Why I hate David and Goliath...

I know I'm behind.

Aside from the fact that the owner of David and Goliath T-shirts is a thieving bastard *ahem* alledgedly inappropriately appropriated another artist's achievements, they've got a ton of sexist, homophobic, and racist shirts on their site. Woo, trifecta.

At least they got their banner right "We make stupid stuff so you don't have to".

Yes. Yes you do.

Let's see, there's the Miso Hor Ni and "Chinese" secret shirts. Or maybe you like fruit? Some conflating of cross-dressing with homosexuality, as well as reinforcing the same tired cliches about gay men on their your boyfriend is gay shirt. The statuatory rape is funny shirt. And pedophilia is twice as funny. Oh, and prison rape, too. Nothing like a little black stereotyping to get a laugh. That and domestic assault. Fat shaming. Mocking and endorsing eating disorders.

The list goes on and on.
And their response to the furor over the shirt just reinforces their classy image

I want my dick to be neither sick nor dangerous, thanks...

I was cleaning out the ol' spam folder on my e-mail, and amid the normal mess of "male enhancement" spam was one with a title that made me do an actual double-take.

"Make your dick sick and dangerous!"

We apparently live in a world where that seems like a good promotional tactic to someone. I'm not sure which is more disturbing: the person who thinks that's good ad copy, or the person who reads that and thinks "Why, yes. Yes I would like to make my dick sick and dangerous!"

The intersection of Racism, Sexism, and Commerce...

Lauren, of Faux Real Tho, had an... interesting experience at a gas station recently. This post reminded me of some of my own experiences living and working in a college town.

I used to work retail at one of the largest bookstore chains in the United States. No, I won't mention names on here. *cough, cough* Excuse, me. Anyway, over the course of my time working at the bookstore, and living near two major colleges, I found myself in situations not entirely unlike the one Lauren describes.

It's interesting to me, because the attendant was treating Lauren the way that I expect most sexist asshole clerks treat other men. This is how it usually went for me: I'm standing in line waiting to make a purchase, and the woman in front of me catches the clerk's attention. He watches her as she leaves, and I'm waiting to make my purchase. Clerk takes my purchase and rings it through and starts talking to me like we're old friends- "Daaamn, she was hot. (insert comment about her chest or ass). I'd totally hit that in a heartbeat, right?" The exact words change, but the idea remains the same- the clerk thinks that the customer is hot, and wants to make it clear to me. And, of course, because I'm a guy, he expects that I'll agree with and appreciate the remark.

I suspect that a lot of other men have been there.

Of course, it's not just register jockeys that make grossly inappropriate, sexist, racist remarks. When I was working at the bookstore, the customers would frequently make horrible comments to me, both about other customers and about my fellow employees. Even if you take the blatantly creepy people out of the equation- the guy who would position himself so that he could see up women's skirts when they rode the escalator, the guy who'd take pornography into the children's section and leave it there, etc- there were plenty of people who were just huge assholes.

Two incidents stick out at me. The first was a group of teenage boys who were hanging out in our store all day. They were annoying, but not really doing anything particularly troublesome, until they discovered that they could look down women's shirts if they leaned over the railing looking down into the middle of the store (where the escalators were). I realized this is what they were doing when they began making very loud comments about a woman's chest and cat-calling her.

In the middle of my store.
At 4:30 in the afternoon.
On a weekend.

Before I could get to them, another employee (Hi, Nat!) dressed them down and, I believe, kicked them out. But, this is a busy store at one of the busiest times of the week, and these guys didn't think they were doing anything wrong by sexually harassing our customers. That's a big problem.

The other incident was a case of racism. I was covering the music department for a break, and we were listening to something- Shivaree, maybe? I don't remember now- but something like that. A customer came back, and asked what cd was in, and I figured he was thinking about buying it (whatever it was, I thought it was listenable), so I told him and started to tell him what I knew about whatever group it was. He cut me off with something like "well, it's really terrible. It's just awful. The worst thing you've ever played in here, hands down." Then he walked away.

Ten minutes or so later, another employee came back and we were going over a display chart, when this same guy comes back over. "I just wanted to let you know again, this is the worst thing you've played in here" he says. I look at him and tell him that I'll let my manager know, and before I can say anything else, and to my shock, he says "It sounds like one of those Jap groups or something. They'd play them when I was over in Vietnam last year, and they all sound the same- singing in Japanese or Chinese or whatever crazy language they speak over there."

It went downhill from there.

I got lucky, and a manager was nearby, so I called her over and told her she needed to deal with him, because if I had to listen to him anymore, I was going to say something that would get me fired, and she ended up asking him to leave.

Moments like that leave me feeling both dirty and confused. I feel like there's something really wrong when people can say and do things like that without hesitation. It's bad enough that they're sexist, racist assholes, but that they don't even feel like there's anything wrong with what they're doing is just mind-blowing. Is there so little social sanction against these things that someone feels completely comfortable saying and doing these things in a busy retail establishment?

The other problem is, of course, how to respond. It's a question I've asked about other things, too- how do you respond to someone who says or does something like that. Particularly, if you're the employee in the situation, what do you do? If you're the customer, you can tell the clerk where to shove it, and take your business away, or get a manager and complain. As an employee, though, you're more limited (unless you don't care about losing your job, of course).

Anyone else want to share a weird/creepy/troubling experience they had, and how they handled it?

Fetishization of Asian Women (link round-up)

Over at Sara Speaking, there's a very interesting post called things that are hard for me to hear, talking about some of the reasons why baby221 finds conversations about "Asian fetish" so frustrating.

There's also the posts that inspired baby221. Over at Feministing, there's Samhita's post Asian fetishes and the myths that perpetuate them. Over at Racialicious, Carmen Van Kerchhove did a brief write-up: Jezebel: Asian women are hot, smart, thin and tell you your skin is bad.

And, of course, both of those posts were responding to an article, too. Moe, from Jezebel, wrote a piece, Are Asian fetishes a myth? We're gonna have to go with "no".

Amanda Marcotte, from Pandagon, tackles the subject, too, with Nor can you generalize all hamburgers from MacDonald's. There's 150 comments (and growing) at this thread, and the conversation, as always, takes some interesting turns.

There's also this really great article by Vickie Chang from the Village Voice, called Yellow Fever: They got it bad, and that ain't good. The page title is "Your Asian Fetish, My Life" (which, honestly, I think is a better title, but whatever). That article is from last year, but it's a good read, and related to the conversation.

Over at Color Q World, D.M. has an article that addresses some of the difficulties of talking about the fetishization of Asian women in a post called Deconstructing 'Asian fetis' - the appeal of physical appearance and/or cultural traits. In it, the author touches on something that makes this conversation so difficult for some of us, but which often seems to go unsaid: the difference between being attracted to physical traits that are common within some racial or ethnic types and being attracted to the cultural stereotypes associated with people of a certain race or ethnicity. In other words: there are some people who might find some of the physical traits common in women of Asian ancestry attractive, while someone else might find the stereotype of Asian women as submissive and docile attractive, even though both might say that they're attracted to Asian women.

This paper, Made in the USA: Rewriting Images of the Asian Fetish, by Maggie Chang of the University of Pennsylvania, is also pretty interesting. This project was undertaken as part of her undergrad work.

If anyone has links to some other posts/articles/papers about the fetishization of Asian women, feel free to link in the comments.

I'm Not Surprised...

I just can't decide whether I should be glad that there was only one bid, or sad that it was almost a hundred bucks.
And that, you know, the auction was up at all.

Also: A note to google searchers...

Please, please stop searching for "Sex with sleeping girls". I can only assume that you're looking for porn, but you're finding my site. And I strongly suspect that you're not really going to find what you're looking for here.

I think I've got a much more accurate search for you, if that's the case.

Wow. Just... wow...

I've been the sometimes reader of Natalia Antonova's for a few months now. In her own words:

I’m Ukrainian, but I’m also American, but my first language is Russian, but I live in the Middle East, but I want to settle in Britain eventually (and hopefully not live off noodles and mayonnaise, but, once again, you never know).

How can you not want to read a blog like that?

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. The important thing is a post she made about a Salon interview with the pick-up artist Mystery. Or, more specifically, the comments. There's a comment by a reader named Alex that is, to put it lightly, troubling.

Alex, despite his protests, is absolutely a Nice Guy(tm). His comments go on at great length about how tragic the dating scene is, and he laments that women who date abusive asshole jerks represent "the majority of womanhood" and discusses how he should just give up and become an asshole too, because, you know, then he could get some play.

Read through his comments a bit, and you'll be, I suspect, shocked to find that he considers himself nice. Let me clue you in to something, Alex: you're not very nice. Your comments are abusive, insulting, and offensive. If you're having trouble meeting women, the problem may not be with the women or the people they're choosing to date instead, the problem may just be with you.

Maybe you're radically different offline, but on? You sound like a grade-A asshole. Nice people don't make racist comments like:

Speaking of callous cruelty, why is it so fashionable now for so many non-black women to date or hook up with black guys? Is it really about the real or fictitious 10″ wangs; the fact that they provide the only male recording ‘artists’ now who sound like they have two balls which knock together when they walk; or that women get off on the idea that they’re more likely to curse or hit them? That they’re not safe, unlike Daddy?

See that? That marks you as a racist bigot and an asshole.
Not nice.

Maybe the problem is with your attitude towards people in general? If you really believe that people are "just a bunch of two-legged hyenas trying to get as much cash, sex, status and power, everyone else be damned" I'd imagine that you're not exactly a big bag o' laughs to be around. That kind of attitude shows, and it's not very attractive. In fact, I'd wager that it's a bit of a turn-off.

And your last missive, wherein you take your toys and go home, vowing never to return? Priceless.

Your posts are dripping with anger, resentment, and contempt... why in the world should anyone find that attractive? And, of course, you blame it on the feminists who are embracing "a cult of unfeeling or contemptuous emotional Hardness." Comparing us to the Bolsheviks is a nice touch. Women don't dismiss you so they can date assholes, Alex.

They dismiss you because you're an asshole.

Nurse Rapes Patients...

While I was reading about the Gulf News report about the sleep rapist, I stumbled upon this lovely story. One of the head nurses at the Peter Dally Clinic for Eating Disorders has spent the last gods know how many years raping and molesting patients at the center. Police aren't sure how many women this scumbag raped, and they've sent out letters to all of the patients that he came into contact with since 1999. They don't have contact information for the patients he would have been in contact with in the 80s.

So far, 8 women have have won compensation from the trust, but I don't see anything about criminal proceedings in the article.

I'm not really clear on why the article put scare-quotes around "molested" in the article headline, either.

No News is Good News...

(This is so lame, but until just now, I never noticed how that can be read in two ways... the lack of news is, itself, good news, or, as in this case, there is no news that is good news. How did I never notice that?)

Anyway, a news round-up: A homeless man in Cincinnati is shot to death when he asks a passerby for money. The woman who shot him is being charged with a hate crime. I'm not really sure where to fall on this one- I absoultely think that it's wrong to shoot someone because they ask you for money.

On the other hand, according to the article, the victim was known to use an aggressive style when asking for money "pushing on people" etc. A 62 year-old woman, alone at night being pushed by someone, I think, might reasonably fear for her safety. It may not justify her shooting the guy, but it makes it a hell of a lot more complicated than "he asked for a quarter."

Which makes the the article interesting, too, for the way that it tries to revoke sympathy for either party- they can't decide who they want to blame: a black woman with a gun, or a homeless dead guy. You're told about how the victim was homeless and used violent/aggressive means to ask for money, but then they describe the situation as a man being "shot to death... over a quarter" and the headline is "Woman Killed Man Over Spare Change" as though she was so outraged by his request for a quarter that she had to blow him away. I can't watch the video yet, but it certainly sounds, so far, like it was probably more about feeling threatened than about the quarter. What do I know, though? Regardless, it's a sad situation, all the same.

This story needs a trigger warning of some kind... I'm just not sure what. It's weird and disturbing... so... you know, be warned, I guess?

Our story starts roughly a year ago, when three men hatched a "scheme" to... dig up a woman's body to have sex with it. One of the men saw the woman's picture in the obits, and... I don't even want to know what he was thinking at that point, honestly. It's all just so fucked up and wrong. Anyway, the long-story-short version: They're caught digging up the grave and promptly arrested and charged with attempted sexual assault and robbery.

As if that wasn't bad enough, at the end of July an appeals court dismissed the attempted sexual assault charges, saying that Wisconsin doesn't have laws against necrophilia. The point of contention was a provision that states that penalties apply: "whether a victim is dead or alive at the time of the sexual contact or sexual intercourse." The court ruling argues that the provision is intended only to cover cases where the victim is raped and murdered in close succession, such that it can't be determined whether the victim was alive or dead at the time of the sexual assault.

It remains to be seen whether they're going to pursue any other charges against the men involved. Seriously? They dug up her fucking grave to rape her corpse, and they're not necessarily being charged with it?! And their smarmy defense lawyer has the unmitigated gall to say that a criminal ban on necrophilia isn't needed because "the instances of it are so rare that I'm not sure that it's worth the time, money, resources and efforts of the Legislature to create that".

Online Harassment and DOS Attacks... This Sounds Familiar...

Last night, Jill over at feministe posted a troubling post. It looks like a number of feminist blogs, including feministe, had been targeted by denial of service(DOS) attacks, and their comments spammed with really disturbing and vile threats. Bloggers were threatened with sexually assault and murder just for blogging about feminism.

In a way, this is a sign that feminism has legs. The vitriol here shows that these assholes are, on some level, afraid. They feminism as a threat to the system that gives them power and privilege. They see bloggers like Jill and piny and the rest that they set out to silence as being the heads of a movement that scares them. They invested time and energy into a campaign to silence the voices of the people that they're worried want to change a corrupt system... they think that feminists want to take their toys away...

And they're right.

Feminism is a threat to assholes like them. As feminists get heard and they push for change, the sort of jerk who would use threats of rape and murder as a means to silence his political enemies is going to find that he has less and less political capital. His views will become more and more unpopular and he will be made to look like the offensive prick that he is. He will lose power.

These sorts of actions- trying to shut down sites that you don't agree with, using threats about rape, threats about cutting someone... murdering them...- it's exactly the sort of thing that happened to Kathy Sierra.

I don't know what else to say, but I wanted to take a moment to draw attention to this, and to say: Thanks to everyone at feministe. You're doing important work, and I appreciate the time and effort you put into running and maintaining an excellent site. These assholes see you as a threat because you are. And I think that the rest of us are better for it.

Your Daughters are Hot... Can I Have One?

Amanda posted about the whole purity movement, and linked to a Marie Claire article called "Father Knows Best".

I started reading the article before I read Amanda's post, and, as it turns out, both of us were gobsmacked by the same part:

For the next seven years, Lauren avoided boys altogether. Then, in February of 2006, the Wilsons paid a visit to the Air Force Academy, which Lauren's brother Colten was considering attending. Accompanying the family on the tour was 23-year-old Brett Black, a blondehaired cadet. Lauren had met him before through church, but "from that moment on," Lauren sighs, "I was just, like, head over heels."

She returned home that evening and asked God if Brett was the one for her. "I set aside 40 days to really pray hard and ask for direction," she remembers. Meanwhile Brett also decided that Lauren and her two teenage sisters were "gorgeous." The idea of a permanent commitment entered his mind.

"I thought, Am I crazy? I'm graduating in three months and possibly moving away," he says. "But I could see myself marrying one of those girls!"

Uh-huh.

I had to let that sink in for a minute or two, because I was just so completely floored. I thought "I can't possibly have read that correctly." But, no... She's completely gaga over this guy, and he's thinking "Man, those girls are hot! I could marry a girl like that!" Now, I'm sorry, but if you're looking at a girl and her two sisters and you're thinking that they're gorgeous and you'd love to marry one of them... any of them... well, I have serious doubts about how much you're really invested in them as people. They might very well be beautiful, but that's not really the best basis for a lasting relationship.

I love that, when he asks her father if he can court his daughters, he's not even sure he mentioned which one. "'I'd like to start a relationship with one of your daughters.' He thinks he specified Lauren." He thinks. Lovely.

So, they start to court. Seven weeks later, Brett asks Lauren's father if they can get married. Seven weeks. That's less than two months, for those of you keeping track. Lauren's father, who gave his permission, says "Brett doesn't know anything about Lauren. So I can help them be a success."

Call me old fashioned or crazy or whatever, but, my general feeling is this: If you don't know anything about someone... you damn well shouldn't get married. And when your idea of "emotionally hot" and "intense" questions are things like "What's the saddest thing that's ever happened to you" or "what's the hardest thing you've been through" I think you've got a seriously stunted conception of what constitutes "intense." Hell, I've seen more emotionally involved questions on a job interview, and these are the questions she's asking to decide if she wants to marry the guy?

The whole thing is just horrifying. From the way that Randy clearly sees his daughter as a posession to be given to a man, to the way that Lauren sees her major worth as being a piece of someone else... Oh, and the part where, on their wedding night, she washes his feet because her "spiritual gift is serving" and she "wanted to show Brett, 'I'm here to love you, follow you, and serve you.'" Yeah, it's horrifying... and sad.

It's definitely worth reading the original article (it'll probably have your jaw dropping in utter disbelief), and some of the author's reactions are pretty awesome.

Woman Charged in Death of Stillborn...

Lindsay Beyerstein, over at Majikthise, reported on a really disturbing case yesterday. A woman in Ocean City, MD is being charged with murder after investigators discovered the remains of stillborn fetuses in her home. The information so far indicates that she had four stillbirths, and police think that she might have attempted to give herself abortions. MD law has a fetal protection law so that people who cause the death of a viable fetus can be charged, but the law has an exception for women who perform abortions on themselves.

All of which is to say that charging this woman with the murder of a stillborn fetus is insane.

Here's my area of concern: This woman has four fetuses stashed around her home- one under a sink, one hidden in her car, and two in a trunk in the living room. When she was taken in to court, she apparently looked confused by the charges and the evidence, and told the judge "This is all new to me."

I'm going to play armchair psych here for a moment, so bear with me. Without going too far out on a limb, I'd have to guess that this woman probably needs some help. She's keeping the remains of her stillbirths hidden around her home, and she seems to be confused about what is happening to her. Maybe I'm wrong, but it sure as hell sounds to me like she's got some problems and probably needs to get some professional help.

It's really disgusting that, rather than looking into getting this woman some help and finding out why she's kept these stillbirths, they've decided that the appropriate course of action is to throw her in jail on first degree murder charges. She's being held without bond for having stillborn fetuses.

And it's really important to note, here, that nobody knows what caused them to be stillborn yet. In other words, she's being charged with first degree murder before they even know for sure that she killed them

So, to recap: We have a woman who probably needs professional help being charged with first degree murder for the death of a fetus that nobody knows how died because of a law that specifically would exempt this woman from being charged with murder if she did, in fact, kill the fetus.

Huh?

Video Games, Manhood, and Murder: The Strange Case of Hans Reiser...

An article about Lynux visionary Hans Reiser, and the disappearance of his former wife, Nina Reiser, appeared in Wired earlier this week. This is the sort of case that gives me a headache- as a man, a feminist, and a video gamer, this case absolutely blows my mind.

Basically, Hans Reiser is accused of having murdered Nina Reiser. There's no body, but they found blood in his car and at his home, and she hasn't been seen for quite some time. The Wired article is... well... sensationalistic. It's more like a movie-of-the-week than particularly investigative, but it is interesting.

Hans Reiser is, as presented in this article, a nightmare. Reading about the way he acts and the things he says and believes is horrifying. The guy is a mess, and it's a little hard to tell, at times, what I'm supposed to be taking away from the author. Am I, as a fellow geek, supposed to feel sorry for this guy? Or am I supposed to be pointing my finger and going "Hey, look, we're not like this guy!"?

I'm not going to weigh in on the whole "did he/didn't he" debate- I don't know the evidence, and, inevitably, if I said either way, someone would come in to complain about it. Regardless of my opinion about his guilt or innocence in the murder case, I think it's absolutely fair to take a look at some of his attitudes, and how completely fucked up and backwards this guy's concept of gender identity is. This guy comes off as a grade-A asshole, and I have to confess that I don't have an ounce of pity for him over the loss of his children, regardless of whether he killed his wife or not.

On page 4 of the article, the author starts talking about the divorce proceedings. One of the complaints that Nina Reiser had about Hans Reiser, was his love of violent video games. In particular, Hans would play games like Battlefield Vietnam with his son, Rory. Rory is four at the time, okay? Four. I've never played Battlefield Vietnam, but a quick search online shows that it's rated T. Also, the article claims (though it wouldn't be the first time an article got video game info wrong) that the game features scenes where:

napalm explosions envelop villages in fire, bodies are hurled through the air, and, when shot, characters collapse to the ground and choke on their own blood, realistic sound effects included.

It's not particularly shocking to discover that Rory has nightmares and spends a lot of time drawing monsters and soldiers, and is, according to Nina Reiser's testimony, showing signs of sensory integration dysfunction.

Now, the record will show that I don't have a problem with violent video games. I play a few of them, myself. I enjoy games like Counterstrike, which features shooting people, blowing them up with grenades, or stabbing them with a knife. It's a pretty damned violent game. It is rather worth noting, however, that I am twenty-eight years old. I've had two and a half decades of life experience over Rory with which to develop the mental and emotional tools to understand the difference between what I'm seeing on the computer and reality. I can seperate myself from the fiction I'm seeing on the screen in ways that a four year old child can't.

Now, of course, every kid is different, right? Maybe Hans is just naive, and thinks his son can handle it and understands what he's seeing? Maybe he's just being stupidly myopic, and doesn't understand the trouble his son is having with the games? Which is not to say that these situations wouldn't still be bad, but... well... it's a lot worse than that.

See, Hans Reiser is completely aware that his son traumatized by the games. In fact, he states "Becoming a man normally is psychologically traumatic for boys" but that the experience "allows him to achieve results in defending family and country." It turns out that Hans Reiser- geek that he is- is still no less invested in the trappings of traditional masculinity than any other macho jerk.

Hans Reiser's belief is that boys have an "instinct" for "combat rehearsal activities" and that games are a way of honing survival skills. This kind of attitude is dangerous to the extreme. He's subjecting his son, intentionally, to images of death and violence that are giving his child nightmares. He knows that this is the outcome, and he's doing it on purpose. I'm not sure what the courts call that kind of behavior, but I call it abuse. As both a gamer and feminist, I find his attitude shocking and offensive.

The suggestion here is that it's appropriate to subject a child to violent imagry because it will make him stronger- where "stronger" is clearly intended to mean "less womanly." He is obsessed with teaching his son- his four year old son- the "culture of manhood." He's happy to enlighten us with clarification about what that is: an "inherent opposition to wallowing in wimpiness." In other words, his investment in stereotypical male power is pushing him to abuse his son because he thinks it's going to make his son a better Man.

At least, in this case, the courts could see how screwed up this guy was, and gave custody to his wife. The sort of mental and emotional abuse that he admits to inflicting on his children is appalling.

There are other indications and hints... eh... blatant examples of Hans Reiser's screwed up sense of identity and masculinity- from the part where it describes his repeated, regular use of "Russian bride" services to find a woman to marry, to his claim that Sean Sturgeon seduced Nina Reiser to "show that he was a better man," to his outrage over "gender confused alternative sexuality dolls."

Obviously, it's hard to know for sure what's going through this guy's brain- he sounds pretty screwed up to begin with- he sounds more than a little paranoid- but the signs are there.

Anyway.

I'm still fighting back my disgust, hours after reading that article. It's hard to know what to think about the case, but it's easy as hell to know that Hans Reiser is a dangerous man. If he's innocent, I hope his trial shows it. If he's guilty, I hope he rots. Either way, I hope he never gets those children back. I don't know what their situation is like in Russia, but the way he was trying to raise them?

Horrible.

Oh, right... The geek in me wants a say, too.

This is exactly the kind of asshole that gives the rest of us geeks a bad name. It's misanthropic morons like him who do stupid harmful things, who intentionally expose their children to inappropriate game that help legitimize the stigma against geeks. When a case like this starts to get publicity, the fact that he was a computer geek and video gamer are going to be major soundbites. The fact that most of us are quite capable of recognizing "Huh... maybe I shouldn't make my four-year-old child play really violent, disturbing games that are causing him nightmares" won't matter- it'll be "He played Battlefield with his kid! OMG!"

Also: His trial has got to be a bloody nightmare. He's accused of murdering someone when there isn't a body. His former best friend is a druggie into sadomasochism and bondage, and has an affair with the Hans' wife, and later admits to murdering eight, possibly nine people! The grandmother whisks the children off to Russia and refuses to return them to the states.

Yeah.

That's not going to be a circus event.

A Wednesday Mini Link-a-Thon...

Things are a little busy around here, but a few links that I found interesting today:

-News Flash! Althouse responds scathingly to the bloggers who pointed out how ridiculous and stupid a Freudian analysis that turns onion rings into vaginas was by calling them stupid-heads and poopy-faces.

-In related news: The rest of the blogosphere lets out a collective yawn in the face of her completely unsurprising lack of maturity and her assinine behavior.

-Over at feministe, piny points out that there are still assholes who think you get a gold star for being minimally decent. I know it's hard to believe, people, but you don't get credit for not attacking people while they sleep.

-Belledame discovers what a lot of us from Michigan already knew: Dr. Kevorkian is creepy as hell, and his actions raise a lot of eyebrows. The analysis of his victims is eye-opening.

-Jenny Dreadful takes an anti-pot ad to task. I haven't seen the stupid ad, yet, but I have to admit that it sounds a hell of a lot better than the "If you get high someone will rape you" or "If you get high you'll shoot your best friend in the face" ads from a few years back. Note: Better does not necessarily mean good.