No time to post. Bunting hunting in progress. An effing mural of buntings, both painted and indigo, are hopping around the Spinster Ornithology Compound as we speak.
A group of buntings is also known, for some reason, as a “sacrifice.”
Indigo bunting, female. Cottonmouth County, TX. April 2009
Indigo bunting, male, Cottonmouth County TX, April 2009
This painted bunting looks like he's balancing on his tail, but is in fact jumping to get at some grass seed. Cottonmouth County TX, April 2009.
This poor thing was getting buffetted pretty severely before the winds carried it off, tail over beak, into the wild blue. Female summer tanager (?), Cottonmouth County TX, April 2009
There are some pretty flashy birds flitting around the Spinster Ornithology Compound, but few of them ever seem inclined pose for our cameras. My Gaudy Bird Perching Reticence theory is that, because the air is solid live oak pollen at the moment and it’s blasting nonstop at 30 MPH, the branches they perch on are not guaranteed, in weather like this, to stay attached to the trees. So they biff off lest they find themselves riding a twig of death on a downdraft to hell.
Alternatively, there are those who would aver that the weather has nothing to do with it. I might, they observe, get more exotic shots if I weren’t too lazy to lug the giant bird lens around instead of just keeping it pointed out the lab window on a tripod and setting it to go off every 15 seconds, just in case a cormorant or a blue booby or a Peking duck happens to fly in and perch on the ledge. Admittedly, this method has been producing a somewhat unremarkable result. I may have to rethink it.
Meanwhile, I give you the plain brown Eastern Phoebe. The Eastern Phoebe just laughs at our ceaseless tornadoes. It cleverly nests in an I-beam down at the Spinster motor pool garage, and hangs around on solid objects like this rusty steel pipe fence. It’s no Painted Bunting, but it does something no other bird does. It says “fee-bee, fee-bee.”
The stalwart Eastern Phoebe. Cottonmouth County, TX. April 2009.
That’s right. This post is nothing but an excuse to put up pictures of the only birds I’ve been able to snap recently. Small brown birds.
Maybe you could give a rat’s ass about small brown birds. I was once like you.
Before founding the world-famous Spinster Ornithology Compound, I was a dolt and an ignoramus. I lived in the city and had no time for small brown birds. I had places to go and straight girls to convert. When I gave any thought to birds at all, it was to be annoyed that their poop was always all over the last empty table at Jo’s. Furthermore, I believed that every bird that wasn’t an ostrich — that is, all small brown birds — were sparrows. One dismisses sparrows on accounta their ubiquity (this is a grave mistake, perhaps because sparrows are in fact an invading alien cyborg species and perhaps not; it remains to be seen, but in any event that’s another story).
But you’d be amazed how many small brown birds aren’t sparrows at all. For example, the Carolina wren.
Small, check. Brown, check. Sparrow, nope. Carolina Wren, Cottonmouth County TX, April 2009.
This wren usually implements a cloaking device, so feel free to congratulate me on having spotted one. It creeps up tree trunks eatin’ bugs, which is a behavior I wouldn’t mind being able emulate in these tough times. Hordes of them invisibly infest the real estate directly outside my bedroom every morning. They go “chirt-chirt-chirt-chirt-chirt-chirt-chirt-chirt” really loud. It’s the kind of noise that, if you hit the sack early the night before, compels you spring from your TempurPedic singing “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” but if you have a hangover, it turns you into a wrenicidal maniac.
“Chirt” is the official designation, by the way. I did not make it up. Birds of North America, the bird-nerd website of record, also lists the following interesting phrases in connection with the Carolina wren: cheer, ti-dink, dit, chatter, rasp, chirt, pi-zeet, scee, pee, growl, nyerk, and tsuck.
Turkey vulture perceives that I have found the right lens and changed the dead battery, so naturally it biffs off before I can focus. Note dead duck toy in lower right.
This is all I got, goddamit. I might have had a hilarious picture of the giant turkey vulture that just landed in the dog run and tried to scavenge offa Bert’s stuffed toy dead duck, but you know how when giant turkey vultures land in your yard to peck at dog toys you never have the right lens on the camera, or if you do, the battery’s dead, and by the time you pull it all together the giant turkey vulture has buzzard off?
Yeah, well join the fuckin club.
How long has it been since you’ve had the pleasure of reading some opinionated spinster auntly pronouncements?
Well, that’s too long.
Today I have two things to say, and, as usual, I’m probably gonna use too many words to say’em. So, if you’re short on time, here’s the synopsis:
1. A link shows up in my Huffington Post feed entitled “Denise Richards Funbags.” It’s a video in which Denise Richards, a Beauty 2K-Compliant celebrity, says the words “my funbags” about 893 times. At the end there are little boys saying it, too, as well as a little girl who can’t wait to grow up and have funbags of her own.
You know what kind of bag would be really fun? A bag full of obstrerperite, a synthetic programmable nanobot compound found on my home planet. You find the knob who made that asinine video and sprinkle this obstreperite into his latte. It bonds to his lobes and compels him to abandon his career as a misogynist video prick, whereupon he takes to standing on street corners, wearing a pencil skirt and a sign reading “I am a human stain. Kick me.” If you program it right, the obstreperite will also give him a permanent erection, making him a social outcast.
2. The next link is “Tijuana: Body Found On Fire, Head Wrapped In Packing Tape”.
!
Another drug-related gangland-style execution. For the lovagod, legalize the fucking drugs, already!
That goddam War on Drugs! One of my least favorite wars. Like all wars, it’s classist, racist, misogynist, anti-kid, violent, unnecessary, and absurd. But the drug war takes war-absurdity to the next level. For example, it is absurd to the point of insanity, this arbitrary prohibition of chemicals XYZ, based on nothing but uneducated emotional response and cultural conditioning. As you know, delicious, legal cigarettes kill two-and-a-half times more people every year than homicides, suicides, car crashes, liquor, firearms, all drugs (including regular old medical pharmaceuticals), and snakebites combined. Way, way, way more people croak because they like sitting on their butt with a plate of Twinkies than because they overdose on heroin. But neither social policy nor legislation calls for the incarceration in state prison of anyone who gets busted with high triglycerides. I’m not saying it should. I’m just saying this paternalistic “it’s bad for you, therefore it’s illegal” crap makes no sense. Marijuana never kills anybody.* [cite]
It is also absurd to the point of insanity for a society to grant the state the power to wage a war against its own citizens. If the ruling class really were motivated by a moral imperative to preserve human life, you’d think they’d stop murdering their own supplicants with tobacco and Twinkies.
“We love the human race, therefore we hereby voluntarily cease production of Marlboros and creme filling. But feel free to grow your own.”
However, the ruling class is not motivated by its love for humanity. It appears more likely that the ruling class is motivated by a self-preservational imperative to create classes of, and maintain control over, the poor and the marginalized.
Because what’s actually getting snuffed out in this “war”? Not drugs, that’s for fucking sure. Surprise. The real casualties are people. Specifically the oppressed classes. According to the HuffPo article, over 10,000 people died in Mexico’s drug war in 2006. I don’t think I’m going too far out on a limb to surmise that few of them were rich white guys.
These folks aver that the drug war is actually a war on education; it has created its own permanent underclass by siphoning youths out of society and into prison. Once kids are jailed for drug offenses, they don’t get educated and they have a prison record, turning them into untouchable outcasts. So back underground they go, doomed to lurk forever in the dank subumbra of America’s effed-up drug policy.
According to Human Rights Watch, black men are incarcerated in state prison on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men. Human Rights Watch does not include anything about women in their “Key Findings at a Glance” chart — why should they, since women aren’t human — but I was able to ferret out of the Internet this statistic:
At midyear 2007, the incarceration rate of black women held in custody (prison or jail) was 348 per 100,000 U.S. residents compared to 146 Hispanic women and 95 white women. With the exception of females ages 55 to 59, black women were held in custody at higher rates than Hispanic or white women across all age categories.
And I don’t have to tell you what goes on in women’s prison. But I will.
In 1997 a US Justice Department investigation of women’s prisons in Arizona concluded that the authorities failed to protect women from sexual misconduct by correctional officers and other staff. The misconduct included rape, sexual relationships, sexual touching and fondling, and “without good reason, frequent, prolonged, close-up and prurient viewing during dressing, showing and use of toilet facilities.” (CIV97-476, US District of Arizona). [cite]
The War on Drugs wrecks lives, rapes women, orphans cute babies, and kills people. It’s gotta go. If you wanna eat Twinkies on the couch all day, I’m with you! If you wanna shoot smack on the couch all day, I’m with you!
I propose instead a War on Rapists.
______________________
* Quite the opposite. Back when I had the cancer, if you will excuse a brief excursion into my personal past, you woulda had to pry my one-hitter out of my cold dead hand.
Turn your iPhone into a Dude Paradise Generator with this remote control app.
However, now that iPhones have filtered into the mainstream, they are little more than mediocrity-delivery devices. And less.
As of this writing, the 20 “Top Paid Apps” at the Apple iPhone Lifestyle section contained:
1. Bikini Blast
2. Bible Shaker
4. sexybytes
9. Sexy Spin
18. Bikini Girls 2
19. Sexy Bikini
“Lifestyle.” Man, I love that word. A set of behaviors and beliefs for which you must buy how-to manuals and that you must update constantly with the latest accessories.
That Bible Shaker is a crack-up.
Are you praying for someone to get healed? Shake out a healing scripture to back up your prayer and pray God’s Word [...] In these dark and troubled times, you need to be equipped with the Sword of the Spirit. What better way to live your life than with God’s answers right at your finger tips. [sic]
But what’s with all the sexy bikinis? Is this Austin Powers’ iPhone?
Recently released, but too stupid even for the Top 20, were:
Of course the iPhone has applications that emulate “Spin the Bottle,” but just try to take a decent picture with the damn thing. Sex before functionality, that’s Apple’s motto. Who needs video and sound recording, cut-and-paste, and for the lovamike, the ability to send a fucking photo with my text message, when you can click on a “foreplay” button and hit that shit?
The rough green snake is over 2 feet long and drops from tree boughs onto your head without so much as a hey-ho-how's-your-toe.
If only there were enough hours in the day. But there aren’t, so this here snake is all I got. And this here link.
Salon. Yeah, I’ve stopped reading it, too, but once in a while a blamer sends a link, and the next thing you know, there I am, writhing in pain over another liberaldudelational paean to liberaldudeliness. Today’s article, written by a self-proclaimed “wingnut” (as part of an implausible feature called “Ask a Wingnut”), purports to explain to dullwitted Salon readers the whole anti-gay-marriage point of view.
Essentially, the essay is an argument for the preservation of heterosexual marriage as the megatheocorporatocracy’s primary self-replicatory unit.
According to Salon’s “wingnut,” the conservative objection to gay marriage is not based, “in large part or small,” on bigotry. Rather, it is the uncouth manner in which homos seem to inflict their repellent selves on regular Americans that chaps the conservative hide. Conservatives apparently draw a distinction between homophobia and conserving “social traditions that, over time, have demonstrated that they exist for everyone’s benefit.”
Also, gay marriage would spoil religion — that bastion of socially sanctioned hate and ignorance — for the religious. Regular Americans love religion just the way it is! Their right to hate people based on the whimsy of ancient barbarian mystics is ordained by God. Homos must not interfere in the special relationship regular Americans have with the Supreme Being. I guess it might piss him off.
To sum up: marginalizing an entire class of people to preserve the social traditions of the dominant culture isn’t bigotry. The right to hate, it turns out, is essential for the greater good.
Because “everyone” benefits from patriarchy!
[Thanks, Glass Cleaner]
I tried to upload a photo of a painted bunting, but this proved impossible, as it turns out I haven't actually taken any pictures of any painted buntings. Instead, please enjoy this photo of the spinster aunt's winsome young relative Finn. We were all surprised when her face did get stuck like that.
I admit it; I have been moonlighting as a flesh-and-blood person lo these past few days, flitting around the countryside as though the Internet didn’t even exist. Spring is boinging up all over the rancho, and — not to be too adorable-woodland-creaturey about it — there are painted buntings to espy.
It’s not as easy as it sounds, espying painted buntings. They are not, apparently, my specialty. I mean, barn swallow: check. Summer tanager: check. Ladderbacked woodpecker: check. Scissor-tailed flycatcher, red-tailed hawk, mourning dove, roadrunner, assorted hummingbirds, Carolina wren, ostrich, black-crested titmouse, 8 black vultures sitting in a row on a fence: check, check, check.
But the painted bunting? It might as well be a dodo.
I regret that I do not have a decent post even now. In fact, all I have, in addition to my gripping bird-watching checklist, is a funny comment from the moderation box, left on an old post wherein I assert that culture is nothing but the realization of patriarchal fantasy. The comment goes like this:
Hey You People !!
I am a Man !! (Patriactical ??) …
I have a wife AND, I have a child …
I am (was) willing to step up to the PLATE (!!), to take the HIT from this loser, that was harassing BOTH, my wife AND my child …
It’s just NOT the female’s OR the child’s nature, to really be able to protect themselves …
Men are NECESSARY !!
But, men are NOT God !! …
And, men should Love their wives, and, men should Love their children …
I’ve ALWAYS tried to do, just those …
And, I’ve ALWAYS had a hard Time with art !!
But, I’ve always believed in, “freedom of expression !!”
So, I’ve put up with their art !!
I didn’t have anything (!!) to lose …
In closing, I don’t even know who Firestone is, but, Life IS Life !!
Let’s get on with IT, shall we !!
Yours truly,
[email address redacted to protect our correspondent from a flood of marriage proposals]
I offer the preceding, not as an excuse, exactly, but for your consideration as an explanatory condition regarding my obligation to take occasional unscheduled vacations from blaming. Even the spinster aunt, with her mighty nerves of steel, can only take so many ellipses before she snaps.
Having undergone a BBC news feed relapse, I discover some South American ants who live in “a world without sex.” But the BBC exaggerates for comic effect, because of course the ants do not live in a world without sex. They live in a colony without males.
The article claims that these ants are the only species in the known universe to “reproduce entirely without sex.” This is also a comic exaggeration. The globe is rife with asexual species. But they don’t get a lot of press, since, unlike chimpanzees, the structure of asexual animal societies is not as easily interpreted by humans to reinforce patriarchal mores.
One parthenogenic species of lizard gets the nod, though, because although they are all female, they reassuringly have “fake sex” at egg-layin’ time. But I digress.
As a spinster aunt, I am one of the world’s preeminent comical antologists, but even to a layperson there can be no mystery as to why insects that are “physically incapable of mating” because “an essential part” of their bidness has “degenerated” are considered female.
Not long ago I posted a blurbette on the Saudi asshole who married his 8-year-old daughter to a middle-aged creep in exchange for $8000; the Saudi courts wouldn’t grant her a divorce because — yup, it’s true — the kid was too young to file the suit.
By way of updating the case: now the Saudi Justice Minister is “planning to review” the “arbitrariness by parents and guardians in marrying off minor girls.”
I mention this, not because I foresee great strides in women’s liberation in these Saudi plans to “review’ tribal godbag customs of child sex slavery which have been set in stone for centuries, but because of the first line of the story in the Telegraph.
The country is a patriarchal society that applies a form of Sunni Islam that gives fathers the right to wed their sons and daughters to whoever they deem fit.
Forget, for a moment, that the sentence is itself awkward. It is almost comical, the way the words “the country is a patriarchal society” may appear in Western mainstream media only when alluding to some distant barbaric land where violent men are not constrained by noble humanitarian considerations. Pakistan. Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia.
The concession that patriarchy exists at all seems only to heave into view when those vulgar philistines over there omit to exhibit sufficient subtlety in the way they go about oppressing women. Here in the West we subscribe to a more civilized mass delusion: that giving lip service to “more equality” for women is the same as liberation. This belief allows the seamless integration of patriarchal ideology with our supposedly progressive politics. Thus may our jingo-happy media single out Saudi Arabia as “patriarchal,” implying that the dudes who run our patriarchy are the moral superiors of those ham-fisted forced-marriage-ists over there.
We don’t need anything as clumsy and obvious as Sharia up in this mug. In fact, our patriarchy is so elegantly engineered that women themselves voluntarily do much of the dirty work of oppression, so greatly do they enjoy and freely choose dudecentricity as the logical conclusion of their natural-born femininity. Many Western women hardly need more than the occasional implied threat to keep them on their little painted toes.
For example, here in the US, patriarchs don’t need to marry off their daughters to assholes; the daughters are sufficiently saturated in the patriarchal imperative (“a husband gives you an identity without which you are worthless”) that they marry themselves off to assholes. And then they call it The Happiest Day of My Life.
Texas State Rep. Betty Brown, racist tool
Betty Brown just can’t wrap her brain around the fact that some certified 100% Texans have Asian names. This is because her brain has the philosophical sophistication of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Texans should have names like “Betty” or “Brown,” good, solid American names she can spell and pronounce. Asian names freak her out. People with these wacked-out foreign monikers should “make [them] more accessible.” Or so she told Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans giving testimony at the Lege on voter ID legislation.
Ramey Ko. That’s one crazy fucking inaccessible name.
“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.
Ko’s “citizens” should make an effort to grasp how “difficult” their language is, and what an inconvenience they present to the real Americans here who are trying to run good, old-fashioned, discriminatory Caucasian elections. They should lose those bizarro names and get ones that Betty Brown can feel more comfortable with. Because, seriously, it’s bad enough that she has to put up with all these damned Spanish people speaking Mexican.
If it’s hard to imagine a white lady with pink lipstick and helmet hair uttering anything more bigoted and condescending than that, you don’t know Betty Brown!
Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”
Listen, Ko, you and your kind are trouble. Can’t you see that if you just knuckle under to honky bigotry everyone will be happy?
[Xie xie, B.R.]
You are reading I Blame The Patriarchy, the patriarchy-blaming blog that has been advancing the radical feminist views of Jill Psmith and/or Twisty Faster, a gentleman farmer and spinster aunt doing the butt-dance in Cottonmouth County, Texas since 2004.
I Blame The Patriarchy is intended for advanced patriarchy-blamers. It is not a feminist primer. See Patriarchy-Blaming the Twisty Way for details.
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