PSA

Just because your headphones prevent you from hearing the excessively loud gas you are passing does not mean your fellow commuters can’t hear it, either.

the “t” word, or, that joke isn’t funny anymore

So, Wanda Sykes likened Rush Limbaugh to a terrorist at this year’s White House Annual Correspondents’ Dinner, and it’s unleashed a conservative media maelstrom about how inappropriate her comments were.

It was, on the other hand, okay when Limbaugh was making similar allusions about a presidential candidate in a decidedly un-comedic context during the election.

Cause that’s, you know. Different.

things that make me cranky, #67, #68

#67–Due to an uncustomary string of morning errands, I got my morning tea from Starbucks today instead of the campus coffee shop.

It cost $2.04.

Um, what? They didn’t even have honey, which is a freaking travesty for anyone selling green tea. Though they did throw in an extra tea bag. I guess so I can wear it to a lame protest party later.

#68–A “small” is not “tall,” and I refuse to refer to it as such.

making the fatties pay!

Yesterday, United Airlines announced its plan to charge overweight passengers additional fees or bump them from their flights entirely.

It works like this. If two adjoining seats are available on the overweight passenger’s flight, they can fly with no additional fees. If there are extra seats in coach that are not adjoining, they are required to pay for a second ticket (presumably to compensate for the flight attendant’s having to undergo the laborious task of asking someone else to switch their seat to accommodate the overweight passenger) or they can pay to “upgrade” to business class. If the flight is completely full, then the overweight passenger gets bumped from the flight. But don’t worry! They get refunded. (Continental, Southwest, and Delta already have similar policies.)

The airline made the change after receiving nearly 700 complaints last year from passengers who claimed that the overweight person seated next to them on their flight “infringed on their seat.”

Perhaps the only thing shittier than this policy is the fact that, in several polls I’ve seen in the past couple days, the overwhelming majority of people seem to agree with it.

I mean, seriously. Do parents get fined when their babies cry throughout a flight, or when their kids kick the backs of seats? Do people get fined for bringing really smelly sandwiches on board that fill the entire coach section with smells of onions and vinegar, or for being really smelly themselves, or having loud, obnoxious conversations with their traveling companions? Cause I’d say all those things “infringe” on the other passenger’s comfort as much as not having a left armrest.

There has been so, so much research on biological causes for obesity, and on the ways the classic diet-and-exercise prescription does not work for many, many people. But no matter, cause our society really hates fat people, to the point that 75% of us say make the fatties pay, goddamn it, even when there are empty seats on the fucking plane, because the very presence of their oversized bodies is “infringing” on our comfort.

Seems like, as our society gets more and more “enlightened,” all it’s doing is creating new scapegoats for itself.

much atwitter about nothing

As some of you already know, I hate Twitter.

One could argue that it is reactionary and irrational for me to spend actual energy hating an interface that hasn’t done anything to me. No one is putting a gun to my head and making me tweet, or read other people’s twits, or listen as they recite these twits in my ear in low, menacing tones.

And it’s true. I’m not being forced to do anything. But the nagging sense of the whole system’s fucked-uppitude won’t leave me.

Cause it seems to me that Twitter–this tool dedicated to “keeping everyone in the know”–is so popular precisely because it makes others think there is so much more to us that they don’t know, and that this unknowability, somewhat paradoxically, makes them feel they know enough about us to want to know more. Even though they still don’t know anything.

It’s like the whole dirty mess of humanity’s existential crisis being hung out to dry on a global clothesline.

Gah. (Shudder.)

Watching The Watchmen

After seeing The Watchmen last Friday, I’m both less disappointed and more disappointed in it than I thought I would be.

Let me try to explain.

I knew that they were making some pretty major story changes in the movie adaptation, which made me pretty nervous. No Black Freighter? No alien invasion? But I was actually ok with the more  substantial changes that they made to the movie. They streamlined the story for movie-goers without going against its big themes.  So, yeah. Surprisingly fine.

What killed me were all the little things–the changes that didn’t seem to do anything but make the story clunkier or less powerful. Some I found most irksome:

• Why the hell does Janey Slater barge into the television studio during Dr. Manhattan’s interview? And why is she all… sweet, and not bitter and shit?
• Why are the people that Laurie and Dan save from the burning building all happy and grateful when it would have been just as easy to make them ungrateful and cranky like they’re supposed to be?
• Why the infinite, infinitely awkward sex scene with Laurie and Dan after said rescue, and why set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujuh,” which is the only bad version of the song, despite the fact that he wrote the damn thing?
• Why so many shots of pooling blood? It’s like the most unexciting way to film blood. Look at your “we are filming blood” options, here–splattering, spilling, gushing, spurting…   And you’re gonna go wild on the pooling? Really?
• Why bring Hollis into the story if yer not going to kill him off proper-like on Halloween?
• Why the ending that refuses to end, and Dan’s riduculous “NOOOOO” that reminds me of Tommy Wiseau’s hysterical “WHHHYYYYYY?” at the end of The Room.
• Why do they give Dr. Manhattan’s last line–and arguably the most pinnacle piece of dialog in the novel– to Laurie, who also happens to be played by the worst actress since Andie MacDowell?

And so on…

(Sigh.)

quitting time, pt. 2

Next on the chopping block, Bravo reality tv.

First Project Runway went to hell in a handbasket, and now this travesty of a Top Chef finale.

I guess I always knew these shows were just as schlocky as all the other reality tv stuff I pretend to be too good for, but for a while they at least maintained a veneer of authenticity. Last night was just lame, though. And sad. A truly lovely personality succumbed to a fatal flaw. A consistently formidable competitor’s dominant past performances were deemed irrelevant. And, as a result, the chef who just barely won was not the best (or second best) chef in the finale.

(He also happens, despite all his assertions that he’s “a nice guy,” to be a genuine prick. That’s really secondary, but it doesn’t make it sit any better.)

I’ve decided that, if dumb tv makes me sad instead of happy, it really isn’t worth watching. So I’m done.

(sigh)

It’s not really the “high road” when…

Ok, so a handful of republican-run states are declaring they don’t need the government’s stinking stimulus money, all in the name of the “return to fiscal conservative values” that’s suddenly so vogue among the mountain-climbers of the Grand Ole Party.

Among these states: Idaho, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas, and …Alaska.

Yes, Alaska. The same state that, for the past five years, received 18 times more in federal earmarks than the national average. That ranked first in federal spending per capita in 18 of the 25 years between 1981 and 2005, and received $1.84 from the federal government for every $1 it spent on federal taxes in 2005.

I guess it’s easy to say no to a federal stimulus package when you’ve already been benefiting from your own personal federal stimulus for the past two and a half decades.

(In fact, the only one of the five states “threatening” not to accept the stimulus that isn’t a beneficiary state is Texas, for which the money received/taxes spent columns come out close to even. So, fine, Texas. But the other four? Seriously. Bad, bad political bluff.)

bridges to nowhere

In anticipation of the 4 million or so people expected to flood DC on Inauguration Day, the Secret Service announced plans to close down the bridges connecting Virginia to the District.

And people are ticked off, I tell ya.

Some favorite quotes:

“The Secret Service’s plan to keep the inauguration secret is succeeding.”

“We are the capital of the free world. What is the message of closing all the bridges?”

“[It's] all just an old Civil War snub. The Yankees are no quicker to forget the past than are any of the dyed-in-the-wool Rebels.”

As anyone who has ever so much as walked by one of these bridges during rush hour on a plain old work day could tell you, the joke of this is that any of these folks were actually planning to access DC by car that day in the first place. Good heavens.

“Pets Everlasting”

A couple of days ago, I read this article in the New York Times about these folks who are cloning pet owners’ beloved pets–for a steep, steep price, of course.

So, if you really love Toonces, or Rusty, or Tucker, you don’t really have to say goodbye when he dies! Live on in your heart? How about on your sofa bed instead!

There are, I don’t know… maybe five billion issues with this, but these are the three that are foremost in my mind.

1. With so, so many animals being killed in pounds each year because they can’t be placed, it seems a little fucked up to allow people to freaking reincarnate their dead animals instead of giving a home to one of these poor guys awaiting the chopping block.

2. I think the grief process is a sucky but important part of being human, and I don’t like the way this messes with it.

3. How long till we try this with people? This is provided someone’s not done it already, which they probably have. Can we even begin to imagine the implications?

(And… one last  thing… how weird is it that this is in the “Home and Gardens” section? I mean, seriously.)