buffalo

Hmm. The witch doctors have informed me that the one buffalo I've been busy digesting is not enough to make me feel like getting out of bed in the morning. I need to eat TWO buffalo, and also present myself for shots daily for a week, and weekly thereafter. If I do not, they might want to stick someone else's icky cootie blood in me instead. So, it's shots and buffalo, here on out.

Apparently I have a wee nutritional deficiency. Could it be because I spent the first several months of pregnancy puking my guts up and living on lemonade and vegetarian sushi? And sour patch kids and bagels? Let this be a lesson to you all: take your stupid prenatal vitamins, so you can enjoy twice the puking and still end up prostrate around on the floor gasping like a starving vampire. I asked the nutritionist why I couldn't just drink blood. I thought you were all about the sustainable agriculture, she said. Yeah, well, it'd be pasture-fed blood, I replied.

Also in the news, there's too much fucking shit to do. I have to tot up all the money we've spent on prescription drugs this year so I can convince the insurance company to actually count that as part of our deductible, which they should be doing anyway, because they know every time we fill a prescription. No doubt it's a slightly different computer system that does the pharm stuff, and they don't talk. Can't we all just get along?

forgive me, internets

but I did not know when I joined Content Challenge that I would be too busy digesting a buffalo to actually post regularly. Also, too busy trying to breathe.

Today I re-joined netflix, after some unpleasant customer experiences on their website, on which they asked me some information I couldn't possibly still know since the last time I belonged, three years ago. So then I called up the customer service line, where they said "before we connect you to a customer service representative, we require some information" -- said information being, of course, the exact information that I did not have which required that I call up their freakin' 800 number in the first place. "I don't fucking have the fucking number." I shouted into the phone, and got myself a customer service rep.

I was peevish with the rep, but then when I told her I'd joined the first time around because of my crappy-ass pregnancy, which was why I was joining this time around too, we bonded over complaints about morning sickness, the size and nauseatingness of iron pills, and how much we hated women women who enjoyed pregnancy. Then she gave me the two week free trial, even though I didn't technically qualify, having previously been a member.

Blog explosions in the news today

From the NYTimes:
an op-ed on Lee Siegal's crash-and-burn at The New Republic for operating a sock-puppet commenter on his TNR blog.

Also, on the front page, an article about the lonelygirl explosion.

You might think I would be pleased to see blog explosions getting such high-profile coverage, but in fact, the coverage IS the explosion. There's a war on, NYT, and some people are trying to brew up another. Our President is a lying monomaniacal delusory freak (oh wait, maybe that's the veep -- well, both of them, then). You refused to put an article about the death-by-torture of some Afghan men at the hands of U.S. forces on the front page, despite repeated pleas by your foreign editor, and yet lonelygirl gets a front-page (at least on the website) spot?

It's a sad day, folks, when not one, but two blog explosions hit the Times on the same day. Authorities have not confirmed whether the attacks were coordinated, but admit the possibility.

Homelands

Eugene Robinson has a good op-ed in WaPo (I almost called it a post, demostrating the blog-borg's takeover of my mind...) about the word "homeland" as applied to America, which has driven me crazy ever since 9/11 :

There was a time, not so long ago, when no one ever spoke of an American "homeland." During World War II there was a home front, and of course there has always been a heartland between the two heartless coasts, but no one thought of our big-shouldered cities, traffic-choked suburbs, purple mountains' majesties and amber waves of grain as anything called a homeland.

The United States was always a place for people who had left their homelands behind, a polyglot, rainbow-colored nation whose defining characteristics were vitality, mobility, dynamism and the restless urge to push toward the next frontier. But now we inhabit an official homeland, with an official Department of Homeland Security to protect it.

He does not think the choice of the word was deliberate, however:

The word homeland is a vivid but relatively inconsequential example -- less a distortion than an infelicitous choice that makes us sound as if we had quaint harvest rituals and a colorful national costume. It strikes an odd note, with its vague connotations of ethnic solidarity and ancient nationalism, and it gives off more than a whiff of us-vs.-them. This nation does have enemies from whom we need vigilant protection, but something more like "domestic security" would have done just fine, with less baggage.

Infelicitous my ass: the Administration have learned propaganda from the masters. They want to evoke us-vs.-them, ethnic solidarity, and ancient nationalism. How else do you get an unnecessary war on?

Unexploded Blogs: A Disaster in the Making

Every day, thousands (millions?) of people start blogs. Perhaps they have a friend who has a blog; perhaps they think it will help them get a date, or a job, or a friend. Perhaps they think someone out there gives a shit about their political opinions, or their cat, or their baby, or their crappy pregnancy. Most of these people are not aware of the incredible danger their blogs pose to innocent civilians, or to civilization. If the scourge of blogging is not stopped, unexploded blogs stand to be the single most serious humanitarian emergency in the world as early as 2020, dwarfing even the consequences of global warming.


There are two types of unexploded blogs:
1. the abandoned blog.
2. all other blogs that are not currently a pop-culture phenomenon.

Type 1: Most blogs are abandoned. Abandoned blogs are not a danger to anyone, except insofar as they may be unexpectedly be reactivated, putting them into category 2. Some blogs vacillate back and forth between activation states, as though they've got loose electrical connections, an especially dangerous and unstable form of Type 1 blogs.

Type 2 blogs, particularly those purportedly written by teenage girls with existential angst, have the capacity to explode into pop-culture phenomena at any time. Suddenly their traffic will spike. Ordinary people, caught up in the shrapnel from the explosion, find themselves watching YouTube movies about the blog, or perhaps composing blog fanfic. The consequences in lost productivity and intellectual decay are immeasurable. Type 2 unexploded blogs pose a serious danger to the world, and must be stopped.

The only humanitarian solution is a complete ban on blogs. They are not, as some have claimed, of purely military application with collateral damage only. Civilian casualties are not a side effect of blogs, but their very purpose. That many of those starting blogs do not realize this purpose is no excuse; their intentions do not cancel out the inherently evil nature of blogs -- the purpose for which they were invented: namely, the destruction of civilization through overexposure, inundation, stultification, titillation, stupefaction, and trivialization of the populace.

Blogs must be stopped. They are an affront to our values as Americans, and as human beings. Please join the Campaign Against Unexploded Blogs today, and help make blogs history.

P.S.: I continue to feel strongly that Blogger's spellchecker should not flag blog, blogs, and blogging as misspelled words.

Today's challenging challenge

OK, challengers: today's assignment is to write a humanitarian manifesto about unexploded blogs.

Hungarian food is good

Max and I went to Budapest a couple of weeks after September 11. While we were there, the anthrax attacks happened. We thought the world was ending. And then we saw The Simpsons, dubbed in Hungarian, and that was so hilarious we stopped worrying about the anthrax.

Hungarian food is excellent. We had a number of great, inexpensive restaurant meals in Budapest. We rode some trams, and two men tried to pickpocket us on a hill above town. One of them managed to get Max's wallet, and Max yelled "He's got my wallet" and, intrepid soul that I am, leaped onto the man in question, wrapped my arms around him in a bear hug, and hung on for dear life. This gave Max a chance to retrieve the wallet. Then we ran all the way back down the hill and took a tram to see a synagogue that was built entirely inside the courtyard of an apartment building. I should put links in to information about all these places, but that would involve actually finding those links.

Oh yeah. Bela Kun. Anything to do with Bela Bartok?

Well, I talked about Hungary, anyway.

Content challenge challenge

Wherein Max challenges the Content Challengers to write an expository piece about Béla Kun and the Hungarian Soviet Republic.

An appalling lack of discipline

led The Blogger to neglect posting yesterday, in direct contravention of the Content Challenge social compact. The Blogger regrets that the decay of modern culture under the influence of scientific rationalism, skepticism, radical democracy, and idealist reformers has led to her personal lack of discipline. She will endeavor to return to a disciplined posting schedule. Deferring to the wisdom of the ages, she will attempt to reinstill discipline through the time-honored techniques of self-flagellation, threatening self with eternal damnation, and throwing herself on the mercy of her husband, the traditional head of the family, who will smack her when she fails to post.

Do I dare to eat a buffalo?

Day 2 of my all red-meat diet. And yes, for those of you wondering, I am gorging myself on pastured, sustainably-raised, humanely treated cattle from a local producer who sells at my farmers' market. And yes, it does cost 8 times what meat at the supermarket costs.

Ari and I went on a pilgrimage to buy a pair of waterguns. He needed two, one for himself, and one for his new monster friend, whose name I can't pronounce or remember. We couldn't find them anywhere because it's not watergun season, it's notebook paper season. Finally we found them at an old-school toy shop in our neighborhood. (Actually, I figured that would be the best place to look to begin with, but by looking elsewhere first I enticed Ari to come with me to get other errands done.) Ari paid with his own quarters from his piggy bank. He is surprisingly wealthy, as he scoops up loose change all over the household and hoards it in his bank, which suits us fine, as then it's not all over the floor and our dressers and everywhere.

The buffalo regimen is having, at least, a temporary placebo effect on my ability to move, as you no doubt can tell by my actual having left the apartment today. I will probably crash tomorrow, when I realize I don't actually feel better yet, but have just been excited about the possibility that what I have can be treated, so I'm not doomed to another three months of lying in bed gasping for air like a fish out of water.

Oh right, politics. What a loser I am. All the torture news that's fit to print, and I can hardly bring myself to read the articles, much less post on them. Instead, I'm reading a book called The Conservative Mind, by Russell Kirk. This is cited by everyone on the Internets calling themselves a conservative as THE book to read on the "conservative intellectual movement". It is, however, published by the same press that publishes Ann Coulter. It's an old book, though, first published in 1958, so you can't really blame the author for the company his publisher currently keeps.

On the other hand, you CAN blame the author for a very long Forward in which he refers to himself entirely in a congratulatory third person, while explaining why his book is so very, very important, and quoting various reviews of the book that back up how great he is. Honest. Also, the Forward was written from a place called "Piety Hill". In Michigan.

Well, geez, Amy, why are you reading this freaking book anyway? asks the Internets. The Blogger has lately been wondering if perhaps she might really be, in some ways, a Conservative, at least in the Conservative tradition, though not what people who call themselves Conservatives today are. After all, she wants to conserve many things about this great country of ours: the rule of law, the separation of powers, respect for human dignity and human rights, the estate tax, the EPA, freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, the right to privacy, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. The list goes on. She is willing to postpone idealistic plans for making the country over as a Democratic Socialist paradise a la Denmark or Sweden, just as long as things don't go on getting worse. Because, as Paul Krugman noted in The Great Unraveling, and as has, hopes the Blogger, become abundantly clear to all and sundry in the last few years, the people running our country are not conservative at all. They are revolutionaries and demagogues and madmen.

The Blogger does not excuse those people who call themselves Conservative Intellectuals who now admit that the current Administration are not really conservative after all, which, as Digby likes to point out, is just their way of disavowing their mistakes so that they can continue to win elections. Oh no, they say, the problem with the Bush Administration is that they turned out to be too liberal. A real conservative administration would do much better. By which they mean whoever is the next person the Republicans decide should be President. The problem with the Bush administration is not that they are too liberal; it is that, as stated above, although in a slightly more genteel manner (Russell Kirk is way into genteel, which I guess is another thing the conservatives have failed to conserve, because, um, Ann Coulter), they are fucking batshit crazy motherfuckers.

Anyhoo, so the Blogger is reading this book that even the fucking batshit crazy motherfuckers insist is the most important book on their bookcases. And she is not sure how the batshit crazy motherfuckers could have read this book and be quite so batshit crazy as they are, but she has only read the first couple of chapters, because it's actually not very easy reading, and the Blogger is someone who slogged through a lot of poststructuralist mumbo-jumbo in college, so it's not like she's a slacker when it comes to these things, so maybe it turns out that Mr. Kirk is also batshit crazy in the end. It seems more likely, however, that the batshit crazy people have not actually read book in question, but simply purchased it and put it importantly on their bookcases next to their also-unread copies of Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Be that as it may, the Blogger has determined, even two chapters in, that in fact she would not be considered a conservative, in any sense, by the author of the book, despite her long list of things she would desperately like to conserve in America. The main reason she cannot be conservative is because she is not Christian, and only sometimes, when her brain's a little wacky, believes in god. And Kirk considers the belief in Divine Order to be an essential aspect of conservatism. The Blogger breathes a sigh of relief, really. She is not a conservative. It is possible, however, that she will read the whole thing and find that somewhere, genuine conservatives still exist with whom she might make common cause over things like the rule of law, human rights, torture, etc. And that having read the book, she might understand those actual conservatives a little better, and respect their positions, even if she does not hold them herself.

The Blogger heartily congratulates herself on her genuine and respectful interest in understsanding the conservative mind, and expects the Internets to rain accolades down upon her (very lovely) head.

Impiety Apartment
September 2006

hemoglobin

I called the midwives this morning, after noticing that I was increasingly sinking into an exhausted stupor, as if trapped on a spaceship with a broken ventilation system. That happened on Firefly, and Jayne told Mal and Wash to stop fighting, because they were using up all the air. That was a gratuitous teevee reference, there. Vomitola mentioned a Tardis on her blog today, and she didn't even give the name of the teevee show. I suppose we're all just supposed to know, like everyone knows what the significance of the number 42 is. I remember I was 24 before it occurred to me that some people in the universe may not have read Douglas Adams.

Anyway, so the midwife on call said I was probably getting anemic, and I should slaughter a buffalo and gorge myself on it. Instead, I dug up some prescription iron pills left over from when Ari was born. They are huge, and make me sick to my stomach. But the midwife said I could expect to start feeling better in a few days, which is way better than waiting for three months.

Content Challenge manages to bring out the trivial in me. Also, my blog editor is broken and I hate using the stupid web interface to post. And I don't feel like linking to anything. And the news is just so depressing. Not to sound like Noam Chomsky or anything, but everything is just lies, damn lies, and propaganda. "Islamofascists!" "WWII" "Chamberlain" "Appeasement!" "Cut-and-run!" "Nuclear Program!" "Madman!" "Freedom-haters."

Terrorists do not have the capacity to destroy our freedom and democracy. Only we can do that. Sure, they can scare the shit out of us. Still, we're way, way more likely to die in a car accident than in a terrorist attack. I am so tired of this story. And no, it's not because I'm getting complacent, thanks very much. You people who drive like maniacs on the highways every single day -- you're the complacent ones.

I can't wait till the annual scare-a-thon is over.

content challenge

Vomitola strong-armed me into a content challenge. Now I have to post. She has an infant (only I think she is calling it a wolverine these days), but I have a three-year-old and a parasitic alien. Let the half-assed post wars begin!

These days, I am still puking. And now I get tachycardia and lightheadedness when I walk across a room, up stairs, or pretty much anywhere.* There is a stop and shop behind my building, and yesterday I had to rest several times on the way there to get eggs. The other day I collapsed in the elevator in my shrink's building, and then puked all over the hallway there. So don't expect much from me, Internets. You're lucky I'm giving you a second glance, dammit.

So, how about that war we're brewing up with Iran? Sounds just like what we need right now, doesn't it?

* Yes, I have asked my midwife about it. She assures me I am not dying. "Just really bad pregnancy symptoms," she says. And I plot how to make sure that I am never, ever pregnant again.