In an effort to curb my rampant net surfing via this CPU (central procrastinating unit), I killed my MySpace account. This is good. I needed a mental health vacation.
I'm not sure which was worse -- having that creepy chick from one of the feminist groups virtually 'stalk' me because I disagreed with her asshat comments about pornography or spending 15 minutes out of every hour of the day in one of the "Lost" newsgroups arguing about the significance of the Dharma Initiative's logo. Ah, yes now onto the MicroSoft training modules and less time wasted on MySpazz with my head up my ass.
Or maybe I could try working on one of my unfinished novels once in a while,
-- Mz M.
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Anarchy Courtesy Uncle Sam
One of the best damn You Tube vids I've watched in a while. Totally explains the 1999 WTO riots. Fuckin' scary and just in time for Halloween.
-- Mz M.
-- Mz M.
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Petite Blonde/Giant Cajones & a TGILF !
My peoples,
Give it up for this little lady. Applaud. Send food. Send Band-Aids for the blisters. Sing her praises far and wide. Damn, that takes balls. Like I said in the Comments section, my overall impression of Los Angeles in January 2002 (sunny, 73 degrees) was: Wow! What a great place to live if it weren't for all these FUCKING CARS.
In other, less globally ecological news, I've got a new celeb crush.
David Krumholtz is sooo fifteen minutes ago! Not only has this theatre geek worked opposite Kevin Spacey on Broadway, nailed an Emmy on a sloppy, stupid David Kelley show but, NO, wait! There's MORE. He also used to be a comic book illustrator and has done the books-on-tape thingie for one of Neil Gaiman's stories. (Gasp!) I'm all a twitter. Ah, but of course, he's married to some blonde bimbo from the South, a mutant Reese-Witherspoon-meets-Cameron-Diaz freak.
I can't wait till we get the back story/history arc on his character on Lost. Oh why do I always fall for the emotionally unbalanced/serial murderer types? Why?!
-- Mz M.
Give it up for this little lady. Applaud. Send food. Send Band-Aids for the blisters. Sing her praises far and wide. Damn, that takes balls. Like I said in the Comments section, my overall impression of Los Angeles in January 2002 (sunny, 73 degrees) was: Wow! What a great place to live if it weren't for all these FUCKING CARS.
In other, less globally ecological news, I've got a new celeb crush.
David Krumholtz is sooo fifteen minutes ago! Not only has this theatre geek worked opposite Kevin Spacey on Broadway, nailed an Emmy on a sloppy, stupid David Kelley show but, NO, wait! There's MORE. He also used to be a comic book illustrator and has done the books-on-tape thingie for one of Neil Gaiman's stories. (Gasp!) I'm all a twitter. Ah, but of course, he's married to some blonde bimbo from the South, a mutant Reese-Witherspoon-meets-Cameron-Diaz freak.
I can't wait till we get the back story/history arc on his character on Lost. Oh why do I always fall for the emotionally unbalanced/serial murderer types? Why?!
-- Mz M.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Let's Be Kind and Move On
That's what my fine art photography professor used to say about my photos. In light of that and the fact that it's been a while since I held a protest sign in one hand while snapping photos with the other, I'm just gonna post the link for the Post Intelligencer's kick ass photo montage of the Thursday protest. Thank Gawd I didn't make any of them. Let's not zero in on the fat little dutch girl.
-- Mz M.
Monday, October 02, 2006
Civil Disobedience & Near Life Experiences
I went to my first World Can't Wait meet Sunday up in balmy Ballard. We met in this monstrous, three story Methodist church that towered over all the hippie houses in Ballard. Afterwards, I walked home putting up fliers for the big protest on October 5th as I went.
Also on Sunday, I got somefreak out news. My older (not oldest) brother, Dana, apparently hit a deer while riding his motorcycle. My sister-in-law said he basically stove in one side of his rib cage, collapsed a lung and broke both clavicles. Most serious, he 'tore' a section of his heart. He's had three open-heart procedures in the last 72 hours to stop the bleeding.
I've been musing on the number of times I've received batshit emergency news concerning my brothers. One of the earliest was when I was nine and Dana went off a cliff with two of his buddies the night before their graduation from Carmel High. They were driving in a 60's VW Bug and it rolled down an embankment. The friend who was driving (they were all shitfaced) died on impact. My brother, all 6'1" of him, was stuffed in the backseat. He kicked his way out of the VW and wandered with a fractured skull and brain hemorrhage several miles before collapsing in the backyard of some rich lady's estate.
My Mom drove white-knuckled from Reno to California and we stalked the gleaming hallways of posh Monterey General for several days until Dana woke up from his coma. A few weeks later, he was back home and brooding, agitated and driving my Dad insane with his California boy lifestyle. I remember him cutting the cast off his arm with a hand saw stealing two six-packs of beer and then disappearing with one of his friends on the back of a dirt bike for some macho mourning over their slain partner in crime.
We rarely saw Dana when I was growing up. He turned up twice in Reno after the accident, both times in a yellow Corvette Stingray that had come from settlement money after the accident.
The last visit he paid to Mom and me was a few months before the voices in my Mom's head told her to pack everything up and relocate us to Battle Mountain, Nevada before the giant California earthquake hit and caused all the water in Lake Tahoe to slop over like a giant teacup and drown all of Reno.
The visit did not go well. We fought constantly, mostly over Cap'n Crunch cereal, the TV (which monotonously aired the Watergate hearings) and what to do on those boring Nevada afternoons.
After Mom relocated us to the Armpit of America, I saw much less of Dana. I can only remember one very brief visit he paid while I was in junior high school. As we cruised that desiccated, gray-beige hamlet of nothingness, he said to me: "If the world had an asshole, this is right where they'd put it." It was an astute comment.
As relations with my emotionally abusive Dad grew worse, my contact with Dana withered down to a birthday card literally once every ten years usually included with a stern admonishment to "straigten up and fly right" or maybe "strive to perform at your potential". His comments weren't just ridiculing, they read like a fucking pamphlet from the local Army recruiters office. Meanwhile, Mom was reduced to having me phone my well-off Dad every single month for the measly $150 child support so we could pay the electric bill.
In 1985, at my Dad's relentless request, I left the tiny community college in Elko, Nevada where I was on scholarship and moved to Sacramento for a temporary custodial job Dana had lined up for me. It was union and $7 something an hour, big pay for 1985. I think my Dad erroneously believed that some of Dana's talent for making money would rub off on me. It didn't happen.
Dana was a changed person in Sacramento. He was impatient, a devout fitness fanatic and elitist thanks to his youth spent in Monterey. He lived in a gated condo complex off one of the busiest intersections in THE blandest of all California 'burbs. He drove a BMW, wore polo shirts and hunted perky aerobics instructors when he wasn't making his first million. In the six months I lasted in Sacramento, sharing an apartment with three trust funded assholes in one of the poorest neighborhoods, I saw him three times. Once was while at work, cleaning the bathrooms at Cal Expo and he was working as a state cop cum Cal Expo security guard. He even had those cop mirror sunglasses to complete his stoic image.
Dana avoided me like the plague. He eventually sold his start-up business and hit the rare air of the upper class. He had time shares in Mexico, a cabin in Lake Tahoe and several vacations to Europe, Hawaii and Australia. Once every six years my mother got a card from Cancun or Amsterdam. Even less frequently, he would show up on Mom's doorstep with a meek girlfriend in tow, always at least ten years younger than him.
In 1993 when our Mom died, Dana flew me and my Dad up to Washington state to meet my oldest brother, Glenn. We went up in Dana's antique Cessna, another toy gotten from his admission into the Upper Class. September 1993 was a black, ugly time in our already tenuously-shared history and Mom's death seemed to accentuate the ugliness in everyone.
After we had her body shipped back to Reno, everyone left all the funeral arrangements up to me. Dana paid for all of it but I had to do the phone work, the leg work and the numbing job of finding a casket. It wasn't Six Feet Under, it sucked. I remember Dad admonishing Dana for crying at the funeral. Yep, Daddy was that dysfunctional.
Post 1993 I chose, wisely, to avoid my brothers. I did this mostly out of self preservation and also out of the deep need for a mental health vacation from their relentlessly manipulative, misogynistic ways. I didn't need anyone telling me not to swear, what to eat (or not eat) or what to wear. I was an adult -- had been for some time -- and I just couldn't get either of these men to grasp that concept. Their inability to 'get it' -- that I'm an adult, a multifaceted individual with my own valid opinions, beliefs and experiences and someone whom in many ways they've never really met, isn't a roadblock to our relationships, it's the fucking Grand Canyon.
Dana lying in a hospital has me remembering something that happened around the time of his first accident. I think it was a few years after. I was staying at my Dad's in Carmel Valley that summer.
It was hot. There was another drought on. My step-mother was growing more and more resentful of my existence. I'd gotten thrown from a neighbor friend's horse but not seriously hurt. I'd then gotten into an argument with the neighbor friend's younger sister. She'd dragged some other neighborhood teens into it. They were all older than me and more cunning in the ways of ostracizing mouthy, hyperactive twelve year olds like me. To show that I was officially 'out of the club' for the remainder of my summer vacation, they'd thrown my denim jacket up into one of those massive California oaks, like twenty feet up.
The thing about the jacket was Dana had given it to me a few weeks before. He said he'd found it while fishing along the river. I'd seized on the idea of wearing it because it looked exactly like the one he wore. It was cool and my big brother had declared it cool. He knew all about cool. He rode surf boards and drove sports cars too fast.
One afternoon, I dragged him up the road to where the jacket was suspended high in the branches of an oak and pleaded with him to get it down for me. Gaping up at that ridiculously high tree, he kicked at the trunk and said 'hell no'. He said there was no way he was climbing that thing and, besides, he had a party to get to.
He left me standing under that giant tree with the horrible new idea that there were things in this world my brothers were incapable of doing, great dark expanses that they could not cross either by motorbike or Corvette. This is where I first fumbled with the idea that there are lengths too great to go for love.
Right now -- more than anything else in life -- I just want my big brother to get out of his hospital bed, go back in time and climb that oak. And get that stupid denim jacket back for me.
-- Mz M.
Also on Sunday, I got somefreak out news. My older (not oldest) brother, Dana, apparently hit a deer while riding his motorcycle. My sister-in-law said he basically stove in one side of his rib cage, collapsed a lung and broke both clavicles. Most serious, he 'tore' a section of his heart. He's had three open-heart procedures in the last 72 hours to stop the bleeding.
I've been musing on the number of times I've received batshit emergency news concerning my brothers. One of the earliest was when I was nine and Dana went off a cliff with two of his buddies the night before their graduation from Carmel High. They were driving in a 60's VW Bug and it rolled down an embankment. The friend who was driving (they were all shitfaced) died on impact. My brother, all 6'1" of him, was stuffed in the backseat. He kicked his way out of the VW and wandered with a fractured skull and brain hemorrhage several miles before collapsing in the backyard of some rich lady's estate.
My Mom drove white-knuckled from Reno to California and we stalked the gleaming hallways of posh Monterey General for several days until Dana woke up from his coma. A few weeks later, he was back home and brooding, agitated and driving my Dad insane with his California boy lifestyle. I remember him cutting the cast off his arm with a hand saw stealing two six-packs of beer and then disappearing with one of his friends on the back of a dirt bike for some macho mourning over their slain partner in crime.
We rarely saw Dana when I was growing up. He turned up twice in Reno after the accident, both times in a yellow Corvette Stingray that had come from settlement money after the accident.
The last visit he paid to Mom and me was a few months before the voices in my Mom's head told her to pack everything up and relocate us to Battle Mountain, Nevada before the giant California earthquake hit and caused all the water in Lake Tahoe to slop over like a giant teacup and drown all of Reno.
The visit did not go well. We fought constantly, mostly over Cap'n Crunch cereal, the TV (which monotonously aired the Watergate hearings) and what to do on those boring Nevada afternoons.
After Mom relocated us to the Armpit of America, I saw much less of Dana. I can only remember one very brief visit he paid while I was in junior high school. As we cruised that desiccated, gray-beige hamlet of nothingness, he said to me: "If the world had an asshole, this is right where they'd put it." It was an astute comment.
As relations with my emotionally abusive Dad grew worse, my contact with Dana withered down to a birthday card literally once every ten years usually included with a stern admonishment to "straigten up and fly right" or maybe "strive to perform at your potential". His comments weren't just ridiculing, they read like a fucking pamphlet from the local Army recruiters office. Meanwhile, Mom was reduced to having me phone my well-off Dad every single month for the measly $150 child support so we could pay the electric bill.
In 1985, at my Dad's relentless request, I left the tiny community college in Elko, Nevada where I was on scholarship and moved to Sacramento for a temporary custodial job Dana had lined up for me. It was union and $7 something an hour, big pay for 1985. I think my Dad erroneously believed that some of Dana's talent for making money would rub off on me. It didn't happen.
Dana was a changed person in Sacramento. He was impatient, a devout fitness fanatic and elitist thanks to his youth spent in Monterey. He lived in a gated condo complex off one of the busiest intersections in THE blandest of all California 'burbs. He drove a BMW, wore polo shirts and hunted perky aerobics instructors when he wasn't making his first million. In the six months I lasted in Sacramento, sharing an apartment with three trust funded assholes in one of the poorest neighborhoods, I saw him three times. Once was while at work, cleaning the bathrooms at Cal Expo and he was working as a state cop cum Cal Expo security guard. He even had those cop mirror sunglasses to complete his stoic image.
Dana avoided me like the plague. He eventually sold his start-up business and hit the rare air of the upper class. He had time shares in Mexico, a cabin in Lake Tahoe and several vacations to Europe, Hawaii and Australia. Once every six years my mother got a card from Cancun or Amsterdam. Even less frequently, he would show up on Mom's doorstep with a meek girlfriend in tow, always at least ten years younger than him.
In 1993 when our Mom died, Dana flew me and my Dad up to Washington state to meet my oldest brother, Glenn. We went up in Dana's antique Cessna, another toy gotten from his admission into the Upper Class. September 1993 was a black, ugly time in our already tenuously-shared history and Mom's death seemed to accentuate the ugliness in everyone.
After we had her body shipped back to Reno, everyone left all the funeral arrangements up to me. Dana paid for all of it but I had to do the phone work, the leg work and the numbing job of finding a casket. It wasn't Six Feet Under, it sucked. I remember Dad admonishing Dana for crying at the funeral. Yep, Daddy was that dysfunctional.
Post 1993 I chose, wisely, to avoid my brothers. I did this mostly out of self preservation and also out of the deep need for a mental health vacation from their relentlessly manipulative, misogynistic ways. I didn't need anyone telling me not to swear, what to eat (or not eat) or what to wear. I was an adult -- had been for some time -- and I just couldn't get either of these men to grasp that concept. Their inability to 'get it' -- that I'm an adult, a multifaceted individual with my own valid opinions, beliefs and experiences and someone whom in many ways they've never really met, isn't a roadblock to our relationships, it's the fucking Grand Canyon.
Dana lying in a hospital has me remembering something that happened around the time of his first accident. I think it was a few years after. I was staying at my Dad's in Carmel Valley that summer.
It was hot. There was another drought on. My step-mother was growing more and more resentful of my existence. I'd gotten thrown from a neighbor friend's horse but not seriously hurt. I'd then gotten into an argument with the neighbor friend's younger sister. She'd dragged some other neighborhood teens into it. They were all older than me and more cunning in the ways of ostracizing mouthy, hyperactive twelve year olds like me. To show that I was officially 'out of the club' for the remainder of my summer vacation, they'd thrown my denim jacket up into one of those massive California oaks, like twenty feet up.
The thing about the jacket was Dana had given it to me a few weeks before. He said he'd found it while fishing along the river. I'd seized on the idea of wearing it because it looked exactly like the one he wore. It was cool and my big brother had declared it cool. He knew all about cool. He rode surf boards and drove sports cars too fast.
One afternoon, I dragged him up the road to where the jacket was suspended high in the branches of an oak and pleaded with him to get it down for me. Gaping up at that ridiculously high tree, he kicked at the trunk and said 'hell no'. He said there was no way he was climbing that thing and, besides, he had a party to get to.
He left me standing under that giant tree with the horrible new idea that there were things in this world my brothers were incapable of doing, great dark expanses that they could not cross either by motorbike or Corvette. This is where I first fumbled with the idea that there are lengths too great to go for love.
Right now -- more than anything else in life -- I just want my big brother to get out of his hospital bed, go back in time and climb that oak. And get that stupid denim jacket back for me.
-- Mz M.
Sunday, October 01, 2006
YOU Can't Wait
World Can't Wait.org
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.
-- Pastor Martin Niemöller
They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
-- New England Holocaust Memorial version
-- Mz M.
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Strange Fruit
Okay, someone please go to this slide show and then identify the fruit for me. I've seen them growing wild out in the Cascades by the meadowful. What the hell are they? Gardeners PLEASE help.
-- Mz M.
P.S. I was wrong about the electric cars! Damnit, they only go about 30mph tops. Shite.
-- Mz M.
P.S. I was wrong about the electric cars! Damnit, they only go about 30mph tops. Shite.
Monday, September 25, 2006
$4,000 Pussy
I'm perplexed by this brave new world.
I mean, you still have to deal with the steaming litter box and the middle-of-the-night lungings at your face and/or loud crashing noises because felines are nocturnal ninnies who want to frolick at 2 a.m. And they still get higher than kites on catnip.
It is cool that they are all going to be showing up neutered/spayed. At least that's one nice twist.
I was always led to believe that the allergy problem was most prominent in un-neutered males, something to do with hormones and saliva.
Now if they could just come up with genetically modified dogs that can bag their own poop ... or even better, use doggie potties.
-- Mz M.
I mean, you still have to deal with the steaming litter box and the middle-of-the-night lungings at your face and/or loud crashing noises because felines are nocturnal ninnies who want to frolick at 2 a.m. And they still get higher than kites on catnip.
It is cool that they are all going to be showing up neutered/spayed. At least that's one nice twist.
I was always led to believe that the allergy problem was most prominent in un-neutered males, something to do with hormones and saliva.
Now if they could just come up with genetically modified dogs that can bag their own poop ... or even better, use doggie potties.
-- Mz M.
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Ultimate Hetero Male Fantasy?
In case you were wondering, James, I've only bought the first one but it ROCKS.
I just put in some hold requests for the next 5 volumes at the Seattle Public Library. At 15-20 bucks a pop, I can't be buying one of these every week.
An, of course, since they started running this thru Vertigo in like 2003, I feel yet again behind the curve.
-- Mz M.
I just put in some hold requests for the next 5 volumes at the Seattle Public Library. At 15-20 bucks a pop, I can't be buying one of these every week.
An, of course, since they started running this thru Vertigo in like 2003, I feel yet again behind the curve.
-- Mz M.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
A View From Harborview Medical Center
I took these pics on Monday evening and really early Tuesday morning after they set me free from yet another weird sleep over at the Sleep Clinic.
I'm experimenting with www.photobucket.com ... let's see how this goes.
This one is my favorite so far.
Click on the link above to read a little about each shot.
-- Mz M.
I'm experimenting with www.photobucket.com ... let's see how this goes.
This one is my favorite so far.
Click on the link above to read a little about each shot.
-- Mz M.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
More Horrors, Same House (Regime)
I just watched this in it's entirety. I urge everybody else to do the same, or better yet, blow 20 bucks and buy the DVD.
Be patient, it takes a while. You might wanna turn the sound off on your computer and walk a way for a couple hours while it downloads the stream.
No big surprise in that "our friends" the Pakistanis had a heavy hand in 9/11.
Just wondering now if the detainees at Git'mo maybe DO know something ... some thing that would incriminate the Bush Regime, not bin Laden. Maybe some Marine-sized interrogator asked Omar the wrong question four years ago during one of their torture sessions. Perhaps something like: "Did you ever see any Westerners while you and your crazy fundamentalist Daddy were staying in Jalalabad?" And poor little Omar -- literally dying to tell the truth -- probably blurted out: "Oh sure, we saw CIA operatives talking with bin Laden all the time. They used to bring us money and guns ... and fruit juice!"
It just gets worse and worse,
-- Mz M.
Be patient, it takes a while. You might wanna turn the sound off on your computer and walk a way for a couple hours while it downloads the stream.
No big surprise in that "our friends" the Pakistanis had a heavy hand in 9/11.
Just wondering now if the detainees at Git'mo maybe DO know something ... some thing that would incriminate the Bush Regime, not bin Laden. Maybe some Marine-sized interrogator asked Omar the wrong question four years ago during one of their torture sessions. Perhaps something like: "Did you ever see any Westerners while you and your crazy fundamentalist Daddy were staying in Jalalabad?" And poor little Omar -- literally dying to tell the truth -- probably blurted out: "Oh sure, we saw CIA operatives talking with bin Laden all the time. They used to bring us money and guns ... and fruit juice!"
It just gets worse and worse,
-- Mz M.
Saturday, September 16, 2006
House of Horrors
I've been listening to Randi Rhodes on Air America talk about the Geneva Conventions all week and then I finished reading this Rolling Stone article last night at like 3a.m. because I couldn't sleep. And then of course, the horror of the Bush Regime sunk in anew and I really couldn't sleep.
Somebody needs to start a letter drive to get this kid and the others like him out of Git'mo. I mean, Marines incarcerating pre-adolecents in some sub-division called 'Camp Iguana'?!
WTF?
I'd like to wake up from this nightmare now,
-- Mz M.
Somebody needs to start a letter drive to get this kid and the others like him out of Git'mo. I mean, Marines incarcerating pre-adolecents in some sub-division called 'Camp Iguana'?!
WTF?
I'd like to wake up from this nightmare now,
-- Mz M.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Feminist Rotating Coffins
If I had a grave, I'd be spinning in it. I read an interview a few days ago in which drug culture and distopian teen flick filmmaker, Larry Clark, basically agreed with something feminist Naomi Wolf said in a New York magazine essay three years ago. Both were commenting on the state of the collective sexuality of young people today.
And they were AGREEING! That is so freaking weird.
-- Mz M.
And they were AGREEING! That is so freaking weird.
-- Mz M.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Tha' Useless Feckin' Jakey
I wasn't surprised when a bunch of women lit into Irvine Welsh at a book tour in the U.K. recently. I was just surprised that it was over his most recent novel, which I haven't read yet, versus Porno which was a hellofa lot more cagey about its narrator's view of women. Several times in Porno, the character Sick Boy, describes obese women as "basically mentally ill." And one of the lead characters, a stylish Nicole Kidman type, explains her fitness and trim beauty by saying "I simply don't digest after 7p.m." when she binges and then pukes it all up in a public toilet.
It's too bad, because I really like his writing. But another Scotsman/Northerner from the U.K. spewing mysogyny? Bleh. Like that's anything NEW! Fuck's sake, it's the country that gave us the Rule of Thumb.
And speaking of sexually unappealing, when it comes to Welsh and his friend Nick Hornby, I'll quote George Carlin: "When black guys do it (shave their heads) it looks cool. But when white guys do it, they look like a freshy circumcised penis."
-- Mz M.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Appearing and Disappearing
It appears I've somehow landed a legit contract job. I'm betting it was dumb luck. I'll be amazed if I last three days. XML anyone?
I'm kissing the FRB and that heinous, hideous, fowl, goat fuck of a commute to Boeing Field goodbye.
-- Mz M.
I'm kissing the FRB and that heinous, hideous, fowl, goat fuck of a commute to Boeing Field goodbye.
-- Mz M.
Saturday, July 29, 2006
Oy Vae Part II ... and III
After listening to Randi Rhodes'take on the shit storm in southern Lebanon, I was ready to see this as Israeli 'NeoCons' hijacking Israeli foreign policy and taking back the Land of Canaan by force as prophesized in their Septagent (Five Books of Moses) AKA the Old Testament. And that's most likely what's going on with a significant nudge toward war from Pres. Halliburton.
Then this happened right here in Rain City, folks. I had to cycle around the Homeland Insecurity fiasco to get to work yesterday. They had cordoned off six square blocks of downtown just in time for the Friday afternoon gridlock. At first, I thought it was a severe over reaction to another crackhead slaying in front of the YWCA Women's Shelter, the site of many a junkie/wino wig out. When I got off the 174 bus last night at 11:45pm, the cops STILL had half of the neighborhood taped off and I again had to go way out of my way to avoid all that yellow police tape and ominous-looking G-men in suits.
The perp of the incident was described as bi-polar, unemployed and troubled. The Muslim community here was quick to condemn the incident as wrong and the work of a lone nut ...
But we all must remember that Islam is the religion of peace?
-- Mz M.
Then this happened right here in Rain City, folks. I had to cycle around the Homeland Insecurity fiasco to get to work yesterday. They had cordoned off six square blocks of downtown just in time for the Friday afternoon gridlock. At first, I thought it was a severe over reaction to another crackhead slaying in front of the YWCA Women's Shelter, the site of many a junkie/wino wig out. When I got off the 174 bus last night at 11:45pm, the cops STILL had half of the neighborhood taped off and I again had to go way out of my way to avoid all that yellow police tape and ominous-looking G-men in suits.
The perp of the incident was described as bi-polar, unemployed and troubled. The Muslim community here was quick to condemn the incident as wrong and the work of a lone nut ...
But we all must remember that Islam is the religion of peace?
-- Mz M.
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Oy Vae!
Again I feel I have to defend that unlucky one-eighth of my family tree, so here goes.
You may have heard of this 'book' called the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". People, it's bullshit from start to finish. Period.
It was originally written in the Dark Ages by one Catholic sect to smear another. It was then re-written in about 1900 so its slanderous bile focused on European Jews. A few decades later the Nazis latched on to it, re-published it and used it in their Final Solution. It's been debunked a thousand times over and yet ignorant Moslems and other anti-Semites still feel the burning need to QUOTE from the fucking thing (see the President of Malaysia).
In fact, the lies perpetuated by that 'book' and way too many anti-Semites has prompted this film.
I'm posting this because I got an essay forwarded to me by a good friend who wanted to know if it was 'showing too much victimization' on the part of the Israeli Jews. Here's the essay/letter:
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE WORLD
Dear World, I understand that you are upset with us here in Israel.
Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry. (Outraged?)
Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset by us. Today, it is the "brutal repression of the Palestinians"; yesterday it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War and the Sinai campaign. It appears that Jews, who triumph and who, therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily.
Of course, dear World, long before there was an Israel, we - the Jewish People - upset you.
We upset the German people who elected Hitler and upset the Austrian people who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians and Romanians. And we go back a long, long way in the history of world upset.
We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders who, on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us.
For centuries, we upset the Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through inquisitions, and we upset the archenemy of the church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.
And it is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you - in a manner of speaking - and establish a Jewish state. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you and disturb you. What better notion, then, than to leave you (and thus love you)- and have you love us and so, we decided to come home - home to the same land we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.
Alas, dear World, it appears that you are hard to please.
Having left you and your pogroms and inquisitions and crusades and holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state, we continue to upset you. You are upset that we repress the poor Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
Moscow is upset and Washington is upset. The "radical" Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.
Well, dear World, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel.
In 1920 and 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered tens of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.
Dear World, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots between 1936-39? Was it because Arabs were upset over 1967?
And when you, dear World, proposed a UN Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a "Palestinian State" alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried "no" and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews - was that "upset" caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of "upset" then?
The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who - when they had all the territories they now demand be given to them for their state - attempted to drive the Jewish state into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of "itbach-al-yahud" (Massacre the Jew!) that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream - destroy Israel. What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today, but we should not "repress" them.
Dear World, you stood by during the Holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres.
You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction.
And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians dream daily of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive
in our own land.
If that bothers you, dear World, well - think of how many times in the past you bothered us.
In any event, dear World, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.
Best regards,
Israel and the Jews of the world.
I think the current madness in southern Lebanon is tragic and wrong. Long ago, when I was taking a World Politics class I was Lebanon. We all got randomly assigned a country to be by our professor and then we held a sort of mock U.N. meeting. It was cool.
Lebanon has been a mess for decades. In the 60s and 70s, the Maronite Christians in Lebanon were accused of being much like the traditional stereotype of the Jews: controlling the banks, holding all the sweet CEO jobs, contributing to the debauchery of Moslems, making the Moslems (particularly the Shiite immigrants from Iran and Iraq) work menial jobs, etc. They had a civil war. Then Pres. RayGun intelligently removed U.S. troops from the area. And then Syria -- under one of the worst dictators in the Middle East -- invaded Lebanon and started parceling it up. In retaliation, Israel invaded a small section of lower Lebanon to create a 'Green' or buffer zone. And it goes on and on.
Now that Lebanon has slowly gotten back on it's feet (no thanks to Syria) along with the newly built luxury hotels in Beirut, they have new, shiny Islamic extremists funded by Iran who have been tirelessly chanting "Death to Israel". Most of the Palestinian terrorists in Israel train in lower Lebanon.
Currently, Israel has a PM and administration much like Bush&Co. in their hard liner and religious ideological approach.
The current fighting is a direct result of those two forces listed above. And Al Franken was dead-on when he described this as a "war by proxy" between the U.S. and Iran.
If there's ever going to be a permanent, safe Israeli state, then the hard liner Israelis (orthodox Jew settlement advocates) have to leave the Occupied Territories. But that's not going to happen until the day the Islamic radicals stop chanting "Kill the Jews, Kill the Jews." And the Islamic extremists have vowed they will NEVER stop chanting that phrase.
To quote Bill Maher: "The Palestinians have a homeland. It's called Jordan."
-- Mz M.
You may have heard of this 'book' called the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". People, it's bullshit from start to finish. Period.
It was originally written in the Dark Ages by one Catholic sect to smear another. It was then re-written in about 1900 so its slanderous bile focused on European Jews. A few decades later the Nazis latched on to it, re-published it and used it in their Final Solution. It's been debunked a thousand times over and yet ignorant Moslems and other anti-Semites still feel the burning need to QUOTE from the fucking thing (see the President of Malaysia).
In fact, the lies perpetuated by that 'book' and way too many anti-Semites has prompted this film.
I'm posting this because I got an essay forwarded to me by a good friend who wanted to know if it was 'showing too much victimization' on the part of the Israeli Jews. Here's the essay/letter:
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE WORLD
Dear World, I understand that you are upset with us here in Israel.
Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry. (Outraged?)
Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset by us. Today, it is the "brutal repression of the Palestinians"; yesterday it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War and the Sinai campaign. It appears that Jews, who triumph and who, therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily.
Of course, dear World, long before there was an Israel, we - the Jewish People - upset you.
We upset the German people who elected Hitler and upset the Austrian people who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians and Romanians. And we go back a long, long way in the history of world upset.
We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders who, on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us.
For centuries, we upset the Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through inquisitions, and we upset the archenemy of the church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.
And it is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you - in a manner of speaking - and establish a Jewish state. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you and disturb you. What better notion, then, than to leave you (and thus love you)- and have you love us and so, we decided to come home - home to the same land we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.
Alas, dear World, it appears that you are hard to please.
Having left you and your pogroms and inquisitions and crusades and holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state, we continue to upset you. You are upset that we repress the poor Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
Moscow is upset and Washington is upset. The "radical" Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset.
Well, dear World, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel.
In 1920 and 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs. Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered tens of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron in 1929.
Dear World, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots between 1936-39? Was it because Arabs were upset over 1967?
And when you, dear World, proposed a UN Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a "Palestinian State" alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried "no" and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews - was that "upset" caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of "upset" then?
The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who - when they had all the territories they now demand be given to them for their state - attempted to drive the Jewish state into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of "itbach-al-yahud" (Massacre the Jew!) that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream - destroy Israel. What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today, but we should not "repress" them.
Dear World, you stood by during the Holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres.
You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction.
And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians dream daily of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive
in our own land.
If that bothers you, dear World, well - think of how many times in the past you bothered us.
In any event, dear World, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.
Best regards,
Israel and the Jews of the world.
I think the current madness in southern Lebanon is tragic and wrong. Long ago, when I was taking a World Politics class I was Lebanon. We all got randomly assigned a country to be by our professor and then we held a sort of mock U.N. meeting. It was cool.
Lebanon has been a mess for decades. In the 60s and 70s, the Maronite Christians in Lebanon were accused of being much like the traditional stereotype of the Jews: controlling the banks, holding all the sweet CEO jobs, contributing to the debauchery of Moslems, making the Moslems (particularly the Shiite immigrants from Iran and Iraq) work menial jobs, etc. They had a civil war. Then Pres. RayGun intelligently removed U.S. troops from the area. And then Syria -- under one of the worst dictators in the Middle East -- invaded Lebanon and started parceling it up. In retaliation, Israel invaded a small section of lower Lebanon to create a 'Green' or buffer zone. And it goes on and on.
Now that Lebanon has slowly gotten back on it's feet (no thanks to Syria) along with the newly built luxury hotels in Beirut, they have new, shiny Islamic extremists funded by Iran who have been tirelessly chanting "Death to Israel". Most of the Palestinian terrorists in Israel train in lower Lebanon.
Currently, Israel has a PM and administration much like Bush&Co. in their hard liner and religious ideological approach.
The current fighting is a direct result of those two forces listed above. And Al Franken was dead-on when he described this as a "war by proxy" between the U.S. and Iran.
If there's ever going to be a permanent, safe Israeli state, then the hard liner Israelis (orthodox Jew settlement advocates) have to leave the Occupied Territories. But that's not going to happen until the day the Islamic radicals stop chanting "Kill the Jews, Kill the Jews." And the Islamic extremists have vowed they will NEVER stop chanting that phrase.
To quote Bill Maher: "The Palestinians have a homeland. It's called Jordan."
-- Mz M.
Monday, July 10, 2006
Satan's .. Cum?
I was just watching a DVD and it suddenly occurred to me:
Has anybody ever seen a horror movie about demonic possession where the possessee WASN'T a nubile young girl writhing on some bed???
I mean when was the last time we had a virginal-yet-ripe young GUY mastrubating with a cross and wandering across the ceiling while reciting Latin backwards?
It's like this whole sub-genre of mysticism and horror fiction is about the subjugation of female sexuality and/or the fear of it?
Apparently the female orgasm is something horrifically terrifying??? WTF?
-- Mz M.
Friday, July 07, 2006
It's My B-Party and I'll Be Sarcastic If I Wanna
I have this friend/aquaintance who I really like, very intelligent, insightful if a bit ... weird. She's an artsy type and I can't say much more because of the 1 in a million she'll read this.
Anyhoo, said friend/aquaintance is roughly the same age as me and married, apparently has been for some time to a fellow artsy type person. Since I've known her, I've never seen/met her significant other ... until recently.
And because I just turned 41 I get to say this without being kharmically bitch slapped: Fuck me, he's old!!!
Wow!
And I'm not talkin' gray around the muzzle, occasionally dabbles in Rogaine and/or Grecian Formula for Men old. Nooo ... My very first thought upon seeing my friend walking down the street with her Significant Other was: "Look! It's Santa!"
This guy isn't even Wilfrod Brimley/Quaker Oatmeal old. He's like Burl Ives, The Final Years Compilation CD Album old.
Damn, girl! Imagine snuggling up to grandpa ala Anna Nicole Smith style every night.
And my female friends wonder why I zoom on the twentysomethings,
-- Mz M.
Anyhoo, said friend/aquaintance is roughly the same age as me and married, apparently has been for some time to a fellow artsy type person. Since I've known her, I've never seen/met her significant other ... until recently.
And because I just turned 41 I get to say this without being kharmically bitch slapped: Fuck me, he's old!!!
Wow!
And I'm not talkin' gray around the muzzle, occasionally dabbles in Rogaine and/or Grecian Formula for Men old. Nooo ... My very first thought upon seeing my friend walking down the street with her Significant Other was: "Look! It's Santa!"
This guy isn't even Wilfrod Brimley/Quaker Oatmeal old. He's like Burl Ives, The Final Years Compilation CD Album old.
Damn, girl! Imagine snuggling up to grandpa ala Anna Nicole Smith style every night.
And my female friends wonder why I zoom on the twentysomethings,
-- Mz M.
Thursday, June 22, 2006
"No, you cannot die from lack of sleep."
That's what the intern says to Edward Norton's character in one of the early scenes of Fight Club.
Until recently, I was blissfully un-sleeping impaired. I sailed right through my 20s and 30s knocking out 9-10 hours of sleep a night unless I was working some ass-kicking job like fighting wildfires where I only slept 4 hours at a stretch, usually under a green fire engine staring up at the drive shaft.
That's all changed. In the last year, thanks partly to a hideous genetic deformity (thanks Dad!) and partly due to getting old(er), I've now got sleep apnea. Or at least some form of sleep apnea because apparently there's like a dozen different kinds.
The fact that I had dental surgery in '02 and the quack I went to "perforated" my sinus cavity didn't help either.
And although it would be easy to hang my latest malady on the you're just fat hook, that doesn't really fly given that I had a friend last year who is the exact same age as me, skinny as a ferret and he sounds like an idling chainsaw when he sleeps. He told me he was convinced that the snoring was making his blood pressure high! Yep, that's just one of the genuinely serious and really fucking annoying things about snoring. My friend had a similar scenario to mine: he would fall asleep exhausted and wake repeatedly because he was on his back and some fat, fleshy glob of middle-aged tissue in his throat had relaxed and was threatening to cut off all his air. When my friend finally had to get up in the morning, he was usually so beat he had to slam caffeine throughout the day just to make it to quitting time.
I feel like blowing up a credit card company.
-- Mz M.
Until recently, I was blissfully un-sleeping impaired. I sailed right through my 20s and 30s knocking out 9-10 hours of sleep a night unless I was working some ass-kicking job like fighting wildfires where I only slept 4 hours at a stretch, usually under a green fire engine staring up at the drive shaft.
That's all changed. In the last year, thanks partly to a hideous genetic deformity (thanks Dad!) and partly due to getting old(er), I've now got sleep apnea. Or at least some form of sleep apnea because apparently there's like a dozen different kinds.
The fact that I had dental surgery in '02 and the quack I went to "perforated" my sinus cavity didn't help either.
And although it would be easy to hang my latest malady on the you're just fat hook, that doesn't really fly given that I had a friend last year who is the exact same age as me, skinny as a ferret and he sounds like an idling chainsaw when he sleeps. He told me he was convinced that the snoring was making his blood pressure high! Yep, that's just one of the genuinely serious and really fucking annoying things about snoring. My friend had a similar scenario to mine: he would fall asleep exhausted and wake repeatedly because he was on his back and some fat, fleshy glob of middle-aged tissue in his throat had relaxed and was threatening to cut off all his air. When my friend finally had to get up in the morning, he was usually so beat he had to slam caffeine throughout the day just to make it to quitting time.
I feel like blowing up a credit card company.
-- Mz M.
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