick, left to her own devices. I have sat quietly and not responded, and she just keeps right on going. I have walked away, only to turn and watch her, without breaking the sentence, simply eye-seek out another person with ears upon which she can rain her lonely prattle. She is not a purveyor of conversation, this person, oh, no. She is a carpet-bomber of loosely constructed words, and on this morning, she has a litany of FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS she'd like to fucking share with me.

CLASSMATE: I can't believe I have this big stain on my sweatshirt.

ME: (briefly regards stain over open book) Yeah, well, I have to get some reading done.

CLASSMATE: Is that for a class?

ME: Yes. (angles away)

CLASSMATE: I don't know how this happened - I got a (some stupid coffee drink) with extra drizzle (a word that always makes me think of Snoop Dogg, so my brain got off of Hayek and onto Snoop for a bit, though I guess he would say "drizzizzle" and when it came back) but I guess the caramel was sitting on top of the extra foam, and I couldn't really get to the coffee at first.

ME: Wow. I REALLY have to read.

CLASSMATE: Right? So, I think what happened is that once the coffee hotness (not kidding) melted the drizzle (drizzizzle) it went down inside the edge of the cup (called a rim) and then when I took a sip it just plooped out (I may kill you) over the edge and got on my shirt. AND I burned my mouth, (not enough) and I think I'm low on gas (oh, for fuck's sake). I tell you, if one more thing happens to me today - 

ME: Let me stop you there. If you don't stop talking to me right now, I'm going to be the next thing that happens to you today. You don't have any real problems. This is a school, please be quiet and let me read now. Shhh.

And then there was crying. Which, in hindsight, seems pretty obvious.

Unreasonable Book Feels

Above is a trailer put together by people who love Warren Ellis & his new book, Gun Machine. That's Ben Templesmith's art, and Wil Wheaton's voice. I finished this book over the weekend, during some time I decided to take off from books I have to read for school right now, and because I hated everything just a little bit. For those of you who loved Crooked Little Vein, well, you can still love that, because it's a thing you can love. This is a different and better thing, in its way, because it works on more story levels than Ellis' first novel, but retains the sharp nastiness of his characters furiously boiling away at the madness all around them pointing their own vomited madness back at it.

But you see, there's too much. I find out from Ellis' page that Ian Rankin is back in the Rebus business with his new one. This is good news, because it's been a bit too long since I got my teeth into a punchy Scots detective novel, and I've missed DI Rebus. Been watching Luther from the BBC via Netflix just for the hit of Brit police procedure. Well. And Idris Elba, who is awesome.

But, wait. Neil Gaiman's got a new one coming out, too. The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Which is even better news, as it sounds like the world decided to give me plenty of recreational reading during the last year of me going to school. So I'm looking forward to that, as that and a novel from Joe Hill are long overdue. Oh, look - a new novel from Joe Hill.

If only there was going to be new Christopher Moore as well. Best you can hope for is Sacre Bleu in paperback. Which you should definitely read if you haven't.

Grace Under Standards

I had my first ever exposure to Nancy Grace (shown here with her meat mask in place so we won't see what she really is) on Wednesday morning. I'm not impressed, but hey - this is what I get for watching television.

I was home with the kids on their last day of Winter Break that morning, and they weren't up yet when I finished C's breakfast, lunch and coffee and saw her on her way to meetings and the run-up for her Spring 2013 student preparations. So I sat on the couch for a minute surrounded by the laundry that was everywhere and the holiday debris that I took down yesterday (realistic goals, people) and flipped on the TV thinking there might be news.

There wasn't. There was only Nancy Grace frothing her noisehole in the general direction of this story about Jodi Arias, the original overly attached girlfriend. Jodi allegedly dated a guy, converted to Mormonism, stalked him and then crept into his house one night, and after they had sex, stabbed him 27 times, slit his throat and shot him twice. Then, after taking pictures of the sex and the murder, it seems that Jodi "hid" the camera in the washing machine where it was easily found by cops. She first claimed that she'd never been there, then that other people did the murder, and finally, that she was defending herself from an attack by the dead boyfriend. I'm not sure why no one's suggested that she might be clinically and legally fucking nuts, but hey - she sings songs from prison and gives really focused interviews, so she's good television.

Which apparently made Nancy Grace jealous, and she decided that she needed to be good television, too. That's why she committed this little travesty of journalism on live morning TV. Once you've watched it and tried to remember that she's not a FOX Talking NewsHead, you might be tempted to pop on over to her website and look at the last several posts where she's milking this fucking thing for all it's worth - crime scene photos, sketches of Travis' the dead boyfriend's wounds, transcripts and photos of Jodi - oh, it's a career for Nancy.

Then you look into Nancy a little bit, and you find out that her fiance was murdered while she was in college. Okay, that makes her motivations to be a prosecutor and victims' rights advocate make sense. However, her time as a prosecutor is marred with misconduct which resulted in accused people going free without trial, which certainly seems like something she should be against, and the details of her fiance's murder seem to have been exaggerated by her to make her mythology more dramatic, which is right up there with the worst kind of lying. Additionally, she has capitalized on the aforementioned murder with a television show and a fiction book of the same, which is just creepy as all get out. The book's apparently the first in a series, too. Bleagh.

So - I urge you to avoid Nancy Grace, who's not out there for victims, she's out there for herself, and is simply another in a long line of loudmouths lowering the tone of informational exchange in contemporary American life.