Sayings

THE BEST

Justice Minister Alison Redford Is A Liar

On whether Marijuana is less harmful than alcohol:

"It is more harmful and whether you're talking about an addiction to marijuana or alcohol it's having a tremendous impact on people."

According to the BBC, 1/25 deaths worldwide are attributable to alcohol.

How many deaths are attributable to marijuana use? That's right, none. Marijuana simply is not toxic enough. How many people are addicted to marijuana? Oh that's right, none, because it is not physically addictive, unlike alcohol, which can actually kill you if you try to give it up cold-turkey. Of course, this doesn't matter, because truth, logic, reason, and rationality don't matter the justice minister. Why don't they? Is she just stupidly deluded, or does she have an ulterior motive? I'll give her the benefit of the doubt, and assume that instead of being an evil liar, she's just too stupid and lazy to pick up a medical textbook, or scientific journal, or even turn on the television. She probably wouldn't care either that the most effective cure for alcoholism is LSD therapy, but who cares about curing 50% of alcoholics when you can cure 2% instead. It's simple numbers, and Alison Redford obviously doesn't care about people, or human rights, freedoms or liberties. I have lived in Alberta all my life, and I love this province, but the sheer ignorance of our elected politicians is making it nearly impossible for a politically and socially aware individual like myself to continue living in this place I love. Cardiff, here I come. Allahu Akbar!

I don't know what this is but it's great!

Stealing, because it's beautiful

so obama has not dropped the ban on gays in the military. he has not broached the subject of queer marriage. for some reason, a lot of gay people get in to linguistic programs in the military so there is a shortage of valuable arabic and pashtun translators in iraq, paskistan and afghanistan. thus, it makes it harder to coloinalize these places. so is the ban on gays in the military a good idea? it makes the war harder to fight due to an inablity to use propaganda and enlist local people to participate in US operations effectivly. so should i be glad that obama is just being a fucking politician and not dealing with queer issues? at the gym today some frathole with huge diamond earrings in both ears (hilariously faggy) made fun of my wearing pink shorts. i blew it. i wanted to turn around and get into, "you got a problem muthafucker." but i was so stunned by this sort of thing in a public place i didn't do anything. he looked like the kind of shitty person who would be in the military. it seems like his prejudice could get him killed in the desert because no one around him could understand what people are trying to tell him.



posted by Jamie

Refusing To Be A Man

i'm not going to try to tell you that i'm different from all the rest.
i've been subject to the same de-structure of desire and i've felt the same effects;
i'm a hetero-sexist tragedy. and potential rapists all are we.
but don't tell me this is natural. this is nurturing.
and there's a difference between sexism and sexuality.
i had different desires prior to my role-remodelling.
and at six years of age you don't challenge their claims.
you become the same. (or withdraw from the game and hang your head in shame).
i think that's exactly what i did.
i tried to sever the connections between me and them.
i fought against their further attempts to convince a kid that birthright can bestow
the power to yield the subordination of women and do you know what patricentricity means? i found out just a couple of days ago.
it means male values uber alles and hey! whaddaya know...
sex has been distorted and vilified. i'm scared of my attraction to body types.
if everything desired is objectified then eroticism needs to be redefined.
and i refuse to be a "man".

dead men don't rape. a gender war in your fucking face. a battle hymn to celebrate the fact that we don't have to become or remain what we've come to hate.

Mood Music V

R/E/M/ - *69
Wow! Another one right quick. Keepin' it short, just like the song I'm talking about. Seriously though, *69? I mean, sure, I was all of... ten years old when this song came out, so maybe *69 was a new thing back then, but still could you imagine someone writing a song about their call-display feature in this day & age? I guess technology was a new a frightening thing back then, "I know you called!", "What? Really? How dare you! How am I supposed to call you and breathe heavily on the other end if you can find out who I am! Stalkers Rights! Solidarity!" yada yada yada. It's not a bad song, I guess. I dont want to seem like I'm complaining about it, I'm not. Just, fr ril, *69? Also, regarding that picture: Hey REM, you look like the kind of band I could be best friends with.
...

...

...
I'm open to that.

Mood Music IV

Depeche Mode - Dreaming of Me.
Early Depeche Mode sounds like it's just a shitty casio keyboard with out-of-tune singing overtop of it. The sentiments are so trite it's nearly impossible to take them seriously, especially since they don't sound like they believe a word they're singing. Maybe it was novel in 1980...

Via REUTERS

A devotee in a state of trance mimics the creatures which are tattooed on his body during the annual Magic Tattoo Festival at Wat Bang Phra in Nakhon Prathom province, about 80 km (50 miles) from Bangkok March 7, 2009. Thousands of believers from across Thailand travel to the monastery to attend the annual tattoo festival to have their bodies adorned with tattoos and to pay their respects to the temples master tattooist. They believe the tattoos have mystical powers which ward off bad luck and protect them from harm.

STAR TERK

A Hindu holy man displays his hair - measuring 15.5ft (4.7m) - at a temple in the north-eastern Indian state of Assam.

Solidarity

How the monkeys are fucking these days

It Is What It Is

I'm glad someone got a picture of this. I'm glad that it's also so good that I don't need to worry about taking one of my own. Given abundantly by No Locus

Something In The Way

Flag of Mozambique

Tezcat sez:

Think of your brain as a computer program, designed to function in a certain way. Unfortunately, people are going to keep trying to hack your brain, so you've got to keep developing patches to keep the operating system running smoothly. That, or you can just let the virus take control. Have you ever used an infected computer? Your brain is infected with a virus, and there *is* anti-virus software available to remedy the situation, but, y'know, you just have to run the software. Trendmicro isn't going to come to your house and fix your computer for you...

English Elliott

Thanks Dark Pizza

Lift The Veil, Kiss The Tank

Here comes the man with concussions in his pocket. Here comes the man with a laser-guided rocket. Here comes the man with a fistful of pills so you can kill with no remorse, with no recourse, dance on your conscience until it's a corpse.

War never ends, war never begins. Hoist up the hag of destitution! His mouth's an empty room where wild woes wander. Young machetes in lingerie charm us all into a frenzy. His mouth's an empty hole full of quadriplegics.

Here comes the man. So you charge into battle, muscles rippling, tanks tingling. Before you fire a shot a white flash feels up your flesh and cloaks you in a robe of blood, maydays you in a ship of mud.

War never ends, war never begins. Hoist up the hag of destitution! His mouth's an empty room where wild woes sleep sow. Young machetes in lingerie charm us all into a frenzy. His mouth's an empty hole full of quadriplegics.

They left you for dead in the desert haunted with the ghosts of prostitutes. They want you! They want you! Dress my corpse up in a low-cut dress, drizzle lipstick on my charred french kiss. Dip my severed jaw in cheap cologne, push-up bras dangling from snapped elbows.

But death's just death no matter how you dress it up.

In Memoriam

Peter Burke Munro, February 6, 1986 - May 15, 2009

Reclamation

It seems strange that, even nearly two decades later, Ian Mackaye of all people would be best able to clue us in to the real issue-at-hand affecting the female community, and distill the debate into easily digestible nuggets, and irrefutable soundbytes.

I read an article in Esquire Magazine this morning, “What Happened To All The Loose Women”, which went on to lament the increasing paucity of empowered and sex-positive women in our contemporary culture. The article referenced a lot of modern “culture” with which I am unfamiliar (I proudly do not watch broadcast-television), the historical-bent of the article allowed me to appreciate those older cultural documents that were being referenced. We seem to have entered a new era of prudishness and priggishness, exemplified by such [allegedly] physically arresting, yet highly sex-a-phobic public figures as the former Republican Vice-presidential candidate, Sarah Palin (though the article contends that Hillary Clinton is much the same). I use the word "seem" because in my lifetime I have witnessed a rolling back of rights and mentalities to a much more conservative, much more repressive social order. This movement, which I’m afeard to characterize as “a movement”, lest people assume I’m talking about a conspiracy or physical-organization, as opposed to a more broadly defined trend (even if there are organizations specifically dedicated to these goals. (The National Organization for Marriage, and Al-Qaeda both come to mind) ) has increasingly been represented by women, on a scale unseen since the temperance movement inextricably tied itself to the movement for women’s suffrage.

Yet for all the polemics, and the fear-mongering, and talking-head partisan bullshit the people who would roll-back our rights and freedoms are forgetting the very simple tenet that underlies the whole debate, whether it be Roe vs. Wade, the War-On-Drugs, or even the recently contentious Bill 44. That simple tenet is what I love Ian Mackaye for expressing so succinctly, namely: “We want control of our bodies.” We, the people want the freedom to control our bodies. The very simple fact of this matter reduces to a fight between those who want freedom, and those who would try and enslave others. Mild-slavery is still slavery, no matter how well-fed the slaves are. One should feel perfectly at ease morally opposing, say, abortion (heck, even I kinda oppose it) but there’s a huge difference between having your opinions (your totally irrational and un-justifiable opinions) and then using the laws of the land to persecute and prosecute others who hold differing opinions. The difference is a fight between freedom and slavery. There is no middle ground. You either firmly and resolutely believe in freedom, or you believe you have right to enslave others. You can not take but one step away from freedom. Those who would oppress others, and prevent them the exercise of their own god-given right-to-life are nothing but power-hungry wolves in the guise of lambs. All their talk about tradition, family values, social-values are lies, meant to deceive, and hide the fact that they consider themselves superior, consider themselves to be equivalent to das Herrenvolk, whether by virtue of their race, religion, or ideology--it doesn't matter, they're all lies, being told by charismatic liars, who would enslave you with the stroke of a pen. They will deny it, of course, because they have to--their political lives depend upon it.

We want control of our bodies, and it is that freedom that has underlay every massive social upheaval this past century, and it would be foolish, if not downright dangereous to assume that the victories of the past can’t be rolled back, and without due-diligence those freedoms will be rolled back. To tie it all back to the Esquire piece, women can choose promiscuity, or not, it’s strictly irrelevant to me, as long as women, and men, are still free to make that choice, and are free to make their own decisions, anything else is slavery. As such, we all have to make the choice of who we want to be: the slave, or the master. Seems like a simple decision, but the truth is that an increasing number of North Americans are making the despicable choice of the latter. Will you?

"These are our demands: We want control of our bodies.
Decisions will now be ours.
You carry out your noble actions, we will carry our noble scars.
No one here is asking, but there is a question of trust.
You will do what looks good to you on paper, we will do what we must.
Return, return, return. Carry my body."

A Novel Experience

Fade in on a nice pale royal blue eye, zoom out on our protagonist, relaxing on a red velvet chaise longue. Kinda frazzled, but not frizzy, brown hair. He sniffs a lot, because his worn out septum keeps giving him grief, he’s unwilling to just give up. Paying Stevie Nicks to blow coke up his ass… wouldn’t that be a sight for sore eyes? These letters are so big. He’s obviously talking to a psychiatrist…

“I think, at heart, I really do, that I’m just a teenage girl. I just want to be wanted, and I want to get teenaged boys off. I want to be the girl I never had in my life, y’know?”

I'd just like to observe, in the wake of drinking a mickey of vodka in the theater the other day, that micqui [mikki] is Nahuatl for "dead," i.e. the nominal participial preterite form of miqui /miki/ 'die'. 

/miki/, that's the present stem, whereas the preterite is just /mik/; to judge by the plural [mik-keʔ], the singular has an underlying /-k/ that doesn't surface at all in the verbal preterite, like ōmic "he died" = [ōmik] /ō+mik-k/, plural [ōmikkeʔ] /ō+mik-k-ʔ/, where [mikki] somehow also reflects /mik-k/. Why do I say this? Well, because in verbs with vowel-final preterite stems, the /-k/ affix appears with no vowel: participial tla-macac /maka-k/, preterite ō-qui-macac. That's also not totally unexpected, since the nominal phonology in general seems to preserve affixal consonants like that, like how /pil-λ/ appears as [pilli] and not **[pil].

It would no doubt be possible to describe this in terms of cophonologies. It may be as simple as nouns having one phonology, everything else something else; as I understand it, the strongest case for cophonologies is that which can be made for nouns.

Anyway, I'm getting off topic here. The point is that "mickey" is almost the same as the Nahuatl word meaning "the dead man" or "it's a dead man."

Stealing, because it's beautiful

preschool story

before i was able to start making a living playing music i was a preschool teacher. the last school i taught in was in seattle. it was a good school and i am happy to ending my teaching career there. there were 2 boys in my class who were obsessed with a girl classmate. she was an almost picture of the 1950s image of little girl. rosy cheeks, curly hair, dresses, big eyes. despite that, she was genuinely a nice child. the 2 boys talked about her and to her all day everyday. they played nicely together and although it was unusual for this to occur to the degree it did, it seemed as if all 3 of the children were comfortable with their relationships together and were as nice to each other as could be expected of any children. after having worked there for a few months the girl moved away and left the school. the boys were devastated. usually when a child left the school we had a little good bye party to allow for the children to adjust and say adieu to a friend. but they had to move suddenly and we were not able to have the requisite ceremony. the 2 boys, on her first day of being gone, knowing she would never return, began to say her name over and over again and take pieces of white paper, color them totally black with markers and crayons, cut them into strips and shove them into her former locker. they filled her locker with this black paper. they spent about 2 hours doing it. it is unheard of for 4 year olds to do anything that focused. it unnerved the other teacher in the room but technically they were not really doing anything wrong, just really intense. they then took tape and started taping up the opening in her locker, a tomb of this black paper, like a cocoon of what was gone. then they paced in front of it until it was time to go home. it was one of the most beautiful expressions of grief i have ever seen. posted by Jamie

NO GAY [PENGUIN] MARRIAGE!

"Two "gay" male penguins have hatched a chick and are now rearing it as its adoptive parents, says a German zoo."

Of course, I also attended a lecture (though I can't remember by whom) where it was hypothesized that even Penguins themselves can't tell the penguin-sexes apart.

Black Hole

Simulation of Gravitational lensing by a black hole which distorts a galaxy in the background.