Twisted Spinster

The thing about the internet is you find stuff out that you wouldn’t have in the days before global communication. For instance, this Finnish documentary on Obama supporters caught one bullying a McCain-supporting student in her class. Now, in the pre-internet days this might have made a stir in the local area where it was filmed, and in Finland and wherever else the documentary was shown (which I doubt would have made the network broadcasts), but it would have disappeared into the general larger life of the world. This is why I’ll bet that after they get the radio waves wrapped up tight the new administration’s enforcers of all that is Good and Fair will try to go after the internet next. However, the internet isn’t structured like radio, and they might find they’ve bitten off more than they can chew… (Via Ace and Ace’s comments.)

On a related note, even though I have never wanted to teach I am enough of a teacher’s daughter that, after watching this comedy routine, instead of just laughing I found myself thinking: “You know, he lost control of the situation. Instead of zapping her with the sonic screwdriver he should have realized that she was a lot smarter than she acted and cleverly drawn her out of her defiant pose. That’s what a good teacher would have done.”

As much as I love Washington DC as a place to visit and soak up some history and good food, there’s nothing much about that town I’d miss if a meteor hit it. At the very least, it would be a great opportunity to move the capitol to someplace more… sane.

(Via Ace of Spades in the comments.)

Via Hyacinth Girl comes this bizarre, pathetic article in the Times Online (of what used to be called the London Times before, I guess, it became a faux pas to remind people that London exists) about Michelle Obama. The article is entitled “Michelle Obama: a new type of First Lady” and might as well have the subhead “black women are prettier than white women; now it can be told!” It reads like something that would be posted in the gossip column of a college newspaper, to turn up later tacked anonymously on the notice boards of sororities, leading to midnight hair-pulling fights in the girls’ dorm.

The article is all gushing, fawning praise for Michelle Obama’s looks and cat-claw hisses of various kinds on the inadequacy of several other leaders’ wives, including, for some reason, the wife of France’s President Sarkozy (who, unless Mrs. Obama can speak French and sing like a chanteuse, can run rings around our new First Lady in the accomplishments department). Miss Sarah Vine writes that Mrs. Obama’s “demeanour is a reassuring mixture of sassy and self-deprecating.” Personally I get the impression that she is tense and angry underneath all the smiles. But that may just have been campaign jitters and memories of her life as the seventeenth child of a poor black sharecropper who had to work her way through college by washing the soiled menstrual cloths of rich white women. That would leave me looking a tad hard and bitter too, and I too might want to give my face Angry Clown eyebrows just so people will be too terrified to write anything about me but sycophantic praise.

I was not surprised by any of this — here’s a US map of presidential winners by county. Note: it may look like more red than blue, but note all the metropolitan areas and how they voted. My county in Florida, Seminole, went for McCain by a slender margin, but Orange County, where the city of Orlando is located, went for Obama by a larger margin. And as for the county of my birth, Miami-Dade, it and the two other counties that make up the “Tri-County Area” are solid blue. I have no particular beef I want to express in posting this, I just like maps. (Note: it’s in the Washington Post, so YMMV, caveat lector, etc.)

(Via The Black Informant.)

I’m the King of Town!

The election of our new prez reminds me of this scene:

DOCTOR: […]So how has he managed all this?  The Master was always sort of…hypnotic but this is on a massive scale.

MARTHA: I was gonna vote for him.

DOCTOR: Really?

MARTHA: Well, it was before I even met you.  And I liked him.

JACK: Me too.

DOCTOR: Why do you say that?  What was his policy?  What did he stand for?

MARTHA: (dreamy) I dunno.  He always sounded…good. (fingers start tapping) Like you could trust him.  Just nice.  He spoke about…I can’t really remember, but it was good.  Just the sound of his voice.

DOCTOR: What’s that?

MARTHA: (startled) What?

DOCTOR: That!  That tapping, that rhythm!  What are you doing?

MARTHA: I dunno.  It’s nothing.  It’s j—  I dunno!

(Via.) I’d link to a clip on Youtube if I could find one, but I don’t have the patience to go through all of them, and most of them seem to have been made into music videos anyway.

Well, I at least managed to resist the hypnotic lure of a pretty appearance and smooth voice, but as usual I’m in the minority. Most people in this country pick candidates the way they pick new boyfriends, and with about as much success. I expect the chorus of “He… he wasn’t like that when I first met him!” to start in, oh, say about a couple of weeks. I plan to stock up on popcorn.

Oh, and for God’s sake, my fellow righties, quit whining. I can’t even mouse over the links on my blogroll, the shrieking noise that comes out of my computer speakers is deafening. Here’s a breath of sense from Steven Den Beste. Remember, it’s leftists who whine that the world will not change to their whims, not us. (Via Slublog at Ace of Spades.) Here’s another person who feels pretty good, Steve H. He seems to think God is punishing us with Obama. I don’t know… God may just be doing some pre-punishing fucking with our heads. If you were God, wouldn’t you mess with your creation every now and then?

(Edited to add picture, because I felt like it. Later: edited to conserve the space-time continuum, which we all know now is a finite pie-shaped object just like wealth and everything else.)

Apparently that’s become the thing to do. Well. Here’s why I’m not going to do it:

— I don’t trust the mail. Come on, hasn’t anyone had stuff disappear into the black hole at the center of the postal system at least once? I haven’t had a lot of bad luck with snail mail — still, voting is important, there’s no need to hang it on something so out of my control as the guy cleaning out the outgoing mailbox at my complex.

— The polling place is around the block from my apartment.

— I don’t have a job, so the usual “I’ll miss work” excuses don’t apply. I plan to get up at my leisure on Tuesday, amble on over to the polling place, cast my vote, and walk back home. Yes, walk — I have a car, but as I said the place is around the block, and frankly I need the exercise.

I don’t think early voting is a travesty, though. However, some of the objections to it on this list (I haven’t read the whole thing, not that interested) might also apply. YMMV.

(Via Machinery of the Night.)

Have you noticed the trend for teachers to refer to themselves and other teachers as “educators”? It sounds so authoritative and academic — it’s all about that extra syllable, and as well it doesn’t bring to mind the mundane world of dusty erasers (though everyone seems to use those whiteboards now), homework, and sarcastic sexist songs sung by the likes of David Lee Roth. Now I don’t know whether this practice is confined to the left side of the political spectrum (I happened to find it in Rush Limbaugh’s transcript of a show on Obama’s recent infomercial on the United States of Misery we live in — the person who used it was one of Obama’s Victim-Americans), but that doesn’t matter; I’d just like it to stop. (Full disclosure: my father was a teacher in the Dade County School system in Florida, in the years before it became the Miami-Dade County School district, and before it was de rigueur for teachers to call themselves “educators.”)

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

My, how times have changed. Back in the 90s when I still lived in Miami my goth friends and I used to go to this bar in Ft. Lauderdale called Squeeze to see local bands like Marilyn Manson and the Spooky Kids, and such. One Halloween we went to their special Halloween party. They were having a costume party. The guy who won had come in dressed as Jesus, complete with a (no doubt made of cardboard or styrofoam) cross hanging off his back. Everyone applauded, even the punks and the guys dressed like Satan.

In a related (more or less) area, speaking of political histrionics, let’s not be these people. Not that I have (or want, currently) a love life to speak of, but I certainly can’t imagine putting anything in my life on hold because I’m waiting for the horse I’m backing to win. I’ll bet she does the same thing to her boyfriend when American Idol is on. (Is that show still on? I never watch it so I don’t know. If it isn’t, substitute some other talent contest thing. When I was a kids I used to watch The Gong Show but that show was cool.)

That’s what I’m beginning to think. I’ve just been informed that we in this country are going through an “ordeal” just because there is a presidential election. Well… no. In my world “ordeals” are something that cause real mental or physical discomfort, and have a more material cause than sitting in the comfort of one’s home at one’s computer fuming because of what someone else typed on their keyboard in the comfort of their home. Let me set something straight: I am not suffering in any way, shape, or form because of this election. I am not sitting here seething in fury or suffering from back spasms — unlike, say, these poor saps. (Is mental collapse due to political beliefs the new neurasthenia? Discuss.)

Instead, I am entertained and amused by the whole thing. Of course, the idea of having a president who is basically a communist is a serious matter. But it’s also funny, especially in light of the fact that another great American tradition, that of tearing down the great man we’ve spent all this time building up, has already started.

Added: perhaps we should apply the MST3K Mantra to our forays into political thought. Or at least, that’s what I’m going to do.

Canadian Rick McGinnis shows that sometimes the foreign perspective, no matter how near the foreigner is to this country of mine, is still the wrong perspective. He says that women should not vote in the presidential election as “payback” to the way we supposedly have been treated by this campaign — you know, all the attacks on Sarah Palin, the pushing of economic theories that will damage our economy and therefore the less-secure economic status of women, even the way Hillary Clinton was treated (I for one did not care for the whole “pants suit” gibes that both sides of the political spectrum engaged in — there’s nothing wrong with pants suits, you misogynist, real-women-only-wear-dresses-and-pantyhose jerks). But Mr. McGinnis is wrong. Here’s why:

— It would have no effect on the hordes of swooning fangirls who cream in their thongs at the very sight of Barack Obama, and who squeal and faint at his speeches.

— It would have no effect on the Sarah Palin haters, many, if not most of whom are women. Has Rick McGinnis never heard of jealousy and envy? When it comes to hatin’ our fellow female, men have nothing on us.

— It would have no effect on the men voting for Obama. True, if some miracle happened and all women stayed home, then McCain would probably win by a larger margin, but telling McCain’s female supporters to stay home only takes votes away from McCain, and as I’ve already said Obama has plenty of fangirls. Whether there are enough of them to make a difference in the election process remains to be seen, but telling women who would otherwise vote for the McCain/Palin ticket to not vote seems to me to be beyond stupid.

— It would rightly be seen as an instance, not of principled political stance, but of pique. “He talked mean about a girl!” In this day and age more than ever the last thing we need are women making decisions based on emotion, and that’s what they would be doing if they let the sight of some stringy-armed coffee-cave denizen wearing a “Sarah Palin is a cunt” t-shirt stay make them stay home and sulk.

— It would not do any of this: “wreak havoc with pollsters and campaign operatives at the very least, and delegitimize a dispiriting and tainted election at best.” He rightly calls is a “slap” in the next sentence — and slapping is what hysterical females do to their boyfriends for forgetting their birthday or something trivial like that. See my point above.

— It would punish McCain for no good reason that I can see, even though he’s run one of the politest, cleanest campaigns I’ve witnessed in a long time.

I don’t even know why this was written. It won’t happen — women don’t think as a bloc, really we don’t, and those few women who might be influenced for this sort of thinking will disappear into the general mass of people who didn’t vote for whatever reason, so I guess he made his word count quota for the week. A better article that he could have come up with: “I am urging all non-American citizens to shut up about the US presidential election.”

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Update: Kathy thinks I missed a satire. (See comments.) That’s as may be — I usually catch these things, but it just didn’t read that way to me. I’m putting this here, though, just to let people know there is a possibility that Rick was being tongue-in-cheek. Canadian humor is famously muted; I guess that’s an effect of living in a country where free speech is seen as a vulgar “American” value and the government has Niceness Enforcement Squads to make sure no one hurts anyone else’s feelings. If they catch you I think they wrap you in tons of pink batting (Canada’s version of red tape — it’s much warmer) and leave you on an ice floe. (If you don’t believe me, read Kathy’s blog. Okay, maybe the ice floe bit is a little exaggerated.)