Twisted Spinster

I started reading this post about a news item from Failed Britannia on yet another Limey establishment’s genuflection to their new Islamic overlords, when my eye got stuck on the following sentence: “Janette Lynch, whose seven-year-old son Keanu attends the school[…]”

How do you expect anyone to take you seriously if you name your child after a foreign movie actor (especially one with all the talent of drying paint)? Get measured for your burkha, bitch.

(Via another link on KisP.)

Keep in mind that most of these people are also fans of Obama. What does that tell you? Well, it tells me that we are fucking doomed, but you knew that already. (And by the way, this occurred to me first. So there.)

Hey, so a few people could possibly get crushed to death by deadly chunks of ice. But that’s a small price to pay for nice, clean wind-powered electricity! Which will be used to power the 24-hour televisions that will be the only entertainment available to the remainder of the population, safe in their concrete-lined underground bunkers.

(Via Tim.)

I’ve been wondering for a while where all these allergic kids came from too. Now when I was a kid (after the Stone Age, thank you very much) we had a couple of kids with asthma and then there was The Allergic Kid (so named because he was the only one we knew of who had permission not to eat certain things because he’d break out into hives — the rest of us had to eat everything we were given or else face a lecture) in my school, and this was in a populous city full of upper-class Jews and middle-class Hispanics, which were the only ethnic groups I knew of with these frailties. (Fun anecdote — I use that word since we are no longer allowed to call things we’ve observed in person in our own lives “facts” unless we have degrees in the subject on those facts and were engaged in an official study of those subjects: half the Cubans I knew were allergic to fish and shellfish. This was hilarious to me because Cuba is an island. When you go into a real Cuban restaurant — I mean where Cuban families eat, not where celebrities flock — in Miami you’ll find maybe one or two seafood dishes on the menu, one shrimp and one fish, and the rest is beef, chicken, or pork. And I knew quite a few Cubans who were allergic to corn and corn meal. Cuban cuisine is less heavy on the tamales and taco-like items than other Hispanic cuisines.)

Anyway, while I knew about food allergies and knew a few kids who had them, most kids were healthy eating machines with the normal likes and dislikes about foods that their parents generally ignored, because that food on that plate cost money, money didn’t grow on trees, and if they wanted dessert they were going to finish their beets or sweet potatoes or whatever else they didn’t like. And I can tell you one thing that was universally loved by every kid I knew and that was peanut butter. I think if I was a kid and I had developed an allergy to peanut butter, I would have gone into hysterics. Peanut butter and kids go together like… I don’t know, peanut butter and the emergency room do today, supposedly. I tell you what. I think the whole thing started with some parents who were sick of their kids asking for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner every goddamn day. “No honey, remember? Peanut butter makes you very sick. Yes it does, that wasn’t a cold you had last week, it was the peanut butter. The doctor says we can’t have peanut butter or peanuts in the house anymore.” And then it spread, until the peanut industry collapsed and thousands of people were thrown out of work, precipitating a worldwide economic depression that caused civilization to go into a tailspin, weakening the Western world so greatly that all of Europe fell to the New Islamic Empire and the United States was dissolved and carved up and divided between China and Brazil.

See? See what happens when you don’t give your kid his peanut butter sandwich? They’ll pry my can of Jif from my cold, dead fingers…

In San Francisco this past Friday, protesters demonstrate against the recent terrorist atrocities in Mumbai. Oh, wait…

Hey! No laughing at the cardboard “cars”!

(Via SondraK.)

We had yet another car/train meetup here in Orlando. It did not end well for the car. What happened (according to the local tv news report) was the Amtrak Silver Star was heading towards a crossing, going about 58 miles per hour (under the speed limit for trains), signalling all the way with its horn of course, and the crossing lights came on and the bars went down. Now, SOP for cars coming up to the tracks is for them to stop at the crossing bars. However, our genius driver had Better Things To Do than to wait for some stupid train, so he went around the crossing bars. And promptly got pasted by the train. The driver is now dead, as is one of the passengers in the car. I believe there was another passenger in the car who was injured. And — here’s the kicker — this will surprise no one who has grown up in an area full of immigrants from a certain culture — the driver was in his twenties, and his last name was Martinez.

Trust me on this, I’ve lived in Florida all my life, and whenever there’s been news of a traffic accident caused by some stupid-ass move on the part of the driver such as running a red light (because Real Men don’t let little lights tell them what to do) or driving too fast around a curve (because he’s a man, baybee, and he’s got important places to go, and he can do wheelies, just watch!) or going around a crossing bar when a train is coming up the track (because his Macho Man rays will slow time and enable him to defeat the laws of physics), nine times out of ten the driver, and usually the passengers, are all in their twenties and all have names like Martinez. And the few (very, very few) times I’ve been in a car driven by young Hispanic men, they’ve all driven like arrogant, world-stops-for-me assholes. It’s supposed to be racist now, but when I was in my twenties my friends and I had a rule for dating: no YLMs (Young Latin Males). Not only were they jealous macho pricks (all the smooth, romantic Latin lovers died of some plague in the Fifties), but the insanity that seems to overcome them when they get behind the wheel could have gotten me killed.

By the way, the train? Was delayed about two hours. Then it continued on its way.

One of my number-one pet hates: whistling. I hate it. I’ve always hated it with an unreasonable white-hot hatred. I don’t know why. My father used to whistle all the time, and he was good at it, but otherwise we got on fine so it had nothing to do with some conventional psychological father-daughter dysfunction. I hate whistling on tv. I hate whistling in public. I always itch to find the person who is whistling and smack him right in his hokey, smugly pursed lips. Whistling is irritating. Even the word “whistling” is irritating. Don’t you just envision some grinning leprechaun hopping around saying “whist, mon!” And then whistling “Danny Boy.” And then you pop him in a cauldron of boiling beef broth, stupid green shoes and all, until he’s rendered down to fat, which you make into soap and sell under the brand name “Irish Spring.”

Okay, the whistling guy has stopped, perhaps because someone walked up and stabbed him through the heart. Not me. You’ll never get me, coppers. I was sitting at my desk typing this at the time of the murder. Bwahahahaah!

Here’s another reason I’m glad I didn’t keep that job at Walmart: an employee was killed when a bargain-crazed mob rushed the doors of a Walmart in Long Island when they opened for today’s “special” sales. Today, as we all know, is “Black Friday” — which has become the day I stay home. Not that I have any money to spend, but even if I did, the insanity that this “tradition” has devolved into makes the few dollars I might save, assuming I would be able to get my hands on any of the “while supplies last” goodies, aren’t worth it.

If we were still a civilized nation and not on the brink of Third World-dom, we’d abolish “Black Friday” and just have a normal shopping day. Or the stores would stay closed on the Friday following Thanksgiving so people could spend more time with their families like they always say they want to. But God forbid someone not make a few extra pennies; never mind that encouraging events like this are actually going to bring the economy to its knees (perhaps when people decide to stay away in droves from stores because, well, they don’t want to be trampled to death by a horde of bloated chavs* looking to save 20% on their fifth wide-screen plasma tv) that much sooner.

*We really do need a special word for the sort of lower-class, often-welfare-supported, yet overfed, over-supplied with unnecessary material goods like brand-name shoes and clothes and electronic equipment, under-educated and ill-mannered ranks like the British do with “chav,” which I believe is even racially inclusive, whereas the term “yob” more specifically referred to a white, lower-class, uneducated thug. I think in Long Island and New Jersey they use the word “guido” but that just refers to people of Italian descent. Well for now I am appropriating “chav.”

Update: more on Protein Wisdom.

I don’t usually do the news reporting thing, but this is important. More commentary on Ace of Spades, and here’s an on-the-scene account I found on Instapundit.

The blogs are really the best sources for news on this. I tried watching the mainstream news but I ended up turning it off. If the stations weren’t busy maundering on about Obama’s boring political appointments (it’s Clinton II, that’s all you need to know), they’re still whining about the mortgage thing. And then when I do find a station running footage of the attack, I have to hear commentary from some academic sort on how we can stop this sort of thing by opening up more of the textile industry to Pakistan also by giving them flour, of which they’re suffering a shortage. (I think that was on CNN.) Yep, let’s try to buy off terrorists by giving Muslims more stuff. You know what? Why don’t Muslim countries pull their heads out of their asses and quit with the jihad bullshit? Then we can talk about giving them food that they’ve been too busy playing war games to grow. There is no excuse for this, and it certainly isn’t because of all the other countries who worked hard and prospered. I refuse to feel guilty because some group of people can’t cope with reality.

It occurs to me that one of the reasons pop culture seems so enervated these days is because we got what we wanted: the alternative is now the mainstream. But what little energy the mainstream got was from weird, avant-garde art, which in turn got its energy from the weird, alternative lifestyles practiced by most avant-garde artists. And many of those artists are, or were, gay, or at least liked to hang around gays for the “different” vibe and conversation gays used to provide. Nowadays it seems that all gays can talk about is the latest boring political movement to force Joe and Jane Schmo to accept their bed habits as being “normal.” But they seem to have forgotten that “normal” is another word for “boring.” I posted the following comment here:

Does anyone besides me and Florence King wonder why gays are suddenly (supposedly) so into being accepted into the mainstream, to the extent that they want their living arrangements to be treated by law just like the living arrangements of heterosexual couples? Back in the “old days” (when I was a young ‘un, cough hack) of the Sixties and Seventies gays prided themselves on being “different” and having escaped the square, dull life of the “straights.” They were also widely regarded as wittier and generally more artistic. Even the loud and trashy drag queen act had that bit of burnish from being “not for everyone” especially the “safe entertainment” sorts. Nowadays, however, thanks to the take-a-mile strategies of the GLBT activists, we are daily presented with the full horror of Gays Are Just Folks Like Us, which means they are just as boring and unattractive and lumpen. Some of them even lack a sense of fashion!

I think it’s all a plot, a plot to destroy gay culture from the inside. Gays should fight back — to have their status as outsiders returned! If I were gay, I know I’d want my closet back after the publication of things like Heather Has Two Mommies.

I think the end started when AIDS came along. Regular venereal diseases were one thing — either you took medicine and recovered, or you went mad and died. But AIDS had no cure, which meant that the culture of diva-ness was merged with the culture of sickness which had been growing in the US since at least the Fifties (when self-sufficient, manly movie stars like John Wayne and Gary Cooper began to be supplanted by neurotic fainting violets like James Dean). The results we see today: no one in an position of authority dares say “boo” to a mouse for fear the mouse will turn out to be a gay lesbian cripple with a stack of hate crime forms next to her iMac. In the meantime, I can’t listen to any songs released after 1992 because all rock bands these days look like the same jeans-clad skinny white boys and all their songs are the same grunge-metal chords and lyrics about bad dorm sex on meth. I never thought I would miss Boy George.

Update: I totally did not see this before I posted.