Post what you like, about what you like, with who you like, including whatever links you like. (Self-link love is welcome too).
Sorry I haven’t been blogging much lately — a combination of a lot of work on the Hereville graphic novel, combined with some non-serious but tedious health problems, have been keeping me away.
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This video is super-cool, featuring a collaboration of a variety of musicians (mostly street musicians, from the looks of it) and some film and sound editors. Thanks to Bean for showing it to me.
Also, Don Heck once did really cool-looking horror work, reminding me a bit of Charles Burns’ work. This may not be interesting to most readers, but when I first got into reading comics Don Heck was the epitome of “mediocre hack,” so seeing that his work once had a spark is surprising.
Also, read the “user reviews” of this t-shirt on Amazon. (Thanks, Mandolin.)
i love this video. i sent it to my mommy, who now lives across the country.
I have a new article about female characters in Pixar movies
I discuss handcrafting, and how some people view it negatively.
Also, I discussed teenage sexuality on the show iCarly.
Nude Photos of Rihanna and Prejean Which One Is The Slut?: Looking at how race allowed one woman to be redeemed and another to be stigmatized with the label of slut
75 Year Old Gets “Designer Vagina”: vaginoplasty is the latest rage and it is not even understood for the mutilation that it is. What exactly constitutes a designer vagina?
Don’t Swear When You Call 911: A woman is hung up on three times and arrested for having the “nerve” to swear on a 911 call.
Glad to hear that the Hereville graphic novel is progressing, and hope I can buy it soon; sorry to hear about the health problems, and hope they go away soon.
Despite the vertigo, I had some fun blogging this week on the local election.
I blogged about how the local press sat on a story involving potentially illegal and definitely questionable actions by a local politician running for office. The financially strapped paper endorsed the politician and speculation was that they were sitting on it to wait out the mail in ballot process which ends in early June for the city council election.
The press didn’t like the blog posting at all but miracle or not, the story it sat on for a month was published the very next day.
I blogged this followup which includes some oh-so-predictable responses by anonymous individuals who as it turns out are working in this city’s official’s political campaign. One might be an employee of his being paid for by the tax dollars of city residents if what I’ve heard from some sources is true.
Today I blogged about how this elected official is still taking campaign donations from a company fined by the county D.A. and sanctioned by the EPA for environmental violations not to mention one that allegedly circulated a false night flights map misleading city residents into believing there wouldn’t be six DHL freight flights over their homes beginning at 3 a.m. six mornings a week.
It’s local stuff but it’s interesting and disheartening how politicians seem to choose the money they get from special interests over the wellbeing of their constituents including thousands who barely slept over a three year period and were ridiculed for complaining about it until the elected officials making those decisions were facing election bids.
It’s talked about at the national level and state but it’s local too. Things begin at home.
It’s talked about at the national level and state but it’s local too. Things begin at home.
Hell, that’s how Barak Obama got elected President.
Or, as Tip O’Neill (D-Ma, longtime Speaker of the House) said, “All politics is local.”
Wall-E and Eve really don’t have genders. They do seem to perform gender in various ways, but, dude…robots. I don’t disagree with the overall point. (And isn’t Bolt a Pixar movie? That has the forumla of 75% males + 1 female sidekick + 1 love interest down pat. I guess it’s good it’s not a movie about a boy and his dog?)
lonespark,
Sorry if this is a dumb, I-misunderstood-Judith-Butler question, but what would you consider to be gender beyond its performance?
lonespark:
if they perform genders, then they’re gendered. just because they’re not alive, therefore do not have a biological sex, doesn’t mean they are not gendered, dude.
also, Bolt is not a Pixar movie, so has nothing to do with what i was talking about.
Then why is her name “Eve” instead of, you know, something neutral like “Lee”?
Not just a woman’s name, the mythical FIRST WOMAN’s name…
Yeah, I think I meant sex. I even thought that as I was typing, but then I wrote “gender.” I felt like neither one was quite right, but “sex” is much closer to what I mean. And yes, they are shown as gendered in the story, but that doesn’t mean the characters would perceive it that way. Would you say EVE has a gender identity prior to interacting with Wall-E? And what about the other EVEs?
May I respectfully disagree with Granduer’s Pixar article? I think that while yes, Pixar’s women are traditonal and a female character would really good for a change, I still think characters like Helen and even Dorry are noble because they risk life and limb to protect friends and family they care about. And do young girls always need a lead female to identify with? Why can’t characters like Woody and Nemo be admired by each gender?
girls can certainly admire male characters. therefore i don’t think it’s much of a stretch for a boy to admire a lead female. i’m not saying that it should always be a lead female, but i mean, come on–in the decade since they’ve been producing movies, not one has a strong female lead.
also, i agree with DaisyDeadhead: if they’re gender neutral why give them gender-specific names (granted they are acronyms, but still).
I pretty much agree with FilthyGrandeures post about Pixar (although I do think that their stuff is marvelous) . . . it’s interesting , though, that you could have written a similar post about Disney in it’s classic cartoon heyday (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, etc). Of course these were retellings of European folk stories, but I wonder what it says about the changes in the way we tell stories to children, and who the story tellers are. To paraphrase the Pixar post:
OK, so achieving womanhood generally means marrying a man, (but the man himself kind of seems irrelevant, just a symbol of attainment of status) whereas manliness is not generally proven by a relationship with a woman. But I wonder about the effects on kids – kids used to watch big blockbuster cartoons with female leads, now more of them are male leads.
@marmalade–
did you quote my post and replace “man” with “woman” and vice versa? because that’s completely not the point i was making. in fact, i don’t get why you would “quote” me with the gist of my post, misquote it, and twist it to fit your argument about classic disney, which is, in fact, plagiarism. as in the title of said post, thanks but no thanks.
FilthyGrandeur, I don’t agree that M’s post was “plagiarism” — Marmalade made it clear that the post was paraphrased. But I do think Marmalade’s post was simply wrong.
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Marmalade, I don’t think the parallel you’re suggesting is supported by the facts at all.
Pixar has literally never had a female protagonist. Not one.
In contrast, in the period you describe (1937-1959), the majority of Disney feature-length cartoons had male protagonists. Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Peter Pan, and the forgettable ones like Saludos Amigos all had male protagonists.
i have no issue with paraphrasing. what i have issue with is taking my exact words and phrasing and just switching out a few terms. that’s not paraphrasing. not even close.
I agree that it’s not exactly paraphrasing, but neither is it plagiarism. Plagiarism is passing off another person’s work as your own; the post made it clear (at least to me) that the phrasing was taken from someone else’s work.
In my experience, the “replace the word ___ with the word _____” form of argumentation is fairly common in internet discussions.
I’ve been following the Drew Peterson case as I do many law enforcement domestic homicides, the latest being that he allegedly tried to hire a hitman to kill his third wife. He’s facing murder charges in the killing of third wife, Kathleen Savio.
I guess they are doing DNA tests on human remains found near the Des Plaines River. Don’t know if it’s Stacey Peterson. Hopefully, at least one family out there will finally find out what happened to their loved one whomever it turns out to be.
Closer to home, some guy who calls himself the local press club is making allegations that the State AG is doing investigations on all the “corrupt” local activists claiming we’re getting paid to write anti-incumbent postings and the money is being laundered into the campaign fund of the challenger. He lists a bunch of us by name and says something about us all going to prison and having to take communal showers. Oh and we’re filing “frivolous” lawsuits. Now an organization is doing so on land development projects but only b/c the city keeps trying to violate growth-control laws and the city keeps losing and/or paying out settlements because the judges uphold the voter-passed laws. So who’s “corrupt”, the government that violates ordinances to appease developers who contribute to campaigns, or community groups who sue them in response to keep them accountable to the law?
This guy’s actually an ex-FOX News anchor locally but fortunately, no one really takes him seriously.
The local DA (who wants state office) got spanked by the grand jury. In two years, conviction rates have plummeted, 25% of his workforce has turned over, the criminal and civil courtrooms are so backed up, they had to get a special task force led by the state’s chief justice to fix it and he refuses to take a 10% budget cut to his office but instead wants a 10% extra. Predictably, he railed against the grand jury system.
Shows me, for posting without doing my homework. Yes, I guess I just remember all the Disney films with female protagonists, and not the ones with male protagonists. And it’s all the more regrettable that Pixar has none, since Disney showed that it could be done so well (at least then).
I plead guilty to incorrectness, and also perhaps to bad taste in misquoting FithyGrandeur’s post, but certainly not plagiarism, as I never tried to pass those words off as original.
Can I get an opinion on this article from anyone who might be interested?
Okay. I think that article is a combination of straw men (who, specifically, are these “western feminists” he’s referring to, that have allegedly said all these things?) and right-wing stupidity.
If there is a long-term improvement in women’s rights in Iraq — more than just four female legislators — then that would be wonderful. But that alone doesn’t mean that Western feminists were obliged to support the invasion of Iraq, or that we must now press for invading all countries where extreme misogynistic laws hold sway. (Are we next obliged to invade Iran? How about Saudi Arabia?)
A more complicated analysis would consider, first of all, whether the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who are now dead because of our invasion would (if they could) agree that the invasion was a small price to pay for putting a tenuous, corrupt and possibly temporary democracy in place. It would also consider how the same amount of money as was spent invading Iraq, might have been spent improving women’s lot throughout the world in less spectacular and violent, but possibly more effective, ways. It would also consider the many ways that rights for women in Iraq may have gotten worse — which isn’t to say that Saddam’s reign didn’t suck, but that in many ways women in Iraq have gone from frying pan to fire.
Finally, I’m rather sick of right-wingers who don’t give a damn about women’s rights 98% of the time, suddenly turning all feminist when women’s rights are an argument that can be used to support war. (I’m not saying that’s you, needless to say, but I rather suspect that’s true of the author of the article you linked to.)
Hmm… My reading was that the author was saying, “Why do you ungrateful bitches keep complaining? We let you vote, don’t we? Now shut up and go support our war like good little girls.” But I wondered if I might be overreacting. Guess not so much so. Thanks for the reality check.
If you’ll excuse the further rant, I was also bothered by two implicit claims:
1. If there are women–any women, no matter how few or how obviously token–in the government then everything is ok for women’s rights. So what if girls can’t go to school because they are afraid of being kidnapped on their way there, women are being forced out of professions where they used to dominate (i.e. medicine), suddenly wearing a headscarf is mandatory not optional, women who used to feel free to tell men to shut up if they felt they ought to can no longer speak their minds, etc? There are women in the legislature so everything is great. Sort of like how racism disappeared when the first black man was elected to congress in the 19th century. And how there was no sexism in Victorian England, because the head of state was female.
2. Democracy cures everything. Democracy is good, rah, rah, usw. But a panacea? Not hardly. The CSA was a democracy, at least initially. Hitler was democratically elected the first time (only won a plurality but still was Kanzler by right of election initially.) The US was a democracy in the 19th century when it was busy committing multiple counts of genocide…And that’s not even counting countries which are formally democracies but clearly really dictatorships with rigged elections. From Pinochet to Saddam Hussein, the US and Britain have supported a lot of those too.
Just for historical accuracy, not to quibble with your larger point, Pinochet seized power in a coup and ruled as part of a military junta, with the country under martial law for many years. It was not even nominally democratic.
Duh! You’re right, chingona. Maybe the old Salvadoran government would have been a better example. I’m pretty sure they had elections.
Your larger point stands up just fine. Many, maybe even most, dictatorships in modern times have elections. The reason so many Latin American countries limit the president to just one term is because there is a very long history of whoever gets the reigns of power manipulating and then outright abusing that power to stay in office indefinitely.
Sorry, I couldn’t read the whole article because this bit was so head-desk (emphases added):
The most charitable interpretation I can make of this paragraph is not that Clive James is so stupid as to believe that Saddam Hussein was ever an established dictator of Kuwait, but that he instead is referring to the 7-month-long Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91, which was supported by no one else except the PLO.
Even the charitable interpretation doesn’t make James look good, however, for a few reasons:
1) While support for Gulf War I was not unanimous, it was pretty damn widespread: the Kuwaitis themselves were very much in favor, the UN blessed it, Saudi Arabia and Japan paid for it, and Israel even sat on its hands and refused to retaliate for Iraqi missile attacks because doing so would have destabilized the coalition (most of the non-American military personnel were from Muslim countries: Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan). In terms of people whose decisions affect history, there were very few who put up a serious opposition to a military effort to force Iraq out of Kuwait and especially away from menacing Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. So against whom is James arguing in saying that this was a good thing?
2) If an occupation by dint of overwhelming military superiority is now the same as “ruling a country by terror,” I’m troubled by what James must think of the U.S. in Iraq.
3) If Saddam had continued to claim some parts of Kuwait as an extension of Basra and the rest as Iraq’s “19th province,” former-Kuwaitis-now-Iraqis probably would have had female political representation much sooner. In 1990, almost 11% of seats in Iraq’s parliament were held by women. (By way of comparison, the 100th United States Congress of 1987-89 had a grand total of 2% women in the Senate, and 5% in the House.) If you believe the Guardian, even Iraq’s failed invasion and occupation benefited women’s rights in Kuwait, like Pearl Harbor for U.S. women:
The fact that the BBC published is a sign that they’re really declining, or that they have decided to let conservatives who are angry at the BBC have an open, unedited forum in which to make fools of themselves. (Not necessarily a bad plan, really. If conservatives believe they don’t get enough time in the mainstream media to voice what they think directly to the people, OK… here’s some rope, er, airtime.)
Wow, that’ll teach me to skim. James’ article is much, much stupider than I thought it was. All I can in my defense is that the imaginary article by James I thought I read was in fact smarter than the actual one he wrote.
Thanks, PG.
(Wipes egg off face….)
As long as we’re trashing James further, how about this quote:
but at least now it is no longer official policy to rape a woman in front of her family
Perhaps. But the official American policy, it seems, is to rape a woman’s family members in front of her instead. NOT an improvement. In fact, I find it hard to believe any woman, faced with the alternative, wouldn’t rather be raped herself than forced to watch her child being raped.
Or did that rumor turn out to be false? I’ve never heard anything further to substantiate or disprove it. I’m really, really hoping it’s untrue because I’d like to think that even the Bush administration wouldn’t be that vile.
Dianne,
Hersh is one of those people who’s so far out on the edge that half the time he’s a brave genius and the other half of the time he’s utterly untrustworthy. Personally, I don’t assume he’s got it right until it’s been substantiated elsewhere, and especially if the forum for his claim is not the New Yorker (the ACLU has no obligation to fact-check a speech) and he hasn’t reiterated the claim.
Radfem, my guess is that those remains are NOT Stacy Peterson. Frankly I don’t thing Drew Peterson is so dumb as to just dump a body either on land near a river or in the river itself. Those tend to be found, especially since the Des Plaines River has a well-known bike and hiking path near Channahon (where the body was found) and for a good 15 miles in both directions from that point and there’s boating up and down the river. While a blue barrel was found nearby that’s quite likely to be a coincidence – the river is in the middle of a major industrial corridor and having canoed on it myself I can tell you that finding a blue 55-gallon drum up on shore is no difficult feat. Remember that he was a cop for a long time and should be pretty familiar with how and where bodies are found.
There are a lot of forest preserves in this area and it wouldn’t be all that hard to drive into one, take a look around a bit, and then use a hand truck to hustle a 55-gallon drum off of the back of a truck and into the woods. Thirty yards into the woods you’re out of sight of the parking lot. One hundred yards and no one’s going to year you. Manage it about 400 yards (i.e., a 1/4 mile) and you can pretty readily find a spot where you can take your time and dig without having to worry about witnesses. My guess is that’s where Stacy Peterson’s body is.
Yeah, I think Lisa Stebic is the more likely of the two and that more than likely, it’s another poor woman who was killed. Still, you never know. I don’t think they’ll know for a while.
I’ve been reading a lot of articles on the shooting death of NYPD Officer Omar Edwards by another officer including this one examining the history of officer-on-officer shootings which in the majority of cases are White on Black shootings. There’s quite a few interesting articles in the New York Times and New York Daily News. Besides the NYPD, there have been cases in the LAPD, Oakland Police Department and the Providence (RI) Police Department.