Archive for the 'Morsel Institute' Category

Page 3 of 16

Roly poly fish heads eat them up yum

Published by Twisty on June 7, 2007. 38 Comments

uchi-mackerel.jpg
Fried mackerel, peanuts, cilantro, lemon curd at Uchi on S. Lamar, June 6, 2007

Stingray and I waited an hour for a table at Uchi last night. Then we ordered the chef’s tasting menu (the actual name for it was a Japanese phrase meaning “I trust you”). Whereupon Jody, our server, brought us 8 or 10 courses in succession, at a pace compatible with the digestive processes of peckish epicures. If I were writing a fantasy novel — and we should all be infinitely grateful that this is not the case, because I wouldn’t be able to put in a single faerie or Golden Sword of Zwyrrdnnflyr — I would describe what happened next as “we flew into transports.” But I am writing a blog post, so I will merely say that we became very pleasantly pisculent.

Succulent little sea-dwelling morsels which only 24 hours earlier had been swimming without a care in the world in and around Japanese waters arrived dressed with indescribably delicate emulsions and sauces and dice of fruit and vegetable and mineral. Each of these edible tableaux was as close to an expression of Truth and Beauty as anything I’ve ever chewed. Buttery slices of snapper with tangerines; Applewood smoked yellowfin with candied garlic, almonds, and taro chips; a whole fried mackerel with fried peanuts and Meyer lemon curd; grilled scallops with fairy-ring mushrooms and roasted grape tomato; yes, and foie gras on a grilled brioche with papaya compote and some mysterious fresh herbs, and yes, I ate it, goddammit; pinball-sized scoops of sorbet made from absurd vermillion mountain peaches with more unidentified herbs and tiny cubes of mint gelatin; fried fish skin, nectarines, tangerines, Asian pears, New Zealand lobsterettes –

Twisty wept.

I would call it the best meal I’ve had in 10 years, except that Uchi’s chef is a fucking genius, and nobody within 1000 miles of Austin is doing anything remotely comparable. “But Twisty,” you say, “why deduct points for that?” Well, precisely because it is so astonishing, the place was crammed to the rafters with expensive people. And because it’s Austin, the expensive people were unable to stop yelling.

Yelling and Truth and Beauty: one of these things is not like the other.

Also, one of our servers called the soup “vishy-swah.”

Also, there appeared to be an amateur pole dancers convention in progress; I hadn’t thought it possible for so many heaving rubber bosoms to so heavily predominate a given square footage except at the MTV Movie Awards.

Posted in Austin and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Breakfast of quadragenarians

Published by Twisty on June 1, 2007. 74 Comments

Moonrise over the berry-flavored barium ’smoothie’.

moon_barium.jpg

UPDATE, JUNE 2: For those of you following my tiptoe through the garden of cancer, the scans were negative for metastases. One is tempted to hoist cups of wassail, but as it is only 10:30 in the morning, a shot of Patrón will suffice. A shout-out to the excellent Elsa, my oncologist’s nurse, for actually calling me on a Saturday so I wouldn’t have to spend the weekend pulling pins and needles out of my ass.

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

XX

Published by Twisty on May 30, 2007. 105 Comments

phils.jpg
After the Twistolution, ‘hamburger’ will have more meaning than ‘woman’. Burger and onion rings at Phil’s Ice House, North Austin. May 2007.

Yesterday I asked yew-all what the word ‘woman’ means. Thanks to those of you who answered; it was sporting of you, considering that I had just posted a curmudgeonly amendment to the Comment-o-festo consisting of “I have not solicited your commentary, so shut the fuck up.” And considering that whenever I ask a dumb question like that, I mean only to be a smart-ass later.

The responses included some XX stuff, and some stuff about reproductive organs. A few of the de Beauvoirians said ‘woman’ is ‘the Other’. Some folks who have been reading too much I Blame the Patriarchy said ‘the sex class’. A couple of hippies dreamily opined, “A woman is whatever she wants to be.” A sweet thought, hippies. But not in this world. I’ll take a hit off that doob, though.

Several of you clever young onions hit upon what I consider to be the point of the exercise, which is that ‘woman’ is a load of crap; defining it is impossible except in terms of patriarchy, which means that sex is virtually indistinguishable from gender, socially, philosophically, and scientifically.

As I learned from the scholarly journal Newsweek, there’s no blood test for it. Furthermore, as I understand it, all sorts of ‘conditions’ — congenital adrenal hyperplasia, androgen insensitivity syndrome, mosaicism — blur the line, so ‘woman’ is essentially meaningless, biologically. So much for XX.

Physiologically there are, in some people, organs specialized for reproduction, but in ‘man’ there are organs specialized for reproduction, too, and unless ‘man’ is also ‘woman’ — ha! Man = woman! Have you ever seen anything so absurd! — you can’t really go by that. And there are all sorts of ‘conditions’ blurring the line again — intersexuality, ‘micropenis’, Klinefelter’s syndrome. One might focus on the difference between the organs, perhaps classifying as ‘woman’ one who possesses fully-developed and functional specialized egg-production and fetus-incubation apparatus. Of course, this definition lets me out, and Tidy, and our mom too.

I can be scientifically classified, neither biologically nor physiologically, as a ‘woman’, but check this out: last Sunday, three soccer moms at Phil’s Ice House [1], while waiting in line for the can marked with a dress-shaped stick figure, were startled when I busted through the gauntlet to the door marked with a human-shaped stick figure [2].

Their surprise, confusion and — if I may say so — awe illustrated that in praxis ‘woman’ has nothing to do with inherited physical traits, whether on a cellular or an anatomical level. I assert this because a soccer mom in the bathroom line at Phil’s Ice House cannot deduce, from information obtained by a quick once-over, the exact number of my X chromosomes (hell, I don’t even know the exact number of my X chromosomes). Furthermore, unless she has X-ray eyes (yes, all mothers claim this superpower, but in reality it’s extremely rare) she cannot know whether I’ve got a uterus.

Yet something about me had communicated to them, instantaneously and comprehensively, that I was not qualified to urinate where dudes urinate. I’d transgressed a vitally fundamental line of social demarcation when I elected to use the ‘wrong’ john. Was the soccer-mommal perception of this breach in the patriarchal matrix gender-based? Nah. With my hairy legs, antifemininity, and stone butch sidekick I am obviously queer as a steer, and unnaturally skirtless though we are, lesbians are still required to use the john with the skirt on the door. Nope, the palpable discomfort in the bathroom line was sex-based. They knew, receiving the vibes I subconsciously exude as a result of 48 years of male-dominated socialization, that I’m no dude. In other words, my behavior was inconsistent with my status, not my uterus.

Sex, though advertised as ‘fact’, cannot in fact be fact, since it cannot be defined or quantified or observed. Since it is not a fact, it must be a fiction. Therefore, ‘woman’ is nothing but a narrative intended to sell the idea that male abuse of the sex class is congruent with essential biological truths.

Here is what 500 years of dudely Western European painters have to say about ‘women.’ Notice that they’re all saying pretty much the same fucking thing: a ‘woman’ is a tilt-headed 18-year-old honky cipher with giant, wide-set doe eyes and a teeny weeny pink mouth.

After the Twistolution, when the world is populated by taqueaux for whom the idea of reproduction as we know it will seem vulgar and barbaric, ‘woman’ will exude the same cultural resonance as ’slave’.

Of course it is probable that our dysfunctional world order will destroy H. sapiens before the Twistolution can take place. In that case, cockroaches will inhereit the earth. Interestingly, female cockroaches have two X chromosomes, but males have only an X. No Y. No Z. Just … a void.
____________________________
1. Phil’s Ice House: burgers, foot-longs, and a giant outdoor structure, surrounded by mulch and infested with small children, called a ‘playscape’.

2. If Stingray and I ever get our wine bar off the ground, the cans are going to be labeled “People Who Sprinkle When They Tinkle” and “Everybody Else.”

Posted in Keep your bias off my gender and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Define this

Published by Twisty on May 29, 2007. 186 Comments

tidy_tomatos.jpg
One of the juicy morsels I et yesterday while not reading the blog comments: a multi-cultivar tomato salad with fried goat cheese and about 36 different herbs, made by my sibling Tidy, who, to the undiluted satisfaction of the Faster family palates, has been watching that smarmy Napa dude on The Food Channel.

i have a question for you. But first, a slight digression.

I have entered a phase in my short and unimpressive career as the moderator of an internet discussion group. This phase is characterized by my viewing the enterprise with curled lip and narrowed eye. This morning, for example, after a weekend spent traipsing merrily about the hill country and cramming down the Twisty craw several juicy morsels that didn’t suck, I returned to my desk to perceive that about 76,932 new comments had sprouted on the blog. A sense of foreboding began to engulf my recently de-harshed mellow. Yet how could this be, I asked myself. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the buttcracky plumbers who were supposed to dig up my yard this morning have put it off for another couple of days, and I found a live gecko in my desk drawer. Life is a bowl of Cool Whip. Why should I feel foreboded upon?

That’s when I realized that being a blogular moderator is bumming me out.

My distaste has nothing to do, obviously, with the usually brilliant commentary. It has nothing to do with drive-by teen boy-holes who misspell a few sexist epithets before biffing back home to Fark; those little dudes are like Ford F-150s with It’s A Baby Not A Choice bumper stickers; you just flip’em off and move on. It doesn’t even have to do with the antifeminists who got here Googling “Asian Pee Porn.” [1]

No, my burgeoning moderatorial angst has to do with this: I never know when (it’s not an “if”, it’s definitely a “when”) I’m going to come across something like “Twisty has not ‘moderated’ your incredibly racist/disablist/fatist/looksist remark; clearly she is in complete agreement with and wholeheartedly supports your bigoted position and is therefore herself a stinking bigot who, fatuously and from a position of priveledge [sic] insults me and my oppressed group’s legitimate but egregiously marginalized pain.”

That’s bad, but this is worse: I never know, when perusing the comments section, whether I’m going to encounter something vile like the following recent bit of rhetoric, the big kiss-off from one long-time commenter to another during an unendurably tedious squabble:

[I am] what you better live in fear of, X, if we ever meet in flesh I’ll rip yours. I have no intellect. Do not no how to argue you. So I will strike out physically. I will cut you if I ever meet you because I’ve got nothing to lose. [2]

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am one lazy mug. I like to take pictures of bugs, eat tacos, lounge around with a marg, and strike the occasional (and, until recently, unheeded) rhetorical blow on behalf of the revolution [3]. Also, I am middle-aged and have cancer and as a result have been forced to admit that life is short. Thus I now abide happily by a policy that entails excising from my personal sphere anything that impedes my enjoyment of these deeply fulfilling pursuits.

Reading shit like what I’ve alluded to above, this sorely impedes my enjoyment of my deeply fulfilling pursuits.

Something’s gotta give.

I know a lot of you have come to rely on this blog as a feminist-friendly haven. It has not escaped my notice that many of you have even expressed that the support you find in the discussions has helped you sort things out, or broadened your horizons, or given you a new appreciation for gifted transgender redheaded bonobos with Tourette’s, or what have you. Yet it may surprise you to learn that the phenomenon of the commentariat is a totally unexpected development; when I first started this blog a couple of years ago, it never entered my mind that in a million years anybody would ever actually read it, much less use it. But here we all are.

I am delighted that an IBTP ‘culture’ of sorts has been a generally happy consequence of the blogular manifestation of my loudmouth opinions. Yet I find, having mulled it over in the wake of recent discussions, that I am not cut out to moderate a forum that has grown to the point at which each post accumulates a couple of hundred comments and spans countless internecine disputes. I just can’t read’em all, much less remain sufficiently up-to-the-minute with the finer points of each individual sub-debate that I can intervene with intelligence.

And horribly, the more FAQs I write, the less people read’em.

Lest I go mad, I toyed with the idea of shutting down the blog altogether, or at least turning off the comments. Ultimately, however, this seemed unnecessarily baby-with-the-bathwaterish, since I enjoy writing the essays, and since generally the level of discourse is superior, illuminating, and hilarious, and since some readers seem actually to get something out of it all. In fact, it’s really only a few authors who spoil it for me, and even these only offend intermittently. They are blamers who often have provocative perspectives to add, but who, to the detriment of my enjoyment of my deeply fulfilling pursuits, occasionally get so hot under the collar that they can’t put a sock in the ad feminam attacks and idiot bickering.

In dealing with this in the past I have allowed myself to go through an absurdly exhausting, time-consuming process, wherein I go back and read the thread, and go back and re-read the thread, and weigh the effect of the bickering against the value of the commenter’s overall contributions, and wonder which comments I can delete without making all subsequent responses seem like drunken non-sequiturs, and worry about trying to be fair without hurting anyone’s feelings, and feel anxious and guilty for not intervening quickly enough to suit the wronged party, blah blah blah.

Well, no more.

The comments section will remain open, and the much-ignored and tragically unenforceable Comments Guidelines will remain in effect, and blamers will, as always, be encouraged to let fly with the first brilliant thing that comes into their heads, and I will continue to look in on the proceedings from time to time. I’m afraid, however, that the level of service you can expect will be exactly what you pay for. This means it’s inevitable that I will not catch every little slight, every instance of bigotry, every perfectly innocent comment that for some reason or other got hung up in the totally automated moderation queue.

It also means that when individual blamers get huffy or become tedious, I may or may not delete their comments. I may or may not delete whole conversations. I may or may not delete comments just because they don’t have paragraph breaks. I may or may not delete comments wherein privilege is spelled priveledge. I might not delete any offensive comments at all. Hell, I might make an offensive comment. I might not feel like messing with the blog for a few days, thus prolonging the length of time someone’s trenchant remarks are stuck in spamulational purgatory. I may resent implications. I might bandy words. I may be inconsistent. I might miss the point. I may be in a bad mood, the way certain blamers always seem to be. I might use the word “motherfucker” even though it may be considered insulting to mothers and fuckers. I may never read the comments again. Who can tell what the heck I’ll do? Life is uncertain!

In short, for my own happiness, I am taking back my blog. The following has been added to the Twistifesto:

Your comments appear on my blog at my pleasure. I have not solicited your views. You do not have a ‘right’ to be heard on this or any other blog. Neither do I owe you the slightest respect or courtesy. I may delete any of your comments I choose, for whatever reason I choose. This includes any responses to those comments, if only for the sake of clearing out the stink. I do not care how you think I should maintain this blog. I do not care if you ‘de-link’ me. I do not care if this bums you out.

But I digress. Here’s the topic of today’s post: I found this remark mouldering in the moderation queue:

“Gender is a social construct, sex is real. Removing a woman’s womb doesn’t make her not a woman, any more than removing a man’s penis and testes makes him not a man.”

This struck me as hilarious. Sex is real? That’s a hot one.

So I put it to the Blamer Brain Trust. Define “woman.”
___________________________

1. Although sometimes antifeminist trolls are funny. Recently I was accused, by someone posing as a feminist, of fabricating reader emails “in the attempt to get you all foaming at the mouth and attacking an enemy that’s not there.” The author of this comic interlude did not suggest what motive I might have for engaging in elaborate mind-control tactics designed to thwart non-existent enemies.

2. I have left this comment up because the next time somebody, in the heat of some future argument, demands to know “Why did you ban XYZ, who always spake the truth?” I can point to the time when she actually threatened to kill another blamer.

3. I also enjoy movies, sunsets, and long walks on the beach. My turnoffs include phonies, mean people, and those who argue against the dialectic of recursive transition networks from a Marxian perspective, or one which supports a Lacanian model of the neocapitalist paradigm of context used not to deconstruct society, but rather to install in the post-sexual narrative the meaninglessness of the consensus of a collective, but parallel, unconscious.

Posted in Blogulation, Keep your bias off my gender and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

But she was drinking

Published by Twisty on May 18, 2007. 111 Comments

margs_el_gringo.jpg
The equivalent of consent: a couple of prickly pear margs at El Gringo.

Dig free rape porn? The Joplin Globe endeavors to give satisfaction. The Missouri paper, whose motto is apparently “It’s your girl. We deliver it,” titillated readers on May 10 (and for all I know it may do this all the time) with a graphic and truly gnarly description of a sexual assault. The Globe stringer was reporting on a court proceeding, but he might as well have been writing a rape fantasy scene for one of those ‘gritty’ dude-crime novels that always end up on the NY Times Bestseller List.

Although the perp in the case, who is accused of molesting and photographing an unconscious woman, was bound over for trial, Globe reporter Jeff Lehr was determined (a) to omit no lurid detail, and (b) to intimate that the 23-year-old victim had it coming to her. Lehr trots out the same tired old subtext: a chick who has a few drinks in public “of her own free will” should then expect to be “taken advantage of” while passed out drunk. If you’re a woman, drinking of your own ‘free will’ = “I consent to whatever abuse strikes your dudely fancy.” Of course the “but she was drinking” gambit is just a bit of shaming to rationalize male use of women. It works, not because it is logical, but because it is consistent with cultural narrative; a priori consent to male abuse, as we have seen, is implicit in the cultural construct “woman.”

Which is why our victim should also expect to have the graphic, humiliating details of her assault printed in the local paper.

Because rape is so hilarious, Globe reader Rick Tiberio was pleased as punch at the opportunity to read this crap. He sent in a grateful letter to the editor, confessing that he had to have a cigarette after reading it. Hilarious old Rick Tiberio should check out the online version; it comes with a handy ad for a casino depicting women as cleavage delivery devices. Nice.

[Thanks, Karley]

Posted in Mass Media, Men Hate You, Morsel Institute and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

It’s only wahfer-thin

Published by Twisty on May 12, 2007. 32 Comments

jeffreys_scallop_lasagne.jpg

Tacos are all well and good, but two or three times a week, when dessert time rolls around, the spinster aunt yearns for a sublime, tiny overpriced morsel of brie, grilled scallops, morels, and about two sticks of butter. The brie “lasagne” at Jeffrey’s on West Lynn is indeed microscopic, but so redolent with gross excess that if it were any bigger you’d have to prosecute the chef for attempted murder.

Posted in Austin and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Why I keep a blog

Published by Twisty on May 10, 2007. 17 Comments

phils_ice_house06.jpg

Come for the blaming, stay for the trippy childhood idylls of the commentariat.

She also got us hot dogs afterwards at a place with a giant hot dog painted on the wall. The hot dog was floating in Lake Michigan off shore from Chicago. Fire-engine boats were using their hoses to launch mustard and ketchup onto the top of the titanic dog. A helicopter lowered a huge pickle. Very exciting, but sadly irrelevant. — Cunning Allusionment?

UPDATE: See the actual hot dog mural here. Thanks, Pinko Punko!

Posted in Blogulation and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Footnote to blaming greatness: the impending what-about-the-men section

Published by Twisty on April 2, 2007. 493 Comments

pterrys_rae.jpg
Stingray’s garish lunch. P. Terry’s Burger Stand, S. Lamar, March 2007.

I’ve been threatening for some time now to inaugurate a “Dear God, What About the Men?” section in the FAQ. I envision it as required reading for callow dudely proto-blamers, with the impossible-but-I-can-dream-can’t-I goal of keepin’em out of the comments section until they get a grip. This way, when what-about-the-men happens, I can post a single link, be done with it, and proceed, like any decent spinster aunt, with cocktail hour.

I continue to threaten rather than do, half because educating clueless dudes is not even remotely the focus of this blog, and half because if I wait long enough, other people will write it for me. Ilyka, you will recall, was kind enough to address the phenomenon of dudely blog commenters who get all worked up on the “hey, I wouldn’t ever rape anybody; you feminists are all just a bunch of hatas!” theme. Likewise has Mr. Shakes (formerly of Shakespeare’s Sister, now of the brand-new same old blog Shakesville) written a swell piece on the pathology of progressive male contempt of feminism. He takes a stab at re-branding feminism as a civil rights movement and at exposing patriarchy as a global oppressor, urging men to stick it to The Man for their own benefit.

Quoth Mr Shakes:

One of the greatest bulwarks against men accepting the feminist movement is that they seem to think that women gaining power must necessarily dilute their own exclusive powers and status. But in so holding onto this erroneous notion, they forget that they themselves are powerless in the face of the corporate plutocracy that now weighs down so heavily upon all of us. If they could get their heads around the fact that they too are powerless and insignificant and ignored, they would stop trying to beat up on the kids they perceive to be weaker and instead acknowledge their own weakness, ally themselves with them, and move forward with them in a new movement that would grant greater freedoms for all of us. It shouldn’t be about trying to maintain some illusory advantage over others [1]. It should be about trying to create concrete advantages for all of us.”

I imagine it would be a pretty fun party if the Blamers met the Shakers, especially if it were on a yacht somewhere. But I digress.

Anyway, because the guiding principle of my twilight years is to do as little as possible, I invite all blamers to submit suggestions, now or whenever you happen across them, for inclusion in the What About the Men page.

Allow me to assuage any anxiety by reiterating that this will just be a section of the FAQ; the blog proper will continue to espouse the same comforting revolutionary chick-centric fuck-patriarchy pseudo-Marxist anti-nuclear-family pro-choice anti-reproduction pro-liberation femininity-is-wack anti-religion anti-gender peak-oil anti-marriage impeach-Bush pro-skank ideology you love and deserve.
__________________________
1. I disagree that the advantage men have over women is illusory; what I think Mr Shakes means here is that the perceived natural right to this advantage is a mass hallucination.

Posted in Blogulation, Dear god what about the men? and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Blaming-lite, Texas edition

Published by Twisty on March 30, 2007. 27 Comments

weathermap.jpg
As you can see, it’s headed right for me.

I know. I recently intimated that once I’d returned from my tarriance in North Texas I would resume posting substantive radical feminist/science fiction critiques of contemporary civilization. Inconveniently, it turns out that it’s thunderstorming today, so I can’t possibly embark on any endeavor more intellectually strenuous than putting fresh batteries into the remote, clapping my wrist to my forehead, and taking to my bed.

You know, ever since Dr. Uterus separated me from my ovaries, gloomy weather seems to reduce the pressure within my obstreperal lobe, which induces in me a kind of melancholic torpor. It’s not altogether unpleasant, but it does tend to cut into what some have described as the spinster aunt’s already minimal productivity. Not to mention the national Cool Whip supply.

Anyway, what this means for the blog is that today’s patriarchy-blaming will be, unlike the Kung Pao Shrimp I intend to have delivered for lunch, lite. We begin with a query from affable reader Jane Awake, who writes:

Hi Twisty, I was wondering, what is the dish pictured on your banner? Every time I look at it, I get hungry. My grandma gave me a cookbook called Cooking with Soup, and after reading it, I started using cream soups as sauces. I assume you have a more advanced recipe. Anyway, I am curious.

Thanks,
Jane

Cooking with soup! Naturally my initial reaction to this astonishing revelation was “well, if you’re going to go to all the trouble of making cream soup, why not just make the sauce instead?” Then I realized that, duh, Jane means canned soup! The mind reels.

Anyway, Jane, the dish in the photo is chicken-fried steak with milk gravy, canned green beans, margarine, and mashed potatoes, and it was a triumph. I did not cook this particular specimen, and cannot recommend doing so yourself, because it makes your whole house smell like the bastard son of What-A-Burger and the State Fair of Texas for two days. I got mine at the Hill Country Cupboard in Johnson City, TX. In a bold and iconoclastic break with tradition, they offer it with a “homemade Mexican sauce” option, which I have never tried because I flatter myself that I am not insane. They also have a “large” version, which I believe is half a cow, breaded, deep-fried, and dunked in library paste.

Those who wish to construe this as an endorsement of butchery, and/or who object to the use of the word “bastard” to describe the lingering aroma of chicken-fried steak, are free to blame me.

Speaking of Texas and vegetarianism (both of which I do endorse), homegirl Redneck Mother, who, as part of her indispensable hell-raising service, occasionally emails me articles from the local paper (which paper I, rightly or wrongly, refuse to read on grounds that they keep sending their minions over to litter my driveway with unsolicited free samples that I then have to expend valuable energy throwing away and complaining about), sends this howler on the subject of PETA’s “Sexiest Vegetarian Alive” beauty pageant. Apparently a local “tomato” who likes spinach is in the finals. (I warn you right now that the article contains sentences like this one:

“When you get right down to it, vegetarian chicks should be pretty cute, because they have less fat content.”

If the reader wishes to imagine that by posting this link I endorse sexism, fatphobia, PETA, or beauty pageants, I wish her the best. Blaming me is every citizen’s right.)

Finally, because blaming never really takes a holiday: NARAL reports, following a Georgia woman’s run-in with a godbag pharmacist over Plan B, that American mega-grocery chain Kroger Co. is the latest on the list of corporations who permit faith-based tramplings of a woman’s right to superintend her own fucking uterus.

But there’s good news, too. The Bush-appointed anti-contraception, anti-choice director of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs, Eric Keroack, has resigned in the wake of a mysterious, unnamed “action” taken against him by Medicaid in Massachusetts. You will recall that Keroack used to work for a “Christian pregnancy counseling” outfit, which, as I pointed out in a previous post bemoaning his appointment, is godbag code for “you’re so havin’ that baby, bitch!”

You know, I was going to shut up, but the subject of compulsory pregnancy reminds me of another notable moron. This one, like so many morons before him, is a Texas State Senator, who Textriotically proposes to compensate for the loss of American lives in Iraq with a slew of state-purchased Texan babies. His brilliant idea — which he has actually filed as legislation — is to bribe women who visit abortion clinics with $500 to gestate (and ultimately give up for adoption) fetuses they might otherwise terminate. Quoth Sen. Dan Patrick:

If this incentive would give pause and change the mind of 5 percent of those woman [sic], that’s 3,000 lives. That’s almost as many people as we’ve lost in Iraq.”

State Senator Patrick knows women, all righty. Just dangle a few C-notes under their nose and they’re yours.

Posted in Austin and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Public meatloaves of Austin, now, sadly, with Garrison Keillor

Published by Twisty on March 15, 2007. 107 Comments

meatloaf_the_woodland.jpg
Somewhat better than lutefisk: the loaf of meat at a new joint on South Congress called, I am sorry to say, The Woodland. It is the sort of place that sells plates of “comfort food” for $12, has a fake tree growing in the middle of the room, and alludes to whipped potatoes as “mashers.”

Great news! I have figured out how to defeat patriarchy.

No, wait a minute. Upon further reflection, I’m afraid it turns out that all my solutions involve the intervention of imaginary 3rd party aliens.

One of which aliens, as long as I am winging along on a flight of fancy, would be under strict instructions to deal sternly with humble down-home liberal gasbag Garrison Keillor, perhaps by stuffing a quantity of lutefisk, made by modest Lutheran church ladies, into his folksy old piehole and applying ducktape thereupon. For though the dude makes it easier to accept as an axiom that old people are all bigots, one despairs to hear him in action.

I allude to remarks tendered by Keillor in a recent essay published in Salon, wherein he lets loose, in a mocking tone, a string of gay stereotypes that, if I had hair, would’ve curled it. Surely you’ve seen it by now? It’s the one where Keillor, a sexist asshole and serial mack-daddy of some renown, makes himself ridiculous as a shill for heterosexual monogamy, on the grounds that it protects innocent children from the horrors of “hyphenated” — i.e. step — relatives, and from pairs of “sardonic,” “flamboyant,” campy-performer-worshipin’, chartreuse-pants-wearin’ “daddies.”

Lake Woebegone is where Rockwellian fantasies of a honky smalltown godbag greatest-generation America go to rot; would that it could also contain the paternalistic, pretentiously faux-rustic prattlings of its delusional old fart creator.

Posted in Austin, Keep your bias off my gender and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.