Split Decision

Oh, if only I'd had this book a dozen years ago ...

-- Mz M.

Cheney's Got a Gun!

(Sung to the tune of Aerosmith's Janey's Got a Gun).



Just in case anybody thought I was turning into a anorexic Republican, Gwen!

-- Mz M.

Everybody Loves Ray ... Ramadan!

Since the hype over the infamous Danish cartoons has reached fever pitch, and since the uber left-wing Guardian newspaper refused to run my letter, I guess I'll wade into the cow flops ... and it's waist deep at this point.

At first, I was incensed like every other free speech lovin' Westerner for these fundamentalist nut jobs' over reaction (when haven't they over reacted?) to the cartoons that a newspaper in Denmark ran ... right before a fatwa was issued on everybody from the receptionist to the janitor.

Afterwards, I did entertain a Conspiracy Theory: what if the CIA, err some agency run by the NeoCons, deliberately manipulated an obscure newspaper in an obscure European country to run these caricatures so the ol' imams would flip out, make a scene and thus obscure any potential REAL controversies here at home like ... oh ... engaging in illegal wiretapping of the American people? But then I thought, naw, the NeoCons just aren't that smart.

There are holes so big in even moderate Moslem's arguments against running the cartoons again, I could drive a truck through them. First of all, the Holocaust was a historical fact, an event involving millions of people that happened during a world war that involved even more people, not some vague iconic figurehead of a religion. Poking fun at it is like trying to poke fun at an encyclopedia. Just watch Hogan's Heroes and spare us the painfully bad joke. And pedophilia is a crime, a felony, in the U.S. and most other Western countries. So stop beating those dead horses, they're not going to get up and run around the debate track. And please, pull out your Arabic-English dictionary and look up these words: analogy and satire.

Second, and this point was raised by freakin' Ann Coulter no less! Wasn't Mohammed's likeness portrayed in wall tapestries, ashtrays, hookahs, etc. for centuries? Here we have the prophet ascending to heaven, here we have the prophet riding his camel, etc. I believe Turkey is full of religious artwork showing the prophet doing holy, prophet-y things. So fucking what?

Thirdly, I'm 40 and I literally GREW UP watching enraged Moslems burn American and Israeli flags on TV. Every single president we've had for the last 40 years has been burned in effigy somewhere in the Middle East. And I'm not just talking about the current fucktard, I'm talking waaay back when Jimmy Carter was in Egypt practically on his hands and knees trying to get Sadat and Begin to sign that peace treaty. When you burn the flag of any country, you're insulting everyone in that country. You don't just insult Pres. Dubya when you burn the American flag, you insult all 280 million of us including liberal anti-war activists like myself. So given that, where's our apology, Islam? Huh? From now on, leave the flag burning up to the dissenters of their respective country's because what teenage Moslem boys do with flags in front of foreign photographers is now so incredibly passe and trite. Something about fundamentalist Islam seems like an eternal re-run of a really bad 70's TV show.

Another thing that's amazed me about Islam is the burning need (not a pun) to hijack every other debate for their own. Millions of Americans -- and we're a very diverse bunch -- have come together to oppose the war in Iraq and the current presidency. Yet the last anti-war/anti-Bush rally I attended was predictably overrun by a shrieking hippie lady screaming for an end to the "Zionist Israeli occupation" and a "recognition of Palestinian rights." That's just great ... and that's a rally for another day in another place. I think Israeli troops should stop "occupying" those trashy suburbs that look like Tempe, Arizona too. But I was there to wave signs and banners protesting Bush, not some other president in some country far away where I have no voting rights and I can't even apply for food stamps.

Finally, when I read in the Stranger's forum that the pernicious North African Moslem cab drivers of Seattle were diligently swiping copies of the Stranger out of newsstands, I got pissed off all over again. I've had it with these rude, backward, grasping, misogynistic, homophobic, racist fuckwits! Gawd!


-- Mz M.


This cartoon, is NOT one of the contested cartoons, and because it's satire is dead on it's clear the imams and mullahs are the butt of the joke, not some long-dead religious leader.

The Kevin Spacey Scenario

I just don't care whether he's gay! I love Michael James McDonald.



He's the best thing about Mad TV, except his character Stuart is stupid. But the rest of the skits he's written are kick-ass funny. He's 6'3" and he used to be a bank exec, which is just weird. And he's got a movie coming out YEAH! It's looks like it's gonna be whimsical, absurdist comedy/romance like Garden State.

I still can't get the CSS on this blog to work right. If you're wondering why you can't leave any comments, blame James. He won't help me fix the comments code. Flakey McFlakersteins!

-- Mz M.

Force-fed Self-Loathing

I've been channel surfing a little during the day while I'm waiting for prospective employers to call me back and I surfed into a creepy episode of Tyra Banks this a.m.

What was creepy about it was that the show, which is hosted by a black woman who used to be a super model, was about teenage girls and bulimia. That's the variation of eating disorder where the kid stuffs her self and then sticks her fingers down her throat to "purge."

According to Bill Maher, the man who thinks the coked-out Olsen Twins and Anne Coulter are hot, this problem is over-rated. On his show, Maher has said he thinks women who do this are achieving some sort of physical ideal, not dangerously sick.

The woman who caused a largely NeoCon-hyped furor over euthanasia last year, Terry Schiavo, was in a permanent vegatative state because she was bulimic most of her life and suffered a massive stroke and heart attack while trying to make her self puke. As Randi Rhodes astutely pointed out, "This is someone who would rather die than be fat."

Anyhow, during a pause in the Tyra Show, the commercials came up. The very first commercial was an ad for chocolate M&Ms. The motif of the advert was this weird sorta retro-70s, acid-trip theme with M&Ms swirling in a kaleidoscopic way, as though the Mars Corporation was trying sell the sugar "high", not just the candy.

The very next commercial was for Slim-Fast diet drinks. Apparently there's a new, better Slim-Fast that helps women "control" their cravings. Note that it was aimed specifically at women, not obese men. Just women.



I've been reading a lot of Naomi Wolf lately. She is a former Rhodes scholar and the co-founder of the Woodhull Institute. Wolf made a name for her self with "The Beauty Myth", which came out in 1991 and "Promiscuities" printed in 1998. Wolf has a lot of very insightful stuff to say about women and obesity:

Female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, women's bodies are not our own but society's, and that thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community. A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Women's dieting has become what Yale psychologist Judith Rodin calls a 'normative obsession,' a never-ending passion play given international coverage out of all proportion to the health risks associated with obesity, and using emotive language that does not figure even in discussions of alcohol or tobacco abuse. The nations seize with compulsive attention on this melodrama because women and men understand that it is not about cholesterol or heart rate or the disruption of a line of tailoring, but about how much social freedom women are going to get away with or concede. The media's convulsive analysis of the endless saga of female fat and the battle to vanquish it are actually bulletins of the sex war: what women are gaining or losing in it, and how fast.
-- from The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf, copyright 1991.

-- Mz M.

Welkum to 'Merika, Suckers!

Here's the letter concerning the dust-up at the SOTU.

I appreciate Cindy Sheehan's plight because I've personally been on the receiving end of some very scary police harassment for being a protestor. In Oct. 1992 when I got dragged by the neck along a barbed wire fence in southern Nevada while trying to cover an anti-nuke rally with some 5,000 participants. I was taking photos (a bunch of which I still have) for the UNR Sagebrush when a burly Nevada state trooper grabbed the strap of my camera and tried to drag me across the fence so it would look like I was trespassing.

Prior to that, in 1991, I got to feel the wrath of the average Red State cretin during the first Iraq fiasco. I got tagged in the side of the head by a half-full beer bottle gunned at me and my fellow protestors by some drunken whitetrash who were warming bar stools in the saloon across the street from where we were marching.

Later today the charges against Sheehan were dropped and check out this rather apologist article from USA Today.

-- Mz M.

Happy Imbolc Everyone!

Light them candles and milk them sheep.




Errr, blessed be,

-- Mz M.