dick move!

3-day weekend, y’all! I leave you with this:

don’t make me choose!

RDJ shoots deadly rays from his ego-containment unit

This is worse than my parents’ divorce: Robert Downey Jr. talks some trash about the movie that kicked Iron Man off the summer hit throne. You’re tearing me apart!

However, he saves himself from looking like a complete hater with a little self-deprecation:

I didn’t understand The Dark Knight. I still can’t tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and, in the end, they need him to be a bad guy. I’m like, ‘I get it — this is so high brow and so  f–king smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.’ …I feel like I’m dumb because I feel like I don’t get many things that are so smart.

Yeah, you better pull your punch a little bit, RDJ. Or Christian Bale might come over and start shoving you around.

too… much… information!

Jezebel thinks it’s important that you feel comfortable changing your tampon in front of your boyfriend. At the risk of sounding like a delicate, fainting tool of The Patriarchy, I must ask: er, why?

I don’t harbor any outdated beliefs about “preserving a mystique”. If your relationship can’t survive ugly little realities like morning breath or everyone’s need to poop, it was never going to make it anyway. I cartainly wouldn’t try to hide the fact that I need the bathroom because Aunt Flo is being a particular bother. And if I was suffering from, say, nasty intestinal parasites, I’m guessing modesty wouldn’t be a factor on when I worshipped the porcelain god.

But it’s not as if anyone lives like most Americans did 100 years ago, large families crammed into a dwelling with a single bathroom. In those circumstances, modesty necessarily took a backseat to convenience. But marching in and squatting while your boyfriend (or housemate, or mother, or anyone) is brushing their teeth just seems pointlessly rude. It’s almost aggressively TMI: I’m going to change my tampon, and you’re going to sit there and like it!

Sometimes it seems to me that other feminists pick the weirdest battles to fight.

mmmooncakes

I stopped by Ranch 99 after work yesterday to get soda, then realized I’d have to use my debit card because I literally only had $2 cash on me. For some reason I don’t like using a card for less than $10, and while glancing around for something else to buy I saw Ranch 99 had put out their display of mooncakes. (The Mid-Autumn Festival is September 14 this year.)

Practically the only nice memory I have of living at the Taiwanese Asylum is when Diana’s mother offered me a mooncake on the Festival, and seemed totally tickled when I accepted. What the heck lady, the operative word is “cake”. As long as it’s not “roadkill cake”, I’m down.

Of course I know squat about the different brands, so I bought the ones that came in the prettiest tin! It wasn’t the most expensive but it wasn’t the cheapest, either.

Pretty! I got the kind filled with lotus seed paste and salted duck yolks (the most traditional filling), because I can get red bean paste or jujube cakes any old day of the year.

They put it in a gift bag, which I thought was nice. Or maybe they thought I’m not buying them for myself since I’m not Chinese.

so far i only have one, but i aspire to be a crazy rabbit lady

Japan has had a falling birth rate for many years, and a recent study reveals that dogs now outnumber children 10 and under. Combined with a recovering economy and increased status for women (not to mention Japan’s well-documented obsession with all things kawaii), this has translated into a huge market for cute dog accessories.

People like to sneer at women who pamper their pets. They tend to get divided into 2 categories: 1) Poor childless souls who are filling an aching void in their heart with a 4-legged child, or 2) Crazy ladies. And yes, when you’re talking about someone like Eleanor Abernathy, clearly that’s someone with a problem.

But what if, hey, it’s just someone who happens to like animals better than children and thinks it’s fun to put a kimono on their Pomeranian? Toshiko Horikoshi, the Japanese woman interviewed for the ABC News article, isn’t some deranged, sad old recluse. She’s an eye surgeon who divorced her husband when he told her he wanted her to be a stay-at-home mother.

I think the reason most of society feels the need to treat these women with scorn, as if they were violating some holy taboo, is fear. Women who don’t kowtow to the patriarchal script of wife-and-mother are terrifying to many people. (And by “many people” I of course mean “conservative Abrahamic douchebags”.)

I’m almost 34, and I’ve never felt less like having children than I do now. Pets don’t run amok in public and embarass you, they don’t pester you for the car keys, they don’t require hundreds of thousands of dollars (food, clothing, college tuition, etc.) over the course of their lives.

And if you’re thinking of saying “And they don’t take care of you when you get old!”, allow me to tell you about the summers I volunteered at a nursing home when I was a teenager. Breeding is no guarantee your kids will wait on you hand and foot when you’re old and dottering.

And the only thing keeping me from putting a little dress on my rabbit is the certainty that it would be clawed off and chewed up within the hour.

don’t drop the soap!

If you ever watched a CSI: marathon on Spike TV, you probably saw hundreds of commercials for Enzyte. Most of them featured “Bob”, a bland, vaguely mid-1960s-ish white guy who constantly sported a frozen grimace that was supposed to convey sexual satisfaction and a huge schlong.

Cue Nelson Muntz: Earlier this year the company’s founder, Steve Warshak, was convicted of 93 counts of conspiracy, fraud and money laundering. Yesterday the judge handed down a sentence as painful as a 4-hour erection: 25 years and $93,000 in fines.

Not only were Enzyte’s penis pills not worth the paper the prescription wasn’t written on; but the company purposely made getting a refund too embarassing for the majority of customers to go through with:

If customers complained, he said, employees were instructed to “make it as difficult as possible” for them to get their money back. In some cases, Teegarden [a former VP] said, Warshak required customers to produce a notarized statement from a doctor certifying Enzyte did not work.

“He said it was extremely unlikely someone would get anything notarized saying they had a small penis,” Teegarden said.

Hey guys, you want to know what real “male enhancement” is? It’s self-confidence and a willingness to go down. You’re welcome. Can I have a million dollars now?

oh fuck, here we go again

Oh, crap.

I’m not worried about my family’s safety. The ‘rents have an evacuation plan; they aren’t dumb enough to think “We’ll just ride it out!… you know, at sea level, near both a river and the Gulf.” about a Category 3 hurricane. And thankfully they have the means to leave. (Not everyone who stayed in New Orleans for Katrina was some kind of blithering, ignorant idiot; a lot of them just couldn’t afford to go anywhere else.)

It would just suck incredibly if their house got trashed again. I mean, they have insurance and it’s all just stuff and blah blah blah, but STILL. No one needs to go through that crap again. I don’t think Mom slept more than a couple hours a night for about a year and a half after Rita.

I gather some commenters at Daily Kos are gleefull at the prospect of Gustav making landfall on the day the Republican primary starts, invoking the ghost of Katrina. (And Rita, hey anyone remember her? People who got screwed by Rita feel like unwanted stepchildren.) So basically, they’re hoping a bunch of people lose their houses and maybe their lives, so they can cackle over how inept the GOP is. Oh, and that New Orleans basically sinks into oblivion; she’s never recovered from Katrina, another hurricane would be the nail in her coffin.

Thanks for reminding me why I stopped visiting DK, assholes. Comments like these are no better than Rethuglicans wishing another 9/11 would happen and scare everyone into voting for the conservatives.

fox news runs out of actual criticism, stoops to playground taunts

Are they for fucking real?

Why? Why does anyone still watch this crap network for anything other than entertainment??

stitching, film processing, and really weird spam

So yesterday afternoon I made it my mission to find a place that processes medium format film. Logically, I knew that it had become a niche film, especially among amateurs who don’t do their own processing. But it was still around when I was a kid, although mostly amongst people my grandparents’ age who never upgraded to 35mm. And you could still get it processed at most places.

Well, I’m apparently a dinosaur, because when I started with the logical places (Target, Longs), they didn’t even know what I was talking about. I would ask them if they processed medium format film and get “Med…i…um…form…at?” in return, like someone parrotting an exotic foreign phrase.

So after a couple of those calls, I decided to stick with camera stores. Ritz Cameras develops it, but doesn’t print it. However, they do have a third-party contractor that will print it. And they can make me a proof sheet, so I can more easily choose which ones are worth printing. I didn’t ask how much it cost or what the turnaround is; I suspect it will be neither cheap nor fast, but I really want to do this.

At some point I may look into enrolling in some non-matriculating classes at Chabot or Ohlone so I can use their photo lab. And I never did learn how to process color film (B&W only), so I’d have to take a class for that.

In other news, this is quite possibly the most bizarrely random spam subject line to have ever landed in my filter (click to get a bigger version):

Is “Plaster Wall” some white rapper I’ve never heard of?

orangina appealing to the french furry market with nightmarish advert

SRSLY YOU GUYZ. This is some freaky shit. And I don’t mean that in a “Tsk, any indication of sexuality is distasteful to my Victorian sensibilities!” way. I mean it in an ”AAAAARGH YOU CAN’T UNRAPE MY BRAIN WAY!!1!” way