Category Archives: Be What You Say You Are

Us So Much In Love And Yet

Posted by Tata on

Via Litbrit, we learn:

Anonymous has set their aim on the “graceless sociopaths” of Westboro Baptist Church, demands the organization stop, or face the hackers’ wrath.

My first thought was Happy Birthday to me! It’s not my birthday. My second thought was something about how it was about time someone took those ghoulish fuckers at Westboro Baptist downtown but not me because I’m trying to think peaceful thoughts. How about you, Godzilla?


Sweet – and my hands are clean. The Westboro Baptist fuckers: they’re true believers and their belief is tolerance of all things gay is bringing God’s wrath down on America. Who doesn’t think the same thing, except for the “belief” and the “all things gay” and that part about “God’s wrath”, but essentially those sadistic fuckers who bring their children along to the traditional picketing-of-the-military-funerals fun sound so normal you could almost mistake them your local PTA zealots or those true believers of the Condo Association, right? Yeah. I get confused. But here’s the thing: as much as I wish the Westboro Baptist fuckers would take up a new hobby that actually makes the world a better place by, say, making the world a better place, they have a Constitutional protected right to be the fuckers they are and say the things they say. I don’t have to like it.

In the article, however, one finds a little extra annoying carnage: the open letter to Westboro Baptist from Anonymous demonstrates a little me-thee problem.

Being such aggressive proponents for the Freedom of Speech & Freedom of Information as we are, we have hitherto allowed you to continue preaching your benighted gospel of hatred and your theatrical exhibitions of, not only your fascist views, but your utter lack of Christ-like attributes. You have condemned the men and women who serve, fight, and perish in the armed forces of your nation; you have prayed for and celebrated the deaths of young children, who are without fault; you have stood outside the United States National Holocaust Museum, condemning the men, women, and children who, despite their innocence, were annihilated by a tyrannical embodiment of fascism and unsubstantiated repugnance. Rather than allowing the deceased some degree of peace and respect, you instead choose to torment, harass, and assault those who grieve.

Oh boy.

Yes, those Westboro Baptist fuckers did those things. Yep, yep, yep.

Your demonstrations and your unrelenting cascade of disparaging slurs, unfounded judgments, and prejudicial innuendos, which apparently apply to every individual numbered amongst the race of Man – except for yourselves – has frequently crossed the line which separates Freedom of Speech from deliberately utilizing the same tactics and methods of intimidation and mental & emotional abuse that have been previously exploited and employed by tyrants and dictators, fascists and terrorist organizations throughout history.

ANONYMOUS cannot abide this behavior any longer. The time for us to be idle spectators in your inhumane treatment of fellow Man has reached its apex, and we shall now be moved to action. Thus, we give you a warning: Cease & desist your protest campaign in the year 2011, return to your homes in Kansas, & close your public Web sites.

I love Anonymous. In a short time, it’s grown from a little guy in a too-big Batman suit to a too-big guy in a Star Trek security suit. Hackers for free speech can’t silence detestable free speech. That’s like matter and anti-matter choosing a china pattern at Crackpottery Barn.

Westboro Baptist as a group is really, really small. Most of their disgusting protests are comprised of fewer than 10 starkly unattractive bigots. I’m not saying they’re harmless, but they sure could benefit from quitting the Flowbee and visiting hairdressers.

I think we can all agree on that.

Must Have Been the Color Of

Posted by Tata on

Yesterday, I reported that lately fellow employees at the unnamed university have been resisting my naïve charm. I can scarcely believe it, but attend:

Mr. [Pool Schedule-Setting Guy],

I’ve been an unnamed university employee since dinosaurs roamed the earth. At some point in the future, when we all ride around in jet packs, I’m going to need a hip replacement. To train for it, I’d like to stand in a pool filled with four feet of water and walk for half an hour every morning. Since I work across the street in the library, I’d like it to be in your pool.

You’re about to recommend I go to another campus. Thank you, but no. I have no occasion to go to any other campus and for most of the year I commute to work by bicycle. Going to another campus would eat up all time I have to be in the pool, walking.

You’re going to recommend I take swimming classes. I do not need or want them. I do not need to swim. I do not need company or direction. Further, my mother taught swimming on a different campus in the seventies and I spent every Saturday in that [stinky] pool. I don’t miss it.

So what do you say? Should I buy a ridiculous Hello, Kitty! swim cap covered with plastic flowers and show up at 7 a.m. on Friday?

Thank you,
Tata

See how charming I am? I am freaking charming!

One major problem…
The [pool of my dreams] ranges in depth from 8 to 10 feet. I know you don’t want to come to [the pool far, far away], but the variable depth pool over here is perfect for what you are asking. What are your thoughts?

He seems nice, but he’d be a lot nicer if he just said I could have anything I wanted! I WANT THAT.

While it is true that I’m seldom 9 feet tall without an ego problem, I’m afraid that [the pool far, far away] is [far, far away]. Bicycling over there from [where I live] would mean dodging very serious traffic. On the other hand, getting hit by a bus would probably solve ALL my problems, I suppose.

Check your pockets, Mr. [Pool Schedule-Setting Guy]. You’ve got a pool [across the street] for me. Unless that’s actually lint.

At this point, you should remember that most people do not talk like me.

Re: pool accessibility I’m not sure I understand your last message. “Unless that’s actually lint”?
What pool are you talking about?

The pocket pool. I mean lint. See what I did there?

I suppose I meant inside your pockets. In some circles, my antics are considered amusing.

When dinosaurs roamed the earth or when I went to gymnastics camp in the gym in the seventies, there were two pools in the [gym across the street].

Writing tip: the writer has failed when she must explain her dementia is hilarious. Generally. But just in case you weren’t sure, the audience circles back and expects closure.

There is a tiny pool next to the main pool but it is only 2 feet deep and you would probably make yourself sick walking in such a small circle for half an hour. Have you considered the bike path that cuts through the park as an alternate route to [the pool far, far away]?

Yes, nausea as a route to improved health is a road lined with NO STOPPING OR STANDING signs. Ask any cancer patient. Thus I assured him I would keep asking for the same thing for the next 10-20 years and he should give in now.

In the meantime, I’m shopping for the most ghastly bathing caps to protect my glorious tresses.

The Block People Will Talk

Posted by Tata on

Having Poor Impulse Control in two places sucks like a giant thing that sucks a whole lot. It’s here and here, where I was goddamn funny. It’s tough over here to keep reminding you of what I said over there. I said a lot of things. Some of them were about recycling. I keep talking:

Hello Ms. [Representative of the Unnamed University’s Recycling Program],

We hear a lot about recycling programs at the university and they sound great, but we don’t hear anything about composting. A simple example: offices and vendors all over make coffee every morning, and every morning, custodians lug perfectly compostable coffee filters and grounds out to the trash, which is then carted off to landfill. We then see university lawns get fertilized every spring.

This is paying people to take something away, then paying someone else to bring something back, wasting money in an ecologically damaging way. None of this is necessary if the university sets up an internal composting system that then can be used to fertilize the lawns. It’s a huge, huge opportunity to take an important step into a better future, and the timing couldn’t be better: right here in the library, the university is opening a café. Here is the chance to make a big step and a big PR splash: have the café contribute its compostable wastes to a pilot composting program.

This is not farfetched. This kind of thing happens all over the world. We can do this and I hope you’ll consider it.

Thank you.

Fucking polite for me, eh? She wrote back like she was giving my shoulder a shove.

100% of organics are recycled, composting is highly regulated and very labor intensive and makes no sense when we have limited labor on campus.

Dahhhling, nobody who’s anybody starts a sentence with a numeral, puhhhhlease!

Ms. [RotUURP],

Actually, it does make sense to have both localized and centralized composting stations. It’s done all over Europe. It can be done here, and it should.

Initially, it’s a bit of work to see plans through, but it can be done and it would make Rutgers look really smart.

Thank you,
Tata

I’m laughing but I want to tear apart her jewelry with my well-placed bicuspids. Apparently, she hates me and punctuation with equal vigor.

Tata we are not composting University is Really smart we have attempted small stations which were abandoned and because we commit all of our food waste from the dining halls and soon from the student and rec centers to beneficial reuse at a cost savings for the university there is no need to compost which requires intensive permitting, and is labor intesive.
Thanks for your interest

I wrote her one more eager epistle attesting to the ease of composting, but by then she’d moved on to fully ignoring me. I should be crushed that she doesn’t find me persuasive and my cause compelling, just crushed – like eggshells in a composter.

Tune in tomorrow for more proof that other people are resisting my irresistability!

You Remember Me Tomorrow

Posted by Tata on

Let’s talk about our old friend the Political Compass, where I am a flaming pinko. I’ve taken this little test a few times and I always come out to the southwest of Gandhi. Naturally, that’s a neighborhood I can live with. I’d take his wife a casserole anytime.

Lefty Leftists are leftastic.

Please take this test. Watch out: some of the questions are gibberish:

It is a waste of time to try to rehabilitate some criminals.

Trying to rehabilitate the smalltime pot user is a waste of time because he/she shouldn’t be a criminal, but please lock up and throw away the key on serial killers. Who wrote this shite?

Charity is better than social security as a means of helping the genuinely disadvantaged.

Apples and oranges. That anyone composed that sentence is a problem all by itself.

Some people are naturally unlucky.

What? What?

Astrology accurately explains many things.

Nothing else explains the AQUARIUS! stickers on my bicycle.

A significant advantage of a one-party state is that it avoids all the arguments that delay progress in a democratic political system.

That is some grade-A political gibberish right there.

First-generation immigrants can never be fully integrated within their new country.

Can we dig up some Pilgrims and ask them?

Those who are able to work, and refuse the opportunity, should not expect society’s support.

Let’s say you’re a nuclear physicist and you can’t find work nuclearly physicisting. Should there be fries with that?

Nonsense aside, after you’ve taken the test and seen where you turn out on the grid, I’d like you to take it a second time. It’s not a long test. What is it, five minutes? The second time, please consider the questions from a different perspective. Chances are good you took the test from a mainstream political perspective in which you get to make some or all of the decisions and some or all of the value judgments. Believe it or not, the vast majority of people in this country do not. So take the test assuming that you might be on the receiving end of those decisions and judgments instead of the delivering end.

Let that sink in. I bet we might actually be neighbors.

Crossposted at Brilliant@Breakfast

The Water Where You Came From

Posted by Tata on

1. People ask me a lot of the same crazy questions over and over at the family store, but my favorite is, “Do you think this will look good in my living room?”

2. She rang the doorbell an hour ago in tonight’s snow storm. Apparently, the Sierra Club works rain or shine. I let her in so she could thaw for a minute and I would have made her a cup of tea if we hadn’t just lost water. Snow in pots and bowls was melting on radiators and knitted squares Darla had left for me were piled everywhere. I’d reached a miserable crossroads in trying to join them for cat blankets when the girl said, “I’m interning at this shelter for orphaned wild animals in Blairstown, where the woman uses pockets like those for the baby possums.” She wrote down the name of the shelter and its phone number. I stared at the squares, then I looked back at her. “Are you allergic to chocolate?” She said no. I brought her a plastic container from the kitchen. “It’s homemade cocoa granola,” I said. “I’m not joining the Sierra Club, but you’ve really helped me. Please take it.”

In My Heart I Do Believe

Posted by Tata on

The other night, Pete, my husband of 5 to 25 with time off for good behavior, set up the turntable in the attic, where we on an almost nightly basis use ancient exercise equipment while watching Rocky & Bullwinkle. Thursday, Pete discovered the cats had rewired the speakers through some sophisticated use of tools and a fine howdyado; Pete had re-rewired the speakers with gimlet eye and spiteful so-there. In other words, you would not have believed the metaphor pileup when I climbed the stairs and sat down on the rowing machine while the turntable and the speakers blasted Pete’s favorite Pete Seeger record and Talking Union. The music was very loud until I cranked up the rowing and hollered the words to Which Side Are You On? The latter song is good for pacing and breath control, but while you are really exerting yourself, be careful singing We Shall Overcome, for one thing because you are going to think of some very serious shit and schlamiels in suits and inexplicably out of clown shoes. Get a load of the hot steaming stupid:

L to r: Johnson and Rhodes, both unclear on the concept of Non-Violence.

Jeh C. Johnson, the Defense Department’s general counsel, posed that question at today’s Pentagon commemoration of King’s legacy.

In the final year of his life, King became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, Johnson told a packed auditorium. However, he added, today’s wars are not out of line with the iconic Nobel Peace Prize winner’s teachings.

This is what it sounds like when a true believer picks a name out of the Famous Dead People Hat and turns that famous person into someone he or she simply never was, but who approves of the true believer. This is like Tony Blair had hinted Gandhi went in for a little imperialist adventure now and then. This is like the American Cattlemen adopting Francis of Assisi. This is like the bishops saying Jesus wouldn’t mind a little child molesting. Dudes, if there was a Jesus and he was who you say he was, you are in the deepest of deep shit FOREVER, NO BACKSIES. And Mr. Johnson? What part of non-violence and economic justice condones war?

In King’s last speech in Memphis, Tenn., on April 3, 1968 – the night before he died – King evoked the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan, Johnson noted.

According to the parable, a traveler was beaten and robbed and left for dead. Two other travelers passed the man as he lay alongside the road – one was a priest. Both ignored the man and continued on their way. Finally, a Samaritan traveling the road showed compassion and took the stranger to an inn and saw to his care.

In his speech, King drew a parallel between those who passed by the man on the road and those in Memphis who at the time hesitated to help striking sanitation workers because they feared for their own jobs.

Johnson said King criticized those who are compassionate by proxy, noting the civil rights leader told the audience in Memphis that night, “The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?’ The question is, ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?'”

I hate to break it to you, Mr. Johnson, but helping striking sanitation workers reach an agreement for decent pay, benefits and working conditions is not the same as dropping bombs on defenseless civilians in a country that can’t be bombed back into a Stone Age that has yet to happen, and you simply cannot extrapolate from a speech about justice that the speechwriter would support an unjust and illegal war. Or you can, but please put on the clown shoes so we know you’re not trying to pass yourself off as a big thinker. You’re certainly not much of a comedy writer.

Volunteers in today’s military, he said, “have made the conscious decision to travel a dangerous road and personally stop and administer aid to those who want peace, freedom and a better place in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and in defense of the American people.

“Every day, our servicemen and women practice the dangerousness – the dangerous unselfishness Dr. King preached on April 3, 1968,” Johnson told the audience.

…because if that’s not funny, perhaps it’s because hundreds of thousands of people have been administered to death, much like in that war Dr. King objected to in life.