Dunk or no--what's the done thing?

Well, alrighty then—for today’s Friday frolic, I’m giving you the social story of the week: the posting on Mumsnet headed, “Do you dunk your penis?”

And, no—I am not making this up.

First of all, I didn’t even know Mumsnet existed until something came across my Twitter feed. Oddly—only my blog account; the folks in Big Data, Enterprise SaaS, Social Media advice & the like appear to have missed it.

(But speaking of Big Data—evidently there was so much traffic to the thread that it crashed the Mumsnet servers. Too much of a good thing, it seems.)

Anyhow—the user named Sara Crewe described her post-sex hygiene arrangements, for herself and her partner, and then asked if anyone else didn’t do the same thing. Anyone? Anyone at all?

Because, “apparently our penis beaker is strange and not the done thing.”

Oh, yeah—Miss Manners was on local PBS radio station earlier this week, taking listeners’ calls on how to handle (um) various situations. I dearly wish someone had phoned in with this one.

Except I’d probably have driven into a tree.

Artistic devices

Hands up everyone who remembers the iconic 80s teen-angst John Hughes film, The Breakfast Club. You know—one of the Brat Pack classics.

Well, the question arose on social media (in this case, imgur) around whether you could remake it today and still have the same, oh, story arc.

The conclusion, obviously, is that you can’t, since no one in detention would give a toss about anyone else there, being so wrapped up in their self-entertaining devices.

That got me thinking about how smartphones and tablets might alter other classic images of isolation and dysfunction. I’m sorry I’ve not got the Photoshop skills, but just imagine what Edward Hopper’s stark “Nighthawks” would be like if there were a couple of iPads in evidence.

Or Edgar Degas’s “The Absinthe Drinker”.

Or Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat”.

I mean—there’s a whole universe of new interpretation here.

The wonder of Twitter

Okay—as you’ve heard me say before, the Twitter-dot-com is a strange, strange place.

The other day there was a #AddAWordRuinAMovie trend going. You know, Finding Nemo Dead, Saturday Night Yellow Fever, Schindler’s Grocery List, Miracle Whip on 34^th Street, The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe Malfunction…

Listen, I’m having a hard time cutting myself off from these. If you want more, click here.

Naturally, I had a few entries, including Tofu Meatballs, which I thought a rather clever oxymoron. Particularly if you recall the 1979 film with Bill Murray. But it’s hardly going to stand up against the likes of Adult Toy Story or The Fairy Godfather or Gone with the Breaking Wind.

So imagine my surprise when I received notification that someone had retweeted my humble effort.

And then imagine my guffaw when it turned out that the retweeter is a pop-punk-unity band from Indonesia. Called Tofu Meatballs.

It’s days like this that make it all worthwhile.

Really mad tea party

If you’re wondering about the thinking process of the Tea Party ’Pubs whose intransigence caused the partial government shutdown, here’s an interview by NPR’s Scott Simon with Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the political group.

In it she twists reality like a LSD tripper on a three-day high, cherry-picks “facts” and generally blows it out her backside like a…well, like a tea partier.

(I’ll give her this—at least she’s not screaming, which is what her ditto-heads are doing on social media. I find it fascinating that you can be holding a Facebook discussion on, say, Nostradamus quatrains and someone will suddenly go ballistic on how—well, how about a direct (anonymous) quote:

(“It is starting to get scary as callers at night are outraged and the democrats went too far with their shut down to run on in 2014. Many of us are from that generation who may be democrats or republicans but they would all be speaking German if not for these veterans who came in planes to be shut away. Fortunately, republicans took down the baricades [sic] and republicans and ordianary [sic] Americans wheeled the veterans inside the open air memorial. They did the same to Martin Luther King and if the Black people are democrats, they took away veterans who wanted to see his memorial so are you happy about that for your party? It had to be ordered by the White House who wants to hurt us all to have his way.”

(Usual disclaimer—I did not make this up. And this woman had plenty more along these lines before I hope her meds kicked in. There’s heaps of the like on Twitter, too; but of course the 140-character limitation cramps the ranting capability somewhat. So they just do whole strings of tweets that are broken up by other people's self-promotion, inanities and non-sequiturs.)

However, back to Martin—I found it interesting that in supporting her accusations that the ACA is causing people to “lose their jobs, their hours, their healthcare” (in present tense), one of her alleged sources of these predictions is…labor unions. (It’s in the audio, not the excerpted transcript.) I’m wondering how it is that righteous Republican lightning did not strike her the very instant that a tea partier spoke the words “labor” and “union” in conjunction without hissing.

But the thing that absolutely had me gobsmacked was when she said, “we are looking for ways to reopen the portions of the government that we agree with.” As though that made them somehow reasonable.

First—by “the portions of the government that we agree with,” she means “the things like the WWII monument or the parts of NIH running pediatric trials where videos of wheelchair-bound vets and dying kids showing up on even Fox news make us look like ignorant, heartless morons.” Even if her followers do manage to turn it into a “democrat” fulmination.

Thus they’ve been trying to pass limited Continuing Resolutions that would fund enough such agreeable portions that would get the journalists off their backs. So, say—reopen the WWII memorial, but keep the other national parks closed. Except for logging and fracking operations, of course.

Second—you don’t get to bloody fund only those portions of the freaking government that you agree with. Not even if you’re a delusional, brain-dead ideologue. We may not have the government we’d like, or even the one we deserve; but we have the government you bozos have delivered. You want to de-fund [insert agency here], you man up and pass a bill to wind it down that you can get the President to sign in the regular course of events. You don't take over the bank with balaclavas, C4 and assault weapons and then offer to toss out a few wads of Benjamins to your BFFs while you insist that you're going to get your way or blow up half the town.

Well, if you're a tea partier, that's exactly what you do. 

Oh, and—BTW: if you think that we don’t notice that all this flapping about with the volume turned to max on these little CRs is nothing but continuing to fail to do your job, it’s time for someone to start trepanning on a mass scale in the US Capitol.

Finally, to get back to Martin’s little hissy fit about how their tea party efforts to “delay” ACA implementation is just responding to what “the majority of Americans want”, let me give you Jon Stewart’s analysis.

People—and Congressmorons—it’s not a debate, it’s not a negotiation, it’s not a “bridge”. It’s the fucking law—passed by Congress, signed by the President and upheld by the Supreme Court. That’s all three branches of our government, just like it’s supposed to work.

Which appears to be something that sticks in these people’s throats. Although sadly not enough to choke them permanently.

Gratitude Monday: the government functionary

As we head into the second week of Shutdown ’13, brought to you by those [insert modifier here] men and women of the Senate and House of Representatives, I’m thinking about the hundreds of thousands of federal workers who aren’t suiting up and going to work.

You know—loan processors, prosecutors, patent examiners, park rangers, auditors, civilian support personnel for the military—even if, as of this writing, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has announced that he’s recalling most of the latter. (Ironic, isn’t it—if Aaron Alexis had held off a couple of weeks before going on his shooting spree in the Washington Navy Yard, he would have come into a nearly empty Building 197.) The people who push paper, check boxes, crunch numbers, investigate fraud and all the rest of the quotidian operations that underlie a functioning organization, especially one the size of the United States.

You can bitch all you want about it being cumbersome, maybe overstuffed and under-efficient in some areas, and blah, blah, blah. The only businesses that aren’t overstuffed are start-ups, except with egos; and they’re still not immune from inefficiencies. So give it a rest.

I’m thinking back to the beginning of 2012, when I faced nearly $100,000 in medical bills because my COBRA administrator had (as it turns out) illegally cut off my coverage based on alleged non-receipt of one of my premium payments. And then they denied my appeal—basically because they thought they held all the cards.

But a US Department of Labor employee—don’t even recall what his title was—responded within a day of my email to him, took down all the facts as I could explain them, and made a few phone calls to my former employer (self-insured; so it was essentially their money that was at stake). I was so dubious—not only because that corporation basically snacks on the SEC and eats the EU for lunch, but because we’re talking federal government bureaucrat…

And yet—a few days later, suddenly the employer found my explanation of the situation acceptable, reinstated my coverage, and I felt immeasurably relieved.

Because a government bureaucrat did his job, his mundane, paper-pushing job. I imagine he’s considered non-essential these days, and has been barred from working. And while—in the never-ending kaleidoscoping world of Congressional politics at least he’s going to be paid for his time away from the job (so what was the point, again, about shutting down the government?), the current stalemate means that his work won’t be done.

That could mean that other people in situations like mine are not having their cases resolved, and they’re carrying around the kind of burden of worry I was.

So, there’s the cost of this mess: work not being done, piling up, maybe deprioritized on the return of the workers. But it’s reminded me of how grateful I was that ET, the DOL guy, was there and did his job competently and thoroughly when I really needed an advocate. I was thankful then, and I’m thankful again now for him and all his fellows, on Gratitude Monday starting Week 2 of the shutdown.

I am not, however, grateful for those yahoos in Congress who think scoring political points with their most extreme constituents is more important than having a functioning government serving the people.

It's the talking animals again

For the first Friday of the first official federal government shutdown (as opposed to what our Congressmorons do by way of work avoidance the rest of the time), I thought we all could use a laugh or two.

And since some of us—federal employees deemed non-essential, and people whose work hours are being cut back in anticipation of slack time from lack of business from said furloughed governmental employees—have more time on our hands, what would hit the spot better than yet another site with animal memes.

So here’s ANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS. Of course.

I’m not exactly sure what the significance is of all caps—yes, some of them are clearly yelling; but some not so much.

Still—in these trying times, anything that amuses without involving a politician is at least worth a look.

Red October down

Tom Clancy has died at age 66, which means that the shelves of “military thrillers” that he pretty well pioneered is going to be left to lesser writers, of the testosterone-infused cookie-cutter variety. Clancy had a style and a verisimilitude to his writing that I expect will not be easy to replace.

I read his debut novel, The Hunt for Red October, when it was in galley proofs and being shopped around Hollywood. Pretty heady stuff for a first effort, and for something coming out of the Naval Institute Press. It’s not really my cup of tequila, but Clancy completely grabbed me with the pace. Seriously—it was indeed a page turner.

I have to say that the film eventually made (not by my employer) was a disappointment; for one thing, it never really was a hunt at all, the way it was in the book. The suspense factor was considerably lower. Plus—well, I like Connery fine, but his Scottish accent as Captain Ramius was just distracting. (Well—maybe that was just their way of showing that he was a Lithuanian amongst Russians? No, probably not.)

Clancy kind of disappeared up his own stealth propulsion system as his career progressed, but—fair dues—he was a storyteller of style and verve.

Shutdown blues: park it somewhere else

I thought it rather cherce that yesterday was the 123^rd anniversary of the establishment of Yosemite National Park, an occasion that Google honored with a Google Doodle:

Because of course Yosemite, and all national parks, is closed until Congress gets its collective head out of its own butt.

So it’s going to be a while.

A modest proposal...

You know, as much as I miss living in the DC area, I have to say I’m kind of glad that I’m not there at the moment because just hearing a few snippets of the posturing going on in Congress about using the budget as a weapon against the Affordable Care Act, via NPR, is enough to make me want to reach for the RPG. If I were there I’d be starting a crowdfunding campaign to put out a contract to terminate all 535 of them with extreme prejudice.

Honestly—we’d be doing the world a favor. The pity is that many of them have already spawned, and we’ve got a couple more generations of posturing, venal jellyfish coming down the pike.

Being a Liberal Arts major, naturally I turn to liberal arts methods of dealing with my disgust and fury at these self-serving twits who every year let what should be a normal, routine discussion on how we’re going to fund the country’s operations become a bloody crisis. Every year. Like it’s some enormous surprise. Every year. And while they’re grabbing at news cameras and bloggers, trying to ’splain why their position is anointed by almighty God and everyone else’s comes straight from [insert infernal, anti-American source here], I’m picturing…relief.

Or, at least not having to listen to their crap. I haven’t got as far as actual, you know, good government yet.

Here are my refuges.

I know that if there’s any sort of Higher Power at all, even as these sleazoids flap about in their $2500 suits, $350 haircuts, salon tans and lobbyist-subsidized surgical tune-ups, somewhere there are portraits of each and every one of them, reflecting the ever-increasing repulsiveness of souls so shriveled up as to pawn the lives of millions of Americans (not to mention screw the global economy) to score a few points with their most extreme constituents/paymasters.

Yes—I’m talking a “Picture of Dorian Gray”, times 535. A macabre museum full of paintings that make the most nightmarish expressionism look like a Kodak springtime moment.

In the absence of the Almighty, where are the Photoshoppers out there? They could be putting these together even as I write. They could compete with one another to show the corruption, greed and inhumanity that flow through these politicians’ veins where blood should be. I don’t get why no one’s done this—starting with Ted Cruz and John Boehner.

My second image is of Heracles’ fifth labor: cleaning the stables of King Augeas. The deal was: Heracles had to clean out the filth left by thousands of head of cattle, horses, goats and sheep in the Augean stables…in a single day. It was a dirty job; but back in those days, heroes didn’t stick at a little manure.

Well, okay—they didn’t have to deal with photo ops. But still…

Anyhow, to clean the stables, Heracles tore a hole in the wall at one side of the structure, and another opposite it. Then he dug trenches to divert the rivers Alpheus and Peneus through the stables.

(It worked, but then Augeas reneged on the deal, and eventually Heracles had to effect a do-over, in the form of getting rid of the Stymphalian birds—man-eating creatures that took over the countryside, destroying local crops, eating the citizens and producing highly-toxic, really disgusting guano. So—not too different from Congress, then.)

I wish some modern-day demi-god would run the Potomac through the Capitol—just gunge out all that bullshit accumulated over the past several decades. If some of the Congressional sheep and goats get washed away in the process, so much the better. I’m so sick of all of them—the nation couldn’t help but be improved if most of them were just swept out to the Chesapeake Bay.

No—looking at the magnitude of the problem, I realize that even in my scorn-fueled fantasies that wouldn’t work.

We’re gonna need a bigger river.

Women's voices: May your song always be sung

Well, we’re at the end of September; I’ve got two more wishes for my Voices to share. Then I’ll go into remission.

I’ve always loved Dylan’s “Forever Young”, and I’ve never heard anyone sing it better than Joan Baez.

I first heard it at that concert at Illini Hall, with my friend Gretchen, so it’ll always be associated with my first experience of mid-western summer humidity and cicadas. But it’s a good thing to wish my readers—that ever-youthful approach to life.

And I couldn’t leave you with a better finish than Eva Cassidy’s “How Can I Keep from Singing”.

On some of my worst days in the past ten years, every time I turned to this, I felt like I had it within me to turn things around. Cassidy has that quality in her, and I do hope I pick some of it up whenever I listen to her.

Peace out.