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.

$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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

I've Cracked the DaVinci Code!

Greetings virtual friend(s),

I went and saw DaVinci Code because I was brainwashed like everyone else by the ads and the subliminal programming forced me to go. (Oh, damn you, government mind control rays!)

If I deciphered the movie right then Audrey Tautou is Jesus' granddaughter ... so what does she get? Free frequent flyer miles if she decides to visit the Holy Land? Shares and silent (secret) partnership in some swank vineyard? Or simply a lifetime supply of matzo crackers???

And since I already thought Paul Bettany was a sexy Brit now there's gonna be this dark, creepy S&M twist to my fantasies because of the whole cat-o-nine-tails scene and ... that thing around his leg. Ouch!

And Ron Howard directed this movie! Ron Howard! I'm trying to picture Opie from The Andy Griffith Show sashaying into a sex shop in SoHo with his prop master. Opie ignores the starstruck drag queen behind the cash register, points to one of the whips prominently displayed above the front counter and uncharacteristically rasps: "I want one of THOSE!"

You know, now that I think about it, Tom Hanks would make a really good submissive. He cries a lot and that's always a plus. Right now out there somewhere is a very happy little Severe Companion.

Keep Jesus in yer thoughts and the church outta yer snatch,

-- Mz M.

Goodbye, Mike Wallace

I watched the roast/farewell episode to Mike Wallace last night. It's weird because I remember my Dad (rabid Republican) and my Mom (active non-participant) devoutly watching 60 Minutes when I was, wow, barely out of diapers.

If this show ever disappears, I'll know for sure that was the last gasp of the Fourth Estate.

-- Mz M.

What is the sound of one pundit ...

... satirizing Bush?
Open up, babybirds, Daddy Colbert's got a big, fat nightcrawler of truthiness!

-- Mz M.

Me 'N the Scientologist Agree!

Until 1990, I'd never even heard of anti-depressants. Then I briefly dated a guy who started taking them after a slight emotional jolt sent him "over the edge" (into depression?). While my then boyfriend was poppin' whatever the pre-cursor to Prozac was, his speech was slurred, his driving skills were terrifying and his over all ability to roll with day-to-day life evaporated. Eventually his sister, who was a nurse, flushed his meds and life returned to relative normal.

In 1995, I had a couple of college friends who were on Prozac. One liked to cut up her wrists with car keys while on it because she said she 'couldn't feel anything.' The other calmly told me she had lurid nightmares of murdering her parents and dismembering their bodies ... but that was just part of the 'process of adjusting to the meds.'

When I moved to Seattle in winter 2003, I (very) briefly rented a room from a 58-year-old, unemployed Boeing engineer who had been on Zoloft for about three years. This was the same amount of time he'd been unemployed. His doctor had initially prescribed the drug for just three months while my roomie was recovering from a mild heart attack but he had since found other ways to get his Zoloft fix.

My roommate's favorite pastimes included: sitting in the living room by himself with the lights off for hours, getting up at 4:30am every Saturday and Sunday to "meditate" and watching the Home Shopping Network. Every day. At a certain prescribed time. He told me he had no doubt that he was "addicted" to Zoloft but that he loved how it had made his life "fuller." His aging Filipino girlfriend was on something similar, Celexa, I think. They enjoyed swapping meds and playing around with the dosages just to see how it would alter the high.

Jesus fucking Christ in a hat.

Recently, I worked a month-long temp assignment for a guy who was on Paxil. This abrasive Yuppie asshole admitted he was addicted to it and he gleefully recounted how he'd mixed up his indigestion meds with the Paxil and "accidentally" taken triple his prescribed dose for several months. He said despite the liver damage, he'd "never felt better." And the guy was twitchier than a monkey after a triple-shot espresso. He was incapable of concentrating on anything for more than three minutes and paranoid? His paranoia made every cocaine or pot user I've ever worked with pale in comparison. They're all plotting against me was his personal mantra.

A five-minute trot around the Infobaun reveals a whole bunch of things about so-called mood stabilizers. First of all, psychiatrists -- a profession not historically known for it's open-mindedness or long attention span -- have admitted that they "don't know exactly how Selective Seratonin Re-uptake Inhibitors work."

There's tons of stuff out there arguing against SSRIs (Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, etc.) at least until doctors have a clue what they do to our brains ... or the pharmacutical corporations admit what they know (it burns holes in your head, your brains fall out your ass, whatever).

Ironically, I'm in agreement with the Scientologist. One of their celebrity darlings, Giovanni Ribisi, said it best: "You're taking a pill not to feel an emotion."

My own psychologist of a half-dozen years was opposed to mood stabilizers unless someone was screaming crazy. He said essentially the same thing that actor said that our culture tries to medicate depression and sadness rather than understand it.

Here's a small list of just some of the side effects of taking these sketchy drugs: irritability, aggression, nightmares, dizziness, extreme nausea, psychological dependency, physical dependancy/withdrawal symptoms, crying spells, light headedness, coordination problems, sweating, vomiting, agitation, memory/concentration difficulties and general fatigue.

And Number One on the Top Ten List of reasons why you shouldn't ever take it: a marked increase in the likelihood of extreme depression and possible suicide attempt.

Oh, I'm sooo stickin' with a Friday night cocktail and a joint ...


-- Mz M.

Child Abuse

I wish I could go back in time, find my 11-year-old self and beat her senseless with a leather belt until she brushed her teeth at least twice a day. There is a legitimate excuse for child abuse: dental care. Not only am I in pain but root canals and the thrill of follow up visits and crowns and all that crap is breath-takingly expensive.

Tragically, I lived on Slurpees and popcorn when I was a kid and refused to take care of my teeth until I was 13 and after a 5-hour stint in a scary hillbilly dentist's office to the tune of about 10 fillings and God knows how much that set my mother back. If I hadn't sucked my thumb when I was little and if I'd not been a stranger to my toothbrush, I wouldn't be sitting here in pain right now unable to eat dinner.

-- Mz M.

Where's Yer Moses Now, Huh?

So I'm watching this cheesy-ass remake of The Ten Commandments and Moses, played -- by the whitest Brit on earth (glow-in-the-dark Honky) -- has just been sent out into the desert by his brother, Naveen Andrews (much browner). And what does Naveen give him as a going away gift?! A scarf! It's like: "Oh wait, Moses. Here take these mittens. It might drop down to 90 degrees tonight."

I never thought I'd miss ol' Chuck Apes-with-Guns-Kill-People Heston but, at least he bothered to get a tan first.

This remake is a bunch of Limeys on a Moroccan holiday gone wrong. Their youth hostel cards have expired so they're all being forced to live in really dirty tents and not wash their hair for a month.

I miss Edward G. Robinson. You never knew if he was gonna breed sedition against Moses or ... push him down a flight of stairs in a wheelchair. Ya know, have him whacked.

-- Mz M.