Gender Identity

Confused? Just examine your browsing history! This dude has set up a way to analyze what sites you've visited, compare their male-to-female ratio, and therefore decide whether you are male or female. The ratios are pretty interesting, people's comments seem to imply that they think there's judgement involved, and are confusing actually being male or female with gender stereotypes (why does my college make me feminine??) but it's just a breakdown -- girls are more likely to use financial sites and buy plane tickets and check out the ACLU than boys, for whatever reason. But boy oh boy is The Pirate Bay male! Incidentally, Google is just slightly more used by women whereas YouTube is exactly even. Given that there are more women than men in the world, but I think there are more men on the Internet -- well, I don't actually know what any of it means (nor where he's getting the ratios from) but it is interesting.

Oddly enough, my FireFox self is overwhelmingly female, while my IE self is overwhelmingly male. I didn't realize I was breaking it down like that. I guess I'll go check out this weekend's Hall of Fame football game on FireFox, then. Go Redskins!

Why this woman can't handle Monica Corcoran

Why women can't handle 'Dark Knight'

Hey, Christopher Nolan.

Ever drink a gallon of Diet Coke and sit for two hours with your legs crossed? Oh and then -- just when it seems like Gotham is safe and credits will roll -- suffer through another 32 minutes of clenching your nether region muscles?

Clearly, the director of "The Dark Knight" and the auteurs behind other interminable fan boy action movies such as "Iron Man" (126 minutes) don't know that a woman's
bladder is about the size of a salted cocktail peanut. Men have bladders that are walnut-sized. And those very gals, after silently praying that the Joker will die or Batman will retire or everyone will just perish en masse and the movie will end, tend to be seated in the centers of theater rows.

Hey, Monica Corcoran.

Don't drink a fucking gallon of Diet Coke before you go to see a two and a half hour movie. Also, don't sit in the center (why do we "tend" to sit there, exactly?). Also, do you honestly have to pee every two hours? How do you sleep? Also, don't tell people how to make their art based on your limitations. Also, salted cocktail peanut?

But it struck me that maybe fan boys are finally getting their revenge on women who mocked them for their comic collections and Spiderman Underoos. Is this comic craze in movies just another Hollywood conspiracy against women? (But "Sex and the City" clocked in at 2 hours and 28 minutes, you protest. Yes, and many women chose to dash off when their least favorite lady hit the screen. Not to mention the fact that it was directed by a man.)

Seriously, what? I chose to not see that piece of shit at all, and I "chose to dash off" out of the English Patient (running time: 162 min) for a completely different reason: it was a terrible movie. And maybe, just maybe, it is possible that the main reason behind the running time of freakin' Batman is not a personal attack on you and your tiny bladdered female friends? I mean, maybe they just hate midgets. Did you think of that? Hmm?

Zack Snyder, director of upcoming geek boy extravaganza "Watchmen," has told the New York Times: "The main picture is nearing three hours long, and I know I have a fight on my hands just with that."

Um, more like a "flight" on your hands at 124 minutes, when a dozen chicks run for the aisles. How about an intermission for the geek girls?

How about if you mess with "Watchmen", I will stab you in your salted-cocktail-peanut-sized bladder with my "geek girl" knife?

Gosh, I am grumpy today. It must be that time of the month, huh Monica? Let's go to the little girls' room together and talk about it. I am assuming your piece is supposed to be a joke, or satire, or funny, or something? But I don't really get it. It's funny how chicks have little bladders? And they don't really like comic book movies, or at least not more than Diet Coke? Where's the funny? I guess I have a little brain, too!


ETA: I just saw Dark Knight yesterday and I didn't have to pee once, so fuck you!

Q&A

Q: Which telecom, singled out by the NYT piece exposing Bush's illegal wiretapping in the first place for handing over customers' data in a way that might not be, shall we say, consistent with the American way, has spent tons and tons of money trying (and succeeding) to guarantee their immunity from prosecution, aimed at both the current Republican administration and Democratic Congress, as well as potential future officeholders (even though campaign finance laws prevent corporations from donating to campaigns)?

A:

They don't say anything about sponsoring conventions!

Commemorative Prostitutes

For a much classier remembrance, I take you to Amsterdam, where they have put this statue of a hooker in the Red Light District to "show respect to the millions of people around the world who earn their money in prostitution" (according to the sculptor, Mariska Majoor, a former prostitute):

Hilariously (for me, anyway), Ms. Majoor was "physically assaulted by an elderly lady who apparently was not happy to have the statue close to her home. The woman was taken into police custody, and released after the unveiling had taken place."

This violent elderly lady apparently has no problem with the actual prostitutes working near her home, just the statue of one. Here's a shot of the square the statue is going in:

See all them red lights? THERE BE HOOKERS. Chill out, feisty old lady.

We Will Never Forget

First of all, as commemorative attack slogans go, this one kind of sucks. Pearl Harbor at least gets "a date which will live in infamy", whereas for September 11th all we have is the fucking date. The Holocaust gets "Never again", which is a little more proactive than just not forgetting (and also used to excellent effect in last week's "Weeds" -- grandfather, Jew and all-around fuck-up played by Albert Brooks tells his grandson that genocide must Never Happen Again. When precocious grandson Shane informs him that in fact it has happened several times since the Holocaust, in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, etc, he gets the very accurate response: "No, to Jews. It must never happen again to Jews.")

Anyway, to aid with the not forgetting, have a $20 silver plated bill:

With the (theoretical) Freedom Tower on the front and 1+2 WTC on the back, PLUS, as their ad on TV breathlessly informed me, it is the First Time Ever that a bill has used two separate numbers to add up to the denomination -- 9+11=20. It's just so, um, special.

This is brought to you by the National Collector's Mint, the same company that was already slapped for selling coins advertised "as having been minted from silver recovered from a bank vault "in the heart of ground zero"", when in fact they were just silver plated, and stating that they are the "first legally authorized government" coins, when the government in question is not, as one might assume, the US government, but is in fact "the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a United States possession with no authority to coin its own currency."

One More FISA Story

I read this tidy summary of the FISA bill passed last week, not thinking much of it, until I noticed the byline -- this story about how the telecoms would not be punished, and Bush has managed to legalize his completely illegal wiretapping over the past seven years, was written by Eric Lichtblau, one of the two guys that won a Pulitzer uncovering it all for the NYT in the first place.

For, as it turns out, absolutely nothing:

"The vote came two and a half years after public disclosure of the wiretapping program set off a fierce national debate over the balance between protecting the country from another terrorist strike and ensuring civil liberties. The final outcome in Congress, which opponents of the surveillance measure had conceded for weeks, seemed almost anticlimactic in contrast."

Thanks anyway, dude, hope you enjoyed the Pulitzer.

Arty Porn

This "magazine" WLTF (Would Like To Fuck, um, obviously?) is kind of pretty, in a full frontal nudity sort of way (really, really NSFW, unless your boss likes dick). Interesting meditations on desire, and while some of the photographs are just whatever (and a lot of repetition, especially in Issue 0), there are some really cool shots.

And speaking of pornography, it seems a lot of you are spending your rebate checks on it:

"Getting more people to buy porn was probably the last thing Bush had on his mind when he came up with his 'stimulus package,' but we'll take it," said Jillian Fox of LSGmodels, a site monitored by AIMRCo.

Insert stimulus "package" joke.

It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia

Coming back Sept. 18th!




If you missed previous episodes, you can always watch them on Hulu. Highly recommended.

Yikes!

Capital News says: "It is now against the law to smoke in any New York State university or college dormitory. Governor Paterson signed legislation Tuesday prohibiting smoking in the housing facilities of all SUNY and private schools in the state."

Boy, that would have really fucked up 504, huh?

Marriage Protection Amendment

Purely hilarious that this is being reintroduced with 1/5 of its sponsors being Larry Craig and David Vitter. Protect marriage from two men marrying, but no need to worry about whores and gay bathroom sex. Marriage can handle all that just fine!

Muppets and Liberty!

Again, thanks to PFAW, I can point you to the Muppets, Big Bird and (obviously) Martin Sheen reenacting the fucking Continental Congress. Cause what else are you doing with your day, really?

Fox News Breezes By New Low

Media Matters has a comparison of the actual photos of two NYT journalists -- editor Steven Reddicliffe and reporter Jacques Steinberg -- and the apparently ridiculously photoshopped versions that aired on a Fox and Friends segment calling them "Attack Dogs" (in response to an article Steinberg published about Fox News' falling ratings). Later in the segment they put Steinberg's head on a poodle's body, so I guess we are meant to know that all the images here are fake, but this seemed a little less clear:

The NYT's David Carr, who writes about media in the Business section, had a whole article on Fox News where he responded to Media Matter's piece, saying:

"The accompanying photographs were heavily altered, although the audience was probably none the wiser. Mr. Reddicliffe looked like the wicked witch after a hard night of drinking, but it was the photo of Mr. Steinberg that stopped traffic when it appeared on the Web at Media Matters side by side with his actual photo. In a technique familiar to students of vintage German propaganda, his ears were pulled out, his teeth splayed apart, his forehead lowered and his nose was widened and enlarged in a way that made him look more like Fagin than the guy I work with. (Mr. Steinberg told me that as a working reporter who covers Fox News, he was not in a position to comment. A spokeswoman said the executive in charge of “Fox and Friends” is on vacation and not available for comment but added that altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations.)"

Very classy.

It's Hard Out There For a Douchebag

So courtesy of People For the American Way's Right Wing Watch, I saw this: the American Family Association's OneNewsNow site, which is, I guess, the part of the news you would want to read if you were a conservative Christian and didn't particularly want to know about anything else, apparently replaces the word "gay" with "homosexual" in all the articles it "reprints" from the AP. Including articles where Gay is someone's last name. Like Olympic sprinter Tyson Gay:

Homosexual barely averts major flop! Awesome.

Anyway, it seems they've fixed it now, as they have a history of responding to PFAW's items -- this piece shows how the AFA was redirecting links to their own site that came from PFAW's blog to a "Good Person Test" (Question: Are you a good person? Answer: No, and you're going to hell. Invariably. Seriously, take the test). Future links PFAW put up go through an anonymizer, but if you click on the older ones in that piece, instead of going to the test they now, hilariously, rick roll you. Who says the religious right doesn't have a sense of humor!

Plain old fuctional bra

So maybe I talk about bras too much? But seriously, this story about a woman who was stranded on a mountain for three days and was saved by tossing her bra into a passing cable car so people knew where to look (after having given up) is not only full of that plucky indomitable human spirit, but also gave rise to some awesome headlines. My favorite?

Bra saves woman from twin peaks

FISA FISA yay yay yay!

So, you know, complete dismissal of the Fourth Amendment, eviscerated Constitution, a President above the law, yada yada yada. The PAA is a train wreck and this new bill isn't much better, telecom immunity makes you wonder what the whole fucking point of "laws" is anyway, et c. You already know what I'm talking about, and presumably you think it sucks (if not, why do you hate America?) so here's a way to maybe help:



Brought to you from the guys responsible for Ron Paul's money bombs plus some bloggy types, they are trying to raise money to put pressure on Democratic Congress members who are up for reelection, to show that "going to the center" by voting against civil liberties can make you lose some of your unquestioned Democratic base, and maybe even your seat. Accountability, y'all! More than just a nice idea! Maybe!