Week 3 (18)

In the wake of the pretzel—
Friday, 11:37

—everything has changed.

•

“The pretzel?” says the Spouse. We’re all of us—me, the Spouse, the collageuse, the budding lawyer, the downstairs tenant—sipping Voodoo Ladies (chai; rum; Kahlua) and giggling inordinately over the word dingleberry. Don’t ask. Anyway, someone brings up the pretzel.

“The pretzel!” we all cry, gasping. “Jesus, you didn’t hear about the pretzel?”

No. She hadn’t heard about the pretzel. Of course, she gets most of her daily news from the BBC, these days.

So we tell her about the pretzel. —Behind us, a supervillain is threatening Arthur in a courtroom. “Arthur!” cries the Tick, frustrated. “Is—the System—working?”

“No!” cries Arthur, cringing.

The Tick, bellowing, leaps to the rescue. Then, they’ve cancelled The Tick.

•

“I think the pretzel’s really changed everything,” says the budding lawyer. We’re trying to track down more whipped cream because, you see, Voodoo Ladies require whipped cream. Problem being he doesn’t know the layout of the store, and while I know where the cream one can whip oneself is stored, who wants to go to all that effort for a Voodoo Lady? We want the pre-whipped, nitrous-propelled shit. And neither of us knows where it is.

“I don’t know if the pretzel’s changed everything. I mean, the change was already there, ready and waiting. You know? The war-time high could only last so long. And there’s Enron, and the Carlyle Group, his embarassingly tortured syntax—aha!” Turns out the whipped cream is kept in the coolers with the glass doors, where they keep the milk and the non-dairy creamer and such-like. Rather near the whipping cream. Makes sense. “Anyway, I think the pretzel was more a catalyst than anything else.”

Which, thinking about it, is just a way of saying that the pretzel, you know, changed everything.

•

Everything’s changed in the wake of the pretzel.

Marriage is down; divorce is up. Enlistment figures for the armed forces are flat, perhaps even down. We’re not going to church in higher numbers any more; there’s been spikes in the murder rate; in petty crimes; we aren’t giving as much to charities as had been expected.

Then again, all of that has been true going back to about Sept. 11, so maybe the pretzel didn’t really do that much.

•

We’re giggling over the field day the international press is having, the stupid late-night jokes, the indignant internet rumors flying about that the pretzel story is a lie, one of those lies where you try to tell something so unbelievably stupid that no one will believe you’re lying, that really Bush got drunk, had a stress-related “episode,” that Ken Lay showed up and popped him one when Bush refused to refund his campaign donations.

Then, “Nitrous,” says the budding lawyer, about the whipped cream.

“Yeah. There was this party I went to once where they had a sort of bong designed for restaurant-sized nitrous canisters. You dropped it into a central reservoir, and there were flexible pipes coming off it, and three or four people could take a hit at the same time when it went off.”

“Geeze.”

“But, I mean, nitrous? It’s not such a great drug I’d want to go to all that trouble for, you know?”

•

In the wake of the pretzel, Bush has been replaying the Heartland values card. Something of a mystery, since that tack tanked last year, and since there’s no hard correlative evidence to support the claim—in fact, quite the reverse. And while two can play that divisive us v. them red v. blue game, I, at least, shall take the high road. Why, after all, should I step in and red-bait when those red Heartland states have committed public servants who do the job for me?

•

So—wait a minute. If he’d died, you know, there on the carpet in front of the sofa, the football game burbling merrily in the background—if he’d died, then they wouldn’t be irresponsibly slashing taxes? Or—wait—if he’d died, then they would irresponsibly slash taxes, but since he survived, they will, instead, raise them? Or—

Meanwhile; meanwhile; meanwhile—

 

Well, phooey.
Thursday, 12:37

One more reason not to watch the Winter Olympics.

 

Type porn.
Wednesday, 15:21

Dean Allen is one of those people I want to be when I grow up, except for the whole living in France bit. Well, maybe even that. I liked France when I was a kid. —But he’s just revived his overview of 20 typefaces which, if, like me, you’re just getting into the fantastically finicky world of typesetting and typography, makes for lusciously prickly reading, ooh and ah; if not, well, you may find it, um. Mysteriously dull minutiæ. But! Take a good long look. At the differences, the flows, the startling shifts in tone, the weights and colors suggested by simple (simple?) black lines on clean white space; think about the foresight of a craftsman who cuts metal with an eye toward what shapes will ultimately result when that metal is dipped in ink and pressed onto the page. (I mean, an A is an A is an A is an A. Right?)

Dean Allen is the sort of person who can make me wince at my fondness for Minion (which, if you’ve got it on your computer, is the font you’re reading this in, if you haven’t overridden my style sheets); Dean Allen is the sort of person who makes me hang my head in shame for having such a busy backdrop at the top of the page and sputter defensively, shamefacedly, for having Palatino as a third-hand backup—I mean, for God’s sake, man, it only appears if they don’t have Minion or Georgia, and Jesus, it isn’t Times Roman! Dean Allen is the sort of person I’m proud to know enough to disagree with, since he’s missing an obscure but essential nuance to the whole em-dash/en-dash thing. Dean Allen is the sort of person I get down on my knees just about every day and thank for writing the Apple scripts I use to typeset just about everything I put on the web these days. Dean Allen knows what the fuck he’s talking about, so the rest of y’all should just check yourselves.

But. Not like I’d ever risk a punch in a bar somewhere by mentioning Peter Mayle to his face, but. This whole Canuck-expat south-of-France thing? With your one true love? Writing about glace de viande and oatmeal and the photos of your dog Oliver, who’s freakin’ adorable, and I’m not trying to implicate him in this or anything, but you know? All that? Makes me think of Peter Mayle. —To his detriment, yes, but still.

 

An important question posed by the first episode of Blue Submarine No. 6.
Wednesday, 13:42

—Which was confusing and in media res all over the place and had lousy music and questionably arty sound design (thank God for subtitles)and was an uneasy mix of CGI and cel animation which achieved some nifty effects here and there and had the sort of obsessively designed ultra-cool tech in it that proves the animators worried far more about widgets and setting than, you know, story or characters, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but: my question being: why is it that the young female secondary character of the sf action-adventure whateverthefuck, after the battle in which she’s been one-upped in piloting the super-cool utterly improbable piece of military hardware by the laconic I’m-too-cynical-for-my-shirt roninistic protagonist who’s just been hauled out of a drug-soaked early retirement by Events Beyond His Control, why is it that after that battle the young female secondary character who’s otherwise been admirably no-nonsense aside, of course, from that astoundingly chirpy voice all female characters in Japanese animation have except maybe the token female antihero and, you know, the old ones, why is it she takes the improbably clingy battlesuit she’s wearing, or maybe it’s a wetsuit, which might sort of start to explain the whole clingy skintight issue, but it’s the one with all the microphones clinging to the cosmonaut-looking head- and neckpiece and the various random tubes and attachments that don’t ever seem to plug into anything but do set off her curves in an aesthetically pleasing manner, why is it she always takes this suit and unzips it down to her navel to show she isn’t wearing anything underneath as she lounges by the railing and peers out at the CGI-sparkling water? —Especially since the laconic I’m-too-sexy-for-my-shirt roninistic protagonist who one-upped her in piloting the super-cool utterly improbable piece of military hardware did so in what looked like a pair of doughboy trousers with the original suspenders attached and, as noted, no shirt. Or head- or neckpiece with microphones. Or tubes or attachments. Or curves.

I’m just asking. I mean, right now? It’s either that or drink a lot.

 

Cuyahoga, falling.
Wednesday, 11:07

Yes, there is a real city of Cuyahoga Falls. No, this has nothing to do with that. Or the song by REM. Or the actual river that, you know, caught fire. Pat Metheny is at best peripherally involved.

I’ve posted two more: here, and here. No, I don’t really know what these mean or what they’re doing. Beyond the obvious. The Tainted Lime, though, does continue to impress as a resource for navigating the wild whatever yonder that is alt.sex.stories.moderated, and not merely because said Lime likes my stuff; I’d just note that, y’know, it was her sister Sam she was talking to, about Sam’s boyfriend Richie, and not “her girlfriend Richie.” But that whole phone conversation was arguably a bit too hard to follow. And I’m sorry about the swagger stick, I think. In retrospect.

Spellcheck?

 

The sort of thing you’re interested in, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
Wednesday, 09:42

It’s not what I would have expected. I mean, I’m not going to speak to the scientific rigor of the survey at all—it’s one of those where whoever wanders in and is interested can answer the questions, so the sample is fucked right out of the gate—but 2300 is a decent-sized pool, and anyway— See, if you’d asked me to break down the sort of people likely to visit a website called The Encyclopedia of Lesbian Movie Scenes, I would not have predicted a 60/40 male/female split. And if you’d asked me to then predict their respective favorite movies, I would not have guessed most men would name When Night is Falling (while short-listing Desert Hearts and Claire of the Moon), while most women preferred Bound. —Call me prejudiced. Susie Bright must be proud.

Myself? Gia wasn’t great, the Wild Side that I saw was risible, Henry & June eh, But I’m a Cheerleader raucously funny if erratically paced. When Night is Falling was luminous, and has Don McKellar in it, but I think I liked I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing better, though it’s been years. (Though apparently, thanks to small-minded Blockbuster Bowdlers, I’ve never seen the super-hot Canadian version of Night.) Bound? Yeah. Bound rocked. But, you know, I was watching it for the innovative use of liquids and wetness as signs of sex and danger, and for the camerawork, and for the snarky transformations of yonic symbols to phallic symbols and back again, like that close-up of a cavernous yawning black pit that turns out to be the barrel of a gun. —And, well, yeah. Gina Gershon. But aside from that.

 

Mark Twain was a hottie.
Tuesday, 12:08

Watched a bit of the Ken Burns thing everyone’s talking about while fiddling with photos from a New Year’s party. One of the narrators—not the pompous one with the neat beard everyone says is articulate (and I guess he was, but he was also pompous), and not the one—Hal Holbrook?—doin’ the folksy aw-shucks Twain accent, but another one—was telling us about when Twain who wasn’t Twain then but Clemens talks this riverboat guy into taking him on as an apprentice pilot and the still photo they were showing was of this dark young man in a natty jacket with these dark piercing eyes that could stun an ox and cheekbones that would finish it off and I then I saw the Twain there, around those eyes, in a crinkle, and I said, “Damn,” and the Spouse said, “Damn,” and since I don’t have a link you’ll have to trust me: a swoony Byronic who-was-that-intense-guy-in-the-corner wouldn’t-ask-him-to-bum-a-smoke follow-him-down-the-street-but-don’t-let-him-catch-you tell-all-your-friends-about-having-seen-him wouldn’t-kick-him-out-of-bed-heck-might-even-invite-him-in-if-I-could-find-the-sand-to-do-it hottie.

 

Speaking, as we were, of the perv zombie—
Monday, 11:58

A full taste of my stream-of-something head, eh? —Yes, yes. I could indeed have been somewhat more clear than I was in my lolitapop post of the pre-S11 irrelevancy of Mark Cromer’s Nation article on porn’s self-imposed restrictions; then, I could have been a lot more clear about a lot in that. Bygones; bridges, the water under which; I will just note that what perhaps I most regret is a lack of fully engaging the hinted-at false dichotomy of nature v. nurture, and why it’s such a hotpoint for issues all across the sexual spectrum: if it’s nature, say, and there really is a Britney gene that makes some large number of men and Joan Collins lust after nubile flesh whatever its sex, why, then, there’s naught to be done, is there? It’s a part of who we are. Mitigatible, perhaps, to some small degree, but. —But! If it’s nurture, why, then, that behavior can be unlearned. Engineered right out of our society. Utopia within our grasp.

Which leads, on the one hand, to family values reactionaries insisting that sexual behavior is learned even as they insist that heterosexuality is natural, ingrained, the Way Thing Were Meant to Be; on the other, it leads some defensively to assert that sexual behavior is entirely genetic, ignoring (for the nonce) the sexual experience of, well, just about everybody, to say nothing of Pavlov and Freud, who were just a couple of dead white guys, anyway. —But it’s a false dichotomy, a construction, a modelled conceptual dissection of an indissoluble feedback loop; you can no more separate nature from nurture than you can, say, the teller from the tale. Oops. —But you see? We’ve already digressed far afield, and stumbled into a can of worms too big for any of the openers I’ve got in my pockets at the moment. Better, perhaps, to have left it the way I did, moderately well-focussed, only a little Vaseline smeared on the lens. Except, as noted, for the whole Mark Cromer thing, and if anyone knows what’s currently going on with all that, I’m curious; please, by all means, drop me a line. And being a bit ballsier with the heavy-lifting in the light-weight summation. At least I didn’t say that it remains to be bally well seen.

But, um. Thanks for the link, Debra. You perv zombie, you.

(Huh?)

 

Reacting overly.
Monday, 11:28

More information on the 9-year-old girl arrested in Connecticut on fourth-degree sexual assault and three counts of impairing the morals of a minor, via Debra Hyde over to the infallible Pursed Lips, without whom, etc. More information, and a context which allows one to see the arrest in a more sympathetic light. —This is not to say all questions have been answered by any means, and whole new cans of worms are opened about jerry-rigging the justice system to provide such intervention (it may get the job done, but), and one would not want to be in the eye of the shitstorm that will be the Manchester, Connecticut police department and social services and district attorney’s office—the original AP link is skyrocketing up the Daypop Top 40, last I looked, for instance, and this story has legs to spare. Check out the MetaFilter discussion for a top-quality slice of the net Zeitgeist on this one: interesting discussion, thought-provoking overreaction (in every direction), a welter of fascinating links from well-read people that I won’t rip off at the moment. Other fish to fry. Like trying to find a goddamn job.

 

Briefly.
Sunday, 18:13

See, I hate it when you zealously delete something from your email account, a message with some important attachments that you’re pretty sure you already downloaded, which you did, because, you know, last week you needed one, so you downloaded the attachments and grabbed what you needed and deleted everything else from the hard drive (which, yes, was arguably a little too full) because, you know, you had those attachments still stuck to the message in your email account.

Working on Ruthie’s. You may clix me, if you like. Or read a little sketch I posted to alt.sex.stories.moderated; it’s brief and quick and nasty enough, I suppose. The Tainted Lime liked it, anyway.