Monthly Archive for April, 2010

Liveblogging my busy morning

Listening to NPR. Piece on Depression photographer Dorothea Lange. Lange expert describes the so-called “Destitute Mother” photograph as iconic in that the woman pictured clearly exhibits anxiety about being dirt-poor, but is also “a very beautiful woman.”

The subject’s actual identity (Florence Thompson, age 32; had just sold the tires off her car to buy food so her kids wouldn’t have to eat frozen dead birds) is obscured by time and the American Artocracy’s mandate to de-dimensionalize women. Thanks to the universal plucky American spirit Thompson still managed to be hot enough enough to become the face of the Great Depression.

Spinster aunt reads boobquake emails

Hey folks, you can stop sending me the “boobquake” alert. Consider me apprised.

What’s a “boobquake”? A reaction to some dude’s proclamation that saucy women showing cleavage are responsible for the recent catastrophic earthquakes, “Boobquake” is blogger Jen McCreight’s idea of “a boob joke.”

Damn, those are always hilarious!

McCreight’s boob joke was this: since that fundamentalist dude has a misogynist fantasy idea about the power of mammary glands over global seismic activity, let’s show him he’s wrong! McCreight calls for all women to wear their most cleavagey outfit at an appointed hour, then sit back and wait for the Big Quake. When it doesn’t come, we can all have a big laugh at the fundamentalist dude’s expense!

McCreight was surprised when about 47.876 million people joined her boob joke on Facebook, largely in the shape of helpful dudes offering to photograph the event.

Says McCreight, wishing to deflect feminist fury:

“I just want to apologize if this comes off as demeaning toward women. To be honest, it started as silly joke that I hurriedly fired off since I was about to miss the beginning of House. I never thought it would get the attention it did. If I would have known, I would have spent more time being careful about my wording.”

We’ve all said stupid things on the Internet. But when you say stupid things about encouraging women to protest oppression by capitulating to Dude Nation’s fondest desire, and then blame it on a compulsion to watch a stupid misogynist TV show, all I can say is, ewww.

Naturally, because it involves a woman urging other women to show us their tits, McCreight is being interviewed by national and global media.

Ewww.

I conclude that McCreight omitted, in her haste to watch the beginning of, perhaps, “American Idol,” to proof-read her statement, forgetting to change the spine-wrenching “if I would have known” to the economical and correct “had I known.”

Double-ewww.

Blamer Brain Trust Alert: Bad Vibrations

As a rule, the spinster aunt may be considered the world’s foremost expert on expertise. However, a matter has come to our attention here at headquarters, and we (me and Phil) are in just a hair over our head. So I thought I’d better put it up to the Blametariat, which, as you know, is comprised of geniuses of all stripes. Those of you in the mental health business, fluff up the grey matter.

The matter concerns a pal of mine. Let’s call her B.

B has an adult daughter. Let’s call her Offspring.

Offspring looks to have had some sort of psychotic break. Once a successful engineer pulling down six figures, she quit that gig, changed her name to Sky Cloud Butterfly, and now purports to be a psychic high priestess who can marshal the forces of “vibrations” to produce favorable outcomes for her clients. Apparently Sky Cloud Butterfly once exterminated an infestation of ticks from a distance of 2000 miles by the power of meditation alone. She believes she is the most powerful vibration wrangler in the world. She can’t do any sort of traditional income-generating work, such as engineering, because the vibrating spirits are against it.

Naturally this view of reality has produced for Sky Cloud Butterfly unfortunate consequences regarding food and shelter. Owing to the scarcity of paying clients in need of vibrational assistance, and having gotten kicked out of her last living arrangement, she arrived a few weeks ago at B’s house, where she lounges around all day claiming that she can’t do the dishes or weed the garden on accounta the vibrations. She also refuses to submit to psychiatric care. B walks on eggshells because she slightest little things sets the offspring off. Sky Cloud Butterfly has taken over B’s life.

B’s husband, something of an overbearing woman-hating asshole to begin with, wants to give Sky Cloud Butterfly the heave-ho. They live in a trailer on a fixed income. They can’t afford a free-loading adult daughter. B’s husband — we’ll call him Fuckface — has been making B’s life extra miserable ever since Sky Cloud Butterfly showed up.

B, of course, can’t throw her daughter out. She’s well aware of the future that awaits a homeless woman operating at diminished capacity. But if the daughter stays, discord in the home in the shape of Fuckface’s tantrums will blow B’s mind.

Naturally I counseled B, like I do at every opportunity, to get rid of the pig husband, because the last thing you need when your daughter has gone off the deep end is some rancid fuckface dude ordering you around. But, as usual, B declines to resect the festering tissue.

My question is this: what the fuck can B do?

Also, does anybody know what brand of utility farm tractor I should buy?

The Hot Flash Chronicles

Big sky
View, from a 40-foot crane, of a crane operator, and of my fascinating roof.

Bizarre hot flash anecdote of the day:

The time: 3:30 in the morning. Spinster aunt was awakened from moist and fitful sleep by hot flash accompanied by usual aura of hopelessness and impending doom (by the way, the Spinstitute for Post-Hysterectomy and Oophalectomy Studies is researching this fucking doom-aura: please contact the department if you, too, have been rudely separated from your reproductive organs and regularly experience the Despondent Melancholic Aura along with your hot flashes).

Anyway. Unable to go back to sleep, I flipped on the TV. The show was PBS workhorse “This Old House.” Some strawberry blonde dude was converting a purlin into a hex-jig, or installing a new blart box in an old neffit; I don’t really remember on accounta I was in a stupor at the time. All I know is, I watched through swollen, sleep-deprived eyes as the strawberry dude effortlessly pulled heat-sensitive galvanized conduit through a wooden alloy breezeway and had the new helicopter landing pad or low-voltage window-washer all up and running in about three minutes flat. Impressive!

The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing. It was my mom, who thinks nothing of calling me at 7 in the morning with results from “Dancing With the Stars.” However, this morning her news was even less dire: some shady ‘collection agency’ was threatening to kneecap her unless she could convince me to call’em up and give’em a blank check. My mom did not grasp the scamminess of this dealio. So would I please call them?

“Chin up, Mom!” I said. “Don’t let’em take ya without a fight!”

The next thing I knew, there was a young assistant TV producer named Tristyn on my doorstep.* This was fairly unusual. I have erected fences and laid land mines and taken other antisocial measures specifically to keep assistant Tristyns off my doorstep. But still, here she was. Having sprinted the mile or so from my front gate, she was moist. Would I mind giving her the gate code so the rest of the crew could get in?

It all came rushing back. It turns out that last month, in a moment of weakness, I foolishly agreed to let some home improvement show come around to videotape footage of my rainwater collection system, which system is apparently endlessly fascinating. I had forgotten all about it, because along with hot flashes and fucking auras of doom, my memory banks have been battered, deep-fried, and served with blueberry mustard on accounta all the chemo and radiation. But the zero hour had arrived, and here, of a bright spring morn, were a bunch of TV-people, infesting the Spinster Compound with cameras, lights, on-air talent, and, yes, a 40-foot crane.

Tristyn introduced me to the crew. They were were all very pleasant (Tristyn had even brought me a coffee), which immediately made me suspicious. I found myself giving one of’em the old eyeball with particular intensity. He was handsome and outgoing. He was genial and sparkly. He had strawberry blonde hai– hey, wait a minute! Things had taken a sinister turn indeed. This was, in fact, the same exact dude from the PBS hot flash incident a scant 4 hours before!

Now that television personalities have begun squirting out of the TV into my living room to exude good-lookingness, congeniality, and a convincing interest in my roof gutters, I am going to have to take security up a notch around here. I have instructed Phil to install a robotic machine gun, and of course, to double up on the Gilligan’s Island-style camouflaged spring-loaded net traps. The gate sentries have orders to shoot to kill any 40-foot cranes.

Well, that’s the end of the anecdote.

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*As a patriarchy-blaming side-note: young Tristyn was the only woman in the production crew. It was her job to run herd on 5 adult males, and to mediate between them and the outside world. Naturally it was she who had been sent on foot to traverse the mile of rough terrain between the gate and my front door, and who later was dispatched to the nearest town to pick up lunch, a hour’s drive away. While she was gone everyone stopped working and lapsed into a coma. She schlepped a giant notebook full of production and travel-related paperwork and intimated to me that her head was about to explode.

Spinster aunt backslides (but can quit anytime. Really.)

Bluebonnets
Springtime at El Rancho Deluxe. These goddam bluebonnets are everywhere.

Longtime residents of Savage Death Island will recall that this Internet feminist once had a pretty hardcore BBC news feed habit. I sat around all day transfixed by the horror of the Beeb. That habit caused my butt to fuse with my Aeron chair, and led to many obstreperal lobe core-breaches. Eventually it got so bad that the drunken wood nymphs with whom I am obliged to revel in springtime staged an intervention. They installed a new (well, factory-refurbished) obstreperal module in my neural net, gave me a case of Portuguese rosé, and forced me at gunpoint to frolic with furry woodland creatures in a meadow of wildflowers (see photo) until I puked. Thanks, drunken wood nymphs! I owe ya one!

Thus I got clean. I stayed Beeb-free for a over a year.

Until today.

But don’t worry. The news is actually kind of good. I mean, the news is of course really bad, generally, but one small aspect of the teeny thing I’m reporting today is kind of not awful.

I allude to the comments on a BBC Have Your Say blurb titled What does Easter mean for you? (Apparently it was Easter over the weekend. Whatever.). Ordinarily I run screaming from Have Your Say-type dealios that depend for their content upon the submissions of self-selected British amateur opinionists, but the imp of the perverse compelled me to click on this Easter thing. What, I wondered idly, is the current thinking on this silly myth?

The comments were refreshingly cynical and secular. Apparently, what Easter means for readers of the BBC website is “just another bank holiday.”

Of course one hippy-dippy commenter writes:

As for the meaning of Easter, we ignore that. Our spiritual needs are well catered for by the splendour of the coastal scenery, the movement of the sea and communion with nature at its best. We marvel at the hand of physics rather than the hand of a godhead.

Just a minute. Physics catering to spiritual needs? Jesus, this god crap can really fester an abscess in even a non-believer’s brain!

So yeah, on this post there are few nut-job responses involving incomprehensible hallucinatory glossolalia about our lord and saviour who died for our sins so we can be reborn as winged faeries who eschew depraved British capitalism, which is “part of the Anti-Christ,” which if you support it you will pay “a million fold” for the suffering you inflict on the poor. But these loons are far outnumbered by the weary atheists who just want a day off from the interminable grind.

Easter means a long weekend. Public holidays are the only good thing that ever came out of man’s need to invent religion.

My personal favorite (and by no means an anomaly; these views represent a solid majority):

[Easter means] nothing. I’m retired and hate all religions.

I realize I need to get out more, but this spontaneous outpouring of lackluster, disinterested, non-religious Jesus-fatigue really gave the old lobe-shaft a couple of sorely-needed cranks. Especially after suffering National Public Radio’s scourgey reportage, wherein correspondents “covered” Easter like it was breaking news.

Dude, here’s some breaking news for ya: Some ancient Romans executed a popular hippie mystic, and, just like he was Elvis, a few fanatics had a hard time believing he was really dead so they pretended they saw him hanging around Trader Vic’s and some leper colonies and such. It’s very sad, but it happened over 2000 years ago! It’s time to move on, already!

But no. The NPR correspondents could not resist interviewing some Haitians, and of course the Haitians were Christians who said that God sent the earthquake “to test their faith.”

Though I knew it was coming, when I heard this I dropped the Meyer lemons I was juggling because earth-inheriting meekness shit like this just chaps my entire hide. Why would anyone want anything to do with a malignant narcissist like that God dude, who “tests your faith” by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people? It simply does not compute. If I were those Haitian Christians, I’d be all for inviting that sensible-sounding Antichrist guy over for a nice lunch and some brainstorming on how to to get this psychokiller God dude outta here.

Would I deny the suffering Haitians whatever small comfort their religion might provide? Pfui. Haitians are not children (except the ones who are children). But the Honky McWhiterman narrative so popular with American news correspondents presents Haitians as simple folk to whom quaint fairy tales are sufficiently meaningful. Certainly fake mythology crap is more expeditious for these child-like naifs than hard-to-understand concepts like science and truth.

Pfui.

The case for flip-flops and flowing robes

When I got a spam for “men in wedding dresses” this morning I thought, hell yeah! I sure do wanna see some men in wedding dresses. I bet men look even more asinine in wedding dresses than women do. And who doesn’t want to look at something asinine first thing on Sunday morning?

Men universally look asinine in women’s clothes, yeah? The reason for this, and for mild funniness in other low forms of humor, is incongruity. Nothing says “I submit to my species’ disdain and surrender forthwith any claims to my own humanity” quite like a wedding dress. Women’s clothes are designed, according to a rigorous standard of misogyny, to communicate that the wearer is totally up for self-abasement. Men, on the other hand, are required by law not to be totally up for self-abasement. Therefore, in accordance with the laws of patriarchy, comedy and gender, a dude in a wedding dress is improbable and unnatural, thus causing the observer to laugh or retch or curl a cynical lip.

A propos of stupid shit women have to do to conform to stringent sex-class requirements: the other day I was sprawling around Jo’s, quaffing (as is consistent with my nature, ego, and nationality) a single, iced Americano in a double-sized cup, when I witnessed a particularly painful women’s-clothing-related tableau. Staggering up the sidewalk came a young woman, about 6 months pregnant, whose ugly, feminine raiment suggested that she had attired herself to appease an employer. Her get-up’s distinguishing feature was the pair of 3-inch heels strapped to her feet. The gait was lurching, the ankles were wobbling, and every step looked to be her last. Any passing student of abnormal kinesiology who happened to be conducting a study on the effects of the slope of South Congress Ave on pregnant ladies wearing high heels would have signed her up on the spot. I could almost hear the bunions sprouting.

The scene was grim. But will it astonish you to learn that nobody, including this internet feminist, thought anything of it? Even though the woman bore an uncanny resemblance to a flapping, oil-drenched gull tangled in plastic six-pack rings? Nobody sprang to her aid. Nobody handed her a helpful copy of The Dialectic of Sex. Nobody alerted Amnesty International. Nobody so much as wiped a tear from the eye.

I mention this because the spectacle of any other creature so deformed by man-made encumbrances would have generated a swirling vortex of soft-hearted do-gooders offering to drive it to the vet, foster it, nurse it back to health, release it back into the wild, and document the whole enterprise on YouTube.

However, people sitting around in coffee shacks, and elsewhere, are conditioned not to see the humanitarian crisis unfolding before them whenever women totter past enmeshed in plastic six-pack rings. It is a universally agreed-upon fact that suffering indignity is consistent with women’s essential nature. Women look natural in stupid clothes because women, as is stated in the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, are biologically and culturally constrained to subsist as degraded masochists.

If you want to gauge the stupidity quotient of a given article of women’s clothing, just picture it on a dude. Picture it on Barack Obama, or Obi Wan Kenobi.

Obi Wan in a pencil skirt with a Birkin bag and Louboutin pumps, some pout-plumper, and a spritz of Beyoncé’s new perfume “Heat.” Stupid?

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The turtle in the video, deformed by a plastic milk-jug ring, was named for film star Mae West, whose artificially-induced hourglass shape was totallay hottt!!!

Speaking of corsets, here is one of those odd niche/historical/tribute websites, this one documenting corsetieres, women who came to your door selling Spirella corsets. And here is a little Wikipedia (i.e. unverified) history of the practice of using undergarments to squish the crap out of your torso.

Bride-man photo pilfered from this website.