Too Delicate For Politics

Meanwhile, I just heard on NPR, which for some reason I keep listening to even though their dire predictions of "the end of men" were exaggerated, an interview with an Iraqi woman. Not only is the woman not going to vote for any women candidates in the upcoming Iraq election, she isn't going to vote at all. Why? Because women are "too delicate" for politics.

The interview was conducted in an Iraqi beauty salon where the woman was getting her hair done.

Anyway, someone should inform the UN of this delicacy issue. Apparently they have some kind of rule, enforceable I know not how, that one-third of political candidates have to be women.

I guess one half would just freak the patriarchy out beyond repair. You know, by suggesting that women, as half the population, are equal or something.

Homos Need To Grow A Pair

John W Jones

And I Don't Mean Cottonballs: Why The Establishment Should Throw a Debutante Ball for Gay Marriage, and Why Gay America Should Suddenly Remember It Has To Wash Its Hair That Night

The whole of human history, which is pretty much just serial episodes of one group oppressing another, is full of this: as you flit hither and thither through life's tulip garden, you must legitimize the beliefs of the oppressing class, or face the consequences.

Consequences typically include, but are not limited to: marginalization, discrimination, public ridicule, physical violence, and death.

It is insanity, isn't it, to hold convictions which are both improbable and unprovable, and to oppress or kill anyone who isn't inclined to high-five your worldview? Especially since, who died and made YOU God?

At the very least, it suggests a kind of desperate lily-liverosity.

I speak of the current government, which is sucking Homophobe Nation's dick with that I-Hate-Fags Amendment crap. Of course, the good old annals are brimming pretty heavily with other examples of oppression by retards, too numerous to list here.

The anti-gay fucktards can't bear to have the homos prancing through town, challenging their beliefs by getting married. They fear that if men marry men and women marry women, marriage will lose its meaning as their most venerable and unassailable bastion of misogyny.

Misogyny, I don't need to remind you, is our culture's founding principle. We simply can't do without it!

The anti-gay fucktards freely admit that they quiver like aspens at the thought of two plastic tuxedoes on the wedding cake. They say gay marriage will defile the world's virgins. They say it will cause tidal waves and apocalypses. They say it will "weaken" the sanctity of nuclear hetero Jesus barefoot pregnancy.

Man, are these guys dumb. They should be happy as clams that so many gays want to subject themselves to the disadvantageous, anachronistic, vive la patriarchie enterprise that is marriage. They should be handing out cigars and composing lyric odes to this ideological victory over queer iconoclasm. At last, the unruly homos are jumping on the patriarchal bandwagon! They're embracing Conservative Family Values! They're flushing feminism down the crapper! They're consigning themselves to bourgeois domestic slavery for the sake of the market economy!

In other words, they're trying to curry favor with the patriarchal hegemony. So they can be slaves in the Big House, and not have to pick cotton no more.

The anti-gay fucktards, if they had half a brain, would cave on this marriage issue, because it is ultimately to their own advantage. The queers have made it a civil rights centerpiece, and they're never going to put a sock in it until they can enjoy the same sort of oppression that straight people do. If they can legally marry, The Man gains hitherto undreamed-of control over their relationships! And meanwhile, enjoyment of gay-bashing can continue uninterrupted.

Or: queers could grow a pair. They could admit that the marriage ideal is all about oppression. They could boldly go where no patriarchal fucktard has gone before and cop to it. It might dawn on them that everybody on the planet doesn't have to worship their relationship for it to be valid. They might note that the heterosexual marriage model is based on a cover of the Saturday Evening Post, and that in actuality the nucelar family is indentured to American capitalism. It could occur to them that marriage is not "value-neutral," and therefore has a deleterious social impact even on those who want no part of it.

Because if they wait for their countrymen to give them a pat on the head and welcome them into the fold, they're going to be waiting a pretty long time. Probably until the Pope shits in the woods.

Weenies and Underwear

The slogan on your T-shirt identifies you to the world as a member of the cult to whose ideology you conform, and what's better than identifying yourself to the world as a conformist? Here's the T-shirt I would wear, if I were 20 years younger. It says "Wal-Mart: Guns • Censorship • Crap from China." If I were the sort of guy who likes to point out irony, I might mention that that the T-shirts in question are "completed at several offshore locations." That is, they're crap from China.



Hanes, by the way--and its patronizing ladies' auxiliary units Just My Size! and Hanes Her Way--is owned by Sara Lee, a global mega-conglomerate that also owns, among many others, Jimmy Dean sausage, Champion sportswear, Ball Park franks, and Wonderbra. Weenies and underwear.

No Santa Butt Plugs

From the Hampton Union (thanks Tony Renner):

HAMPTON - A parent of a Hampton Academy Junior High School student says the principal of the school told his son to leave the school’s holiday dance on Friday night because the boy was dressed in a Santa Claus costume, which was politically incorrect.

Principal Fred Muscara said he told the boy he couldn’t get into the dance because he was wearing the costume.

"It was a holiday party," said Muscara. "It was not a Christmas party. There is a separation of church and state. We have a lot of students that go to Hampton Academy Junior High that have different religions. We have to be sensitive to that."

This school principal, like many Americans, is confused. He thinks that, because Santa and The Little Baby Jesus compete for ratings during the same eight weeks every year, Santa and The Little Baby Jesus are interchangable, or equivalent, entities. This is patently untrue! Though they are both icons of a feelgood American mythology designed to obfuscate the repulsive truth of human cruelty, and though it is customary to erect in front yards illuminated plastic statues of them both, and though both are honkys, there are are two--and by two I mean three--crucial differences.

One: Santa is completely uncircumcised. I bet you didn't know that!

Two: if you google Santa, you get a fairly lame shopping site, but if you google Baby Jesus, you get butt plugs.

Three: The Little Baby Jesus has the personality of a poached egg, whereas Santa is the evil twin of that nice St Nicholas.

St Nicholas is a formerly pious guy who got the pi sucked out of him by American capitalism. He started out as a 3rd century Turkish bishop, a mystic Christ-like Robin Hood dude who healed the sick and chucked bags of gold at the impecunious through the windows of their stinking hovels. During this early do-good period his behavior and appearance conformed to the ideals of Roman Catholic saintly gravitas, and once his tomb started oozing manna, it was a done deal: he was given a feast day, Feast of Our Holy Father, Nicholas, Archbishop of Myra in Lycia, the Chucker of Gold-Bags, and promoted to Patron of Sailors. For 1500 years he eked out his veneration on a series of ship's figureheads, at the forefront of European imperialism.

One of these figureheads ended up on a Dutch ship in a body of water that would one day be known as New York Harbor.

St Nicholas, however, didn't get a chance to chuck any gold bags in the New World. He had been weakened by the Reformation, and died quietly of acute 16th century politics. Dutch colonists, in dire need of quaint Old World traditions to Americanize and throw in the face of the British, surreptitiously got Nicholas' twin brother sprung from Riker's (where he'd been awaiting trial on a drunk-and-disorderly), and, calling him Santa Claus, which is Dutch for "bad-ass who thumbs his nose at the stinkin Brits and their pansy-ass St. George," pawned him off as the beloved populist St. Nick.

Santa's comeback solo career got a major boost with the jolly elfin habitué-of-chimneys persona, invented for him in 1809 by New York image consultant Washington Irving, but it wasn't until 1822 and the wide release of the sentimental blockbuster verse "The Night Before Christmas" that he acquired his stylin' ride, his posse, and his "jelly"-like physique. The red plushie DSI (Department Store Issue) uniform (the outfit to which the festive junior high school kid aspired--rashly, in my opinion-- to do justice) was invented by Coca Cola in the 30s to market "the Claus that refreshes." The success of the campaign, combined with his willingness to reward the undeserving with booty plundered from the misery of the third world, has made Santa the hardest working man in show business, and the most successful shill in the history of the world.

Thus, Santa is an advertising gimmick, and as such can offend no true American capitalist, whatever his/her ethnicity.

Washington Irving is the same guy who responsible for the tenacious myth that pre-Columbian Europeans believed the world was flat.

And to all a good night.

My Violent Dinner

Yesterday evening I put a large pot of water on to boil. As I gazed upon the dour countenance of the wild Canadian lobster gurgling in my sink, I listened to a horrible story on NPR about a kosher slaughterhouse in Iowa. Secret PETA-cam had captured footage of rabbis ripping out cows' tracheas while the cows are still alive, struggling to stay on their feet. And other grisly cruelties.

When I went to dispatch the lobster, it tried to grab the side of the pot on the way in, a final assertion of ancient instinct.

So I commenced weeping. This added an uncommonly maudlin note to the sauce, which was excellent. I'm no PETA nerd, but if I personally had to kill everything I ate, I'd probably feast a bit less often on things that have dour countenances. Let alone, you know, soulful eyes.

PETA report on AgriProcessors, Inc

Screw The Labradors

My quest is at an end. There will be no cuddly Labrador puppy for Twisty. There is not, it turns out, a single breathing specimen to be had anywhere in the southern United States. All the decent litters have been spoken for by people who have patiently endured months and months on waiting lists. Stupid patient people. I hate them.

After 3 solid days--and by solid days, I mean 9 hours with only 45 minutes for lunch and 45 minutes for martinis and 45 more minutes for idle loafing--of searching, I was only able to turn up one possible litter. This was at a gun dog kennel. Their website contained the headline "BUSH CHENEY 04 HOORAY WE FLUSHED THE JOHNS."

I'm switching to Italian Spumonis.

Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life

You know you wanna hear the song!

People like to reflect, at this time of year, on the momentous crap that transpired over the previous 12 months. Why 12 months? It's those minions of patriarchy, the TV gasbags, trumping up nostalgia for the good old days of last February with heartwarming footage--gosh, I hadn't thought about those swift boat guys in weeks! Oh, and there's dear old Abu Ghraib! And never mind, my darling, we'll always have Paris Hilton--and they keep promoting this fiction that a "new year" begins in a couple of weeks.

A year is just the length of time it takes the earth to complete an orbit of the sun. It has no more meaning than that. It might as well be the length of time it takes to smoke a cigarette, for all the cosmic significance it has. The earth will eventually stop orbiting the sun. At which point people, if there are any left, which I doubt, will look back on this and laugh.

For most people there won't really be anything new on January 1. Things will continue just as they were before the stupid holidays supervened and brought everything to a screeching, nutmeg-flavored halt. New Year my ass. If it was rotten in 2004, it will still be rotten in 2005.

January is a crap month to start a year in, anyway. I'd like to meet the bonehead who thought that up. There's barely 2 hours of daylight in January. Who doesn't want to blow their own head off in January? I'd like to meet the freak of nature who doesn't, for at least a few seconds, want to blow their own head off in January.

Anyway, a year is too long to wait between evaluations of important stuff like "well, is this life worth living or isn't it?" Too much happens in a day, let alone a year. Which is why I like to divide time up into manageable epochs of about 49 hours' duration. This approach promotes highly satisfying, introspective wallows with far greater frequency. Why condemn a whole year to the crapper by labeling it "the year my dad got cancer and my dog died," when you can reflect, at the end of each bittersweet 49 hours, on the principle of equilibrium, and how it keeps you from killing yourself?

By equilibrium I mean a condition of psychological poise wherein pleasant and unpleasant events are perceived at equal rates, so the overall comfort level remains unchanged over time. Try it out. Tally up the momentous crap that transpired during the last 49 hours. The super-automatic espresso machine threw a rod. The cat got in a fight. The can of anchovies you opened when trying to make a Caesar's salad--a real Caesar's salad, not the bullshit kind with "southwest fajita chicken ranch" currently poisoning the American culinary ethos-- was off. Yet you discovered the new taste sensation of deep-fried wasabi peas, and got a really good parking spot downtown, and scored the second-to-last bottle of Château Jeanin-Bécot 2001 in all of Austin.

Equilibrium.

Today, for example, I have a gruesome torn ligament in my shoulder, which is unpleasant, but this morning when I walked the dog (with my good arm) I saw a homemade plywood yard ornament in the shape of a sunflower with the word "Hi!" painted on it, which is pleasant. 10 minutes ago the espresso machine manufacturer called me up to say that it will take 4 weeks and $150 to fix my broken machine, but equilibrium was maintained when I remembered that I have an emergency backup super-automatic espresso machine in a box in the garage, and that if memory serves, it makes even better coffee than the broken one does.

So far, my equilibrium has been holding steady for 45 years. When it begins to destabilize, which it's bound to do sooner or later, I most likely won't be able to tell you about it, because I'll be dead.

A Blog By Any Other Name

Would Not Be Called "Meat"

Three people have noticed that the blog name changed from "Long Horn Meat" to "I Blame The Patriarchy." One of them has asked for an explanation. I don't really have one. I'm sorry. All the good blog names have been taken.

I can tell you this, though. For a while I thought about calling the blog "Twisty Has A Great Weblog!" I also like the titles "Chocolate Isn't That Great" and "I Wouldn't Mind Too Much If The World's Religious Fundamentalists All Died Screaming."

There are some who might advance the theory, upon careful reflection, that I have been known to do a bit of patriarchy-blaming in my spare time. This, of course, is utter nonsense.

Dog's

Harlan Pepper: wingnut or poseur?

You've seen Best In Show? Funny. Yet it has a flaw: it fails to capture the battiness of dog people. Compared to the unbelievable truth, the movie is but a pale shadow. Yes, you are skeptical now, but all will be revealed when, like me, you try to buy a purebred dog.

Because I don't personally know anybody batty enough to breed dogs, I've been searching the web for a litter of Labrador retriever puppies. This is a mind-boggling undertaking. I have unearthed some interesting facts. Such as:

Breeders of Labrador retrievers come in one of two species: hobbyists and hunters. Hobby breeders are sentimental suburban females who all seem to own at least one dog named "Diva." These are the women you see loping along in sensible shoes in Animal Planet dog shows. They breed dogs that look pretty while trotting in circles.

Full-on professional facilities, on the other hand, are run by he-men and/or lesbians in camouflage who train gun dogs and like to photograph them with dead ducks hanging out of their mouths [1]. These dogs are bred to enjoy the pleasant sound of gunfire, and spend their lives rootling in the underbrush for dead ducks to pose with.



You know how you've always wondered why our cities are populated by packs of fat, misshapen yellow labs with one bulging blue eye? After brooding on the philosophies of the two breeder species, I have deduced the answer: neither will sell a puppy to a non-professional doggist like me unless the creature is either too deformed for the show ring or too dumb to find dead ducks. In other words, "pet-quality" Labrador retrievers are, by definition, retarded.

Dog breeders may be described in many ways, but "masters of web design" is unlikely to top the list. You never in your life saw so many pawprint rainbows, wagging cartoon spaniels, wavy flags, snowflakes, dog-silhouette background images, "support our troops" ribbons, and bizarre MIDI soundtracks. Often the thing is one endless scroll of centered 18 point Comic Sans and blurry snapshots of puppies in Santa hats. I don't like to stereotype, but the hobbyist ladies seem particularly to excel at this web design style. And let's face it, an exclamation that probably won't be escaping anyone's lips any time soon is "boy, do those dog breeders ever understand the apostrophe!" These dog websites are definitely a dropped stitch in the crocheted tea cozy of civilization.

The Labrador retriever is America's #1 dog, but this glut is clearly the result of puppy mills, since no "reputable" breeder ever has actual puppies for sale. There is no way to tell this from the their websites, though. This is because dog breeders have no concept of time. It is not uncommon to come across the words "we currently have a litter of 4-week-old puppies" and "site last updated 4/99" on the same page. If you are used to one-clicking on Amazon, this will curl your hair.

Dog breeders almost without exception refer to their dogs as "boys" and "girls" (or "boy's" and "girl's"). Sometimes the girls are "ladies," and occasionally "bitches," but the boys are never "men" or "dickwads." I blame the patriarchy.
_________________________
[1] There is a correlation between guns, feathers, and photography, and I'm gonna get to the bottom of it.

Deep Thoughts

Slash's new band is scientifically designed to appeal
to the broadest spectrum of today's music lovers

Another Gray Day Results In Caustic Musings

Nothing, as the ever-useful Tony Patti has pointed out, is more mindless than the Grammys. As usual, I have heard only a miniscule portion of the nominated music, but that won't prevent me from flinging a few sarcastic words at the topic. I remind you all that my dog just died, and that I have no taste even on a good day.

I am already on record as being flummoxed by Elvis Costello's enormous popularity. "Delivery Man"--you can't dance to it! He's a shoo-in for Most Intellectual Pop Deity, though. He learned how to read music in order to compose his "classical" album!

Tom Waits. A guy I endorse on a conceptual level, but can't bear to listen to. Hands down he should get the Grammy for Best Use of Damaged Vocal Cords.

Brian Wilson is supposedly some kind of genius. The bulk of his oeuvre, SMiLE included, sounds like a barbershop quartet accompanied by an upright piano made of glass. Dead he's not, but brain-dead he is, so maybe he's got a chance against Ray Charles in the Deceased Genius Pop Star category.

Velvet Revolver! What a stupid band. They sound like if you put every guitar band since Nirvana into a Bass-O-Matic and squirted the resulting rock-flavored slurry through DigiDesign's expensive new plug-in, the Common Denomin-Ator (using algorithms that digitally extract idiosyncrasy, this plug-in lets you dial in the highest possible level of mass appeal). Oh, and don't forget to put a naked, gun-toting chick on the cover! Dumbasses.

Misojeanist

Levi's ad: wag your glow-in-the-dark moneymaker at The Donald!

Jerky Male Commercial Update

This week we report another stunning entry in the field from Levi's, now the country's leading Misogynist Jeans Brand. See if you can spot the misogyny!

The gripping plot: a beautiful woman is chased through the neighborhood by a large snarling dog. The dog trees the girl, biting her jeans leg. The girl jettisons the jeans. The dog reports back to the jerky male with the pants. The jerky male smirks at the woman, who has walked home in her thong and is now striking an alluring pose in the doorway with an "I hate you, let's fuck" expression on her face.

Let's recap: guy sets vicious attack dog on woman; woman strips to save life, is humiliated, goes crawling back, poses in thong; guy smirks.

Do men want to be that asshole? Do women want to do him?

That chick is pathetic. She should join a soccer team and meet some nice girls. She could do a lot better than that asshole.

"Our advertising," says Levi-Strauss, whose website, incidentally, still trumpets the company's sanctimonious reaction to 9/11, "conveys the values of our brands." Thus, in addition to promoting violence against women as a "value" (why mess with the classics?), they also give us Profiles In Butt-Thrusting, exemplified above by young Sissel Kardel, a "painter." Ms. Kardel models the new Levi's 515's, the first jeans designed to gently ease the wearer into an attractive "make me your bitch" posture.

But wait! There's more! Levi-Strauss may feel pangs for the victims of 9/11, and their brand may be more America-iconic than a blue-eyed Jesus draped in a flag, but it turns out the jeans are all cheap crap made by indentured slaves in China. That's right. They closed their last two U.S. plants last January. Why?

Two words: Wal-Mart.

Update update: This is not the first time that LS&Co advertising has used attack dogs to appeal to white male America's domination fantasies. Check this out.

Update the second: Twisty has obtained information suggesting that another Levi's commercial held the British record for most-complained-about advert from 1998 to 2003. The ad apparently featured a dead hamster.

Update the third: It had totally escaped my notice, what with the celebration girl-hating violence and all, but this commercial offends dog lovers too; they object to its "egregious stereotyping" of the pit bull. It's all in the point of view, I guess.

God Is Boring

This time of year--by which I mean Christmas, which got its start as a quaint tribal ritual but is now a "season"--is a mercifully God-free zone. At least it used to be. This was the Magic of Christmas! The secular reigned supreme! Media busied themselves with stories about shoppers and shopping, while the whole country threw itself into a massive effort to buy stuff and redistribute it amongst themselves. Some, charitably, redistributed it amongst "those less fortunate."

["Those less fortunate" is of course a euphemism for "victims of racist oppression and corporate greed."

How the local news stations loved to air footage of the indigent gratefully accepting the spoils of consumerism by proxy! Their moist eyes reaffirmed the American faith in materialism, for the have-nots were more aware than anyone that the true meaning of Christmas lies in cheap crap made by indentured slaves in China. They were also aware that, starting on December 26, nobody would give a crap about them anymore, for the next eleven whole months. A glance inside the charity grocery bag of dented, off-brand cans of creamed corn told them it had already sort of begun.]

So, while a nation carrying $800 billion in credit card debt celebrated the Season of Retail, we usually got a God reprieve. Occasionally there was even the odd Constitutional feel-good moment, such as when some court decided that in an enlightened society an electric plastic Baby Jesus doesn't belong on the City Hall lawn.

But not this year. No way José. Ever since the American voters informed God--by which I mean Christian American God, a guy who expanded his franchise from a zany little Middle Eastern concern to encompass a global dominionist patriarchy--that he represents a majority, it's been nonstop God, God, God. All God, all the goddam time. Even reliable old Christmas isn't putting a sock in it. Smirking theologians are infesting the talk shows with political monologues, and smirking politicians are infesting the talk shows with religious monologues. The news media has turned into church.

The Jesus guys, the politicians, the journalists--they're all goons for the same pulsating, amorphous lump of sanctimonious America-God baloney, and if it weren't for the 80's-style metal-framed glasses favored by the first two groups, you could hardly tell'em apart. The Jesus knobs all go on TV and just make shit up, whereupon the journalists treat them with pious deference. As though religious lies should carry more weight than regular old secular ones! And these are the gasbags in charge of American opinions!

And my god, they're so boring! This is the outrage that taxes my outrage-management skills to the utmost.

Traditionally my official policy re: people's moronic philosophical beliefs has been somewhere between "live and let live" and "I don't give a crap." Think virgins can have babies? Be my guest! Believe God created the earth several billion years after it was actually formed from cloud of primordial hydrogen and helium? What do I care? God says you're a Chosen One? Mazel tov! Just stay off me.

But now that God is a boring politician and a boring journalist, this town's not big enough for the both of us. He's being dull in my personal space. I might not mind so much, but God, I hate to break it to you, is also an asshole. Maybe his mom was a drunk, or he got picked on in school, or he's going through a bad divorce. Either way, it's hardly my problem; the guy's petty beefs with France and homosexuals and stem cell research are boring the crap out of me, and I just don't need that kind of baggage in my life right now. So screw him.

And screw the evangelical, homo-hatin', racist-ass horse he rode in on.