Is smart the new sexy and other FASCINATING questions! Fuck the Sams, and why I’m gonna be light-on with the posting

So I won’t be posting much in the next little while. My laptop just died. Just like that! It won’t be back til around Monday I think.

Also am enjoying of the exercise and study, and hanging out with mini FP and attempting to persuade him that homework is both delicious and nutritious.

So check *THIS* out: Sam in the City dissecting the allegedly “very real”  debate of smart v sexy.

For my money, stupid is the biggest turn off so whatevs Sam and most of us have our heads around the fact that it’s entirely possible to be both smart AND sexy.

Sam uses the word lecherous in a way that brings to mind the quote from Inigo Montoya. No, not “You killed my father, prepare to die” though I’d happily swordfight with her, but rather ”You keep using that word! I do not think it means what you think it means”

And then of course there is Sam-I am SO a Feminist You Whinging Humourless Feminist FatArsed Dyke-deBrito expounding on the inequality of the sexes, and how COME chicks can watch SatC and he can’t say he’d never date a fat arsed biatch??

This is a spectacular return to form for deBrito, it’s the barely concealed anger and *OMG me TOO is a victim* that make this in my mind the Nessun Dorma of whitebread shithead oped vomit.

Women, however, are ones who buy the magazines, clothes and potions that drive this ‘ideal’; men like me, who are attracted to it, are merely the by-product.

Ahhh…I see…the mags MEN buy have NO INFLUENCE. Posts like this don’t contribute to it. That women are fully REQUIRED day after day to regulate their food, their exercise, to buy lotions and potions in order NOT to attract the derogatory comments of you and your wanking mates has NOTHING to do with it. Women are the ones who set up this system and poor men would LOVE to be able to get off with our horrible womanly bodies, but they’re broken victims and they JUST CAINT!!! Ah fuck off with your idiot self.

What happened deBrito? Finally figure out that all your smoke-and-mirrors, Yes Officer, I’m a Feminist wasn’t gonna get you into Emily Maguire’s pants?

Ratatouille

So I’ve been sick for a while, and I got stir crazy and started listlessly flipping through a food mag when I found a recipe in an old Vogue mag for Ratatouille. It turns out this particular recipe is the one they based the Ratatouille dish at the end of Ratatouille the movie on (well so they said). I thought it might be a good way to get the kids interested in cooking and eating vegies.

Honestly? I had NO IDEA it would work that well. They helped out with cooking, they ate vegetables they normally HATE, without complaints, and took second helpings. There was really nothing in there that my son liked (or so he thought) but well it proved what we all knew, that if they’d just put stuff in their mouth without going “Ewww YUCK” first they’d probably like it.

I just need to convince Pixar to make movies about carrots being fun to eat and I’m set.
Anyway, from memory this is the recipe: (WAIT:I can’t believe I forgot the roasted capsicum the first time!!!)

 

4 capsicum, roasted in oven til skin blisters, cooled, peeled and cut into thin strips

2 eggplants sliced about 1/2 cm thick

4 zucchini about same

1 Litre passata or tomato puree

stacks of tomato sliced around the same thickness

breadcrumbs

chunk o gruyere

thyme

Whack the passata on the bottom of the dish, the eggplant, then the zuchinni, the capsicum, then the tomato, then the crumbs/cheese/herbs mixture.

I’d layer the tomato and maybe the sweet sweet capsicum through the other vegies more, cook it down at around 170 for an hour, use more herbs and maybe chuck in some parmesan for some more bite…but YUM!!! We found that in a big arsed baking dish we had a bit too much in the way of veggies, so maybe two small eggplants, and three zuchinni and three capsicum?

But seriously? It’s apparently a magic-making-kids-eat-veggie recipe and is Comfort Food on a par with Mac and Cheese and not half as grossly clogging. Plus…nutrients!

I’m really very proud of miniFP

So as discussed earlier, mini FP turned 12 the other day.

As he’d been given quite a hefty Christmas/Birthday present at Christmas, I’d said he wasn’t getting one from me. But I stumbled across a box set of old literature ‘for boys’ books. Yeah, yeah, I know…blah blah canon, blah blah ‘boys adventures’.

But the thing is, he’s been digging out Raymond E. Feist and Terry Pratchet books when he can’t get new Alex Rider novels, so I know he can read at a level beyond those ‘pre-teen’ series books and that he was up for a challenge. I figured if I could get him into these books I’d open up some challenges, get him interested in different styles of writing and prepare him for literature study in high school.

Anyway, he opens this box set of old school books and he looks mildly disappointed. But five minutes later he grabs ‘Tarzan’, takes off and devours half of it. I ask him on the walk home what he thinks. He says “it’s a bit racist, but the story is not bad”. I tell him I’m really pleased he can pick out the racism in the books, and we have a discussion on this, and on the fact that you can expect to find that in a lot of British books of that era, and that being able to flag it as a problem is a big achievement at twelve.

My family didn’t know what to get him, so I bought books from each of them as well, including an illustrated but full text version of Don Quixote, which he’s rather taken with now (after looking at me like my sister had gone made after he was presented with it). He’s devoured it now, and he’s getting a real kick out of the cultural connections in books (ie/ he told me nothing much happens in Treasure Island, but was delighted to realise ‘Yo ho ho and a bottle of Rum’ pre-existed Jack Sparrow;  and can be heard excitedly explaining to anyone who will listen that the expression ’tilting at windmills’  comes from Don Quixote.)

I’m really enjoying his enthusiasm, his ability to tell me what he thinks is boring, what he thinks is great, where he sees racism, what bores him even though it’s *meant* to be awesome. I don’t want to instil the idea that people who’ve *read* the *right* books are better, or that canonical books are better, I just know there’s cultural cache in being familiar with many texts, and that the more breadth he gets to his reading the more ready he’ll be for English in High School and beyond – plus the Alex Rider novels pissed me off when I picked one up and on the first page there was a major geographical mistake with South America…

As well as all this, we had a date to go shopping for a new computer game, but I had come home from work really ill. I gave him the option of travelling to get it himself or waiting til I was  better. It was a big deal as this suburb is about a 15 minute bus ride from here, and a busy place. He had his phone, and his keys, and he took himself off. He checked in regularly and turned up at home proud as can be both of his new game, and of his grown up adventure.

Anyway…all this just goes to me being proud that my boy is growing up.

My, isn’t Sean Delonas in possession of a cutting-edge wit?

Sean Delonas is the Comical Genius behind the Oh So Witty and Not At All Playing On Centuries Old Racist Tropes cartoon featured in Wednesday’s New York Post. The cartoon shows a chimp dead from police fire, referencing a chimp that tore off a woman’s face, and was later shot dead by police. The caption reads ‘They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill’.

As Huffpo commentary points out, the most charitable possible interpretation is that the stimulus package was so bad that chimps could have written it.

As Reverend Al Sharpton points out, the cartoon is

“troubling at best given the historic racist attacks of African-Americans as being synonymous with monkeys”.

It is more than a little hard to believe that any fully adult person living in America could claim to be unaware of this, or unaware that given that the stimulus package has been seen as largely Obama’s project that it was likely that the cartoon *would* be read in this way.

I would have liked to link to Sean Delonas’s website but it’s been taken down for now.

Now, the only other *possible* ‘positive’ reading I could imagine, and believe me, it took work, was that Delonas was making a scathing commentary on the entrenched racism within the police department…

So. How likely is that? I guess I’d better take a look around at his history. The Sydney Morning Herald reports his recent cartoon showing Jessica Simpson (in the news for having gained some weight) dumping her boyfriend for Ronald McDonald. Hur hur. *Fat* chicks chase burgers. Doesn’t sound politically aware and transgressive does it?

Then I find *this* (Ten Cartoons From Delonas – a little snapshot of his well rounded bigotry) over at Gawker.

Gah. In case you need them summarised, Al Sharpton having his ‘fat arse’ kissed cos lord KNOWS all politicians are under the control of African-American civil rights activists, ‘ew poofs’, ‘wtf transgender’, ‘lezzos’ and ’sluts’. Doesn’t seem all that likely that it was a critical engagement with systemic racism within ‘justice’ institutions now does it? I mean I figured not in the first place, and even if so, Al Sharpton’s point would still stand. But you know bigots, they get *very* upset when fellow bigots aren’t given the benefit of everyone’s totally extracted under duress doubt.

Anyway – so Rev. Al Sharpton (with his long history of campaigning for civil rights) makes an *entirely fucking reasonable point* and what does the publishing paper say?

In a statement, Post Editor-in-Chief Col Allan said: “The cartoon is a clear parody of a current news event, to wit the shooting of a violent chimpanzee in Connecticut. It broadly mocks Washington’s efforts to revive the economy. Again, Al Sharpton reveals himself as nothing more than a publicity opportunist.“

What. The. Fuck???

You get yourself in hot water by publishing a cartoon that appears to be mocking the first efforts of the new President, the first African American President, a cartoon that is plausibly read as equating Obama with a chimp gone off the deep end and your answer is to call Al Sharpton a ‘publicity opportunist’? Your response to a well known African-American civil rights activist raising concerns (and he raised them in a fucking mild way in my opinion) that something in your paper is racist or could certainly be read as such is to dismiss a man’s activism and reduce him to empty mouthing off for personal gain? EXCELLENT WORK convincing the world you’re genuinely concerned about racism.

Toolbag of the week automatically granted.

Ok, you can now comment without a WordPress Login

Once at a party many many years ago, my then boyfriend was showing off a teeny tiny device he called an EMPEETHREEPLAYER. I was fascinated. “What does it DO?” I wondered. Turns out this device held and played music. Like LOTS. (Really? It’s so TINY. And how does it get ON THERE?). Way more than the CDs I’d just started to buy to replace my great tape collection.

I said ‘Wow…I just got used to the cd player’. Given they’d been out about a decade, a nearby friend said ‘You’re still walking around with a ghetto blaster on your shoulder, aren’t you?’. Yep. That sums up my technology-related knowledge on all fronts I think.

I have had this blog for 16 months. People have told me they can’t comment without a WordPress login.

It was only today when I admitted that I had no idea what to do about that that some very lovely bloggers over at Hoyden came to my rescue and showed me how to (very easily) remedy said problem. Sigh.

Time for more panadol?

I’m sick – I have a fever. I keep forgetting. When I’m home and still/quiet it feels ok. I do 20 minutes of housework and then I need to lay down. I head out and by the time I get to the local shops I’m ready for a nap.

I went to Coles this afternoon. It was busy. No music. Eery silence. I hate that, it feels creepy. Everyone scurrying like ants to collect their food.

I stare at my sunglasses – where to put them, hands full…I decide to put them on my shirt. One arm falls off. (Of the glasses, not mine). I laugh and say to the lady watching me ‘Well I guess I’m not putting them on my shirt then’. She looks at me quizzically. I forget you’re not supposed to interact in these spaces.

I’m there with my list and I’m getting hot and nauseous and ‘woozy’ and I can’t find the coconut milk and it seems like this task will defeat me and dammit I HATE being defeated by things I *know* I can handle.

I walk up aisles, and down aisles. I frown. I mutter. I mutter within earshot hoping for some assistance, but I guess you don’t wanna offer assistance to the clammy looking woman muttering angrily to herself about something that sounds like ‘fucking coconuts’.

I keep at it until the fevery tired overwhelmed feeling leads me to want to break the eery ordered silence by throwing my head back, opening my mouth and yodelling desperately “WHERE IS THE GODDAMNED COCONUT MILK???”.

I resist.

Holy Shit

This reported in the Sydney Morning Heral under the headline ‘Fears ‘Mata Haris’ trade sex for secrets’.

EUROPEAN Commission officials are being told to beware of the charms of Mata Hari-type interns, accused of trading sex for the innermost EU secrets.

Paranoid Brussels security officials fear that Eurocrats might be susceptible to the “pretty trainee with the long legs and the blonde hair”. Every year hundreds of “stagiares”, or interns, work at the commission’s headquarters. Many are young and female.

Well, INSTANT cause for suspicion eh? Why ELSE would young females want to be in paid employment

“Like any large-scale organisation which deals with sensitive or confidential information, there are always people who endeavour to gain access to this information,” said a commission spokesman. “It could be the pretty trainee with the long legs and the blonde hair.”

A confidential memorandum sent by Stephen Hutchins, the director of security, warned that “the threat of espionage is increasing day by day”.

Yeah…based on what now? I think we need more than your spank fantasies before we start lynching women you can’t stop leering at you fucking toolbag.

More opportunistic hate mongering

Not to be outdone by Danny Nalliah, Miranda has decided to use the loss of nearly 200 lives and counting to make a few headlines and push her political agenda.

Arsonists didn’t cause the fires, GREENIES did says Devine.

Hang the GREENIES from the trees (or was it lamp-posts? I don’t remember and I’m NOT rereading such offensive schlock.

Never mind that many greenies just BURNT TO DEATH YOU SICK FUCKWIT!

No, no, do feel free to use the pain and loss of others and use it to draw some fucking attention to yourself.

You and Nalliah – both arseholes.

How *sad* for Elizabeth Farrelly (cos we all know Mardi Gras should be about HER)

Poor old Lizzy-poo is lamenting that ‘Mardi Gras has become too straight for comfort’.

Why? Because there was a discussion that Mardi Gras might consider moving to Homebush. Waving away very real discussions over classism and a consideration of the fact that many participants in Mardi Gras, and many just-as-queer-folk live west of Bankstown, Farrelly instead sees the *consideration* of such an idea as proof positive that the Flaming Queers are no longer Flaming enough for her tastes. Those boys are supposed to squeal in horror and stamp their high heeled shoes over any location not hip enough for their tastes! My STEREOTYPING demands it!!

Oh haha – GLBTQ sounds like a sandwich filling. Oh haha – Queer is vague and nebulous, a ‘catch all’  for non-straight…oh haha…why don’t you go on and ask which *bathroom* a transgendered person should use Farrelly? You’re headed in that direction with your smug condescending mocking.

Direct quote:

And the question? The question is this. What happens when being GLBTQ is no longer queer at all? What happens when gay goes straight?

Well I don’t know. Why don’t you ask that when gay and lesbian folk don’t get bashed or killed for not being straight? Why don’t you ask that again when transgendered persons don’t run such an extraordinarily high risk of being raped or killed? When jokes about ‘which bathroom’ stop sounding hilarious to heteronormative fuckwits? When Ken Starr is NOT trying to anul marriages? When being gay doesn’t make you a paedophile suspect in the eyes of many? When you can marry who you fucking well please? When a transgendered man having a baby doesn’t cause people’s HEADS to nearly EXPLODE with indignation and amazement.

There’s some random story about one guy who suggests that says that identity politics ruined his sex life (am I reading Farrelly or Sam in the City here?).

An offensive point about how straight men *used* to be titillated by the transgressions til the gays went and ruined that fun by coming out and fighting for their rights -damn them.

Farrelly ignores the fact that in the ‘good old days’ they often kicked the shit out of people later…some of those ‘enjoying’ their ‘transgressions’ were also gay-bashers. This is often STILL THE CASE. It would appear that most of the ‘lamentable gentrification’ has happened in Farrelly’s noggin. And what of the similar pattern of ’straight guys’ being both titillated and repulsed to sex with transgendered men and women? The high levels of murders linked to sexual desire/abjection? To ‘proving’ their heterosexuality?

A couple of digs at ‘celesbianism’ (and jesus, is there anything more telling of white straight priviledge than thinking you’re witty for dropping words like that? Hi, your disrespectful arrogance is showing) and then we’re onto her *point* such as it is:

My purpose, rather, is to wonder what it might mean for Sydney, the world’s runner-up of gay meccas, when queerness is not only legal and accepted but becomes a genuine part of the norm

Well gee, Farrelly, I forgot it might be a struggle for respect, equality and rights. NO! It’s about SYDNEY’S struggle to stay hip, urbane and trendy!

It’s about lamenting that queer culture is no longer interesting when there’s not quite the risk their used to be that coming out meant you were likely to be beaten to death/raped/thrown in jail.

Farrelly is sad that she’s lost that little frisson that came with being so ‘edgy’ that she knew about/watched something that was blanketly despised and mocked in wider society. Poor Farrelly.

This paragraph is particularly bad:

Costumery is fun, and Mardi Gras is making money. But the radical chic that once fitted it to Oxford Street like a hand in, well, a glove has gone. Now both parade and precinct seem somewhat past their best, not so much down at heel as too well-heeled; middle-aged, middle-brow, middle class. And it is impossible not to feel just a little nostalgic for the days when Mardi Gras meant something.

Oh, we GET your inuendo ok?

And it’s a little funny infuriating to hear a well-heeled; middle-aged, middle-brow, middle class white woman talk down about how Mardi Gras doesn’t MEAN ANYTHING ANY MORE!

*rude fingerful of spoof*? Just stop. Every time you make a little ‘gag’ like this it shows your heteronormativity. “Spoof”  you get it??? *Glove*, geddit, geddit? HAHA – QUEER, get it?

So Farrelly is lamenting the vicarious frisson of fear/thrill she got when GLBTQ was (to her) just *poofs* and *dykes*, when Mardi Gras carried an appreciable (to the straight white arbiter) risk of violent disruption.

Now she’d like to *send it West* for that same risk of offence/violence. (Oh she doesn’t SAY she wants the violence, but that’s the upshot of people being ‘offended’ by sexualities and bodies that disturb their world view and their sense of heterosexual superiority.

But k.d lang isn’t the only GLBTQ to have slipped of late from rock ‘n’ raunchy into a schmaltz more comfortable.

No indeed, Elizabeth, it seems you are keeping her company.

I don’t believe in any god that wouldn’t strike Nalliah instantly mute for this shit

Most of the nation has been frozen with shock at the plight of families who’ve lost their lives/homes/loved ones/friends.

Not this raving idiot fuckknuckle jerkoff charged with bringing us all God’s wonderful love and justice and mercy.

No, no, this man with the special relationship to the God of love and compassion thinks 173 people have been burnt alive because Victoria decriminalised abortion.

Fuck. You. You. Total. Monster.

If there *is* an omnipotent god interested in justice, who dishes out punishment for sins then YOU, you giant fuckface will be denied entry into the ‘heaven’ you’ve spent your life trying to get into. You make me sick.

AND while we’re at this, if god can ‘withdraw his protection’ from a country due to sin, then WHERE WAS HE when Aboriginal babies were murdered? Where was he during the massacres? Where was he during the Stolen Generations? During withheld wages and the raping of Indigenous women.

Sounds very much like Convenient Theory for YOU day.

You say you’re in the area handing out disaster relief? You should stay the hell away from these people with those views. The Red Cross can give them blankets and foods WITHOUT the sideserve of hateful bullshit.