I found this incredible store, and I’ve been shopping my ass off.
Monthly Archive for September, 2007
Have you seen this thing? I wish I had found this hilarious website back when I was suffering an attack of unsightly butt-boils; never did a spinster aunt’s ass more sorely need to be laughed off.
You will laugh your ass off when you grasp the premise of the ludicrous raptureletters.com. It promises sanctimonious jesusians that when they get sucked up by the Exalted Celestial Hoover come the Rapture, it will send emails to the Left Behinders of their choice. The emails will explain that the sanctimonious fucks were right and the heretic recipients — those who just shrugged and went “whatever” whenever it was suggested that they devote their lives to an invisible omniscient honky old American male fogey who is obsessed with the minutia of human reproduction and who can be contacted merely by closing your eyes and thinking really hard — were wrong. Nyah nyah.
Because what good is an invitation to Paradise from the ghost of a dead Nazarene hippie if you can’t thumb your nose at all the poor slobs who didn’t make the A-list?
Rapture.com explains its free service this way:
After the rapture, there will be a lot of speculation as to why millions of people have just disappeared. Unfortunately, after the rapture, only non believers will be left to come up with answers. You probably have family and friends that you have witnessed to and they just won’t listen. After the rapture they probably will, but who will tell them?
We have written a computer program to do just that. It will send an Electronic Message (e-mail) to whomever you want after the rapture has taken place, and you and I have been taken to heaven.”
Here’s an excerpt from the actual letter:
This may come as a shock to you, but the one who sent you this has been taken up to heaven.”
It gets better. The website will send the Electronic Message e-mail) on the first Friday after the rapture, and again every Friday thereafter.
Well, it’s happened. Unable to contain her lust for fame, glory, and riches, my sporty sibling Tidy has enrolled her dog Fletch in dock diving school.
Dock diving is a competitive sport invented by ESPN wherein the dog runs like mad toward a body of water, launches itself, and endeavors to splash down at a distance greater than that of all the other contestants. Currently the world record is held by a greyhound named Country, who in 2005 was able to sail 28 feet and 10 inches before succumbing to the earth’s gravitational pull. Fletch’s dock diving coach Greg says that the first dog to jump 30 feet will win $30,000. You should’ve seen the dollar signs light up in Tidy’s eyes when she heard that.
She’s got a long row to hoe, though. Here is Greg’s yellow lab Butterbean demonstrating the esoteric dock diving concept of “big air”.
And here, alas, is young Fletch.
A chorus of yips went up at Spinster Aunt HQ when the news broke: a couple of national doctor clubs have experienced an uncharacteristic moment of lucidity and come out in opposition to cosmetic vagina surgery. In a Bloomberg report, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons reveal to a stunned public that surgical pussy-maiming isn’t, it turns out, in a patient’s best interest. Procedures such as “G-spot amplification” and “revirginization,” they say, “should be banned as risky and ineffective.”
This despite assertions by some plastic surgeons that “having a sleeker, thinner labia makes a tremendous difference in [patients'] lives.” By improving their XXX2K compliance!
Slightly problematic is the paternalistic edge to the ACOG and ASPS pronouncements, which can be boiled down to “improved self-confidence cannot justify risky surgical intervention.”
Don’t misinterpret me. I’m not disagreeing that labiaplasty (or any other scalpel-related beauty treatment) is misogynist butchery. But whenever you get a bunch of doctors sounding off on what should or shouldn’t be important to women, caution should be exercised. These guys are still doing over 300,000 boob jobs a year, remember, so their heads can’t be totally out of their butts.
The raucous demand for cosmetic surgery is only a symptom of a vast malignancy, anyway. I don’t like to put a fly in the at-least-it’s-a-step-in-the-right-direction crowd’s ointment. But. You can ban all the “revirginizations” you want, but it won’t liberate a single woman from sex-based fear, loathing, or oppression.
[Thanks, Cithra]
Blamer Alexandra writes:
Q: I was (seriously) wondering: Is it feminist to giggle? I’ve never known a man to giggle. Is giggling a natural thing, or should I blame the patriarchy?
A: You’ve come to the right place, Alexandra! I am Director of Hollow Mirthless Laughter at the Twisty Institute, where I am also widely considered the world’s foremost authority on giggling.
To the extent that laughter generally is postulated by snickersperts to originate from deep within the antique, reptilian recesses of the human brain, it may be regarded as “natural.” It is a primitive vocalization thought to be associated with promoting cohesion in social groups. Individual cultural tradition determines situation-specific varietals, but the universal wheel-greasing message of all laughter is, approximately, “I bend over before your superior magnificence.”
In fact, when startled by sudden improbable ludicrosity, many guffawing adult humans will spontaneously bend over to express their humility. I did this myself only yesterday, when the bagger at Whole Foods eyed me narrowly and remarked, out of the blue, “Hey, I know you. You’re the one who says ‘Africa’ is your Number One Jam!”
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, I was spontaneously overcome with delight that this kid, who sees thousands of identical honky chuckleheads every day, had remembered a fit of ironical clowning to which I had subjected her while shelling out $143 for a couple of tomatoes many months prior.* In involuntarily doubling over, I was acknowledging her generous condescension in commemorating my dorky jest as one of her young life’s golden moments.
“I say ‘Number One Jam’ all the time now!” cried the bagger as I disappeared down the escalator, waving a fond farewell with my 29-dollar bag of organic Cheetos.
I guess you had to be there.
At any rate, giggling is an adaptation of this supplicatory behavior specialized to indicate particularly acute self-effacement. For this reason males are conditioned from the cradle to eschew — and eventually, as they tumesce to the full extent of their authoritative masculine fatuity, to mock — the giggle. Concomitantly, in contemporary narratives giggling is closely associated, pretty much in equal measure, with packs of prepubescent girls, coquetry, vapidity, fits, hysteria, and derangement.
In praxis, among sane persons old enough to menstruate, giggling is a feminine affectation employed almost exclusively to lubricate the egos of higher-status entities. According to Twisty Institute findings published in the Fall 2005 issue of Kackle Kwarterly, the Journal of North American Laffology, giggles most often accompany conscious or subconscious efforts to solicit favor from exalted personages through sexual manipulation. Adult women of commensurate status who are not tryin’ to whip off a piece do not spontaneously giggle amongst themselves.
At least, not those who have resisted the infantilizing pro-giggle conceit of the specious girl-power craze, which craze was invented as a marketing ploy to sell pink Hello Kitty stripper poles to grown women who have been brainwashed to believe that feminism is tacky now that we’ve come so far.
__________________
* It was like this. “Africa” was blurting out of the Muzak system, and I had of course informed the bagger — with the smirk of a recovering scenester music snob — that it was my Number One Jam. Which had cracked her up out of all proportion. The Twisty Institute has found that most instances of spontaneous laughter do not occur in response to actual, formal comedy jokes, but as involuntary expressions of incredulity over the fact that middle-aged spinster aunts wearing golf visors and fannypacks should be so adept at deflection when they are caught singing along with Toto in supermarket checkouts.
Last night I thought I’d do something uncharacteristically current-eventish, and watched McLaughlin on PBS. It was another one of those “are bloggers legitimate journalists/whatever will become of poor print media?” discussions. Counting McLaughlin, the panel was Y-chromosome heavy, with a ratio of four dudes to one woman. The woman, of course, was plucky DC wit Ana Marie Cox, formerly of Wonkette and currently of Time.com.
Since I am an avid reader of celebrity internet gossip only when all other avenues for insipid entertainment have been exhausted, I have not closely followed Cox’s career. It turns out that while I was farting around eating tacos, Cox was hard at work parlaying her pottymouthed bloggerdom into a meteoric rise to Professional Token Edgy Hot Chick on the pundit circuit. One of her weekly stops was the Don Imus show. When Imus got shitcanned for bigoted assholery last April, Cox hopped on the “I always knew that guy was a racist!” bandwagon. She wrote a column for Time.com wherein she revealed that the only reason she was allowed anywhere near the Imus boys’ clubhouse was so they’d all have something to “leer at.” But she sucked it up — not just the leering, but “the race-baiting” and “casual locker-room misogyny” — because she rilly rilly wanted to win her “media-elite merit badge.”
Of course, having once pursued a vocation as a suck-up doesn’t automatically preclude a token edgy hot chick’s subsequent contributions to elevated discourse. But I’ll never know if Ana Marie Cox has anything of philosophic value to say on television or not. If she does have, she omitted to say any of it on McLaughlin last night. Even if she’d wanted to — and whether she did or didn’t want to, I cannot say — three things would have obscured her efforts.
1. McLaughlin invited her to opine only infrequently, compared to his three other guests, the dudes. Unlike Cox, these dudes did not give the impression that they were now, or ever had been, sassy.
2. When the great man did give her leave to speak, Cox relied heavily on the word “like” — like, you know, a teenager — and talked rilly rilly fast. Rounding out her repertoire of giddy, submissive gestures, she kept her head tilted at a superhumanly acute angle, a move she seemed unable to resist combining with an inflatable-doll “O” mouth and batting her eyes at the camera. Adorable!
3. When McLaughlin brought up the Kathy Sierra episode and cited a statistic that women bloggers are targeted for hate speech and death threats at a rate 25 times that of dude bloggers, he turned to Cox — the Token Chick blogger/default authority on misogyny — and asked her why there’s so much misogyny on the internet. Her answer was comedy gold. She doesn’t think — seriously, she actually said this — she doesn’t think death threats, rape threats, sex-based derision, and DOS attacks are misogyny at all. Her theory is that the Internet is merely dominated by dudes in greater number, so some women might find the atmosphere a little less than welcoming.
This bending over and taking the status quo up the ass was not only a painfully transparent effort to distance herself from unfashionable feminist hags and bring her a step closer to her merit badge, it made the bloviating dudes look like radical feminist spinster aunts. And one of those dudes was Pat Buchanan. It was excruciating to watch.
Of course, this is a woman who wrote, in a NY Times review of Katha Pollit’s Virginity or Death: “Strident feminism can seem out of place — even tacky — in a world where women have come so demonstrably far.”
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