Archive for the 'Easy Persiflage' Category

Speak to me not of tulips

Published by Jill on May 10, 2010. 73 Comments

Saugatuck

Saugatuck, Michigan, you will be interested to know, is a summer lakeside resort for wealthy vacationing refugees from Chicago. Although I am not a wealthy vacationing refugee from Chicago, I was recently obliged to biff off to Saugatuck for a few days, to rally round the sickbed of an aged relative.

Here’s how it all shook out:

My sibling Tidy was in charge of organizing the northward migration of the Faster branch of the family. I had already commenced panicking because I’d just found out that we were going to hit town right in the fucking middle of Tulip Time.

Sad tulips, Holland MI

Tulip Time is a week-long festival wherein the honky citizenry of the adjoining town of Holland, Michigan all put on wooden shoes and pointy lace caps, take to the streets, and clomp their brains out in celebration of their supposed Dutch heritage. They do this against a wholesome backdrop of tulips that were, perhaps, at their most dewy fresh the week prior. The honkys of Holland, Michigan get a big bang out of celebrating their Dutchiness. Thousands of others agree, apparently, and come from miles around to observe the Hollandites’ gaudy display of something called “street scrubbing” that I have yet to figure out what the fuck.

Wooden shoes: a spinster aunt cries, "why?"

Hence my panic. Traveling in general is bad enough (you can’t, it turns out, even get from Cottonmouth County to Saugatuck, Michigan; first you have to go to Austin, then Dallas, then Detroit, and then Grand Rapids, via a series of increasingly improbable conveyances! Seriously! And the whole time the only thing you can find to eat is ’salad’ in plastic boxes!).

Not only did the thought of crowds of Dutch-loving tulip worshipers strike terror in my lobe, Tulip Time meant that no decent hotel rooms would be left, and that I would be obliged, in addition to all this other bullshit, to put up at some fleabag flophouse or, worse, a quaint bed-and-breakfast.

Perhaps you are one of those adventuresome psychos whose idea of a big time is to move into a complete stranger’s weirdly-appointed, moldy-smelling, creaky old house for a couple of days. Maybe you enjoy sitting around a communal dining table first thing in the morning with six or eight alien septuagenarians each of whom is bursting with such vim that they think nothing of bounding up the 332 steps to the top of Mount Baldy-Head or whatever the hell it is and then telling you all about it over grapefruit garnished with a maraschino cherry before you’ve even had your coffee in a chipped china cup. Maybe you get a charge out of feeling obligated to ingest the ‘innkeeper’s specialty’ — a sort of goopy egg pudding doused with caramel sauce and earnestness — for breakfast instead of your usual life-giving spinach smoothie. Possibly you are a connoisseur of diaphanous 19th century walls and of having to tiptoe around in your room after 8 PM for fear of rousting up the whole house. Fine. Go stay in a B&B with my blessing. But leave me out of it. When it comes to lodging in lakeside resorts, give me privacy or give me a gun.

“For the lovagod,” I therefore said to Tidy, “don’t, whatever you do, book us into a goddam quaint B&B.”

When we rolled up in front of the quaint B&B, a low moan escaped my piehole.

“Talk to the hand, ” said Tidy. After 16 hours of continuous and gruelling travel, 4 of which hours were, I am sorry to say, the unfortunate result of my inadvertently having gotten us lost owing to the similarity between “I-96″ and “I-94″ (I mean, come on!) old Tidy was apparently not in the mood. I had the last laugh when our mother elected to sleep in the same bed with her on accounta Mom’s own quaint trundle was uninhabitable.

But I digress.

Repellnt Dutch kid plaster figures, Holland, MI

Back in Holland Michigan, at one of the 358 or 359 Tulip Time parades down the main drag, I made a few observations.

1. I espied a float, sponsored by the Turning Pointe School of Dance and Borculo Wrecker Service, toting the Holland Area Mothers of Multiples. Nothing warms a spinster aunt’s heart like the spectacle of white women dressing up like LDS wives and getting acclaimed for their feats of reproduction.

Mothers of Multiples

2. No persons of color attended the event.

3. White people in Holland, Michigan, when feeling festive, eat things called ‘elephant ears’: absurd globs of fried dough the size of hubcaps.

Elephant ear

Anyway, now that I’m back in civilization, and it has apparently been scientifically proven that Boobquakes cause earthquakes in Taiwan, I can go back to sneering at regular stuff.

More of my trip photos are on display here.

Posted in Easy Persiflage and Not Altogether Depressing. Bite me, Chad.

What I did on my Christmas vacation

Published by Jill on February 18, 2010. 86 Comments

Liquid Sanctimony

A couple of months ago I had a near-death experience.

Oh no, an autobiographical interlude! If I were some science blogger I’d probably say, “Hey, get your own fucking blog for that crap!”

But you know how it is. Everythang I do gon be funky from now on, etc.

The near-death experience was a 24-hour interlude wherein lab tests performed by a local branch of the Cancer Industrial Complex made it seem likely that my cancer had returned. Well, lemme tell you, I had about 47 kittens. When the interlude was over, and it turned out I was still what they call “cured,” I spent an hour in the can doing what you do when you have just found out you’re not going to die after all (at least not right away).

When that was over, I said, “That’s it!”

And I meant it, by gum.

Whereupon I quit pussyfooting around. First to go were the three or four cigarettes I was letting myself smoke every day after fifteen years of botched attempts at quitting, which botched attempts included hypnosis, Wellbutrin, 637 boxes of Nicoderm, chemotherapy, and three complete rounds of Chantix, the pill that makes you sui/homicidal. Who was I kidding? I had fucking cancer. I can’t smoke.

So I went back on the patch for a month and just fucking did it. Blam. The end. It turns out it is not possible to quit smoking unless you have recently been under the impression that you’re about to croak of a hideous disease but somehow you oiled out of it at the last minute.

Next, I removed from my nightstand drawer the embarrassing 471-pound bag of peanut M&Ms. Not only are M&Ms fundamentally gross, they have those creepy TV commercials where the talking M&Ms are delighted to go to their deaths as cheap human snacks.

I also removed from my freezer the embarrassing 471-pound bag of tater tots. Processed frozen fried reconstituted potato nuggets! What am I, twelve?

I hauled out of storage my old elliptical machine, therabands, balance ball, heart monitor, yoga mat, and dumbbells, and began sweatin’ to the oldies.

Next, I invented Aunt Food. Aunt Food is an organic whole wheat tortilla smeared with avocado and topped with grated carrot, grated zucchini, diced red bell pepper, steamed corn, a few sunflower seeds, cilantro, and pico de gallo. It is washed down with an ice-cold half-gallon of Liquid Sanctimony.

The result? I am now a superfatted bore with huge guns and gas bloat!

Because of its beauty and whimsical health claims (it can make you invisible), everyone’s been begging me for the recipe for Liquid Sanctimony.

Liquid Sanctimony

2 giant kale leaves
2 giant chard leaves
handful dandelion greens
fistful spinach
handful parsley
handful wheatgrass
handful broccoli florets
1/16th of a red cabbage
2 celery stalks, with leaves
1/3 cucumber
1 carrot
1/2 avocado
1/4 lemon (with rind)
1 tomato
2 of those little tangerines that come in plastic net bags
1 banana
1 apple
1″ pineapple ring
1″ ginger
handful blueberries (fresh or frozen)
handful strawberries (fresh or frozen)
handful raw cacao nibs
handful dried goji berries (Navitas brand is somewhat edible)
handful sesame seeds
handful sunflower seeds
handful almonds
handful flax seeds
1 tablespoon coconut butter
1 tablespoon bee pollen
1 maraschino cherry (optional)
1 miniature paper umbrella

Put the greens in a VitaMix with 2 cups of water.
Don goggles and protective noise-blocking earmuffs.
Set VitaMix on “stun.”
Activate.
Whirl 17.4 seconds.
De-activate Vitamix.
Wipe off goggles, kitchen cabinets.
Add remaining ingredients (except cherry, umbrella).
Re-activate Vitamix.
Whirl 28 seconds.
De-activate VitaMix.
Inspect resultant sludge with critical eye.
Dilute with water or ice to desired viscosity and re-whirl.
Serve with cherry, umbrella

Makes about 2 quarts. Drink the whole thing. Repeat daily for 2 weeks. Prance around town glowing with vitality and smug superiority.

Note 1: For maximum sanctimony, use only organic fair trade ingredients grown by weathered-looking folk living simple lives.

Note 2: Do not attempt with a lesser blender. The machine should be capable of generating a wormhole, lest the beverage come out all gritty and lumpy and insufficiently liquefied, which would impair both digestibility and your sense of sanctimony.

Note 3: if you use Liquid Sanctimony to detox after coming off a hardcore tater tots/cigarettes/peanut M&Ms habit, steel yourself for interesting gastric events.

Posted in Crazy sexy cancer, Easy Persiflage and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Feel-good post of the week

Published by Twisty on December 4, 2009. 39 Comments

The other day I rode a horse bareback for the first time in 30 years.

This horse.

Stanley

It was just like riding a bike, if the bike were 6 feet tall, 1300 pounds, and would spook like a deer at the terrifying sight of a cigarette butt on the ground.

I had to get a leg up. Actually, it was more of a push-and-shove up. It turns out that I’ve completely forgotten how to mount a horse without stirrups, stairs, or a jetpack. Further complicating the situation was my choice of mounts. Rather than one of my demure little Arabian mares, the animal I was attempting scale was that Matterhorn of equines, the giant gelding Stanley.

“Don’t forget to jump!” pleaded my reluctant assistant Christina, just before she heaved me up. She was worried that I would be like unto a sack of shit and throw her back out. She is a delicate flower.

So jump I did. Even so, the situation quickly emerged as a classic confrontation between gravity and romantic delusion. As I was hanging there off the side of the horse, wondering with no small interest whether the exercise would eventually go north or south, a separate compartment of my brain was busy accessing my Idyllic Childhood Nostalgia Module.

Memories of youthful vim superseded all awareness of my present clumsiness. I recalled the agile young Twisty executing innumerable effortless vaults onto innumerable tack-free horses. And what was this? A dim recollection of my old brown mare, at whose plump rump I’d take a running jump, like a movie stunt rider, springing into place from behind. Somehow I’d always end up on the right part of the mare, and like as not go tearing off down a wooded trail somewhere.

That little brown mare was snappy as heck.

Thus it was that, at a critical point in mid-dangle, some memory-based self-preservational impulse kicked in, and I managed to scramble my skinny ass up out of half-mounted limbo.

Or maybe Christina gave the skinny ass in question another good shove; I can’t remember, it all happened so fast.

And then I tore off. On Stanley. At a lumbering walk. Around the dusty old round pen. But in my mind it was 1975 and I was galloping that little brown mare down a wooded trail with a Grape Nehi in my hand.

For about 30 seconds. Then I looked down. Christina waving at me from the rail, and she looked like an ant from way up there. I briefly considered busting out into a full-on jog, but came to my senses in time to conclude that the horse would infallibly bounce me off in two strides or less, so robust is young Stanley’s trot, and so non-existent is old Twisty’s seat.

I hope it will not be too heartwarming to note the simple pleasure I experienced when the ride was over? I slid uneventfully from Stanley to the ground, without spraining anything, exactly as I’d done a thousand times before (gravity is kinder to the spinster aunt on the dismount). But the best part was the sweaty, horsehair-encrusted britches sticking to my legs. They were like an old bud I hadn’t seen in years, who just happened to be carrying a bottle of pretty good wine. And a corkscrew.

Posted in Easy Persiflage, El Rancho Deluxe, Heartwarming Nature Crap and Not Altogether Depressing. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt has puerile episode

Published by Jill on November 16, 2009. 77 Comments
Attic black figure wine stompers, ca. 600 BCE

Attic black figure wine stompers, ca. 600 BCE

My sidekick Stingray is a professional wino. She can tell you the names of about 87 different species of fungus that grow on grapes. She speaks reverently of the Moldavian terroir. She goes around telling people what wine to drink with their fire-roasted frisée frittatas.

Lately she’s been on this kick where she quits her job, shoves a few necessaries into a bumbag, and biffs off to some distant vineyard or other to toil in a cellar for months on end. I’m not sure what, exactly, this cellar work entails, but I get the impression that it more or less involves attaching lots of hoses to lots of tanks for about 12 hours a day in an ultra-misogynist environment for next to no pay. Stingray stresses that it absolutely does not involve picking or stomping grapes. Stomping grapes, she says, has fallen out of vogue. She thinks it maybe isn’t even legal in the U.S.

Anyway, Stingray is lately returned from one of these indentured servitude binges, this time in the Douro River Valley in Portugal. The winery was apparently picturesque in every respect. Rolling hills, winding river, ancient vineyards, and yes, human grape treaders.

I got pretty excited about this last feature. Grape stomping, as anyone who has watched I Love Lucy can tell you, is an iconic motif in the ancient European rustic narrative. It’s Bacchanalian. It’s bucolic. It’s barefooted. How soothing to know that, persisting through the mists of untold millennia, in some faraway Arcadian paradise, human feet yet aspire to this high moral purpose, squishing the crap out of grapes for the enbiggenment of all humankind.

Naturally I subjected Stingray to an extended debriefing on this foot treading theme.

“I can’t believe they still do that!” I said. “Did you stomp grapes?”

“Uh, no. Why does everybody ask me that?”

“What! How come?”

“Well,” said Stingray, adopting the weary tone of an evolutionary biologist addressing an audience of feeble-minded Intelligent Designers on the meaning of the word theory, “they asked me once if I wanted to, but I didn’t feel like taking off my –”

“Are you mad? How could you pass up a primo local color experience like that?”

“I don’t know, I was like up to my elbows in wine all day, and I just didn’t feel –”

“This is a travesty.” I was sorely disappointed by this bloodless disinterest in grape-stomping. “Who goes all the way to Portugal, works in an idyllic ancient vineyard where idyllic ancient rituals flourish, and suddenly declines to stomp grapes? Grape stomping’s a fucking archetypal theme!”

We went back and forth like this for a while. Eventually the facts emerged.

Fig. 2b. Photo by Stingray, 2009.

Fig. 2b. Photo by Stingray, 2009.

Apparently, as a wine professional, Stingray is immune to the romantic lure of the grape stomping mythos. A further, even more shocking revelation: grape stomping is actually considered lowly. It turns out that the most popular insult around the cellar was “Why don’t you go stomp some grapes, you miserable grape stomper!” In Portuguese this colorful sentiment is expressed somewhat more poetically by the phrase peez ah pee. Or possibly pizza pie.*

Stingray produced some photos of the Douro Valley grape treaders. They didn’t look miserable to me. But the longer I contemplated the pictures, the less nostalgic I began to feel toward stomping. I began to formulate in my lobe a hypothesis I’d never considered before. You will observe in Fig. 2b that the treaders are not wearing sterile disposable latex long-johns.

They’re wearing Speedos.

“Sometimes,” noted Stingray, “these people are up to their crotches in grapes.”

Coincidentally, my fridge happened at that moment to be full of Portuguese wine, so my next question was exactly what you think it was.

Stingray delivered a detailed speech on the subject of filtering practices, albumin, the antibacterial properties of alcohol, and other hygiene-related crap. Unsoothed by this, I pressed her for more. She mentioned the alcohol thing again, and something about a sort of screen on a spigot somewhere. I remained dubious. Finally she admitted the truth: that although the odds are pretty well stacked against it, it’s not 100% impossible that a bottle of wine might contain a pube.

A bottle of wine could contain a pube! A bottle of wine could contain a pube!

____________________________

* Portuguese speakers are invited to improve my phonetic treatment of the phrase with actual spelling.

Posted in Easy Persiflage, Lobe-blowing and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Danger and slapstick on Savage Death Island!

Published by Jill on October 5, 2009. 73 Comments

Fois gras
Fois gras on toast. Uchi, Austin TX, July 2007

In keeping with the recent commentary-on-a-comment motif into the self-referential depths of which this blog has recently plunged (if a blog may be said to have plunged into a motif, which contingency is, I admit, something of an uncertainty), today’s post is a blog comment upon which I comment.

First, the set-up:

Somebody saw an old post in which was featured a description of a dish I enjoyed at a trendy Austin foie gras shack a couple of years ago. Describing herself as “angered” by this, the reader wrote in to demand an explanation for my reprehensible foie gras-eatin’ behavior.

I was annoyed because

a) it blisters the spinster’s butt-barnacles whenever readers demand explanations for things. Particularly when the tone of the demand is sanctimonious, and the nature of the thing being demanded is personal;

b) I decline, cravenly and absolutely, to be seen as the head of some sort of cult who is expected to gleam with noble perfection and tow the party line barge on every little goddam thing, using my personal, real, 3D self as an example to all; and

c) I had, as it happened, already thrown myself on the mercy of the Savage Death Island Grand Tribunal regarding human carnivorosity in general and foie gras in particular, and, having adjusted my views — in a Very Special farewell-to-bacon episode — to align more locksteppedly with radical feminist food doctrine, felt unjustly accused.

I realize now, of course, that the angered reader was not in possession of all the facts, and that she was, in fact, merely asking for a clarification, and that a loudmouthed Internet feminist such as myself, who puts both her dinner and her crackpot ideology on public display using a medium that invites the commentary of total strangers, should expect to field these kinds of queries from time to time, even though there is an escape clause in the IBTP Terms of Use Agreement specifically designed to let me off the hook whenever I feel like it (the Cosmic Indifference Clause).

However, we spinster aunts are some of the most notorious fuck-ups in Cottonmouth County. So naturally I scrawled some asinine rejoinder, a scrawl I now regret. I meant it to convey a certain impatience with the habit of blog readers to hold blog authors to the same standards that they (the blog authors) daily espouse, and to suggest, dammit, that what I do on my own time is beeswax that ought not to be minded by the blametariat. What happens in Cottonmouth County stays in Cottonmouth County, by gum. Or something.

I must apologize to the angered reader. What she witnessed was not my finest hour, for the asinine rejoinder, it grieves me to reveal, alluded to my bowel movements.

Which brings us, finally and mercifully, to the comment upon which I am about to comment.

Quoth Pinko Punko:

I know Jill must use the most decadent and wasteful of toilet paper. Dried centipede husks are even a luxury for some people’s bits. Flagellate thyself!

Pinko Punko is absolutely clairvoyant! I buy only 100% silk toilet tissue. It’s made in Mongolia by blind orphans, from silkworms who are fed nothing but foie gras.

Speaking of centipedes, I’ve got an anecdote.

Scolopendra heros

Yesterday afternoon I was lounging with a pitcher of margs watching that psuedo-documentary TV show about women who suddenly turn into homicidal maniacs, when there came a faint scratching sound from behind the lime green recliner. Fran, my yella Lab puppy, began yelping like a hellhound. Absently I hoisted the spinster keister and shuffled over to the hub of the hubbub. I was thinking it was probably just another case of Fran attempting to menace, like she does about 587 times a day, some random household object, such as a coffee bean, an errant dung beetle, or my foot.

Well, when I saw what it was I shot up about eight feet in the air and let out a yip, which wasn’t so much a yip, really, as it was a scream, and of the specific nature of that scream let me just say that the traitors trapped in the jaws of the Ninth Circle of Hell’s three-headed Satan could have done worse.

As you have no doubt surmised, what I observed was one of those giant Scolopendra heros. You haven’t really been yanked out of a pleasant afternoon torpor until a venomous, 7-inch, yellow-legged, needle-footed, red-headed, carnivorous invertebrate aggressively strolls across your livingroom floor, headed, in its belligerent, gazillion-legged way, straight for a flip-flop containing your personal foot. Picture an anaconda crossed with an armadillo crossed with the alien in Alien, with a chip on each of its 23 pairs of shoulders, and you’ll have it about half right.

Listen. I do my damnedest not to be an anti-Scolopendrite. I’m the first to admit that in the wild, as it biffs hither and yon with its hypnotically undulating legs and gaudy color scheme, gracefully rearing up to envenomate its prey (furry woodland creatures such as mice, bunnies, and wildebeests), S. heros is Truth and Beauty itself. But holy shit! Stick one in the Twisty Bunkhouse and watch a spinster aunt devolve into a sniveling (albeit in what I like to think is a slightly butch way) glob of eek-a-mouseterism.

I had to get rid of it, and fast, before it scuttled off into the woodwork. I didn’t want it popping out later, in the dank subumbra of night, to challenge one of the dogs to a death match, or — the thought paralyzes me even now — to crawl into my bed and up my nose into my brain, winding itself around my obstreperal cortex and turning me into a centipede-woman! A ticking time-bomb, if an arthropod may be said to tick, which (though an arthropod may be a tick) it probably can’t.

It was the aforementioned embarrassingly convolute and panic-stricken B-movie thought process that led me to my first gambit; I ill-consideredly threw on a nearby pair of heavy boots with the idea of smushing the enormous bug. We circled each other for what seemed like hours — me clomping, the centipede undulating — but in the end I couldn’t commit centipedicide. This is not because I entertain any sentimentality on the subject of centipedical right-to-life. It is because I possess a weakness of character; I am literally nauseated by the sensation of stepping on any entity that crunches. I can’t smush beetles, scorpions, roly-polys, or Rice Krispies treats, either, if I expect to keep dinner down.

Next I had the bright idea that I would put a piece of glue-board down and herd the thing onto it with a broom, thereby immobilizing it and allowing me to remove it via barbecue tongs to its original habitat. But the great beast wasn’t down with herding.

So I tried to nudge the glue-board into its path with my toe, with the comical result — wait for it! — that both the Scolopendra and my boot got stuck!

In accordance with my instinctual antipathy toward footal proximity to venomous arthropods, my amygdala jerked the affected limb away in a panic, but, because my life had suddenly become a Charlie Chaplin film in which “glue-board” was a metaphor for “poetic justice,” this knee-jerk merely strengthened the glue-board’s affinity for my boot. So what did I do? That’s right; I tried to hold the glue-board down with my other foot to facilitate the extrication of the first.

I bet you didn’t see that coming!

So there we were, adrenaline-crazed spinster aunt and incensed homicidal centipede, each with several feet mired in the same 6-inch piece of glue-board. And great Scott, this centipede had the strength of ten centipedes! It was breaking loose! No wait, it wasn’t just breaking loose, it was breaking loose and crawling up my boot! Already it was a quarter of the way to my obstreperal cortex! Scratching hideously with its gazillion needle-feet, its blood-red eyes burning with the icy purgatorial fires of impending doom as I pogoed impotently around the room, shrieking. What a tableau.

In all fairness, the centipede did have the physical advantage in this contest. If I’d had 44 more legs, and microscopic needles for feet, instead of 2 large glue-lovin’ boots, I might have been the one to get loose first.

Fortunately I’ve seen about a million movies where the action hero extricates himself from a tight spot by slipping out of his activewear, so, once I stopped screaming, for me it was but the work of a moment to yank off the boots, one of which was by now completely colonized by the glue-board and all but the last two sections of centipede, and heave the whole affair outside through a handy door. Finally, my neurotic obsession with antifeminist classic films paid off! As did my rigid insistence, against the advice of the baffled architects who designed the bunkhouse, on having 7 or 8 exterior doors installed in every room.

As has been noted by more poetical heartwarming nature crappists than I, centipedes “seem to exert a weird fascination on the morbid appetites of the hysterical and insane.” I know this is true, because I have written at least 3 posts [1, 2, and 3] on this species alone, and even made a movie. Inexplicably, the movie failed to beguile audiences, and went straight to video, where it awaits cult classicdom.

Posted in Blogulation, Easy Persiflage, Heartwarming Nature Crap, Morsel Institute and Not Altogether Depressing. Bite me, Chad.

Yay and boo

Published by Jill on September 26, 2009. 43 Comments

Punctuation pain

From the perspective of the cinquagenarian spinster aunt-on-the-go (a dying breed, literally), this screen grab (from the iTunes store comments section; the commenter is bitter because s/he is not getting something for nothing in an iPhone internet radio application) illustrates practically everything that is both right and wrong with the Internet and the world. iPhones: yay! Capitalism: boo! Internet radio: yay! Whiny iPhone user entitlement: boo!

Etc.

But damn (and certainly you’ll agree one hundred and ten percent); an ellipsis — a fucking five-dotter — followed by an exclamation point? It can but harbinge what we all knew was coming: the evolution of H. sapiens into a non-cerebral, plant-like species. Only an insouciant stalk of kelp could type those characters and not feel obligated to commit sepukku afterward.

Update: I mean seppuku. Dorkwad’s Law: any blog post critiquing the slackening standards of today’s written English, even when the written English is Japanese, must contain an error.

Posted in Easy Persiflage and Lobe-blowing. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt talks about the weather

Published by Twisty on March 13, 2009. 51 Comments
Fig. 13a

Fig. 13a

Cottonmouth County, home of Spinster HQ, is the droughtiest county in the droughtiest state in the country. I know, because, like all spinster aunts, I am an expert climatologist, and also because I consulted the U.S. Drought Monitor. If I may direct your attention to Fig. 13a? Observe the section of the map that looks like dried blood on a bullet wound. That’s Cottonmouth County.

Thanks, global warming!

There hasn’t dripped a drop of rain around here since about 1947. Even the rocks are beginning to wilt. All along the highways, instead of wildflowers, are signs reading “Burn Ban in Effect. This Includes Lighting Farts.” * Everything is dead or dying, which, I grant you, is a bonanza for vultures, but for most everybody else the drought is pretty inconvenient. It’s pointless, for example, to plant food in a drought, which condition has obvious consequences for both food planters and people who eat food. It is also inconvenient for livestock who eat food. A spinster aunt can’t tootle down County Road 666 for half a mile without seeing at least one skeletal cow planted in the dust with four in the air. I expect the wild herbivores are similarly feeling the pinch.

Meanwhile, bone-dry perma-winds have been howling through El Rancho Deluxe at 20 to 40 MPH for two weeks straight. Whenever I leave the bunkhouse I have to wear goggles to keep my eyes from being ripped from my skull. I pick my way around the landscape clinging from tree to tree, brachiating on foot like some mutant earthbound gibbon.

To prevent the pruneo-dessication of my person I’ve been forced to have water trucked in by price-gouging drought profiteers. The water driver is a guy named Keith who, irritatingly, always accepts what I intend to be a strictly disingenuous offer of coffee. While my water pumps into the cistern he stands around slurping and raconteuring about the good old days in the Navy when he was a real ass-kicker. Unless I want to see ex-ass-kicker Keith every week, I have to be fairly frugal with showers and the laundry. So a certain aroma hovers.

But overarchingly, I’ve been pretty much living in a state of panic that some crazed armadillo hunter’s insufficiently stubbed-out Marlboro will float over here on a dirt devil and El Rancho Deluxe will go up in a blaze of deluxeness like some crap Hollywood special effect.

How dry is it? Two nights ago I was awakened by what could only have been an army of hydrophobic claw-footed aliens parachuting onto my hot tin roof from a giant pulsating mothership hovering directly overhead. I surmised that the aliens were allergic to water, and had journeyed to the Texas Hill Country from a recently flooded planet 4,307 light years away in search of the parched conditions that could sustain their species. I supported this hypothesis with the direct observation of two instances of thunder and one instance of lightning. As you know, mothershippal pulsations always generate thunder and lightning.

But the origin of the roof racket turned out to be even more alien than an alien invasion. It was, of all things, rain. Like all the other spinster aunts in Cottonmouth County, I tested this wild hypothesis by leaping into my wellies and hot-footing it dramatically out into the anhydrous dust that used to be my hay field, twirling with outstretched arms and singing my number one jam, “Africa” by Toto (including the keyboard “flute” solo, because damn those are some hott lixx).

Sure enough, I became damp. Hypothesis confirmed.

The precipitation continues today. Please join me for celebrational cocktails on the Lido Deck at 4 PM.

Drizzle at the Spinster HQ Climatology Lab: God is crying because He hates feminism.

Drizzle at the Spinster HQ Climatology Lab: God is crying because He hates feminism.


___________________
* Remember, during W’s first term, how he was always hanging around his Texas ranch “clearing brush”? Ranchers fucking hate brush. Almost as much as they love fetuses. Brush is anything that grows where the rancher wants to plant genetically modified hybrid grass to feed genetically modified hybrid cattle. The product of brush-clearing is a huge pile of wood. Ranchers always burn this pile, sending gallons of nasty hydrocarbon globules into the atmosphere, rather than going to the expense and trouble of turning it into mulch, thus incurring pollution and increasing the likelihood of wildfires. Nice.

Posted in Easy Persiflage, El Rancho Deluxe and Not Altogether Depressing. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt just can’t let it go

Published by Twisty on February 4, 2009. 33 Comments

Naturally you are following with unprecedented interest the shocking story of Mungo’s sudden decline, so here is the current state of affairs down at the Spinster HQ computer lab:

Total disarray! But the outlook, according to the Magic Eight Ball, is good.

Sure, I’m no board-certified geek, but I am a spinster aunt, which is just as good. By which I mean, I have a philips (sp?) head screwdriver. Over the years I’ve given Mungo a couple of video card transplants. I’ve performed open DVD-drive surgery to resect an impacted disc. I’ve reset its PMU and changed out its PRAM battery. I’ve reenergized its di-lithium crystals and massaged its obstreperal lobe. Thus it was for me it but the work of an instant to harvest the SATA drives from Mungo’s cold dead corpse. The drives now await transplantation into their new host bodies, which are currently being flown in by emergency airlift.

The autopsy revealed much deeply embedded dog hair, and also brown goo oozing from Mungo’s logic board. I fell to my knees, stretched my fists to the sky, and cried “NOOOOOOOO!” causing flocks of birds the world over to take flight.

Then I caved and ordered a new computer, also being flown in by emergency airlift. Lard help me, as much as Apple hates me, it’s another effing Mac.

I used to be an Apple cultist, looking down the Twisty honker at Microsoft’s cheezy UI, talking paperclips, and strange “.exe” viruses, but no more.

You know what? Fuck Apple. Like all bloated corporations with captive customers, Apple’s products are overpriced and increasingly unreliable. And omigod, the customer service? It sucks shit through Hefty bags. Considering the kind of grip $$$ they’ve extorted from me over the years, when I stagger into an Apple store with my 50-pound hunk of Chinese crap they should usher me into an Eames lounge chair, bring a bottle of wine and a tray of canapes, give me a neck rub, and listen with great interest as I speak of my hopes and dreams, of my childhood, of my relationship with my mother, of the coming feminist revolt. But instead they make me stand around, waiting.

On principle I refuse to browse the sparkling gewgaws.

Eventually, although not before the store has emptied of hot teen chicks buying iPod Nanos, they size me up as a middle-aged lady about whom the usual assumptions concerning computer literacy are made. So I give’em the old “I’ve had Macs on my desk, in my bag, and up my butt since they shoveled your first pair of Pampers into a landfill, so how about a little respect, you little retail mall toady” speech. This makes them hate me even more. They cop the ‘tude when I reveal that I didn’t buy their rip-off extended service plan, at which point they inform me with ill-concealed schadenfreude that I have to make an appointment with a “Genius,” the next available of which is next Monday at rush hour.

The crappiness of the service in their retail stores, however, is like eating a caviar taco on a yacht somewhere in the Aegean Sea compared to the condescension and rudeness when calling Customer Service, for which torture Apple charges like $92.86 per call for some tool to tell me — after asking moron questions like “Is it plugged in?” and “Did you restart it?”– that I need to take it in to the shop.

Back when I was a big smoker, I once took a Mac — Mungo’s G4 predecessor, Pongo — into a mom-and-pop repair shop. It smelled like rancid curry in there. Pop opened up my machine and recoiled against the wall, an arm flung across his face.

“It stinks!” he cried. “It stinks like cigarettes!”

Well, when I got that computer back it stunk like rancid curry for about 3 months.

No point to that story, really.

I want to be done with Apple once and for all, but dang it, I’m too old to learn a new platform, and they know it, the benighted geekbags. At least I have the small satisfaction of knowing that, by cleverly sending off for third-party RAM instead of ordering their ridiculously overpriced DIMMs, I kept a cool 5 bills out of their evil clutches.

Fuck Apple.

Except, you know, for the iPhone. That thing is fucking cool.

I may or may not resume blaming the patriarchy from a non-catastrophic computer situation viewpoint tomorrow.

Posted in Easy Persiflage and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

The mighty Blametariat: global threat on the march

Published by Twisty on January 29, 2009. 292 Comments

worldmap012909.jpg
2009

worldmap2.jpg
2006

Occasionally it’s instructive to contemplate the global map in terms of the patriarchy blaming population. Behold a couple Sitemeter images. Compare and contrast! The one on the bottom is from January, 2006. The top one shows the locations of the 500 most recent (as of 15 minutes ago) blog visitors. No telling how many of them accidentally clicked on I Blame the Patriarchy looking for kiddie porn (that happens a lot for some reason).

Well, actually there is a way to tell that, but it’s labor intensive, and doing a search on pornulators is just gross.

I’m United Statesian, as are many of the Blametariat, but as we see from our visual aids, blaming is not exclusively an American pursuit. In fact, it kind of looks as though, over the past 3 years, blaming has begun to catch on in corners of the earth far flung from Rattlesnake, Texas. Even as we speak, somebody’s blaming in Sudan, in Santiago, in Shanxi.

Tehran, Wollongong, Utrecht.

Saudi Arabia, Nowy Sacz, Seoul.

Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Montréal.

Kristianstad, Pretoria, Paekakariki (I think that’s in New Zealand).

Tasmania, Togo, Ylivieska.

Kyoto, Ahmadabad, Perth.

Bangkok, Bangalore, Burnaby, Brighton, Bournemouth, Brisbane.

It’s not on this map, but I had a guy write in from McMurdo (I say “guy” because do they even let women into Antarctica?). A member of the blametariat had broken his heart, and did I have any advice? Which I took to mean, are there any radical feminist magic words that could make her love him again? Alas, I did not have such advice. Our culture of domination and submission precludes (with the obvious exception of your Nigel, of course) heterosexual relationships free of the patriarchal impediments that ultimately lead to unhappiness. Dudes who wish their girlfriends could love them with free agency, and not out of fear, self-loathing, or some sense of obligation to heteronormative dudely tradition, should a) not require that they get married; b) instead of looking for an Internet Feminist’s shoulder to cry on, go live on a mountain top in Tibet, contemplating male privilege’s contributions to a) their relationship’s demise and b) the global oppression of all women; and c) overthrow patriarchy.

That lone white dot on the eastern Mediterranean is in Palestinian Territory, Occupied Hebron, home of the Cave of the Patriarchs, where doth lie the celebrated corpse of patriarchal coot Abraham, and site of assorted dudely bloodbaths.

And there’s Hattie, our solitary Hawaiian blamer. Hey, Hattie!

Hawaii, I believe, is technically part of the US, but I understand Oprah owns most of it.

Of course no self-respecting, moose-murdering Alaskan would read a radical feminist blog. No dots there!

Clearly I need to publish Alaskan, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and several Afro-Asiatic and Semitic versions of this blog. Rosetta Stone, here I come.

See your dot on the map? Stand up and be counted. Don’t see your dot? Stand up and be counted. There may be a fellow Monstrous Woman right next door.

How’s the state of blame in your neck of the woods?

Posted in Easy Persiflage. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt cuts blogular corners by making another dorky video, this time about her outing to a giant Human Demoralization Center

Published by Twisty on August 13, 2008. 86 Comments

I know, I know, but these video things are way faster than writing, and these days time is of the essence for the spinster aunt. Sadly, because I did this in one take and without any script or rehearsal or talent, I perhaps failed to emphasize my main blaming point, which is my disgust at the obnoxious classist forces at work on the mind of the typical IKEA shopper.

A common misconception, one which apparently appeals to the honkys who flock there to pick up build-it-yourself orange leather entertainment centers, seems to be that all that cheapo IKEA stuff is made in Sweden by happy, well-paid blondes with excellent benefits.

It is not. By now we all know that the only time anyone can afford anything is when it was made by non-Swedish indentured workers in a part of the world far, far away from happy, blond, egalitarian Sweden.

Although everything for sale at IKEA does have a Swedish name, according to a “naming system.” From Wikipedia:

# Chairs, desks: men’s names
# Materials, curtains: women’s names

No shit.

Posted in Austin, Easy Persiflage and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.