Category: Uncategorized

The banality of emo

I was looking at the OC Weekly for the first time in forever because it was their 10 year issue. Some great stuff, like a history of their investigative reports. Jim Washburn’s attempt to lengthen his penis with a weight on a rope was hilarious and I’d forgotten about it. And then I’m paging through the ads for head shops, bad restaurants, and whores (“Date 25 young Russian women on this trip: GUARANTEED!”) and I see the ad for the Mouse of Blues and wait, hey I know those people. Looks like Gina AND Jackie in the ad. Boy I hope the Mouse paid you a nice fee on top of your waitressing salary for that picture! Also, Gina has an entire pizza in front of her. Maybe that’s how they got them to do it.

I really like the people who work at my two local grocery stores. They’re just solid, likeable folks. When things aren’t busy I stop and talk to them for a few after I’ve got my stuff.

I made chicken noodle soup today, with orzo pasta and a leek and thyme and a finely chopped onion and black pepper. I also made fresh cornbread. Unfortunately we were out of eggs so I made the cornbread about 15 minutes ago when I got back from the market. But we had a delicious carrot and cabbage salad with a basil olive oil dressing. Cooking is a good place for me. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s a made thing, that I can make well. And I can share it with others and get an ego stroke when it turns out well. There’s nothing else like it for me. It’s my refuge.

Beauty is bad for me. Really, really bad. I can’t have it,, I can’t stop wanting it, and I know I shouldn’t want it and beat myself up about it.

What is our major malfunction, numbnuts?

General Joseph P. Hoar, USMC (Retired) would like to point out out that it’s the American Revolution in Iraq, but we’re the redcoats. He’s obviously a wild-eyed emo liberal towelhead-hugger who… oh wait, no. He’s a crewcutted 70-year-old professional hardass covered in combat medals.

Some notable quotes:

…when you think about Iraqi democracy, don’t think about Iowa. Think about Lebanon, you know, and that’s again best case. It’s going to be messy.

…

If you’ll permit me a sea story: In 1966, I – my first time out there, I was an advisor with the Vietnamese marines, and we were up along the DMZ and there was a Vietnamese airborne battalion that got in trouble in a place called the marketplace, which was just north of Con Tien. That battalion had 211 soldiers killed that day, and we went to relieve the pressure and we covered for them. We stayed there the next day and were involved in a pretty good-sized fight. And the bad guys broke off because of the artillery and air – the whole works.

But any number of months from 1966 until the Americans disengaged in that area, if you ever wanted a fight, all you needed to do was go to the marketplace, and you got a fight. And they killed 20 or 30 of our people and we killed a couple hundred of theirs, and then everybody went home again, and then at some unpredicted time in the future we went back up to the marketplace and did it all over again.

…

When you talk about the Middle East, if you don’t talk about Balfour and Sykes-Pico and McMahon and General Mott and Gertrude Bell and that whole crowd of people and what’s been going on out there throughout the 20th Century, you can’t begin to understand the dynamic that exists today. And we are the direct linear descendants of those colonial overlords. And that, in my judgment, is the problem, and we’ve done very little to dispel that belief.

…

I want to leave you with something that I think is really important. I was in the Middle East on a trip of five countries this past winter, and in Saudi Arabia there seemed to me to be agreement that, regardless of what happens in Iraq, these jihadis that are now there – we don’t know how many, or at least I don’t know how many there are – of 15 to 20,000 bad guys, how many of them are hardcore guys that are going to continue to fight? But regardless of what happens, these people are going to be well trained and be out of a job, and they’re going to disperse into the local countries and continue their work.

So it has come to this.

A cultural trend in my country follows a particular course, with few variations. A marginalized minority or subculture produces it. It propagates via pop culture, especially music and film. Teenagers adopt and adapt it. A major motion picture blesses the trend. Older people who idolize teenagers take it up. The rougher edges of the trend have been removed at this point and it is a marketable commodity. It is now an ordinary and acceptable part of daily social life.

At this point, if the activity has any physical expression at all, it finally and permanently becomes a method of exercise.

The New Porn Culture of suburban middle-class America is no exception.

Cardio Pole Dancing

Anna-Lise de Texte

  1. Those Starbucks Doubleshot iced coffee things taste like the milk at the bottom of a bowl of Cheerios.
  2. Here is a gallery of vintage children’s books. miss_education and others with coulrophobia urged to skip it.
  3. Three word phrases that go together: Grim Meathook Future and One-Rupee Suicide.
  4. To lighten the mood a bit from that, here: WFMU presents way too many variations on “They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Ha Ha”.
  5. The Army finds that anthrax is a lot cheaper if you buy it in bulk.
  6. The user Agnieskza on Flickr posts a lot of good photos. Quite a few of them are of her looking cute, but the others are pretty sweet too. Example below: