this is why public schools should still assign ‘to kill a mockingbird’

Hey boy, I'll give you a nickel if you bust up this here chifferobe!

So you probably read all about this yesterday, where some white gal out campaigning for Grampy McCain got lost in the Pittsburgh ghetto (Twittering all the while!) and was mauled by Savage Negroes who then gently imprinted carved a “B” for “Barack” on her face. Which just happened to be backwards… almost as if she’d done it herself, in a mirror. Fishy!

Well, in an admission that is a huge shock to absolutely no one except for drooling morons like Matt Drudge (who gave this story the full-press treatment complete with wailing sirens when it first emerged yesterday), it turns out she made the whole thing up.

I think this may literally be the death-rattle of McCain’s campaign. Savor the sound, my fellow Obama supporters!

p.s. Ashley Todd, next time you might want to do an “O”. That way you won’t be tripped up by pesky letter-reversal!

p.p.s. HA HA HA!!! (Look at the URL. It was taken down literally seconds after I left a contemptuous comment.)

p.p.p.s. OMFG this dumb bitch was originally a Ron Paul supporter. That explains everything.

shorter* alan greenspan: “oops”

Gee, who knew that a decades-long orgy on the altar of the free market would lead to a global economic meltdown?

Oh, wait a minute: EVERYONE WHO WAS EVEN SLIGHTLY MODERATE-TO-LIBERAL AND WHO GOT A PASSING GRADE IN ECONOMICS 101 KNEW THAT.

*”Shorter” concept stolen from Sadly, No!

good news for us filthy constitution-lovers

Even while I’ve been marinating in schadenfreude over Obama’s probable victory come November 4, I’ve been trying to ignore the fact that Proposition 8, the prop that would ammend California’s constitution to deny gay citizens of their full rights, seemed likely to pass.

See, California is not as liberal as everyone who doesn’t actually live here likes to pretend it is. You have Los Angeles and the Bay Area, which are islands of godless hedonism; then between them you have an ocean of ignorant redneck conservitards. You know, the kind of people who wouldn’t vote for Obama because “OMG HIS MIDDLE NAME IS HUSSEIN!!1!“. The state almost always goes to the Democrat in the presidential races, because that part of the state has a much lower population density; but if you hang out in San Joaquin or Butte counties, you aren’t going to run into a lot of latte-sippin’, Volvo-drivin’ women’s studies perfessors.

Looking at a red-blue breakdown of counties, it goes like this:

(The 10.3 is the percentage that Kerry won over Bush in 2004.)

Well, worry no more: Proposition 8 is now losing 52%-44%.

I don’t want to be premature, obviously we can’t just sit back on our butts and ride it out until election day; it’s important that everyone who believes that gays and lesbians deserve the full civil rights accorded to them by the Constitution continue to shout about it until election day. But this is good news.

What infuriates me the most about the Yes on 8 side is that they’re being funded almost entirely by out-of-state hate groups that want to impose their selective version of a Christian theocracy on California. Bay of Fundie has a really excellent entry on where the $$$ is coming from (hint: Not from secular and/or California-based organizations), and how all the commercials for Yes on 8 are a tissue of lies from beginning to end. (I’m also indebted to the site for the image above.)

I’m also impressed with this group: Mormons for Marriage, which is against Prop 8. Especially because the LDS church has been pouring tithes into the Yes on 8 coffers for months. It takes guts to take this kind of stand against your church. I bet these people are pretty sick of being told “I’ll pray for you” (where “I’ll pray for you” is code for “BURN IN HELL YOU SODOMITE!!1!”) from their fellow church members. I noticed their comments have been closed, I can only assume that’s the result of “concerned” comments from their fellow “Christians”.

In related news, Proposition 4, the “parental notification” abortion law, is narrowly holding on to a 2% lead; but there are still a lot of undecided voters, so all is not lost. We need to see a concentrated media blitz from the No on 4 groups, like we’ve been seeing from No on 8 recently. I mean, a lot of those undecideds have to be pro-choicers who aren’t sure that “notification” is necessarily a bad thing, they just need to be better informed (and shown that the whole “Sarah’s Law” jiggery-pokery is a huge load of manure.)

new toys are fun!: fuji instax mini 25

I kept checking the UPS website yesterday, and it kept saying my camera was “in transit”. When it wasn’t there by the time I got home, around 6:30, I gave up for the day, because UPS allegedly only delivers until 7:00 to residences.

The UPS guy rang my doorbell at 7:15. Yay!

(Pencil is there for scale.) How do the Japanese manage to make everything so darn cute?! And it’s orange, my favorite color!

Instant photography is regaining some of the popularity that was usurped by digital in Japan and other parts of Asia, particularly among teenagers and young women. Unfortunately, you can’t buy the Fuji Instax in the US, because they use improvements made to the Polaroid process that were invented by Kodak, that Polaroid successfully sued Kodak for patent violation over. Lomography is probably able to get around this because they’re based in Europe; and there’s always eBay. However, with Polaroid permanently ceasing production of all instant cameras and film this year, that may change.

shorter* mark souder

Are you now or have you ever been a complete lunatic?

Michele Bachmann is NOT a pants-shittingly crazy neo-McCarthyite drunk on her own sense of power, she’s just STUPID!

*”Shorter” concept stolen from Sadly, No!

gary busey will pull your endocrine system out of your body… and then probably snort it

Flea powder is an awesome high!

What’s weirder than Keith Richards snorting his father’s ashes? Gary Busey snorting coke off his dog!

Actor Gary Busey hit a low in his drug addiction days when he found himself snorting cocaine off his dog.

The Big Wednesday star, who claims he has been sober for 13 years, couldn’t help himself when his pet pooch rolled in a supply of the drug.

He tells U.S. news show Access Hollywood, “I went in like a cropduster with my nose flying first and snorted the cocaine off the dog.”

But he got more than he bargained for: “You get a little bugs, you get little hairs, you get grease and goo from the ground; it’s not at all a healthy thing to do. But when you’re an addict, you don’t think of health, you think about destruction of yourself unconsciously.”

Okay, 2 things make this even more awesome than your average “washed-up celebrity admits to snorting drugs off pet” story:

1. “The Big Wednesday star, who claims he has been sober for 13 years…” “Claims”. Because no one really believes anyone could be that insane without help from drugs.
2. “…it’s not at all a healthy thing to do.” Coke is fine for your health, but when you snort it off your dog, suddenly you’ve gone too far!

If I may quote Margaret Cho here: Gary Busey is not a part of nature!

p.s. Go see Best Week Ever’s re-enactment. You’ll thank me.

on november 5 i’m going to have sex with a lesbian muslim on this woman’s lawn while simultaneously reading aloud from “god is not great” and having an abortion

this is gonna end with the 2 of them plummetting to their deaths from a chandelier

You know what the world needs to take our minds off of the crushing economic depression and the ever-widening divide between the haves and have-nots? A very public, bitter, acrimonious celebrity divorce. Thank you, Madge and Guy!

It’s kicking off to a promising start: She called him “emotionally retarded” to a small gathering of a few thousand fans; he compared having sex with her to “cuddling a piece of gristle”. Well, he does kind of have a point:

When did Madonna turn into a flesh-colored skeleton?

To add spice to the delicious stew of public humiliation, there are accusations of stalking; that weird thing with A-Rod (complete with Madonna dressing son David in a Yankees jersey with A-Rod’s number in order to get Guy’s goat), who’s allegedly studying Kabbalah while he lurks offstage; Guy talking smack about Kabbalah; the fact that there’s no pre-nup; and Gwyneth Paltrow’s insistence on sticking her enormous lollipop head in the middle of the whole thing. What the hell? It’s not 1998, Gwynnie. No one cares what you have to say about anything. Go back to doing what you do best: Giving your children retarded names and chastising the unwashed masses for not having individual nannies for each of them.

Oh, and they both had movies released this month, and both of them are stinking up the joint. (When I saw the trailer for Filth and Wisdom, Madonna’s directorial debut, my initial reaction was “Why is Madonna directing the Dov Charney biopic?”) It’s like Madonna somehow sucked all the talent out of Guy Ritchie without managing to absorb any of it.

The only thing that keeps me from unabashedly enjoying this trainwreck is Lourdes, who I kind of have soft spot for. She’s like Madonna v. 0.1; before decades of fame, gallons of bleach and eyebrow wax, about 25,000 hours too many of working out, macrobiotic diets and bad marriages and insane faux religions thoroughly screwed her up.

goodbye, zima! (buy stock in bartles & james)

This crap was unironically referred to as "malternative"

Nooooo!

I didn’t drink in high school, in spite of being a goth and therefore “rebellious”. Probably because my best friends were all Mormon.

But they started manufacturing this swill the year after I graduated and started hanging out with people who weren’t as shiny-happy, and therefore it figured heavily in most of my adventures in underaged drinking, along with that pre-mixed Jack Daniels’ Lynchburg Lemonade.

(I didn’t enter my Boone’s Farm phase until after I broke up with my first serious boyfriend, a few years later. Between the 2 I had a brief flirtation with malt liquor and Mad Dog. Eventually I thankfully entered my current phase of alcohol consumption: “Booze that costs more than $1.99 and doesn’t taste like Kool-Aid spiked with gasoline”.)

I have a vivid memory of puking at a gas station after drinking Zima and eating a package of Red Vines, and experiencing a nightmarish moment of thinking I was vomiting up my own dissolved intestines. Good times, noodle salad.

you can have my café au lait when you pry it from my sweaty, jittery hands

Coffee growers warn: We’re approaching “peak coffee”. Oh, shit.

I’ve never really considered myself to be one of those GOTTA HAVE IT coffee drinkers. I never have more than one mug/thermos per morning. And it isn’t particularly strong, being a) adulterated with chicory, and b) made café au lait style, meaning half of it is hot milk. During the week, I don’t drink it until I get to work; meaning I shower, ride my bicycle to the bus stop, lift my bicycle onto the bus rack, and do a dozen other tasks that require both mental and physical agility before I have my coffee. And I almost never drink it after that. If I want a hot beverage in the afternoon or evening, I’ll almost always have tea or cocoa instead.

Still, the fact is that I drink it every day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and that adds up to a lot of coffee; even though I can comfort myself that it’s partially chicory and that I make it myself with a French press, meaning no discarded paper cups or bleached paper coffee filters.

I guess I’ll just have to gird myself for higher prices, and tell myself that the fact that I no longer drive means I don’t have to feel guilty. I should look into fair trade coffee, but being as how I like it with chicory, I’m not sure it’s an option. And I’m sure as shit not going to give it up. Much as how the French feel about cheese, I feel that life without coffee is not a life worth living.