We bought these little suction cup balconies for the shower and they are smart, but our housemate complains when I chant, “Evita! Evita!” at my haircare products.
My Mad Existence
Category Archives: The XX Factor
Who’s To Blame?
(With apologies to the B-52s)
Surprise! Party!
Yeah, we just thought we’d drop in!
Where’s your icebox?
Where’s the punch?
Eww, House-a-tosis!
Who’s to blame when parties really get out of hand?
Who’s to blame when they get poorly planned?
Crashers get bombed
Slobs make a mess
Ya know sometimes they’ll even ruin your wife’s dress
Crashers gettin’ bombed. (Who’s to blame?)
Can you pull it back in line?
Can you salvage it in time?
What can you do to save a party?
Parcheesi?
Charades?
A spur-of-the-moment scavenger hunt,
Or Queen of the Nile?
Who turned out the lights?
Bombed,
Crashers gettin’ bombed,
Crashers gettin’ bombed,
Bombed,
Bombed,
Bombed,
Well, who’s to blame?
Who’s to blame when situations degenerate?
Disgusting things you’d never anticipate
People get sick, they play the wrong games
Ya know, it can ruin your name!
Crashers gettin’ bombed. (Who’s to blame?)
Can you pull it back in line?
Can you salvage it in time?
It shouldn’t be difficult!
Try not to condemn!
O.K. who ordered pizza?
I’ll be tactful when making the rounds
Be tactful when making the rounds
And maybe you can save a party…
Party gone out of bounds!
Gone out of bounds!
Images and videos courtesy of the Intertubes. Thank you, Intertubes.
I Go From Here To A Better State Than This
FARGO, N.D. — Gov. Jack Dalrymple of North Dakota approved the nation’s toughest abortion restrictions on Tuesday, signing into law a measure that would ban nearly all abortions and inviting a legal showdown over just how much states can limit access to the procedure.
Mr. Dalrymple, a Republican, signed three bills passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature in Bismarck. The most far-reaching law forbids abortion once a fetal heartbeat is “detectable,” which can be as early as six weeks into a pregnancy. Fetal heartbeats are detectable at that stage of pregnancy using a transvaginal ultrasound.
Most legal scholars have said the law would violate the Supreme Court’s finding in Roe v. Wade that abortions were permitted until the fetus was viable outside the womb, generally around 24 weeks. Even some leaders of the anti-abortion movement nationally have predicted that laws banning abortion so early in pregnancy are virtually certain to be declared unconstitutional by federal courts.
“Although the likelihood of this measure surviving a court challenge remains in question, this bill is nevertheless a legitimate attempt by a state legislature to discover the boundaries of Roe v. Wade,” Mr. Dalrymple said in a statement. The Supreme Court, he added, “has never considered this precise restriction” in the heartbeat bill.
“I think there’s a lot of frustration in the pro-life movement,” said Paul B. Linton, a constitutional lawyer in Illinois who was formerly general counsel of Americans United for Life. “Forty years after Roe v. Wade was decided, it’s still the law of the land.”
When women die, when infants suffer needless deaths and tortured lives, when school systems choke, when children go hungry, when poverty wipes clean any hope of a better life, it’s all on you. If the federal courts do not overturn these laws, the blood is on your hands. Fuck you, just fuck you. I hope women leave you and find safe haven elsewhere.
See the World Spinning Round
Ladybugs: friends or crunchy snack?
The horror of a massacre of first graders and their teachers – children and women – was immediately compounded by the loud and persistent call by an apparently endless parade of crazed white men for more guns in schools. Before the bodies had even been removed from the school, white men slammed teachers and unions for the wholesale killing, blamed contraception, blamed everyone but gun culture and mental illness. Columbine was thirteen years ago and I was no longer interested in school shootings because Americans were playing them on TV as spectacles and I wasn’t playing along; but this latest crime brought us a secondary horror. One would think that when women and children lay in pools of blood, men, ultimately our partners in the enterprise of living, would lay down their arms to take us in theirs. Instead, all across the electronically connected United States, white men have chosen to hang on to their guns.
This is not just a gun problem. This is not just a mental illness problem. This is also a profound disconnection of white men from women and children, one I still can’t really believe I’m seeing. It’s shocking and, somewhere in my gut, something has changed. I now wonder if women and children should have safe towns or even states where men are not allowed, and if that is the only way we can live in relative peace and safety.
It’s Like A Disease, Son
Via here, and here, and here, and here, and here; all of which came from here.
A load of this shit, you must get it.
From the HuffPo cite above:
“I think it’s the perfect place to advertise a pro-life message,” Springdale Cleaners owner Paul Dehler told HuffPost. The 66-year-old said he printed the images on the hangers to support his sister, who’s opposed to women’s right to choose an abortion.
“I don’t get into all that,” Dehler said of the abortion debate. “I’m just putting the message out there, and doing it for my sister.”
Pro-choice advocates in the U.S. have historically used coat hangers as symbols to illustrate the dangers of outlawing abortions, suggesting that women would use such rudimentary tools to end pregnancies if the state barred medical personnel from performing abortions. But Dehler, who has run Springdale since it opened in 1969, said his hangers are aimed at promoting a pro-life stance.
Springdale Cleaners first started producing its pro-life hangers six years ago, when Dehler’s granddaughter was an infant, he explained. “Some customers have said they don’t like the hangers, and in some cases I’ve lost their business,” Dehler said. “But I’d like to think that I’ve gained more customers with these hangers than I’ve lost.”
That cites a New York Times article you should read in its unforgiving entirety written by a retired gynecologist, but this is salient:
My early formal training in my specialty was spent in New York City, from 1948 to 1953, in two of the city’s large municipal hospitals.
There I saw and treated almost every complication of illegal abortion that one could conjure, done either by the patient herself or by an abortionist — often unknowing, unskilled and probably uncaring. Yet the patient never told us who did the work, or where and under what conditions it was performed. She was in dire need of our help to complete the process or, as frequently was the case, to correct what damage might have been done.
The patient also did not explain why she had attempted the abortion, and we did not ask. This was a decision she made for herself, and the reasons were hers alone. Yet this much was clear: The woman had put herself at total risk, and literally did not know whether she would live or die.
This, too, was clear: Her desperate need to terminate a pregnancy was the driving force behind the selection of any method available.
The familiar symbol of illegal abortion is the infamous “coat hanger” — which may be the symbol, but is in no way a myth. In my years in New York, several women arrived with a hanger still in place. Whoever put it in — perhaps the patient herself — found it trapped in the cervix and could not remove it.
That’s what coat hangers meant. This is what coat hangers meant:
Gerri Santoro was a real woman with real problems and no way out.
Paul Dehler is a stupid man who should keep his opinions about ladybusiness to himself.
To Know That You Are Dreaming
Is that really the question?
Spinning In Infinity
It helps to want what you also need. In this case, chicken livers with butter and sherry, because this is delicious and I am anemic.
Some People Are In Charge Of Bombs
What’s clucking up at the Henhouse?
Fox News Says Gabby Douglas’ Leotard, Other US Olympic Uniforms Not Patriotic Enough
Bless us, a grown man is talking smack about a teenage girl, so it’s got to be about fashion. He must be very butch. So says the assistant principal:
[David] Webb noted that gymnasts “adjust their uniforms within boundaries sometimes,” but he still had an issue with the “anti-American feeling.”
…
“If you want to be in the Olympics, you’re playing for your country,” said Webb. “The Chinese are wearing red predominantly as that’s their national color, if you will, so why not us with the red, white and blue? There’s a meaning behind the red, white and blue that has been lost.”
Gymnasts sometimes push up their long sleeves and judges sometimes penalize for it. The rules are very strict. Last night, Gabby Douglass was chewing gum in the stands and I was as shocked as if I’d seen her eating actual food.
Has the gold medal. And detention, apparently.
Believe it or not, Webb, who should be arguing about hall passes in the Mr. Blackwell Middle School in Nowhere, Pennsyltucky, is in a state of high dudgeon over little pink leotards. I mulled over the pink uniforms too, but I wondered how the designers got away with it. The elite athlete of questionable patriotic fervor is a teenage girl; in the general population, teenage girls carry pink phones in their pink purses and wear sweats with the word PINK plastered on their tiny teeny butts. Teenage girly-girls wear pink and our women’s gymnastics team is composed entirely of teenage girls whose femininity is seriously and publicly policed by the US Gymnastics Federation and the Olympic authorities. Some committee okayed these uniforms made by the blistered hands of tiny Chinese slave-children. Just kidding. I’m sure they were slave-adults.
Not on the team but still pretty, which counts bigtime in gymnastics.
Also: it never crossed my mind that Alicia Sacramone might have been the intended wearer of the fuschia leotard. No. Not at all. No. She looks great in fuschia.
Assistant Principal Webb again:
‘What’s wrong with showing pride?” Webb asked. “What we’re seeing is this kind of soft anti-American feeling that Americans can’t show our exceptionalism. Frankly, if they are offended about our showing our exceptionalism then they have that right and I don’t care. And neither do most Americans.”
Gymnastics has rules against showing your exceptionalism. Or your cootchy. Don’t do that. It’s a big deduction.
What is this frustrated jerkwad talking about, anyway? Four other girls were dressed the same unpatriotic way. He doesn’t mention them. Maybe he wanted Gabby Douglass to roll a tank down the vaulting runway and end every routine with a military salute? This is stupid and inappropriate and in keeping with Mouthbreather-Americans’ fetishization of all things military and flaggy. Yes, this is an international event, but the point of the Olympics is peaceful competition between nations. That point is lost on a lot of people. So what the fuck is this guy doing in turning one teenage girl’s outfit into a nightmare of thwarted hypernationalism? And doesn’t it sound a lot like what the Henhouse cluckers say about President Obama?
If the Lights Keep Flashing
No black athlete, male or female, has ever won the All-Around gold at the Olympics.
A Rainstorm And You Howl Like
Atticus among Dad’s bonsais.
In the spring of 2007, – forgive that I’m repeating myself – Dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer and I slept on Dad’s office floor for a month. My back has never forgiven me, but this happened, too:
For a couple of weeks, I awakened with a twelve-pound cat tangled in my shining tresses. I’d spend half an hour talking to said cat, whose name is Atticus. He’d purr, he’d preen. He’d tell me where he wanted to be scratched and nip if I scratched out of bounds. Then, I’d go downstairs and start household chores for the day. One morning, Darla and I were discussing something serious when Atticus padded softly into the kitchen, took one look at me and sauntered off.
Tata: Darla, am I imagining it or is that cat pretending we’re not sleeping together?
Darla: He’s acting like he doesn’t know you in public!Apparently, Atticus saw Samantha sitting on my lap and now he’s all like “Girlfriend, please!” And I’m all like “But honey, you’re the only cat for me!” And Atticus is like “Sugar, I’m not sure you even like cats.” I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin’!
This morning, he was sleeping near my head but not on it, but he did tangle my hair a little. While I wonder if Atticus will take me back, the world keeps turning.
A sweet guy with a keen fashion sense.
Recently, I’ve been thinking about Island of the Blue Dolphins, which I like every other girl my age read as a teenager. Sometimes we have no control over whether or not we are alone or who our companions might be. Atticus certainly had no say in such matters, but for the past few years after Darla moved back to Canada, Atticus liked sleeping on a corner of Darla’s bed, with his paws resting on her hand. Sometimes, love is a situation.
It’s odd, I guess, that I was mulling over a book from my childhood and the loss of a cat-friend on the twenty-first anniversary of my grandmother Edith’s death when Wintle sent along this.
Everything goes somewhere, but no one’s going anywhere in those shoes.
Poor Impulse Control 