Tim Lieder

Homosexuality and Homophobia and that massive place in between...

2013-05-24T23:57:22Z

Ok, here is where I speak in defense of Adrian Peterson of the MN Vikings who gets the Headline of "Gay Marriage: I'm not with that" when the full quote is “To each his own. I’m not with it. But I have relatives that are gay. I’m not biased towards them. I still treat them the same. I love them. But again, I’m not with that. That’s not something I believe in. But to each his own.”

Tumblr and blogs and the internet have turned us into an extremist culture. When politics is give-and-take negotiation full of compromises and built-in utilitarianism, politics are so much more fun when people are at each other's throats. So we have assholes in the tea party and assholes in the Occupy movement (nice people in both movements). We have people who are complete homophobes and people who hate all homophobes.

When I was in high school, I felt just a little disappointed that I was not in the 60s when everything was so clear. There were racists and warmongers and there were civil rights leaders and Abbie Hoffman. I was unaware of my own privilege but also scared of it. I wanted to beat up KKK leaders. There were no damn KKK leaders in Minnesota. I think this was a very common perspective since every time a couple of losers marched through East Saint Paul in Nazi uniforms or Tom David wanted to start the White Student Union at the U of MN, there were thousands of protesters to chant the racism away.

And in the case of the Progressive Student Organization, a guy wearing a Norse swastika to an anti-racist rally had legally given up all rights to leave that rally with his head intact (and every bullshit asshole punk zine for the next 5 years would have news on behalf of the guy that hit him on the head with a flashlight, because if someone is wearing something that we don't agree with, how dare anyone prosecute us for committing assault and battery?)

So now, we are inclined to condemn all homophobes as if we have no homophobia in our past.

Adrian Peterson would have been a hero of the gay rights movement as late as the 80s. Hell, Madonna grabbed the gay audience by proudly declaring herself a fag hag in a pop music culture that was full of flaming musicians all of whom claimed that they were straight (even Boy George denied being gay. Seriously, it's like everyone had to be coy by Liberace). But now, he's a guy that doesn't really like homosexuality, doesn't know how to deal with it and is saying what he believes at the moment.

He's wrong but there are going to be people who condemn him and idolize him since extremism is so much more fun than decency.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't tell outright homophobes to go fuck themselves. Hell, I posted that Lily Allen song in regard to one homophobic idiot. But we should give them the benefit of the doubt. We are all learning. And growing.

Every damn time

2013-05-24T03:47:17Z

I spend weeks - sometimes months - working away - grinding out the stupid term papers all the while telling myself that when I have a free moment, I will totally work on the novels or the short stories or the publishing company. I will send out stories and get back on Cracked. I will actually fucking relax and ask women out.

Instead I spend my breaks worrying about money and re-posting Craigslist ads.

Damnit.

Ok, I am getting some work done on those things but not nearly enough. I think I really have to force myself to work on this stuff when I don't have the time. That's not good.

Sometimes there are conspiracies...maybe

2013-05-23T06:17:57Z

There are so many bullshit conspiracy theories being tossed about with the internet and Alex Jones that it almost seems crazy to be suspicious of something that could very well be a conspiracy. But the death of Ibragim Todashev really makes no sense. I mean, I don't know the guy, so he could have been pushed into confessing to a triple homicide that linked him and the Boston marathon bomber. He could have outright said that he did it and then made a move on the FBI agents only to get shot in the process. This is all very possible.

But improbable. More probable is the FBI agent getting pissed at the guy and shooting him and then writing an official report that clears a baffling homicide, puts him in a hero position for two major trials and then stabs himself to make it look good.

Makes sense especially since Ibragim Todashev's friends said that he was getting afraid of the questions.

Now I'm not going to say it's one way or the other. I don't know. However, unlike 911 Truth or Obama is a Nigerian or Aaron Burr had Merriwether Lewis killed to stop him from narking on him, this is not an elaborate conspiracy that requires years of planning and thousands of people keeping silent about "the truth" (or at least neglecting to tell Alex Jones that he's really correct in his insanity). It requires one FBI guy and his partners going "Ok, fuck it. This guy is probably guilty and if you don't back me up, how can anyone ever trust you again?" and a case clearance.

Oh hell, Ibragim Todashev could have killed himself and the FBI guys could have just decided to close a case that they were 90% certain that he did anyhow.

Books Read in 2013 # 46 - I have failed as a Jane Austen reader

2013-05-22T18:10:55Z

46. Northanger Abbey graphic novel adapted by Nancy Butler and Janet Lee - I always feel like I'm missing out by being bored with the Jane Austen mania. There are works inspired by Jane Austen that I like. I thought that The Jane Austen Book Club was one of the better romantic comedies I've seen in a long time (primarily because it's about people who read books and talk about subjects that aren't The Plot) and most of the adapted movies I quite like. It's just Jane Austen books themselves that bore me to tears. And being caught in the Orthodox Jewish community where no one dates for fun and everyone dates for marriage (according to the official party line) I should be totally seeing the point of these books. Hell, one friend bored me at a party about how she and her friend came up with a way of ascribing Jane Austen characters to frum girls in the frum community. I imagine that I would have found the conversation a little less odious if the "friend" wasn't most likely my ex-girlfriend.

But I went into Northanger Abbey the comic book thinking that I could get over my innate dislike of most Jane Austen books (actually I think I was relatively entertained by Persuasion) and there is nothing here that a Jane Austen fan can't like. The artwork is amazing. The movement through the story is fast enough. It's just that the source material is crap. It's still all the drinking tea and "oh what family are you from" material.

And maybe there's a personal dislike here. Maybe it's like the Delaney book where current dating mores are bothering me but this time it's the Orthodox Jewish ones which I originally embraced after coming off a 4 year relationship that never advanced beyond the stage where we would have our own apartments but stay over (the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow stage?) and never move in together or get married. So I wanted a relationship that wasn't 2 years of fun and two years of waiting for a replacement. But Orthodox Jewish dating is job interviewing. You have to go on dates and spend most of your time answering questions like "do you have any brothers or sisters?" and "What do your parents do for a living?" and seriously, I don't like to say that I'm a convert because it's a boring story. Ok, it's not a boring story but it's a story that can't be told well in the 5-10 minutes allotted.

But I really think that I just don't like Jane Austen. And I know that some people love her. But I can't really love a book where everything is underhanded and obsessed with marriage. Of course, Northanger Abbey is acknowledged as the terrible first book but even then it has all the Jane Austen tropes that bore me so much in other narratives.

The Abba Movie makes no sense

2013-05-22T17:49:56Z

This movie is called The Abba Movie and it does have Abba concert footage with all the songs, but it's also trying to have a plot. I think that their referencing of the Beatles movies shows what they are trying to do here, but the plot is about a creepy reporter who walks around in red bikini bottoms more than anyone should ever walk around in red bikini bottoms and just keeps missing them. He doesn't have his press pass in one scene. In another scene he wakes up late and yells at the front desk at the hotel. Even though he actually has a right to be a jerk in that case (hotels have wake-up service for a reason) he seems like the one in the wrong.

I don't know if we are supposed to sympathize with him when he interviews Abba fans who just say that they are "clean" and not all dirty like most rock stars from the 1970s. Granted, there's a novelty in a rock band that isn't routinely snorting cocaine off of each other's butts but I don't know what that's a selling point. I imagine it would have been a selling point for me when I was a kid and quite enamored with that whole record burning movement. That was the point when I said that I liked "Light Rock" and then when I was a teenager listening to metal I would have hated them for the same reason.

Oh, so there's a happy ending where the reporter runs into them on an elevator and they sing some forgotten song about flying like an eagle (not one of the ones that was pushed in Australian movies) and now I think he has broken his tape deck or something.

New Cats - the tabbies

2013-05-22T06:10:23Z

I got Gambit from a strange set of circumstances. My friend Jered tried to set me up with a woman that he thought I would like because I think we were both pro-Israel and converts. I think that was his reasoning. Apparently I knew her from LJ and her name was something like Jennifer Ray but she changed it to something Jewish (even though she never converted and she's the kind of person that gets blocked from conversion under the "it might be a side effect of the anti-psychotics" standard. I know it's unfair but there are enough crazy Jews in the world without importing some) and I pretty much saw no potential for that in the beginning. Yes, I know that it is unfair to judge someone based on mental illness, but when someone says that she's on medical leave and gets money from the state for mental illness, it's a little more serious than I am capable of dealing with.

But she was friends with a pet rescue place in Pennsylvania and they were trying to get Gambit adopted. Gambit is a two year old tabby who was abused. He got along great with Socrates until Socrates died. Socrates didn't fight him off, but Socrates was old and tired. He's making an effort with the rest of the cats.

Even better, by the time I was looking to adopt Gambit, Jennifer Ray was getting steadily more annoying. It's like I couldn't be on FB without her commenting on every single thing I wrote. Most of the time she was speaking in cliches but a lot of it was just nothing. A week before I was supposed to get Gambit, she took offense with my non-sadness at Aaron Swartz's death. So she wrote to Karen stating that I was making jokes about suicide (I kind of was) and that she couldn't recommend me for Gambit. So I got a couple other friends to recommend me. Karen stopped working with Jennifer Ray and I had the reason I needed to block the woman. If I just blocked the woman without the backstabbing, I would have felt bad about it.

So Gambit is still not coming up to me. He is really good at running away. For the first month, he was hiding in the box spring (Willamena is in the box spring now) but he started to get out and walk around. I am actually sorry for him concerning Socrate's death since he liked Socrates (it was hard not to like Socrates) and he wasn't afraid of him as he is of the other cat.

It's a slow process. Gambit has a lot of trust issues and he's not entirely jibing with the other cats (I actually got the other cats sooner than later due to the fact that Gambit was not going to cozy up to me for a long time and he needed the company as well). But now I have a cat toy which is a fake tail on a stick.

If he's sufficiently calm, I can get him to play with it when I'm holding it (he plays with other cat toys away from me) and if I am lucky, I can pet him with the fake cat tail. He's becoming more comfortable with me, but he's still running away. Hopefully, he will get over it, but whomever abused him did a great job of fucking him up. I hope the former owner has died in a nasty fire by now.

Fighting on the internet

2013-05-21T04:34:15Z

The thing with Seth Eben Shapiro is making me reflective. It's like I don't keep fighting on the internet. Hell, calling Jeremy a fat pathetic queen last night (he's homophobic - I only get that bitchy around closet cases) was pretty much for the entertainment of everyone else. It's not like I think that I can get through to the crazy whiner. But I also went off on him because there is only so much of the same crap I can put up with. There are certain points where I stop trying to be nice and patient.

The fact that Jeremy got me suspended on Facebook for 12 hours is a mixed blessing. On one hand, fuck that guy for starting something that he couldn't finish. But on the other hand, it's nice to stay away from FB (ok I didn't stay away - I actually asked out a woman that I met on Shavuos. She said no, but I did ask - something I haven't been doing for a long time. But should).

Then there's Seth Eben Shapiro. I didn't like him. The last time I talked to him it was a disaster because he was trolling me and acting all crazy. I should have unfriended him when I saw him on the FB feed arguing with Jews for Jesus and Dov Bear and other political groups. I was only partially surprised when it became him trying to tell me that Marx was totally like Orthodox Judaism. And then pushing it and pushing it until he thought that he was the center of attention.

So he's dead. That death part doesn't make me sad. There are way too many people who are dead or dying whom I actually LIKE to care about some guy that was a total troll.

But his life made me sad. The man had no other outlet except fighting with people on Facebook. That was his relationships. And that's truly sad. It's also a cautionary tale. As much as I might like getting into it on FB, I need to be with people in real life and get out of the house more often. And I can't just be fighting on FB or hating on celebrities and the standard crap. I got novels to finish, short stories to edit, term papers to write.

Addendum: Since I know that either Jeremy or someone else is reading this and can get it back to him, I will note that I got an exasperated text from a friend who is still making excuses for Jeremy. And therefore, this friend decided to tell me that he's sick of the drama. Of course, the better thing to do would be to hang up on Jeremy and tell him to grow the fuck up, but this is a friend who is much nicer than me. But knowing that Jeremy is reading this in order to make sure that his precious last name is not on it, I have replaced his last name with his first name as a favor to the friend that still puts up with Jeremy's bullshit.

On a personal note to Jeremy - you fat little queen - the homophobia isn't fooling anyone. Furthermore, if I hear ANYTHING from ANYONE about you - friends, strangers, people that I knew in high school - I will post every psycho bullshit FB message I received from you. I will talk about you incessantly. I will put your name on every chat room and comments section that I can find. No one will be able to google you without finding something that I wrote. If a friend of mine even HINTS that you were upset about something that I have written or said, you will know what it's like to find your name everywhere and not just in regard to that shitty Carlbach music you play.

Whatever you need to do to stop thinking about me or saying my name - whether it's drugs or therapy or growing the fuck up - do it now. I'm not putting up with your shit anymore and if you push this shit on the rest of the world, then you will discover just how many more people will stop talking to you.

Final warning.

Yeah. This is awesome.

2013-05-21T03:11:24Z

So Hasbro is releasing the Ponies as teenage girls to "meet market something" but really it's so all the cosplayers and cloppers can have the ponies as the purple and yellow teenage girls they were meant to be. Because that's totally not weird.

But yeah, I'm totally going to this if it's in local movie theaters.

On the other hand

2013-05-21T02:31:52Z

In the interest of making myself a better person, I am going to confess that it appears like Amanda Palmer is a nice person. Everyone who has met her has liked her and not only was she sweet to them but she was a great conversationalist. While I do not like her poetry, music or attempts at relevance, I am not going to hate her personally. There are too many people that I hate already - both in reality and as a matter of principle.

Trying to cut down.

When you feel bad for the person that is annoying you on Facebook

2013-05-20T07:14:11Z

Jeremy was a guy who came up to me one day in shul and marveled at the fact that I dyed my hair purple. Actually, more to the point, he was actually scared of it. He thought that purple haired people were the kind of people who shot up synagogues (this was before that Holmes idiot decided to make Batman more exciting) and I talked to him but he seemed like he really wanted to ask me about the purple hair. Ok, he really wanted to interrogate me - as if I could get mussar from him - or whatever. Anyhow, after I mentioned this to Chaim, Chaim dismissed him as an idiot.

Sam, on the other hand, defends him as a puppy that poops on the floor. Oh sure, he's yappy and he says that same crap over and over again (conspiracy theories and anti-Obama rants and terrible Carlbach music) but you can't be mean to him because that's like actually hitting that puppy. And sure, he's not properly house trained, but you can't get mad about it. You just have to be more patient.

Both of these perspectives are important when dealing with Jeremy because most of the time he is on FB spewing his shit. Is he just an idiot like Chaim claims or a clueless idiot like Sam claims? Sometimes I get mad at him and I get Sam reminding me that I should feel bad about myself. After all, I didn't grow up in the same ignorance. At other times, Chaim talks about another time when he was in Golan pontificating his moronic rants.

Of course, I don't like to argue with him because he hits the same notes. The "you hate me because I disagree with you." one or the "you are being mean to me just because I said racist crap about the president." There's the standard "Why are you talking about the gay basketball player as brave when Tim Tebow is being censored?" crap.

Anyhow today I mentioned that someone - a friend of a friend who I just met via FB (and who is really hot and newly single - just saying) said that Alexander the Great shouldn't be considered "gay" because he led armies. Of course, that led to my sarcastic bit about how "oh sure, Alexander the Great is stereotypically gay. He didn't like witty retorts or fashion design or interior decorating. In fact, besides having sex with dudes and hanging out with naked sweaty guys, he was pretty straight" which I thought was a funny line. Most of my FB updates are there for the humor. And the sarcasm.

But Jeremy went and posted a "joke" that went "you seem obsessed with this topic. Makes me wonder."

To which I replied with the standard annoyed stances by calling him a sad little closet case. The problem is that when I call him gay, I'm not only way more creative (seriously, there are only so many ways that you can say "you're projecting" which comes down to "I know you are, what am I?") but also because I know it gets to him.

Because he is a sad little queen who freaks out at the very thought of homosexuality. So when I write

because Jeremy G is totally the arbiter of truth and mental cases - Of course, I see you are way too much of a pussy to leave your original homophobic comment. But that makes sense. Because are one of those sad fat little queens who thinks that he can bitch his homosexuality away.

I know it hits.

But if he writes the same thing about me (nowhere near as creative) I don't care. I'm annoyed that his blatant homophobia is on my FB comments page, but I am comfortable with who I am. I know I'm straight. I got over my homophobia in college. If you call me gay, you might as well call me Asian or lefthanded. I'm not. But I have friends who are. He didn't get that.

He also doesn't get that he's stupid.

Anyhow he asked me to take down the comment above and I put it on his wall. He then blocked me. But then he logged in under a different name and started following me under that name. So I blocked him. Then he unblocked me and I blocked him again.

It's not that I'm annoyed with the guy all the time. And I mostly agree with Sam in that Jeremy is too stupid to be truly malicious. But I don't want to be fighting with him every time I'm on FB. He's the kind of troll that doesn't know that he's trolling because he sincerely believes in the idiocy that he's spewing. And then he gets into it with me and after repeating himself over and over again, he finally starts crying foul and then I feel bad because it's like he took a knife to a gun fight. I know I can demolish him and get into his head and mess with it. But I shouldn't. Only I don't really see myself not doing that as long as he's following me on Facebook.

It's like that Chereskin kid who posted TWO memes mocking Amanda Todd (that teenage girl that killed herself after being harassed by online perverts who saw her naked pictures that she took for someone else) as unworthy of sympathy. I want to give people the benefit of the doubt but sometimes that is not what is happening.

Maybe when Jeremy comes out of the closet, he might be tolerable.

Edit: Someone who knows Jeremy asked me to apologize for the good of everyone because he really isn't right in the head and he will talk incessantly. This of course leads to another issue of mental illness because there is no worse mistake than entering into a discussion with someone who is mentally ill when they are at a bad place and expecting them to be rational. You can't tell a Depressive to "just cheer up" and you can't try talking sense to a schizophrenic who is coming up with new conspiracy theories.

Books Read in 2013 # 45 - Pirates!

2013-05-19T05:14:27Z

45. Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch - I have a disagreement with my friend over these books. He states that this book is infinitely better (and more focused) than Lies of Locke Lamora and that the pirate material is largely unnecessary. I'm not sure if I convinced him, but I think that both books are great (this one is a little better because it's scott_lynch's second and he is more certain of the material) but they both have a certain pattern - start out with an intricate robbery plot where Locke Lamora is presented as the most cocksure thief/con artist in a social order that is already corrupt, show several steps in the con including a scene where Locke seems to completely blow the con by revealing that he's working a con to the mark (which of course means that he's using misdirection) and suddenly HOLY FUCK THAT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN and suddenly a book that reads like an Oceans 11 imitation (nothing wrong with that) suddenly becomes a very tense book about a man who is barely trying to keep his head above water and has to catch up with everyone else who was playing him all along.

In Lies of Locke Lamora, the HOLY FUCK scene can either be the death of one major character (whom I am still pissed off about him killing) or the death of another major character by big fucking sharks. In Red Seas, it's the pirates. Suddenly this intricate plot about Locke Lamora and Jean conning a casino owner gets derailed by a town magistrate (more like the dictator appointed by the oligarchy) sending Locke and Jean off with fake pirates only to get them stuck with real pirates and Locke evaluating and re-evaluating his loyalties.

Even though this could have been a much shorter book without the pirates, it wouldn't have been as fun or as rich in the character development of Locke and Jean. The pirates are the comrades that Locke and Jean have been seeking since the disasters of the first book and the pirate captain with kids is one of the best additions to the canon.

Unfortunately this is one of those books that is better to come at with fresh eyes so I don't want to give too much away. There are pirates. There is a town dictator. If you read the description to the next book you pretty much knows how he gets his claws into Locke and Jean. There's an elaborate Oceans 11 con that a lesser writer would be content with making the entire plot. That's all I want to say. This book may not be perfect. There were some annoying fake-outs and anti-climatic moments. There's also a cliffhanger that gets resolved in the "oh, that's how that turns out? Ok," way. But yeah, this book is awesome. Just fucking buy it. Read it. Buy multiple copies. Give them to your friends. And the next one is out in October.

One last thing - if you read the first book and not this one, you will be happy to see the bondmages back. However, what I rather love about this book is the fact that Lynch doesn't destroy their mystique (they are still the scariest bastards in the world and Locke is still crazy for going against them) but he does ever-so-subtly hint that they aren't nearly as scary or as powerful as they would like the rest of the world to believe. Of course, in a book series about con games and images, it's pretty certain that nothing is what it seems, but the way the bondmages affect the story is very interesting. Which is another reason why I'm looking forward to the third book (I suppose Lynch won't have advanced reading copies when he goes to CONvergence and even if he did, he wouldn't have enough to give to me even though I would totally review and probably rave about the third book)

Amazon Vine and Ebay let me down

2013-05-17T22:52:24Z

Ebay has now changed its policy so that it holds the money for you when you sell something. Isn't that nice. Bad enough that paypal always sides with the bitchy customers and ebay stopped letting you warn sellers against customers through negative feedback (which is why I don't leave feedback as a seller). So that's pretty much it for ebay. I may repost all of my sales like once a month, but at this point it ain't worth it to sell on ebay. Especially since reposting the sales every week is just costing me more than what I make off of it.

Amazon Vine has decided to go ahead with that stupid 100% within 30 days rule. They did limit it to the books that they have given this year so that all the old books for review are no longer in need of reviews. I suppose that makes some sense since a book review three weeks after publication is automatically more valuable than a book review 3-4 years after publication (hell some of these books have gone out of print by then). But it's still bullshit since it means that in order to get more books you either have to now make sure to read the 4 books (or 5 or 6) that you get a month or just write fake reviews based on the other reviews and the editor reviews. In one fell swoop, Amazon has turned all of its happy customers into Leonard Pierce - faking reviews in order to just get more free stuff.

Granted, professional book reviewers (like Leonard Pierce once was) should be able to read a book within a week and churn out a review of it. Ok, PW demands 4 months in advance to make sure that there is someone with enough time to read and review your book, but that's PW. Other reviewers get them - what? - a month or two in advance. And they get a bunch.

On the other hand, professional book reviewers get paid for it. Granted, I could get on that freelance. That's the way that ethical freelance writers work.

So that's that. For years, I was buying stuff and then selling it on Ebay. Or getting it for free from Amazon Vine and selling it on Ebay. Now I will still sell on Ebay and still get stuff for free but it won't be the same. I will feel bad about writing bad reviews. I will not add new stuff on ebay unless I am absolutely certain that it will sell. Instead I will donate my books to the local Goodwill. I figure I need to give tzeddaka more anyhow.

Stupid Apologetics for Gender Separation

2013-05-17T06:25:44Z

On my newsfeed was a rather long essay/rant by someone who is using Clara Oswald as their avatar. And with Clara as your avatar, you are totally in the clear because who would hold anything against Clara? Besides people who remember her first two appearances and marvel at how little she has developed as a character since then. But the rant begins thus -

I grew up with boys and girls mixed together in school and in the synagogue and in the Jewish youth groups we all attended. But my children are all growing up in a community which keeps boys and girls separate until they are ready to date for marriage. Personally, I think my children have an emotionally healthier situation. Do you know how many boys I hurt when I was a teenaged girl? Do you know how many of my teenaged friends were hurt by boys? And the reason was that we were too young and uncommitted to do those relationships well. I’m pleased that my children will have time to mature and to grow and to learn how to be a proper, giving partner before they enter into the arena of male-female relationships. They’re less likely to get hurt, and they’re less likely to hurt a partner that way.

If you want to read the rest of it, go here - https://www.facebook.com/groups/141577886025229/permalink/150821671767517/ It's an open group so it should be public to everyone.

Years ago when I was stumbling around Dassie and thinking that I was in love (if only I had gotten over her before I dedicated one of the Dybbuk Press books to her) I was in a perpetual state of confusion. While a lot of it was my fault - neediness, the inability and the lack of motivation of doing the work of dating, focusing solely on one person, belief in fate and all that crap, having been out of the dating pool for a long time due to the converting - there was quite a bit of it on her side. Some of it were qualities that I believed she had that I quite liked - a morbid sense of humor, an ability to say anything inappropriate, amusement at my social gaffes to the point where I felt like I wasn't so much of an oddity in the Frum community (which does value conformity). But there was another side to it and that was the way that she would flirt with me, act like she really wanted me around and then pull back and act like I was the last person in the world she wanted to see. It would go back and forth like that. I would see her at one point and she would brighten up and we would just talk for a long time and it was fun. ANd then the very next time I would see her there would be this undercurrent of "what the fuck do you want?"

And I hate to say it but the "what the fuck do you want?" moments were just as attractive as the flirting. I had a great friend that I should have been dating who was emotionally supportive and wonderful and just a little judgmental at times, but I just took her for granted when I chased after an openly manipulative woman.

Part of the confusion here (besides my own denial of personal self-loathing) was the fact that when I met Dassie she was 23. A grown woman by most accounts and she was playing these high school games. I knew that they were high school games but I didn't believe that a grown woman would play them. The cognitive dissonance of knowing that I am dealing with someone who alternate flirts with me and acts like I'm the person she least wants to see (more the latter when she was dating someone) who is NOT a 16 year old but a grown woman was headache inducing.

It took my friend Eli to point out that a lot of the frum girls in my neighborhood are playing these bullshit high school games because they never got a chance to play them in high school. Rather than "waiting until they are mature enough to handle dealing with the opposite gender" they carry these immature games with them because they are stunted in their growth. The whole "less likely to get hurt" trope - it's just as much bullshit when it comes to dating as it is when it comes to being raised in a place without consequences or pain.

This also explains why Chasidic guys in their early 20s act like douchey teenage boys - even when they've been married - ESPECIALLY when they've been married. I used to believe this crap about how separating the genders spares people the pain of male-female (heteronormative) relationship problems, but it doesn't do a damn thing. It only DELAYS these issues. So you get a Chasidic guy in his mid-20s blithely calling his ex-wife a cunt and acting like he's the cutest thing in the world. You get creepy dudes like Moshe H., my former roommate, bitching about how I "cock blocked" him for talking to a woman that he's creepily trying to hit on and you get Chabad guys who won't even pay the fucking strippers at their bachelor party because they didn't do the proper lesbian show.

A dopy little twit calling herself "Shaindy Frumgirl" can go on about how BEAUTIFUL and wonderful it is to make their kids separate by gender and never have the headaches of adolescence because she didn't grow up with that crap so she thinks that HER high school experience was the worst thing ever and somehow if ONLY she had waited to interact with boys everything would have been different. She's completely unaware of the fact that you don't become a person who is capable of having mature and stable relationships with the opposite gender (affection, friendship, etc.) by just waiting around in your cloister (or yeshiva or seminary), you do it by fucking up. All she's doing to her kids is forcing them to make stupid assumptions about dating and marriage without testing those assumptions. And so they become "nice guys" and "friendzone makers" and manipulators when they should be mature and decent human beings. If you don't fuck up and spend at least a little time as a nice guy or a manipulating jerk (or often BOTH at once) then you are NEVER going to learn how to not be that kind of creep.

All the rebbetzin lectures on dating in the world aren't going to make up for the experience.

Dead Trolls

2013-05-14T09:04:47Z

So remember Seth Eben Shapiro, the disbarred lawyer whose entire life consisted of annoying people online and getting into long and rather tedious arguments with everyone? I got stuck in a long fight with him back in early March. It was one of those things where I thought I was just talking to someone who seemed more acerbic than usual only to realize that he was going to keep pushing his "You NEVER read Das Kapital. I caught you! I caught you!" crap.

Apparently he's dead now.

He actually died about a month after he had the fight with me. April 10 was the date of his death.

I like to imagine that he was fighting without someone online and burst a blood vessel in the process.

So who wants to pick a fight with me online now?

Touchy Authors. Very touchy

2013-05-14T04:37:53Z

So I mentioned this before but I HATED Paula Bomer's book Nine Months and while there are some authors that I don't review because I know them personally and there is a vast difference between how much I like them as people and how much I hate their books, Paula Bomer is not one of them. I sort of know her on Facebook. I sent a friends request when her first book of short stories was being cross-promoted with She Nailed a Stake Through His Head. There are also authors where I like them a great deal and I am disappointed in their books. I do remember giving Ronald Damien Malfi a bad review for one of his books. I felt secure giving him a bad review because we are friends and I have promoted him at every opportunity. And I really liked most of his books.

I say this because I got this in my FB mail -

Paula Bomer

If you hate a person's book to the extent that you write a nasty review of it on Amazon, you probably should unfriend them on facebook.

She also blocked me from responding. Now, this might be fair. Not every writer wants to be FB friends with someone that hates their book. Hell, there are so many RL friends who don't like your books, you might as well limit your FB interactions to people who love you. I am reminded of Darryl Schwartz coming over to bitch on this LJ about me saying mean things about the Village Voice article about him (which comes down to "people on the internet are really MEAN to midlist literary writers). He ended up saying that I was a monkey flinging poop. Which was probably the best turn of phrase he came up with.

The problem is that I didn't write a "nasty review" as far as I'm concerned. A nasty review is a one-star review that sees no redeeming values in the book. The review that I wrote of The Delilah Complex (the book about the sex therapist whose clients keep getting killed) was a nasty review. This was my review of Nine Months:

This book started out so well. I really wanted to love this book since most of the Mommy books tend to uphold this myth that parenthood is ultimately the best and most fulfilling experience (diapers and lack of sleep notwithstanding). It was nice to see the opening chapter where the woman gives birth and she describes it in the most horrifying way possible. Writing a book about a woman who doesn't want to have a child and acts out is a rather audacious endeavor. Call it the anti-Juno.

The problem is that the author is asking the reader to spend about 250 pages with a thoroughly self-involved and unlikeable woman, inside her head and attempting to take her side as she throws up and complains throughout. Unfortunately she's not fascinating enough to justify the effort. Instead this character is a particular type - the Brooklyn hipster. She has pretensions to art but she never made as much of an effort to follow it. She thinks about other artists and compares herself but she prefers to live off of her husband. Talk of Brooklyn neighborhoods and private schools fascinate her more than they could ever fascinate the reader. She is utterly disdainful of everyone around her and

The writing style is powerful. Paula Bomer can put words together to convey the maximum tension. However, they are in the service of a story about a woman who is not only thoroughly repulsive but also utterly boring.

Oh sure, I called the protagonist repulsive and boring. Of course, I am discussing the main problem with novels and audiences is that unlikeable protagonists are going to have a harder time winning over the audience. Many authors pussy out by giving the protagonists sad back stories like dead pets or retarded sisters. Making a protagonist so thoroughly repulsive without redeeming values is a ballsy move. I'm totally praising her for that. The problem is that you can't sustain a narrative on moxy alone.

I also said that the style was powerful. For the first 20 pages I was totally ready to love the book. Hell, I bet Paula Bomer is a great short story writer based on those 20 pages. It's just when she asks the reader to spend 250 pages with a self-involved narcissist that her book turns to shit.

But yeah, thanks but no thanks for the advice Paula Bomer. If I hate a book to the point that I write a nasty review on Amazon (especially if I got that book through Vine which means that I have to review it) and that person is a friend on FB, I leave it up to them if they want to unfriend me, block me, send a snotty little note, etc.

People really trying to make drama

2013-05-14T03:17:32Z

So Alyson Hannigan was giving an interview. The subject of Buffy came up -

ACTRESS Alyson Hannigan says Buffy co-star Sarah Michelle Gellar was "annoyed" at having to play the vampire fighting hero.

In a TV interview, the How I Met Your Mother star was asked who was most annoyed to be on Buffy the Vampire Slayer by the seventh and final season.

"Sarah," the 39-year-old replied. "Well, she had a big career going on ... It was a lot of work."

Hannigan was then asked after what season did Gellar start hating Buffy.

"Uh, three," Hannigan answered.

Gellar, 36, spoke years ago about the problems she had with committing to a series.

"I was 18 when I started the show; I'm 26. I'm married. I never see my husband [Freddie Prinze Jr.]," she said. "This has been the longest span of my life in one place. There've been times where that's been difficult - you want to pick up and go, try other things, live in different places. It feels right, and you have to listen to that."

Of course, at http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/77732342.html they make a big deal out of this. Beyond the fact that the last paragraph is a verbatim quote from Sarah Michelle Gellar about how she WAS indeed sick of Buffy, the only part of this story that is controversial in any way whatsoever was the way that Hannigan said that Sarah was sick of Buffy from season 3.

And that might very well be a joke.

But if you read the post and the comments, you would think that "Sarah really wanted to get away from the show in season 7. Hell she was bored with the show by season 3" is the WORST THING EVER anyone could say about anyone else. Apparently "Sarah really wanted to get away from the show" is code for "Sarah is a syphilitic whore who fucked everything on two and four legs and she can kiss my rich ass. Yeah. I said it. Fuck Sarah."

Or something like that.

I know that I get hung up on the celebrity gossip meshuggas at times. I try not to but it's hard to ignore and it's a little more fun than paying attention to Aunt Sharon and her kids (the horrible Dawn and the really dumb Brian) but there's a point when people start taking sides on an argument that doesn't even exist when this shit just has to stop.

Nothing in this quote says that Hannigan is bitter or angry. She's just talking about people that she used to work with on a show that people still like to talk about. It's not her fault that people take the completely innocuous fact that Sarah Michelle Gellar was sick of the show to the limits of crazy town. She doesn't work in the FBI. She isn't sworn to secrecy.

And this is nothing compared to Dominic Monaghan saying that his former Lost co-star is a man who beats up women and he wants nothing to do with him.

I find it worse when people decide to be "professional" and make records with Chris Brown and refuse to talk shit about him.

Books Read in 2013 # 44 - Superheroes without Teenage Fans

2013-05-14T01:07:15Z

44. Astro City: Life in the Big City by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson - A few years ago, I was on a panel at Arisia entitled "When did you stop reading comics" with the mostly disgruntled panelists basically complaining about the point where we felt that comics had let us down. The interesting thing about this panel was that even though yendi and I more or less agreed that the comics had become stale and tiresome in the late 1990s and early 2000s (and also when the prices just kept going up), the other two panelists were certain that comics stopped being decent well before either of us started reading them. This gave me some reason to re-assess my anti-comic book stance since it seems like we were all engaged in the same discussion that infects music criticism which is basically "In MY day..." which is perverted by the hormonal state of the first encounter. Nothing quite sounds as false as some dude extolling the virtues of crap like AC/DC and Aerosmith while slamming on Nicki Minaj and Ludacris. Or pathetic. Seriously, AC/DC sucks.

In the past few years, my trips to the library have changed my mind about comic books or graphic novels. I no longer think that graphic novel is just a pretentious way to say comic book. Reading graphic novels in the book forms has opened up a huge array of interesting stories and awesome titles. From the Love & Rockets series to the Will Eisner titles, there are some great comics that I missed when I was too young to appreciate them. There have also been some really terrible comics (I think one was called The Green Lama where every issue just had a lot of criminals getting beat up). I have read two major works by Scott McCloud that weren't Understanding Comics and I got hooked on the pomo superhero comic Powers (which is really about homicide detectives investigating superhero murders - with the first volume being a takeoff of the rock star biographies) but I never really got into superhero comics. Or more accurately, I left superhero comics in middle school. Beyond a few exceptions made for some DC mega-stories (my love of 52 is documented below) I am not much for getting excited about superhero comics.

This has now changed. Actually I knew I would love this book when Kurt Busiek is admitting that most superhero comics are adolescent power fantasies. The superhero comic has been a renewable resource with Peter Parker being the picked on nerd who finally gets to beat up on random people. But his main point in the introduction is that superhero comics can be about adult concerns and reflect people who aren't teenage boys who want to beat up their bullies.

So these stories are about people living in a superhero world, with the first story being a Superman type story which points out just how much Samaritan is overworked. The book ends with his barely coherent date with a superheroine and the date doesn't go well because they are both too busy. Forget about the couple getting together because of the needs of the plot. Superman doesn't have to end up with Lois Lane or Wonder Woman. In fact, the whole superhero recognition makes dating that much harder if you aren't focusing on groupies (which was one of my favorite examples of Powers playing up the superheroes as rock stars trope). Stories from the perspective of newspaper editors recalling their times as reporters and people who are just seeing heroes for the first time proliferate.

My favorite one was about the alien spy who is basing his planet's entire invasion plan on the actions of the superhero who happens to live in his rooming house. With the Other as both the observer and the actor, the story unfolds in wonderful and bizarre ways, with completely arbitrary judgments.

Overall, I have to say that I was wrong about superhero comics - in the same way that I was wrong about comics - just because 95% of comics are boring adolescent revenge fantasies with boring fight sequences (X-Man was one that really bored me) doesn't mean that either the medium or the genre is without redemption. Condemning comic books and superhero comics as worthless based on the silly crap is like condemning all science fiction without knowing about either Samuel Delaney or Octavia Butler.

Books Read in 2013 # 43 - Essays. I really need to read more essays.

2013-05-13T16:34:22Z

43. Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson - When the author of Rust decided that he didn't like some woman that he met at a convention - mostly because she didn't like self-publishing - he started out by calling her a bitch. Then he said crazy bitch. I don't even remember what she said that made him so angry because he was already making me hate him with his attempts at wit. Later on, he wrote an essay that came down to "my wife tells me that I might have come across as sexist." Requires Hate frequently goes straight to the invectives in order to describe books. In rare moments, she actually says something about the book that calls it out for being sexist or heaped in Orientalism, but for the most part she has a shtick and that's pretty much her entire audience. When Tempest Bradford decided to call out Jay Lake for racism, she didn't even say what he said that was so racist. The fact that he said things that she didn't like was more than enough for her and her audience to jump on the OMG Racefail bandwagon. In fact, I RH lost all entertainment value when she slammed on Lake and in response to "so why do you hate him" said that I should just read Tempest's blog which says absolutely nothing (happily I haven't seen Tempest in a long time on line. I'm sure she's having a bitter and angry fight with someone over something)

Ronson has several essays in this book, but the ones that truly stand out are the ones that can double as character assassinations - especially against Dave MacKay and Sylvia Browne. The Sylvia Browne one has been making the rounds on FB (it's entitled "Is She for Real?") since one of the kidnapped girls that just got free had a mother who died shortly after Browne told her that the girl was dead. These essays aren't devastating based on any invectives or fancy insults that Ronson comes up with. They are effective because he really tries to understand the people involved. And he doesn't always turn on his subjects. In fact "The Sociopathic Mind Guru and the TV Hypnotist" comes out in favor of this pair of self-help guys who are trying to help people manipulate others and also help people manipulate themselves.

With the more critical essays, the critique is more due to the fact that Ronson is taking the reader through a relationship including initial suspicion, maybe infatuation and then annoyance that leads to anger that leads to hate (and sadly no lightsaber battles). Dave MacKay is a cult leader who was raised in a cult that was way too loose with the sex scandals so he started his own church. His main sacrament is to convince his followers to donate a kidney. After all, we all got two kidneys. In the course of the essay, he goes from someone who seems genuinely wanting to help people, to a little clueless to slightly manipulative when he wants to put out a false report that will turn people against the church but then come out with the real deal. Finally, he turns out to be a total control freak who bullies Ronson into apologizing and changing everything and at one point, advises one of his followers to give her kidney to an older man instead of a young woman and then claims that he's letting the woman die so Ronson won't depict him as manipulating his followers.

With Sylvia Browne, he doesn't like her initially but there's a sense of fairness that he's trying to maintain as he goes on one of her cruises and listens to her bullshit psychic predictions. Turns out that she isn't even trying to convince people. He brings up the false predictions that she has made in the talk shows - usually about missing persons - but the most devastating part of the essay is when he hears her bitching about the people and the moneys and dealing with assistants who are only too eager to make her happy.

Not every essay is amazing. I thought that the opening one about the Insane Clown Posse was a little too smug. That could have been me, since it's really hard to report on what the ICP states (especially when defending "magnets. fucking magnets are miracles) without it sounding smug. Or like you are trying to make them sound like idiots. I also had initial misgivings since the book was dedicated to Sarah Vowell (one of my least favorite "historians" working today - I do put her above Howard Zinn or Paul Johnson only because her eternal asides about the history of Sarah Vowell that distract from what she is talking about are mostly harmless) so I think that also colored the ICP essay.

Yay Veronica Mars is a Movie now - in defense of Kickstarter

2013-05-13T04:28:54Z

After Veronica Mars was funded by Kickstarter or at least the initial $2 million was secured by micro-financing, I saw the usual suspects on my FL decrying the fact that a bunch of naive people were giving their money to a film in return for maybe a cameo or a bunch of promotional items. It was the same old "Hollywood people aren't exactly starving here" argument and Kickstarter has plenty of projects that are more worthy of your money if you are going to fund projects.

Also some that are less worthy such as kynn's RPG that he is never going to make; but thankfully, no one is going to be let down because they don't care since kynn raped a dude at Wiscon and who the fuck wants to buy a feminist RPG from a rapist?

Also Zach Braff's sequel to Garden State.

And I didn't like these arguments - found the people making them to be pretentious in that More Radical Than Thou way - but I was sort of in agreement with them. I know that Hollywood movies are funded by a variety of sources. The producer is more or less there to secure funding. Hell, you see a strangely famous name on the poster as the Executive Producer (like Danny Devito on Pulp Fiction) you know that the guy just had a lot of money to play with and said "yeah, this looks cool" and put the movie over the edge. But still, we are going to pay for the movie when it comes out and shouldn't that be the place where non-investors and non-studios get involved?

I finally figured out why I am not engaging in the Class Warrior discourse when it comes to movies. It's in the fact that people are fucking stealing these movies already. And while it seems innocent, it has basically meant that the truly experimental movies don't get made. A movie that's less than $10 million to make can take chances but it's also limited by resources. A movie that is over $100 million will have plenty of money but it's following a particular formula and there's only so many places you can go. Tony Stark will not realize that his life is shit and drink himself into a coma. Indiana Jones will live (in the stupidest way possible). As long as it works, Hollywood will do it until it doesn't work (such as giving directors total control after Heaven's Gate or allowing Kevin Costner near $100 million dollar action movies).

So if the internet makes it possible for people to fucking steal movies to the point where they don't even believe that they are doing anything wrong (yeah yeah down with SOPA because freedom of information - and by information we mean the new Superman movie on our computers three months before it hits the theaters) then it definitely should be possible for people to FUND those movies.

At least then Veronica Mars is getting someone's money to make up for the stupid assholes who want to steal shit without consequences.

Oh yeah. Fuck Aaron Swartz. I know he's dead, but fuck his corpse.

The Language of Film (is lost on novelists)

2013-05-13T04:10:52Z

I can't wait until I'm finished reading The Retrospective (aka Hesed Sefardi) by A.B. Yehoshua to comment on it, just because I've seen this dynamic before. Even though it's probably true that movies have changed books to the point where novelists are changing their scenes based on camera angles and cutting like filmmakers. I can see that. I read Mamatas' essay on The Da Vinci Code.

Only when novelists actually write about filmmakers, they seem to be inspired by the lamest and silliest filmmakers possible. I don't know if the novelist is trying to make a point or just never goes to movies except for the shitty ones that their friends drag them to. Anne Rice first introduced me to this trope when she wrote a romance between a filmmaker and his teenage girlfriend where all of the films involved riding on horses near the beach.

For Yehoshua's book, I've read 36 pages and here are the scenes that he's described -
- A woman who gives up her baby and goes out and finds a homeless man and nurses him
- A dog who is following a woman around because he's really her jealous husband in a different form
- Characters eating lunch for 16 minutes (18 if you count the people cleaning up after them) in a relatively short film that is 'only' 123 minutes
- a big bloody abortion that the camera stays on as a dare to the audience.

I am not really sure what Yehoshua is saying here or more accurately, my first instinct is to think that he's fucking around. Seriously, these are boring ass films that wouldn't get stolen from piracy sites much less rate a fucking retrospective that sends the filmmaker seeking out the screenwriter who wrote that "homeless dude nursing on my girlfriend" scene (the fight came when she wouldn't do it and the director backed up the actress, and broke the actor's heart) but maybe Israeli movies are that pretentious and boring and stupid. Maybe a filmmaker from Israel is perfectly happy talking about how he moved away from surrealism (dog who is really a human - even though that's the plot to Oh Heavenly Dog and A Talking Cat?) to realism but the movie with the 16-18 minute eating scene is called Potatoe.

That MUST be a reference to the Moviefone ad with the Russian Hit "Look at my Potato". It can't be serious. Yehoshua can't really think that people make movies this banal or stupid and then other people love them so much as to have film festivals about them.

Oh sure, Godard is working 44 years past his expiration date but at one point he made entertaining and fun movies. The Bicycle Thieves is a neo-realist movie that is really sad but it's also a damn good and compelling movie.

I don't know. I suppose if I finish this book I will figure it out, but right now I don't know if A.B. Yehoshua REALLY thinks that filmmaking involves boring ass movies that critics crawl over because he's never seen a movie in his life or because he is mocking the shit out of the Israeli film industry.

Write Boring Stories the Marvel Way (circa 1986)

2013-05-13T03:26:04Z

When Marvel came out with the "New Universe" in 1986, it was supposed to be completely different stories that touted the realism of the world with only a "white event" to give everyone their powers. There were 8 titles with 4 getting canceled in the first year (Merc had the funniest cancellation since it was established that the title character HATED his wife's new husband to the point that when the new husband wanted to encourage the kid at little league, Merc (I think that was his name) would stubbornly glower about how that kind of pussy attitude would get men killed in Nam. No seriously. This humorless asshole was the HERO of the comic. So when the new husband did something dickish to get Merc killed, Merc went to house and confronted him. In the middle of the night. So the new husband responded by a whiny bullshit speech about how the kids and the wife still love him and boohoo - because "good try" wasn't enough to let the reader know that the guy was a pussy without redemption - and then fucking shot Merc. Seriously. Just shot him. But since Merc is the awesome alpha male he strangled the pussy husband # 2 before passing out. A special annual issue was written to kill him.) and they were all pretty bad. By the time they were all canceled there were some interesting plot developments. Pittsburgh blew up since the superhero flagship was an idiot. There was a war starting up that didn't make much sense. Marvel tried to tackle race in one of the comics. A bunch more people got killed. Good times.

Anyhow, the letters to Marvel about these titles were universally praising. Of course, they were. It's not like the editor of the letters column is going to publish "why the fuck am I reading a Superman ripoff comic?" as a letter. But the praise was always two edged. The Starburst (or whatever the hell that title was) letters column had letters praising the alpha male fantasy character (who just fucked everyone despite being the biggest loser in Pittsburgh) as "realistic".

But the best one was for Psi-Corp, a comic about a bunch of superpowered runaway teenagers who come together to make a bigass Indian Bird thing - like Voltron, with Indians. Magical Indians. The first letter after the first issue stated "Let's see, there's a valley girl, a juvenile delinquent, a nerd, a Christian and a joke - and I even haven't gotten to their powers yet." Instead of slamming on the comic for writing the most poorly drawn cliches available, the writer is praising it for making those shitty and boring tropes into the main parts of the characters as opposed to their powers (which were universally terrible - I think that the Chinese Valley Girl could make shit sparkle or something like that).

Yet, when I was reading these comics and thinking "Oh yeah, I'm totally getting in on the ground floor of a phenomenon and these are going to be worth millions some day" (later on I would lose the original run of Sandman comics on my trip to New York. I am STILL pissed about that - my own damn fault for not putting my mom's address as a return address on the thing) I read that letter and I thought "screw you, I didn't think it was so bad" and it took me a long time to figure out that pointing out their most obvious character traits was an attempt at praise.

I suppose I could have put this rant into my review of Astro City which attempts to make superhero comics about things other than male teen revenge fantasies, but I just found it so strange at the time and years (decades) later I still find it strange that Marvel would pat itself on the back for being "realistic" when really, it was imitating The Breakfast Club. Badly.

spoilers are out there for the next Doctor Who and I want to see them - just to judge the season

2013-05-12T21:30:49Z

I don't hate Doctor Who. I see that many people are hating on Moffat and I already addressed that. I still compare him to Davies and he's still better.

However, Clara has been a wash. The first episode, she was great. Oh sure, we all saw that "but she's really a Dalek" twist coming from miles away but she was charming and funny. And then the next time we see her, she's also fun and charming but Moffat covering up for not being able to do much more for her by going "ooh she's dead now and she dies the same way so it's a mystery" did not please me.

And now she's had 4-5 episodes to prove herself as a regular companion and it's a disappointment. I defend Moffat a lot but these Clara episodes are just tedious little number because there's really nothing about her that makes her all that memorable. Oh sure, there are bits and pieces here and there (the part where she's slapping the Doctor in Nightmare in Silver was pretty cool) but for the most part, she gets stuck being The Big Mystery and it's the Big Mystery that won't get revealed until the last episode. It just gets dangled there in front of the audience and it sucks all interest we might have of the character herself. She might do things and talk and all that but no matter what happens, there's the Big Mystery hanging over her. Hell, Journey to the Center of the TARDIS was solely in place so that the producers could remind us that there is a Big Mystery. And then everything went back to normal and we all sighed and waited for the next Mad Men or Game of Thrones

As far as I can tell, the main spoiler for the last episode (and this is just people saying it without it being true or confirmed) is that the Great Intelligence (a sad villain from the Troughton era) will fuck around with the Doctor's timeline. Clara will jump into the fucking around and get killed throughout space and time. And then River will sacrifice herself because she's so good at it. And everything is fine.

In other words FUCK MOFFAT.

Seriously, fuck that shit where it's "ooh, I keep running into her so that MUST mean that she will get into a time-related mixup and go throughout all space and time - so I AM the reason why I keep running into her throughout space and time" because Moffat did that bullshit with Amy and he did it with River. The only reason why there is a crack in Amy's wall is because that's just where the TARDIS was when the Silence decided to blow it up. So she's all special and wonderful because she was in the right place at the right time. And don't get me wrong, I loved the bit about River really being Amy's daughter, but now she's just tiresome.

And when the fuck are we going to get to the part of River's timeline where she's all "Oh hey Doctor, I'm not really sure about this relationship and you seem to know WAY too much about me and it's a little creepy" because she has turned into the one-note character of "woman dealing with husband with Alzheimers" which was great in the Library two-parter but when they do it again and again and again, it becomes a drain on an otherwise fun character. At least in The Time Traveler's Wife there is some tension where both people realize that they are basically turning each other into the people that they met (still marvel at the part where she gets angry for him basically manipulating her throughout her childhood into falling for him when they meet because she finds him and chases him and basically tells him that he has no choice). And if we are going to do the "time traveler is frustrated because significant other doesn't know the history" story, might as well have the Doctor do it now.

And if they get rid of River then everything gets erased so the last episode will be a bigger and more obnoxious version of Journey to the Center of the TARDIS.

So yeah, I'm dreading this last episode while I look for spoilers.

I love that new David Bowie video - Camille Paglia might be to blame

2013-05-12T20:02:15Z

Sadly the main place where I finally found it was http://io9.com/david-bowies-new-video-is-the-least-subtle-comment-on-503477495 where the commentator is very unhappy and everyone joins in the blase pose. The blase pose is for religious people trying to prove that they are better than the material and they aren't offended. So some state that Bowie is just a Lady Gaga ripoff and someone else compared this video to "Like a Prayer" (a truly offensive video - not for the burning crosses but for Madonna's assumption that she can just walk into a black church and the choir will totally sing along with her - as opposed to showing her to the door and telling her to put on some clothes when she comes to church - on a side note I hate that video so much that I stopped liking Flora + the Machine for using their black Baptist choir. Seriously, bands, find someone else to back up your pop songs. Leave the Baptists alone.)

But this video is all violent priests and sexy whores in the church setting with Gary Oldman as the nastiest priest around. It's a totally whip and blood video. All fits into Camille Paglia's main theme about how art is about repression and the energy of the art comes from when the Apollonian forces break and release that Chthon chaos upon the world in an orgy of violence and sexual horror.

So of course, you're going to use the Catholic Church. It's not like you can get that kind of repression out of Lutherans.

Best FB blocking ever

2013-05-12T07:10:00Z

I'm told that a couple of my friends sometimes bitch about me when they are talking about shit on the internet. This is a couple where they idolize Amanda Palmer and Dave Sims so all I can do is avoid the conversation around them on FB.

And I know that sometimes I piss off people online. I hear that. Hell, even people who like me tend to mention that I seem to not give a fuck (with a mixture of admiration and revulsion).

So today Andrew Ault just unfriended me and blocked me. After a "that's the dumbest thing I ever heard". And why did he unfriend me and block me? Because he was talking about how Dan Akroyd (remember him? Chevy Chase's most likely replacement on Community?) was talking about how the Blues Brothers are touring again. And he said something about Harley bars and how he misses Jake or Elwood.

I repeated the mostly innocuous (in my mind at least) joke about how white people don't play the blues. They cause the blues.

So he got mad and blocked me.

I suppose I shouldn't have added this Carlin routine to the Dan Akryod FB update - or tagged him in it.

But damn, don't say mean things about The Blues Brothers around Andrew Ault. I guess I learned that lesson too late.

No really, a funny movie from the late 70s that pretty much set the template for the next ten years of black people in movies being there solely to make the white people seem cool and hip is not just an enjoyable Keystone Cops ripoff with music. It's the gold standard.

Hell, that totally racist scene in Weird Science where Anthony Michael Hall does a step-n-fetchit bit at a blues bars and no one asks him to shut the fuck up (yeah, the racist part is the fact that there are black people in the world who would actually think that shit was cool) would never have existed without Jake and Elwood.

Unpleasant Shabbos Meal

2013-05-12T06:51:27Z

I don't even remember the guy's name but he lives in 160 Bennet and he needed another guest since the only other person he invited was that British guy that goes to Revel (and has the rattiest face this side of the guy that played the mouse/wizard in the Harry Potter movies). I went but then I spent most of the time listening to Ratface Brit trying to wrap his head around the whole First Amendment (yes, in America we can say whatever the fuck we want - deal with it) and I went off about the WBC case which is based on Falwell v. Hustler and the ad about Falwell fucking his mother.

So anyhow Wimpy Guy started getting on the "I have Neighbors" including an old couple that lived next door. So when Ratfaced Brit got into his "I don't believe in gay marriage" and I was accusing him of being gay (because I do that) and he said it was d'Oreisa, I pointed out that the only d'oreisa condemnation was anal sex.

And that was the second "KEEP IT DOWN" because the old couple in the next apartment never had anal sex apparently.

Of course, I was already in a foul mood and the main thing I was saying with that gay marriage bit was that Keith Ellison - the Muslim representative from Minnesota - was very much in favor of Minnesota passing the gay marriage bill at least in the house. So stuff your stereotypes about Muslims being a bunch of Jew hating homophobes where you put a stranger's dick when you are on extended trips because otherwise it'd be gay Mr. Ratface Brit.

But Wimpy Guy was doing that. I mean he just started and did the whole "the problem with this country is that liberals don't want to appear Islamophobic" while ALSO bitching about antisemitic propaganda in Gaza. Getting kind of sick of pointing out that when you are bitching about antisemitic propaganda, you are bitching about people seeing ALL JEWS as enemies and taking away Jewish rights to individuality. When you go and do that to Muslims, then you are a fucking hypocritical asshole.

I was trying to do it nice by noting that the Boston Brothers were Alex Jones crazies and that the conspiracy theories were very Jew-free (ooh evil Monsanto!) but the point that Keith Ellison, Muslim, is perfectly happy with gay marriage led us to the anal sex bit.

And the fact that I will ask Ratfaced Brit about whether or not he's out of the closet yet every time I see him from now on.

It actually got less heated later. Discussions of Roman and Greek beliefs and the Roman romanticism of Judaism which led many Romans to convert to Judaism until they got ahold of the New Agey non-circumcizing pork eating version of Judaism and the relative history of Jews in Muslim and Christian lands as well as Tareq al-Hashimi (seriously, just demonstrate that you know more about Iraqi internal politics as related to Iran and Turkey than the standard "well it's all fucked up right?" and people start giving you way too much respect).

So the meal ended on a decent note. I don't think I'm going to get invited back (and if I do I'm totally talking about anal sex in as loud a voice as possible) but I don't really want to get invited back. I seriously find it strange that people holding those attitudes would actually invite me of all people to their Shabbos dinner.

But then again, I was nice about it. Mostly nice about it. Ok, besides calling them Wimpy Guy and Ratfaced Brit (and that's only because I can't remember their names) here. But that kind of ignorant shit is just beyond me.

On the other hand, I actually argued with someone who didn't know that "ethnic cleansing" is a term that was exclusively and originally used by Serbs in order to be a euphemism of their genocide of Muslims. THis person (who is also the same person that appoints herself the language police) said that she doesn't hold with that definition. Well, ok, then carry on and claim that Israel is engaging in Ethnic Cleansing and pretend that you don't REALLY mean to say genocide because it just means segregation and checkpoints, right?

This person also believes that saying gypsy is the worst crime ever committed against the collection of tribes that includes Roma, Romani, Romany, etc. even though there's no other fucking term for ALL of them and even though the person stating it does not mean gypsy as a slur. But if SHE is enforcing the term, then fuckall if you agree with her definition.