I Can’t Believe We’re Losing to This Guy

 

John McCain Thinks American Workers Are All Too Lazy.

Sarah Palin Has Never Reflected on the Reasons for the Iraq War.

John McCain Made the Most Important Decision of His Campaign Based on the Advice of a 21-year-old blogger.

If You Lost Your Home in the Housing Crisis, John McCain Doesn’t Think You Should Be Able to Vote.

Sarah Palin’s Family Deserves Reproductive Rights, Yours Does Not.

McCain Thinks Courting Fickle Extremists Is More Important Than Getting the Right Person for the Job.

McCain Doesn’t Think He Should Have to Explain Himself To You.  STFU and Read His Books.

McCain Supports Voting Rights for Made-Up Black People.

But Not for Actual Black People.

Sarah Palin Doesn’t Understand What Taxes Are.

Or Where Iraq Is.

McCain/Palin:  Cronyism We Can Believe In.

John McCain Thinks It’s Only Reform When He Does It.

And finally, John McCain Thinks Guarding Children Against Abuse Makes You a Pedophile.

Chickens Are Decent People

RIP George Carlin.  I drank a fifth for that ass when you passed.  

Not a perfect man by any means, but still the author of this, maybe the greatest pro-feminist male rant of all time.

Episcopalianism Conversion Watch #1

 

Your humble host is, despite all odds, a practicing Catholic.

When I’m confronted with my crass hypocrisy by either my progressive/feminist friends or my Catholic friends, I generally have two answers:

1)  Hypocrisy (especially the sexual variety) is the birthright of all Irish Catholics.

2)  Less flippantly, I quote Graham Greene. “Continual failure or the circumstances of our private life finally make it impossible to make any promises at all and many of us abandon Confession and Communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens.”

Part of me thinks the joke is the better answer; we must all learn to live with certain inconsistencies in our lives.  Less broadly, we must all learn to live with contradictions and imperfections in our inner lives.  We’re all sinners, after all, and abiding inner turmoil for the sake of preserving the status quo is a good personal definition of sin.  Quite Catholic of me, I know, in both my willingness to blame the individual and in my obtuseness.  

My personal confusion aside, I read things like this (especially coming on the heels of the California gay marriage decision), and I want to down a shot of Bushmills, put on an orange scarf, and skip down to the nearest Episcopalian church whistling “We Sail The Ocean Blue.”

Adventures in Close Reading: A New Series

The other day I ran across the enclosed, a close reading of The Verve Pipe’s late-90s modern-rock radio hit “The Freshmen.”  Now, there are few cultural artifacts less worthy of scrutiny.  I’m quite confident that parsing the lyrics of “How Bizarre?” would yield more enlightening results.  Yet our man on the scene, Brian Vander Ark, an actual member of The Verve Pipe wanted to leave no ambiguity.  So moved, was I, that I decided to inaugurate a new series on this blog, one where I focus all my insights on the most disposable pop cult possible.  On the things themselves, in fact.  Thank Brian Vander Ark, for ushering in this new era. 

To recap: 1)  Brian Vander Ark wrote the lyric:  ”Stop a baby’s breath and a shoe full of rice, NO”

2)  Brian Vander Ark then felt the need to explain to you the lyric’s metaphorical content. 

Enjoy:

Of Pantsuits and Burqas

This photo is so mindblowing I can’t even begin to parse it:

Whether in the fundamentalist Muslim feminine garb or the Western corporate feminine garb, at least the women of the world all love plush pink velvet rooms.

Via/More

Let’s Overthink: Nerdiness, Part 2

So if we’re seeing sitcoms change their minds about what “the masculine” means, what does that mean? That depends who you ask. If you ask The Big Bang Theory, it means that pretty girls are to be chided for their “shallowness” if they don’t immediately take off their clothes for the socially awkward. If you ask Chuck, it means that the nerdy guys ought to butch up, while somehow still keeping their nerdy inner sweetness. The former is the insane, but durable fantasy that all men are entitled to a wife who looks like a supermodel, regardless of appearance, personality, or social status. Nice guys routinely whine about how hotties won’t do them, but women aren’t allowed to care about those things without being “shallow.”