"Anyone else feel like the last feisty wife in Stepford?"
Lorne, on Angel


This is apropos of many things, especially our recent national mindset that "war objection=treason," and I can't fucking believe that there isn't more vocal outrage about this, but mostly I just laughed and laughed when I watched this tape of Angel the other night. If you are avoiding television these days, you have good reason to, but there is humor out there coming from sources other than our national leaders or the Iraqi misinformation minister (see below).


There is more horrible news on my personal homefront which I am too exhausted to go into here, but it is taking everything I have to keep the brain cells firing today. Trying to grease the skids with a blog episode or two.


Britney Spears is like so five minutes ago...

This I learned from V this weekend. I had already gotten inklings of this earlier this year, when she and her fellow 9-10 year old friends informed me that, collectively, they liked her music (their term, not mine) but didn't like her. Yesterday, in response to one her songs coming up on Radio Disney (Music Your Way!) I was reminded of this fact. And the reason (you won't believe this):

"She's had too much plastic surgery."

Now, my heart did a little gladdened leap at this, because for the moment anyway it suggests to me that V has internalized an important lesson about appearance and personal value and all of the things about which I am frankly quite concerned, since members of her family place such a high priority on how "pretty" she is. And she's very much a Barbie-doll enthusiast, so there has always been (for me, anyway) a closet fear that she would start to idealize that sort of appearance. Hearing your five year old worry that she is getting too fat as she looks in the full length mirror is cause for alarm, people. Now that she's older, the pressures are greater. So Britney has plastic surgery, and that's bad. Hooray!

"What kind of surgery do you think she had?" (I ask questions for a living, remember).

"Well," she says, "she did her boobs..."

I nearly drove off the road.


posted by MT at 3:05 PM |

We Love the Iraqi Information Minister...Dot Com!

Okay, even I have to admit that he was morbidly appealing in his staunch denial of the facts. You just have to admire someone so unabashedly and slavishly devoted to delivering the party line. Of course, it is probably likely that someone had a gun to the head of his favorite pet to encourage his enthusiasm.

And so, in the web's inimitable style, we now have fan sites devoted to the guy. Try this site for starters. My two favorite Photoshop efforts are below.






posted by MT at 4:33 PM |

I don't think this is what the Department of Homeland Security wanted you to do with it...
link via sensible erection



A Levittown, Pa., woman, honored last year for her work as a foster mother by a local organization, is now under arrest for allegedly wrapping up her foster children with duct tape.


Great. I had planned a big rant about parenting and lack of compassion and how those things sometimes co-exist, but...naah. The story speaks for itself.

Happy Festivus, lemurs. Heading to Dad's for bunny day, where LK gets to meet Grandma Rose for the first time. Don't worry sweetie. She will fall in love with you too.


posted by MT at 1:29 PM |

From the Unfortunate Moments in Advertising files...


Found this link via FARK dot com.



The caption reminds us that shortness of breath is one symptom of SARS.

D'oh!


posted by MT at 11:09 AM |

Orwellian is becoming a meaningless term anymore.

Kind of like "diva."

ACM sent me this link which I find chilling but sadly, not particularly surprising. Apparently the "jubilant crowds" that cheered as the statue of Saddam was toppled numbered about 200 at the outside, and may have been planted for this media "event."


posted by MT at 11:07 AM |

It was either them or McDonald's...
stolen from The Daily Probe



posted by MT at 1:15 PM |

Marketing challenges

Back when I used to teach research methods, I often posed the following question about targeting and demographics to my students: Who do you think that the marketing folks think is at home during the day? Answers: women, the angry, undereducated unemployed, students, out of shape people with lots of disposable income....and their pets, seniors, accident victims with an axe to grind.... And so on. The point being that you aren't getting a necessarily representative sample if you, say, make phone calls during the day looking for a good cross-section of society (we'll shelve, for the moment the discussion of whether that list represents a representative cross-section of society...I'm leaning in one direction but that should be obvious).


All of this by way of highlighting the powerfully strange spam I've been getting lately. It makes me wonder whether they even bother to do any targeted marketing at all. Of course, by now they know that I'm of an age where p0rn dominates my thoughts, as indicated by the dozens of ads for "Lezbian Academy!" and "MILF Hunt Continues!" and others that are not safe for prime time viewers that I get routinely in my bulk mail box. But I just got the following: Look Great in a New Powered Wheelchair! From "Cool Wheelchair" (that's Dr. Cool Wheelchair, I believe, but they made it more friendly and colloquial to get me to open it up. Clearly.)

Now I ask you, how does one reconcile the computer geek bulk spam, the pr0n, and the happy friendly wheelchair? And then, I am to believe that at 37 I will look "cool" in such a device? First of all, I am inclined to think (and LK will agree because she loves me) that I don't need a wheelchair to look cool. I'm way cool without one. But more to the point, when you look at the photos they embed in the ad, I'm not really thinking that anyone looks cool in these things. There's little in the way of flashy chrome, or handlebars with neat tassles on them, or anyplace to put your fuzzy dice, and the sound system frankly leaves a bit to be desired. I doubt you could annoy anyone at the traffic light with this thing, unless of course one considers the aggravation factor of a motorized chair going speeds of up to 2 on the open road....

So I'm at a bit of a loss. If there were an easy and essentially free way to accomplish it, I would love to find my name cross-referenced on whatever mailing lists I'm on, with a little description of how I got there.


More spam

In the second class of spam (the first being the inappropriate but Enthusiastic! Offers! For You! As You Requested!) are the re: fwd: RE: mizzpelled xypmior ads fr U to reed...As if they hired a cadre of second graders to type quickly without a dictionary. From this second group came the rather odd existential question: are you tiered? And I thought...why, I clearly am. Aren't we all?? On one level, there's the deep desire to to good in the face of shifting social norms and pressure to succeed at any cost. Layered over that is the deep cynism brought on by media bombardment and the general distrust of elected officials that this engenders. Over that you have to slather the love of cats. So yes, I would have to say I'm rather tiered. And all of this will be helped by some new ephedra-based herbal stimulant. Or so they would have me believe...

I remain dubious.


posted by MT at 10:04 AM |