Scatalogical Graffiti
This house is about a half a block from where my Aunt lives. Every single holiday they go all out like this. The whole house and yard is covered in lights and decorations.
As I was heading up on Christmas Eve, the owner was in the yard, tending to all of his little toys, making sure they were in place and clearing up any litter. His display is kind of a big deal every year. People drive to visit it. Every now and then, a local news crew shows up to film it. It’s one of the things I always look forward to. Christmas isn’t a holiday I really get into that much. I never decorate my apartment or look forward to many traditions, but that house? Yeah. I dig it. Especially the time I took my little nephew to see it.
This is the first year I split from the family festivities to take a picture. When I was walking back, I noticed this. Because, you know, who among us hasn’t walked down a public street and been overcome with the urge to write the word POOP in giant letters on the sidewalk?
I’ve got nothing as of late, other than wishes for a Merry Christmas. I’ve been tinkering with a post about The Wall that I hope to have up this weekend. Until then, have fun eating, giving and receiving and all that other good stuff that comes along with the holidays. If you don’t celebrate Christmas, think of another reason to have some fun. Cheers.
Good Riddance To Rotten Rubbish
Good. I hope it was painful. She’s a rare case where redemption and forgiveness was never an option in life and mercy or compassion are completely undeserved upon her death. I don’t care who she leaves behind or any of the phoney charity work she did for when she made appearances before the parole board. At one point during her sentence, she tried to claim she’d never picked up a weapon in her life, when in truth, the only reason she and the other creepazoid Mansonites got caught was because she bragged, in detail, about what she had done to cellmates when she was imprisoned for a different crime. She’s left behind nothing but a legacy of death and terror. It wasn’t just the people she killed. An entire city went into a panic for months because of what her and her cronies did over the course of two August nights in 1969. She laughed her way through her trial as if she were skipping rope in a school yard, in a manner so gruesome, you can’t even write it off as youthful stupidity. Her behavior was monstrous and her subsequent actions in the years that followed never suggested a person who accepted responsibility, except in the hollow words spoon-fed by attornies trying to fool everyone into giving her the life she robbed from others.
Rot in Hell, Atkins. To quote the woman herself, in the final words Sharon Tate probably heard before taking her last breath, I have no mercy for you, bitch.
A Bibliophile Breaks Her Audio Book Cherry
Audio books used to baffle me. I always thought the pleasure of a book was reading it, not just taking in the story itself. I’ve since had a few people explain that they’re nice when you’re driving or jogging or otherwise engaged in some activity where your hands or eyes aren’t free. It changed my mind somewhat, but I still never took the plunge and actually listened to one (does “War of the Worlds” read by Orson Welles count? That was more of an abridged dramatization, wasn’t it?). Last night, while I was bored and fumbling around iTunes, I came across an audio version of Geek Love and couldn’t resist hitting the “buy” button.
It’s narrated by a woman named Christina Moore and what a wonderful job she’s done. She reads with such passion and animation, it’s simply captivating to listen to her. I’ve probably read that book a dozen times now, but the experience of hearing it was entirely fascinating and new. I lit a couple of candles and got lost in this amazing, strange, bizarre world while relaxing in the dim night. I couldn’t have done that with a book. My last shred of anti-audio book snobbery is formally gone.
~Emily Beezwax
And I Still Have It On Vinyl
It’s impossible to explain the Michael Jackson hysteria of the early-to-mid 80s if you weren’t there. Every person you knew owned a copy of Thriller. Even my pop culturally challenged parents caved in and bought the album, a precious piece of vinyl that I still own to this day. That music was everywhere. The video for the song “Thriller” was the first one that was helmed by a big-time director and cost over a million dollars to make. That kind of thing was unheard of then. Of course, it’s unheard of now, but that’s because the nature of music as a business has changed. In between, people kept trying to outdo it, to do it bigger than Michael Jackson. Nobody ever did.
When I was in the sixth grade, I was living in Germany. Even there, across the ocean, Michael Jackson was huge. My class was taking a ski trip to Austria. We were riding a bus on the way and made a pit stop to pick up sodas and snacks. That’s when we saw the headlines. They were too devastating for our ten-year-old hearts to bear. We couldn’t believe it. It was the worst thing that could have happend in the world short of the Soviet Union nuking our Army base in Berlin.
Michael Jackson’s hair had caught on fire while he was filming a Pepsi commercial.
Oh my God. Was he okay? Was he going to live? Would he be scarred? Can he still sing and dance? Did the Glove make it through?
I don’t know if you can picture it, but try to imagine a busload of pre-pre-pubescent girls on our way from Germany to Austria, bawling our eyes out because we didn’t know the answers to those questions. There was no internet then, at least not unless you worked at the Pentagon or something. Twitter wasn’t around for your online friends to provide up-to-the-second information courtesy of the hands greased by a sleazeball like Harvey Levin. All you knew was what was inked in the press that morning.
Michael Jackson’s hair had caught on fire.
I’m not one of those overwrought people who would drop everything to throw myself over his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I didn’t cry or light candles. I wouldn’t even name a pet after the guy. But I did have to take a moment last night to pull out that old copy of Thriller on vinyl -despite the fact that I now have it in CD and MP3 formats – and give it a spin, if only to contemplate the fact that Michael Jackson’s music has been in my life since the day I was born.
~Emily Beezwax
Pain And Suffering
No, really. They mean it.
Oh, it was brought. I poured a tiny drop on my finger to give it a taste. My eyes immediately began to water. My ears were ringing. My tongue went numb. My colon clawed its way out through my butthole and demanded a habenero-flavored double espresso with shards of glass mixed in to ease the pain*. Lucky for both of us, it managed to crawl back in before I spent a less-than-leisurely hour trying to pinch a loaf the size of Rhode Island. Smallest state, my ass.
And that was just from one drop. Imagine what an entire bottle can do. It could melt steel or possibly be harnassed as an alternative energy source. We could declare war on North Korea with it and win. It is that fuckin’ hot.
*after visiting the website of the manufacturer, I have seen that they are also the makers of other hot sauces with names such as “Assplosion,” “The Devil’s Bitch,” and my personal favorite, “Pain and Suffering.” I can’t wait to try them, because I’m the kind of girl who never learns.
~Emily Beezwax
Post-Lord Stanley Quips and Quivers
*I cannot even imagine how shitty Marian Hossa feels right now. He left Pittsburgh for Detroit this season, taking a pay cut to do it, because he thought he had a better chance at winning the Cup with the Red Wings. For Penguins fans that are harshing on the guy, consider cutting him some slack about now. Winning that trophy is something hockey players fantasize about from the time they put on their first pair of skates at the age of three. He had a dream and he did what he thought was the best way to make it come true. He gambled on the wrong franchise without the benefit of hindsight that we all have had since the third period horn sounded last night. Don’t give me any of that crap about team loyalty, especially not coming from fans that disappear in droves when the Penguins aren’t winning. How many bankruptcies has the team filed for due to lack of local support? It wasn’t that long ago that they were at risk of having to leave Pittsburgh entirely (you can thank your boy Mario Lemieux for caring enough to swoop to the rescue while you celebrate in the coming weeks and months). I didn’t hear any of you complaining about lack of loyalty while my boy Chris Kunitz was whooping tail for your team after being traded from the Ducks. The trash talk during the series was tolerable, but after? Way to kick a guy when he’s down.
*Getting that out of the way, pardon the contradiction while I write of how annoyed I was by all of the people shaking their fingers at the Malkin and Crosby bandwagoneers. Yes, miracle of miracles, sports fans tend to enjoy watching teams more when they are playing well. Bandwagoneers = more TV viewers and higher attendance = bigger ratings and revenues = higher hockey visibility = MORE STINKING HOCKEY! Please explain to me how this is a bad thing? Don’t you ever want hockey to pull itself out of the inaccessible gutter that is Versus to a larger and more widely-available network? So, some bandwagoneers disappear when there’s no title at stake, but some also become fans for life and stick around through thick and thin.
*No matter who wins in the end, I will never, ever get tired of watching the absolute glee of the players when it happens. Alternately, seeing the faces and cowered heads of the guys who lost hurts like a pain. It’s a great comfort to see both teams shake hands in the end, many opponents being old friends and ex-teammates willing to console the ones who are going home without the Cup.
*Number three for number 66. The moment Mario raised the Cup rocked my ass off.
*I know people can give the guy shit he sometimes doesn’t deserve just because he’s good, but I don’t want to hear the name Sidney Fucking Crosby for the next 100 days.
*I watched last night with some old family friends and my Auntie. The most they collectively knew about hockey was that it was played on ice and the object was to get the little rubber thingie in a net at one end or the other. One friend was only rooting for Detroit because he’s from Cleveland and hates Pittsburgh. Auntie only rooted for Detroit because I told her to. “Which one is Detroit?” she asked. “The guys in red,” I aswered. She spent the rest of the game shouting “woo! Go red! Go red!” and once cheered a Penguins goal because she didn’t realize what was going on. I was subjected to a billion questions all night – “what does ‘icing’ mean?” “why is a Penguins penalty a good thing?” “What’s with the octopus?” Friend from Cleveland, a fan of other sports besides hockey, apologized for asking “I know this is going to sound ignorant, but has Mario Lemieux ever won the Stanley Cup?” (me: “yes. Twice.” That number has changed slightly since last night).
*This experience reminded me of why I get irritated by hardcore fans that are so judgemental and condescending towards casual fans who don’t take their interest in the game to *ahem*… our larger obsessive levels. In the end, watching sports is supposed to be about having fun. If it’s had by a sixty-year-old lady who asks which one is the quarterback, or a guy who wouldn’t watch otherwise and is rooting harder for one team to lose than another to win, who cares? As long as they’re not being dilettantes and acting as if they could call it better than the pros, leave them alone. Let them enjoy it at a different level. You aren’t better than anyone because you know more. You simply have a deeper interest in something that, in the end, is just a silly game of grown men behaving like children while dressed in brightly colored uniforms. It’s meant to entertain. While I may love hockey more than anything else you can say the same thing about, I certainly don’t fault anyone else for not feeling the same way.
So long NHL ‘08-’09. Thanks for the ride and I promise to visit often in the history books.
Confessions of a Foode Snobbe
I admit it. I’m a snob when it comes to food. I don’t look down on people who don’t like cooking or enjoy their Nachos Bell Grande or what not. To each their own. But with rare exceptions, I’m a all-from-scratch kind of gal who shuns packaged or pre-made frozen foods like they could give me butt cancer. Cooking is a very relaxing and fun thing for me and the more people to feed, the better.
Food is a hard subject to write about without coming off like a stuck-up douche. I’ve tried and tried in the past and given up because everything seems to come out like elitist twattery. Some foodies really look down their noses at people who don’t share their hobby and I never want to be one of those a-holes.
Okay, that being said, will somebody please explain to me how in the fucking fuckity fucks Sandra Lee has not only her own cooking show on the Food Network, but appears to be amassing a Martha Stewart-like dynasty with published cook books and her own magazine? Her recipes are shit, if you can even call them recipes at all. Take this macaroni and cheese “recipe,” for instance. It’s a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese with some Lawry’s seasoning and a little extra cheese added in.
Again, nothing against Kraft macaroni and cheese. I even buy a box once or twice a year and throw in some cut-up hot dogs because it reminds me of being a kid. But for heaven’s sake, if you have your own cooking show, shouldn’t you actually know how to…cook? Besides, nobody that’s interested in cooking doesn’t know how to spice up generic foods on their own. I don’t need Lee’s advice on how to make mac and cheese taste like something more than powdered elbow noodles. Nobody that knows even the slightest bit about cooking does.
What next? Alerting her viewers that too much salt can ruin a recipe? Explaining how to work a pepper grinder and how to peel garlic. Oh, right. She wouldn’t do that. She buys her garlic in a can.
Her recipe for marinara sauce? Store-bought Newman’s Own with some garlic and red wine thrown in. I get it. Some people don’t have the time or energy to make meals from scratch all the time. Every now and then, you’re in a hurry and have to eat on the fly. Jarred sauce is just fine for those occasions. But it doesn’t belong on a cooking show, something people watch because they want ideas for recipes, not instructions on what kind of canned vegetables and factory sauce they should buy at the market to warm up in the microwave along with their Marie Calendar’s TV dinner. It’s not cooking. It’s a friggin’ shopping list. That’s it. Nothing to learn or anything new to try. It’s beyond useless and stupid and is a waste of television air time.
Sandra Lee’s Recipe of the Week
Tater Tots
Ingredients:
One bag of frozen Idaho Spuds Tater Tots
Salt to taste
Ketchup for dipping (recipe follows)
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Arrange tots on a lightly greased baking sheet in a single layer. Cook for 20 minutes or until golden. Remove from oven and then put your head inside until you die for needing somebody to tell you how to do this.
Ketchup
One bottle Del Monte Ketchup
And Surprisingly, It Did Not Suck
I agreed to go to a play with a friend last night who had to see it for a class she’s taking. It wasn’t until about five hours before curtain that I was told it was a play based on a book by Henry James.
I almost puked. Dear gawd, how do I get out of this? “I’m sorry, but I’ve suddenly come down with a case of spinal meningitis…and the bubonic plague…at the same time. I’m highly contagious and inches from death.” Hell, actually catching the bubonic plague almost seemed preferable to sitting through anything based on something written by Henry James. Christ, the insufferable dialogue, the hysterical women, the repressed! Victorian! hypocrisy! themes stuffed down your throat. Never mind the plague. For shit’s sake, I’ll probably die of boredom.
Actually, what I was dreading more than the play itself was the obligatory chatter afterwards. Henry James is one of those authors that, whenever you mention you don’t care for his writing, some pretentious intellectual has to condescendingly explain to you that the problem is you just don’t “get it.” You must recognize the central themes and statements in his work – which they will explain to you as if they were talking to a child who’s just grasped Dr. Seuss for the first time – and go back and give it another chance. Then you will just love it forever.
Um, no. I get it. I understand it just fine, even the sentences I have to re-read six times because James is such a mess of an overly-wordy writer. The only one of his books I still own is The Turn of the Screw, so I grabbed it, opened to a random page and picked a random sentence:
Such things naturally left on the surface, for the time, a chill that we vociferously denied we felt; and we had all three, with repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each time, to mark the close of the incident, almost automatically through the very same movements.
That’s not even the worst of it; it’s just a sentence plucked by chance. Imagine if I actually went deliberately searching for something more awful than that.
Anyway, I was surprised that I actually enjoyed “The Heiress” (based on James’ short novel Washington Square, which I’m told is the Henry James book that even people who hate Henry James actually like, apparently because it’s written in a much more succinct and straight-forward style. Maybe I’ll give it a chance). But I was even more surprised after when the people we ended up talking with about the play were all James haters as well. We all went out for drinks and spent the entire night making fun of his crap prose by making up stories Henry James-style.
“Here we sit, in boundless lack of motion, with soundness of thought, though not uniformity of character or mind, as in reflection like a newly formed puddle in the cobble-stoned streets that are broken, as our hearts and lives.” Crap like that. And it only got worse the bigger our bar tabs got. It was a lot of fun.
~Emily Beezwax
Surviving Atlas Shrugged
I know some of you younguns out there, at some point in your scholastic careers, are going to have a fucking idiot of a teacher that thinks it is important for you to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. It won’t be. Trust me. That is why, like the men of yore who stared into the face of cannons so their sons would not have to, I am offering the following to help you survive the experience without wanting to climb a belltower with automatic weapons and take out your classmates in a hail of bullets.
*First of all, once you get to the 200th page, stop. You have read everything Rand will write in the 800 pages that follow. All she does is repeat the same stupid ideas over and over, as if her self-perceived “philosophy,” which is really nothing more than a sophomoric attempt at pseudo-intellectualism, were so complicated and difficult for us plebes to grasp that she must explain it to us repeatedly in excruciating detail. As a rule, when people use 1000 pages to say what they can in a quarter as many, it’s usually to disguise the fact that they’re pulling it all out of their ass. They are rarely offering little more than common sense packaged with fifty-cent words.
*Everything you need to know about the “philosophy” of Objectivism can be learned from skimming the Wikipedia entry. Whenever you’re not sure, take the principles I’ve outlined below and reduce them in application to the simplest form of black-and-white scenarios imaginable. Remember to exclude any real-life variables that may conflict with your conclusions. This is fiction, so you can do that.
Virtuous
Total self-interest and disregard for the needs of others.
The pursuit of personal wealth and gain, no matter who may be harmed or alienated by it.
Complete distrust of any forms of government.
Contempt for the meek, needy and poor.
Disbelief in any power, religious or otherwise, higher than yourself.
Immoral
Charity, compassion and altruism.
Any person not generating wealth or practical commodities. I’m lookin’ at you, you useless art fags!.
Government of any kind, especially one that provides for the needs of its citizens. If the sick and hungry cannot fend for themselves, it’s better to let the leeching fuckers die.
Publicly funded art of any kind. Again with the damn art fags!
These are just a few examples to help illustrate the underlying tenets of Objectivism that will help you pass the test about Atlas without having to actually be tortured by the whole of it. Onward with the final portion of our study guide.
*The characters in this book do not speak to each other like normal people. They exchange bogus philosophical lectures between them. Imagine meeting with a friend for a cup of tea and casually saying “The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it!” and your companion replying “Yes, yes! Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values!” Shit like that. Lucky for you, they are also utterly and indefensibly one-dimensional, so it’s not like you’ll have to pick them apart like it’s Pride and Prejudice or anything. As with the “philosophy,” reduction to the simplest principles, motivations, thoughts and actions will always serve you well when you’re in doubt.
Finally, remember that in no point during your lifetime will the contents of this book be useful to you. It will not nourish your soul as does literature or provide you with practical approaches for everyday life. It will not help you become a reflective, thoughtful individual or arm you with witty anecdotes to drop at parties (unless they’re Libertarian parties, in which case, all hope for you is lost already). Don’t feel bad about skipping it. In the truest words of Dorothy Parker upon reviewing the hideous beast that is Atlas Shrugged, “This book should not be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
~Emily Beezwax
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