Twisted Spinster

Complaining that Sarah Palin came off as stupid while being interviewed by Katie Couric, the talking kewpie doll of network tv, is like complaining that George W. Bush is stupid because he pronounces nuclear like “nukular.”

Here’s a picture of the cockpit of the plane Bush learned to fly. Kinda more complicated than my Toyota Tercel, but I’m on the intardnet every day, bet I could learn to get that thing off the ground in, oh, never.

(Click for larger. Geniuses.)

And just to close this out — how many of us keyboard wizards know how to kill and dress a moose? (Hint: that doesn’t mean dress the corpse up in your grandma’s wedding dress.) But hell, it won’t play on CNN, so let’s all cry Doom! Doooooom!

If I had thought about changing my mind about moving out of Florida, this would have got me re-enthused. Alcee Hastings is one of those corrupt Florida politicians that just won’t go away, and now he reveals that he’s another crazy, PDS-inflicted loser. And no one but us bitter, gun-clinging (guess now that means I have to buy a gun), Bible-pounding right-wing warmonglers will call him out on it. Because we’re RACIST.

In personal news, I went to bed early last night because I had a stomach ache. I have no idea… I’m hoping it was just one of those things. And I do feel better already; in fact, I finally got around to doing the rest of my laundry. I have to go put everything in the dryer now. And I’ve already started sorting through my clothes; I plan to get rid of all but a small set of outfits. I always end up wearing just the same five things over and over again anyway (yes, I wash them between wearing!), and I have all these “oh, that’s cute and on sale” items that I never wear anymore. They probably wouldn’t fit my fat rump anyway.

Off to the laundry room.

I just found this:

In this week’s U.S. News & World Report, staffer Justin Ewers interviews Benjamin Jealous, the new president of the NAACP. (I couldn’t find it online anywhere.) Near the end of the Q&A, Ewers poked at “catty” Sarah Palin…

No really, his last name is “Jealous”? Sometimes real life beats fiction all to hell.

This article is best read while listening to this song.

Naturally, the fact that Naomi Wolf (“the men are killing women with makeup! Aaaggghhh!”) is driven to hysterics by Sarah Palin makes the latter seem even cooler than she already is. This election is getting more exciting by the day. McCain, you SLY DOG.

(Via Rachel Lucas.)

“Well, honey, I pretended that the war hadn’t actually ended. See, fighting was too much fun, and even more fun was the nice way everyone treated you when your side was losing. Then the tide turned, we won, and then it wasn’t fun anymore… because we realized that our winning meant everybody got to benefit, even people who weren’t our sort. That wasn’t supposed to happen. We were supposed to take all their power and lord it over them the way we had been lorded over!”

It was never about fixing society’s ills. It was always about revenge and power.

I mean, if you’re 84 years old and clearly demented, what are you waiting for? Time to do your duty!

(Via Tom McMahon’s news feed.)

I’ve thought occasionally about a cottage at the beach. Not for full time living, you understand, but for vacations and the like. But in my mind it’s a simple place, a shack really, with electricity and plumbing (I needs my toilet and my hot coffee) but not much in the way of luxuries. For one thing, I wouldn’t have air-conditioning. Right on the beach, even in Florida, you don’t really need it if you have the proper kind of place to live — in other words, a simple sort of place with lots of open screened windows. And I wouldn’t have luxe furniture, or cable tv (heck, I wouldn’t have tv). Since I only have a cell phone these days I wouldn’t need a phone line. That would mean no internet, but that’s what coffee houses are for. And the whole point of a getaway place is to “get away.”

Here is the plan of my dream beach mansion: basically a one-room house with a bathroom, it could have just a shower, I don’t need a tub for a vacation. I could do with a kitchenette, or no kitchen at all — I actually have stashed in my closet one of those combo coffee machine/toaster/tiny fry pan on top jobs that pop up in bargain stores (I got mine at Big Lots). I also have a larger electric fry pan. And of course I’d have a simple grill outside, just a pile of concrete blocks with a metal grill stuck in them, or I’d get a cheap charcoal grill from Walmart.

I’ve already said no luxe furniture, just some cast-off stuff maybe, or those cheap resin chairs and a beach lounger thing. And a simple cot to sleep on. The shack could be made of wood, like old Florida houses (like the house I grew up in, actually, which lasted through fifty-five years of Miami weather only to succumb to the wrecker ball). And when a hurricane came along and wiped it out, it wouldn’t be like I lost a million-dollar mansion with all the conveniences of the hectic city life I was supposedly leaving behind.

You know, that whole “it won’t happen to me” mentality? You do know that’s like painting a big target on your behind, right? God likes to keep in practice.

Remember when “telling it like it is” (that is, speaking and writing in blunt, “real world” language devoid of the fripperies and embellishments of what was seen to be over-educated, dessicated discourse) was promoted and praised? If you’re old enough to remember the Sixties and Seventies you do. And like many of that era’s fashions, this practice soon became overused and exaggerated, resulting in today’s atmosphere of f-word this, f-word that in areas that the liberal arts were supposed to “uplift” and enlighten, which in turn has led to a frantic backpedaling and seeking of the sort of enforced niceness that was once seen as one of the main weapons of the older generation against the young. What a difference a few decades of “brutal truth” makes…

The problem is, along with the rules of polite discourse we have thrown out the idea that there is a superior culture that all must at least have knowledge of and preferably imitate as well as we can. So instead of a movement towards “highfalutin’, fancy-assed” over-cultured activity, we get this:

As lawyers take over the internet, only a certain level of discourse is deemed acceptable. People like me, from lower class backgrounds, where blunt talk about the obvious, undeniable differences between ethnic groups is commonplace, are increasingly pressured to adopt a phony baloney way of writing in order to be considered acceptable.

The flowery utterances of the snobs of yore might have been irritating to the hoi-polloi, but at least it indicated a society firmly planted in the solid ground of Western Culture, all 2,000 plus years of it. Today’s yammering Kos kid and puling “spokesperson” for this or that politically-correct group of busibodies might as well come from another galaxy, one where all the stars have burnt out long ago.

Eve Ensler is very worried that Sarah Palin is going to perform dentistry on polar bears. Or rape them. Or something. I’m not really sure, as I find the ravings of demented, pathetic loons hard to interpret. I did get that she is going to vote for Obama in November, despite the fact that she goes on and on about needing the whiteness of polar bears. Doesn’t she know that’s racist?

(Via.)

Update: wow, when you start looking you just can’t stop… Polar Bears for Obama. Do they have to apologize for not being black bears? (Should we start calling black bears African-American bears, even though there aren’t any bears in Africa? This is your head on Democrats…)

Okay, on to important things — I heard there was this gigantic hurricane about to hit the Gulf Coast. What’s it called? Oh yeah, Ike. It’s odd — I could swear that Gustav got more coverage than this one, even though it’s a much worse storm. (Just checked the tv news — Houston trashed, Galveston under water, over 4 million people without power.) If you ask me, once it was clear that everyone’s fun party playtime town, New Orleans, wasn’t directly threatened (though much of coastal Louisiana is getting flooded by storm surge, but fortunately not where celebrities go to get beignets and gumbo) and there is no special Republican event going on, many of the doomshriekers went elsewhere (to Alaska, apparently, where I hope they all get eaten by polar bears).

Oh, and the cynic in me wonders how many of those idiots who refused to evacuate places like Galveston were hoping to get a big fat FEMA check out of their ordeal? Not to mention some pity face time on teevee when they are rescued off the roofs of what remains of their homes. According to one news story, many of these stranded people started calling for rescue after such had become impossible, as they had been told would happen. Hurricanes: Ma Nature’s way of clearing the human race of idiots for hundreds of thousands of years.