Origin unknown. Sent in by Tidy.
Archive for the 'Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot' Category
Male eagle feeds fish shards to E2. Screengrab from Decorah eaglecam.
Surely, because you have not spent the past week under a rock or in a cryogenic stasis of some kind, today’s heartwarming nature crap-cam recommendation is unnecessary. I allude to the Decorah bald eagles with which you are undoubtedly already obsessed, so I don’t need to explain that they’re a nesting pair raising 3 recently-hatched offspring in a giant tree in rural Iowa while hundreds of thousands of people spy on them 24/7 via sneaky webcam.
Everyone I know is obsessed with these eagles. My mother calls me every morning to express her anxiety that the smallest eaglet isn’t getting enough to eat, and to impugn the sub-par parenting skills of “the mother.”
You know, it’s funny, she used to call me every morning to say the same thing about my sibling Tidy’s sub-par parenting skills. My mother considers herself a professional mother, but it might be more accurate to say that, like so many women, she is a professional mother-impugner. My nieces, for example, may be tolerably well adjusted but it’s no thanks to Tidy’s howling ineptitude; if she’d only take Mom’s advice! Likewise, Mom is convinced that she could raise eagles better than eagles do, but the truth is that if you left her alone with this brood of hatchlings they’d all be dead as doornails in about 24 hours, mostly on accounta the mater’s longstanding reluctance to rip dead squirrels apart with her beak.
You know a viral video has spiraled completely out of control when it starts affecting medical care. I suffered my biennial ankle sprain a couple days ago, so I went to my sporty doctor to see how much gruesome surgery I’d be needing this time around. She gave the appendage — the usual Guam-sized purple foot dangling brokenly from leg, etc — a perfunctory eyeball, but seemed to entirely lack the comforting injury-related focus that an aunt with an excruciating ruptured ligament looks for when visiting a medical professional.
“I can’t stop thinking about those eagles,” she said, absently poking at the afflicted limb. “I haven’t seen them since this morning. Is the third one getting anything to eat? I wonder how long before they can regulate their own body temperature? Can you believe the nest weighs over a ton? I bet it really stinks with all that rotting meat lying around. Huh? Oh, just ice the crap out of it. And tell the eagles ‘hi’ for me!”
Horribly, there has suddenly appeared, on the website next to the video stream, a very distracting Twitter/Facebook feed. The content of the comments is precisely the kind of sentimental anthropomorphizing vapidizations you would expect from gawkers at a zoo whose exposure to birds has apparently been limited to Foghorn Leghorn and Tweety. The adult eagles are “Mom” and “Dad”; the hatchlings are “babies,” and the situation is universally perceived as precisely analogous to a human nuclear family.
“Oooh, baby just pooped lol!”
“More housework for Mom hehe!”
“A woman’s work is never done….lolz!”
“Aw momma is tired!”
“Why doesn’t she feed the little one, she is a bad mom!”
“Aww, daddy is feeding the babies bwekfast! Good daddy!”
And of course the trolls — “I kill eagles ery day mmm Eaglette taste good” [sic] — who “ruin it fore evrybody!” [sic]
My favorite tweet so far: “Is there a pecking order?”
It is remarkable that human people can look at eagles — creatures that inhabit Volkswagen-sized piles of twigs 80′ up in trees, that lay eggs, that have no hair and no boobs, that eat raw squirrels, that can fly, for crying out loud, and that in pretty much every other respect that is germane to discourse on human social structure are the very antithesis of H. sapiens — and see themselves. And by “themselves” I mean the patriarchal paradigm. In a nest of eagles.
Fig. 7. Unknown Artist. Kid trophy. 2009. Plastic and marble, 5 1/2″ x 3″. Collection of Finn Faster (age 5).
From the colorful comments on the MacGyver post:
Oppression is like kids’ soccer: we ALL get a trophy! — tinfoil hattie
Hetero feminists are not all Stepford Wives, you know. — Jezebella
If one partners with a man, with or without papers, it REQUIRES you to live in a one-down position every day of your life. — FemmeForever
The whole het-vs-lesbian debate strikes me as a little bit disingenuous, since sexual relationships are not the only kinds of relationships that can occur between men and women, and indeed are not, in my opinion, particularly distinguished or special as compared to familial, friendly, or professional relationships. — Triste
Having a father or brother is not voluntary. Having a husband or son is. Platonic friendships and professional relationships do not have the same emotional intensity, i.e. the kind of emotional intensity which encourages compromises. — Kali
I would go further and say the superlative importance our culture places on romantic relationships is the very KEY to how patriarchy maintains itself. — Darragh Murphy
Being with women doesn’t insulate me from things I fear about patriarchal culture. — nails
So, a tube sock, an Olivetti, and a Timex watch walk into a bar. — buttercup
[A] long period of celibacy for women is crucial to coming around to the idea that men aren’t necessary for happiness and fulfillment and that life can be pretty satisfying without them. — speedbudget
Radical feminism is deeply unpopular among heterosexual women. It requires of us what we cannot do: give up our collusion with our oppressors. — Hedgepig
Just the idea of a man’s peen grosses me out now — sorry, but what awful dangly little things they are! urgh. — N/A
I like to pretend emo bands fronted by impossibly-banged boys in skinny jeans are actually headed by Amy Ray. — Sarah
Fellatios are quite a hassle. *– Anna
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* Remember the Fellatio Wars of Aught-Six? Good times!
On the outside chance that there still exists a member of the Blametariat who has not seen Privilege Denying Dude, a quasi-amusing expression of the deep inner pain of the sex class and other perma-dissed persons, here ya go. Thanks to everyone who sent it in, particularly those whose emails began “I know you’ve already seen this but.” What a great idea for my own opening line!
I love Privilege Denying Dude, because he’s every dude I know, and lard knows how much I love dudes!
OK where the hell have I been?
I hate to be mysterious, but the insolent sticks-in-the-mud who boss me around are on my case about revealing a bunch of personal crap on the internet. And let’s face it, people’s personal crap is fucking boring anyway. So let’s just say that a combination of circs, or, if you will, a “perfect storm” (that’s what my sibling Tidy calls every confluence of 2 or more forces the outcome of which involves a spilled latte or burned-out light bulb) has worked its influence on my fate of late, preventing me from being seated at my desk for my customary hours on end. Meanwhile, I have applied for, and been granted, a 6-month sabbatical. Formal blaming takes a holiday! The Twisty Kiester is goin’ a-flittin!
Naturally, informal blaming will continue without interruption. Which means that whenever I see a trailer on TCM for a movie entitled — I’m not even kidding — “Every Girl Should Be Married” (1949), which movie is billed as a sort of how-to for “landing” a husband, as well as a revelation to dudes on the wily methods women use to “trap” them (stalking, apparently), I will still curl the narrow lip and narrow the jaundiced eye. Sure, they pass it off as a harmless relic of antiquated mores, but unto TCM I say: aired without any critical analysis, this movie’s unremitting “classic” misogyny just adds another layer of gunk on the antifeminist zeitgeist here in 2010, endorsed by dreamboat Hollywood icons-cum-patriarchy minions like Cary Grant.
Anyway, I’ll look in on the blog from time to time, whenever computer access permits. No way to tell how often that will be. The future is uncertain!
Until an actual patriarchy-blaming time slot opens up in a day or two, allow your absentee blogger to offer a) an award-nominated photograph of the leopard frog eggs found yesterday in the Spinstitute for Texas Herpetology Dept’s experimental algae-choked swamp of a former swimming pool, and b) this light and amusing BDSM-related interlude entitled “You’re chaining up far too many women.” Thanks to blamer Mary Ann — who says in her email that she not only loves but also adores me — for sending it in.
Suddenly an idea for a great new time-saving email policy suggests itself: from now on my secretary Phil will be instructed to only read emails that commence with declarations of the writer’s love and adoration for me. Notifications from my derelict cell phone company, my ISP, Amazon.com, the Human Fund, RH Reality Check, and dudes who write in to complain that the I Blame the Patriarchy commenting policy is sexist, classist, racist, and some other ist I can’t remember? Fuggeddabowdit.
Remember when you first got the Internet? I don’t, but maybe you do. Maybe you remember how kooky those first few spams were? Penis enlargement! Baldness! Impotence! Bwahaha! Nigerian princes with money trouble! Bwahaha! Etc.
Alas, those days are gone. Spam remains dude-centric, like all manifestations of patriarchal culture, but now it’s all banal lists of links to niche porn, or worse, the spammer just phones it in with a monotone “nice post, thnks. britni sex tape” or “how to fix my credit … I must put a bookmark on this website!…”
O the tedium.
Until today. I’m not sure what, precisely, is being expressed here, but whatever it is, it’s totally got a vigorous, sutra-esque, cosmic truthity thing going on.
Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in actuality, the four acts of the mirthful opera known as freshness, and they pass like bubbles of a grit of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a entire fool. Sent from my iPad 4G
Meanwhile, today’s No. 1 Science Information takes the shape of the tomato hornworm, a moth larva belonging to the popular sphinx family of moths. In larval form, the tomato hornworm is known primarily as a pest of the first water. This fat caterpillar is precisely the color of tomato vines, which pigmentational situation we here at the lab attribute to a science-process known as freshness, or, as some folks like to think of it, natural selection.
The tomato hornworm can exceed lengths of 3-4 inches, and will make short work of your eggplant, bell pepper, and tomato plants, which insatiable pillaging you’re likely to take personally, but really, just let it go.
The spike, or “horn,” on its butt is intimidating, but doesn’t sting.
After the tomato hornworm spends the winter pupating deep in the cold, hard ground, it emerges in spring as a humongous — and I mean a 5-incher, bigger than some hummingbirds — bark-hued sphinx moth with orange spots on its sides. At dusk, the moth ransacks flowers, relieving them of nectar.
Observations by the Twistitute for Arthropodical Enstudiement, Lepidoptera Dept include:
The tomato hornworm poops out enormous (1 cm) capsules (or, as the entomologically-inclined like to call it, frass) shaped like radiatore pasta.
The tomato hornworm emits very disturbing clicks when you pry it off your tomato vine (which is difficult, because that fucking caterpillar does not want to go). This alarming sound may be interpreted by heartwarming nature crappists as the voice of a sentient being declaring “As a goddam tomato hornworm I assert my natural right to be here on this vine so piss off, you grotesque pink savage.”
It’s all part of the mirthful opera of freshness.
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No. 1 Tomato Hornworm Information Notes
Drees, Bastiaan M. and Jackman, John A. A Field Guide to Common Texas Insects. Houston: Gulf Publishing. 1998.
Dave’s Garden, “Definition of tobacco hornworm”. June 4, 2010 < http://davesgarden.com/guides/terms/go/3080/ >
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Have you tacqueax seen this? I found it when I was researching TV tropes. It’s called TV Tropes.
TV Tropes is a charmingly nerdy, somewhat dorkily written pseudo-scholarly reference work, a wiki-style compendium of literary conventions and devices used in television and beyond. Some of the tropes are direct from the good old literary canon, some are modern coinages what may or may not stand the test of time, but it’s all so Byzantine and labyrinthine and mezzanine and infinitely recursive I just can’t stop reading it.
This wiki is nothing if not overkill. It covers the beaming up of the aforementioned conventions and devices into the 21st century media mothership, sure, but it also identifies, classifies, and documents modern media-specific conventions and devices to the point of neurosis. This thing is hilarious, especially if you are a cinquagenarian spinster aunt who has begun to feel the hot breath of future shock on her wrinkly neck, because the concepts are often specific to pop sub-cultures I know nothing about on accounta they weren’t around when I was young enough to care about pop sub-cultures to the point of identifiying, classifying and documenting their minutiae. Anime. Video games. Fanfic.
Here’s an example.
Paratext
Everything that is an element of the whole package immediately encompassing the text and not part of the text itself.
In other words, all that stuff that isn’t a part of the show/movie/story itself, but still comes with it. The stuff on the box, the stuff that comes before the show/movie, etc.
I had to meditate on that for a minute before I grasped what is meant by “the whole package” and “stuff on the box.” Whereas I might consider dustjacket blurbs as examples of something called “paratext,” it never before dawned on me that there is a whole, classifiable species of non-content “content” that envelops modern media. Bonus material, pop-ups, trailers, bloopers, closing credits, even PBS titles thanking Viewers Like You. I would quibble that some of this stuff isn’t, technically, text, but a lot of it is, so, fine.
Anyway, I mention all this because it has long been a dream of mine to do something similar with a blaming wiki. How convenient it would be! Instead of putting all this time and effort into banging out these lousy posts, I could just publish a collection of wiki links to the specific ideas and concepts I wish to drag out of mothballs to make whatever point, and call it a day! Because let’s face it; there’s not a whole lotta new under the patriarchy blaming sun.
Not My Nigel, Mansplainin, Obstreperal Lobe, She Was Asking For It, Empowerfulment, etc — they’d all be neatly collected in one spot for your blaming pleasure. Sadly, I’ve never been able to figure out how to do this wiki without having to spend 8 days a week culling out all the troll crap.
The idea for this non-post popped into my lobe when I noticed that my last two essays (“The Girl” and “The Slain Masseuse”) are actually blaming-trope classifications in disguise.
Got any favorite blaming conventions of your own? Or any idea how to pull off the wiki? Please enlighten the group.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that I would be posting only intermittently, on subjects that nobody cares about, for a while. And I did not lie. To wit:
This huge abstract pain is totally overpriced. Considering how easy it is to construct your own for free, out of practically nothing.
Speaking of free pain, Etsy really is an excellent source. Awesome!
Oh no! A 40-second video of a dancing cartoon butt wreaks havoc with my neurotransmitters!
Below, sent in by blamer Katie — thanks, Katie! — is the video that generated my paroxysm. According to my secretary Phil, the video is funny, but not as funny as I think it is.
Because of my award-nominated, it-is-highly-unlikely-that-you-are-qualified-to-post-here moderation policy — “Old Iron-Fist” is what they call me down at Spinster HQ — readers of I Blame the Patriarchy aren’t always exposed to mansplaining at standard Internet concentrations. I sometimes wonder if this is really all to the good, since mansplaining can be so goddam hilarious, and who doesn’t enjoy a hearty guffaw after a hard day of gossiping or neurosurgery or trench-digging or whatever it is that you do all day?
But then I come to my senses.
Mansplaining — you know mansplaining, right? It’s that loud, annoying, repetitive alarm call that men emit whenever they perceive a lower-status person challenging their authority — isn’t really so goddam hilarious in and of itself. This is because it is a hallmark of domination culture, because it is comprised primarily of meaningless noise (whether taken in or out of context), and because it is obfuscatory, oppressive, denigrating, sexist, and rude. It can only achieve comic status when openly mocked. Preferably by an angry mob.
My thoughts turned briefly to mansplanation mockery this morning when I found myself deleting a something of a dilly. The author in question was, as is typical, correcting me on this point and that, explaining that my views (but not his) are “sexist,” yadda yadda, in a tone that suggested so deep a reverence for his own intellect that he’d expect the solar system to explode if he failed to execute this very important takedown on my blog. His brilliant denouement? The assertion that if I “honestly” disagree with him — apparently this contingency should be all but impossible — then “what [I] practice isn’t feminism.”
Aww yiah. It’s my very favorite species of mansplaining, the species where some dim bulb with a feeble and unsophisticated grasp of the principles — instead of kissing my ass and begging me brokenly for a few words of enlightenment that might ultimately prevent him from going through life known to the ladies as Chad, the Purulent Lump of Gonorrhea — purports to know — better than the actual feminist — what feminism is or isn’t.
How appropriate that veteran blamer Ron Sullivan should have chosen this point to alert me to an excellent mansplaining-mockery post at Zuska’s entitled “You May Be A Mansplainer If …”. This post is the greatest thing ever published on either this Internet or that one. Zuska invites readers to give examples of, and to ridicule, mansplaining. It’s the angry mob of which I spoke so yearningly just a moment ago! As of this writing there are over 200 comments. Like this one by Zuskateer mightydoll, a classic in the Men Literally Cannot Hear Women Speaking Division.
my ex used to do this:
ex: something’s wrong with my computer.
me: Oh, looks like there’s a phrenicle in the stubert zone
ex: something’s wrong with my computer
me: Why not check the stubert zone for phrenicles?
ex: something’s wrong with my computer – - I’ll ask Dick at work about it.
A WEEK PASSES IN WHICH I MENTION THE STUBERT PHRENICLES A FEW MORE TIMES
ex: Hey, I spoke to Dick at work about my computer. Turns out, (begins speaking really slowly) there are these things called phrenicles which SPEAK … TO… the molydimes. The molydimes can reside in the jiminy zone, or they can reside in the stubert zone, but WHEN they reside in the stubert zone, sometimes there’s a problem with them communicating with the loovarths, so it’s best to keep phrenicles out of the stubert zone. All I have to do is move these phrenicles back to the jiminy zone and it’s solved. Isn’t Dick at work a computer god?
me: …
Or this, from SKM:
You might be a mansplainer if you begin a sentence addressed to a woman whom you know holds a degree in neuroscience with “there are molecules in the brain called neurotransmitters”.
This You May Be A Mansplainer post is not without its bittersweet moments. For instance, there is the introduction into English of the exquisite and apparently Brazilian phrase “rule crapper” ( as in “There, he did it again, he just crapped a rule”), but tragically, the author of this revelatory comment simultaneously mansplains that mansplaining “is not necessarily sexist” because men crap rules at other men all the time.
Even if it happens to dudes, it can still be sexist, yo.
Poop, I just crapped a rule!
Poop!
In fact, quite the buttload of Zuska’s mansplaining commenters are apparently authoritative experts on mansplaining. This is surprising and kind of meta, since it is a well-known fact that men who claim to know what the fuck mansplaining is cannot resist mansplaining that it doesn’t, at least for them, exist. More than a few of them mansplain that theirs is a truly lofty and nuanced apprehension of mansplaining, which is why when they do it they aren’t really doing it, so it isn’t the same as when actual mansplainers mansplain.
Then the outraged feminist shows up with the news that this awful manhating post has — get ready for a shock – made feminism the laughingstock of the whole internet. Oh no.
“Stop helping” is this outraged feminist’s refrain. Women should steer clear of critical analyses of male privilege because it makes us unpopular with the Chads of the world.
This is all outrageous and very maddening!
God, the whole thing is just swell.
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