Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

hen writing about the Claim Jumper foolishness yesterday, I forgot to return to a point I teased midway through.  I'd never have remembered, if not for Malaya poking me about it.

I said:

Seven strips, battered with BBQ sauce, and all of them were at least eight inches long. They had to be breast meat, and damn near an entire breast each, they were so large. Like small ears of corn on the cob. Remember that later, when I get to the "when we got home" part of this tale.

What I was going to say, was that we got home with them in a styrofoam container, which we left on the kitchen counter.  I went and hopped in the tub since my legs were sore from the long jog, and Malaya was working on things in the living room.  About 20 minutes into my bath she began yelling and cursing in frustration, but wouldn't say why. Some time later she came into the bathroom and told me what had happened.

She'd left the box open on the counter, where no kitties are allowed to go.  Jinxie had gotten up there, and silently and stealthily picked up one of the chicken strips, leaped down with it, and carried it into the living room under my desk, where she began to devour it with great gusto and delight.  Malaya did not detect her activities until she had put a substantial dent into the chicken piece.

The amusing part is the size of the chicken.  As I said, they were huge strips, half a foot at least, and quite thick.  When eating them, we were cutting them into 4 of 5 segments, and each one of those was a two-bite affair, if we wanted to be neat and civilized, rather than just stuffing huge chunks of flesh into our mouths.  Jinx is growing and she's quite fierce, but still, she had to look like a dog carrying a baseball bat when she had the chicken strip in her jaws.

And once she was on the floor eating it, Dusty finally noticed it and came hesitantly crowding in for his share.  We always figure if there were enough food here for just one cat, Dusty would die in about a week.

His one bit of redemption has come about recently, as I've been making the super burritos, and one of the ingredients in them is shrimp.  Small, cocktail style shrimp, that I nuke for a couple of minutes and sprinkle over the tortilla with refried beans and cheese, before popping that into the toaster oven along with the two or three taquitos.  Jinx likes practically everything, certainly everything with any sort of animal product in it, but for some reason she doesn't like shrimp. Loves meat, loves fish, loves chicken, but she sniffs at shrimp and turns away, though she'll occasionally eat one when Dusty is, just out of jealously or pique or frustration.  It drives her nuts that there's something he likes that she doesn't, and he seems to revel in it, begging far more forcefully for shrimp than for anything else, even though he likes fish and chicken and such, if he's given it.  Or perhaps he just really likes shrimp the best; more than anything else, and we're assigning emotions and behaviors that are far too human for cats to realistically practice.

I'm not sure though, since Dusty eats shrimp, but he eats other things just as eagerly, if you give him a pile and Jinx a larger pile some distance away.  Otherwise she'll eat one thing from her pile and then spy Dusty's, and come crowd him out of the way, abandoning her remaining pile just to take what he was working on in his halting, tentative, "paw at it first," style.

Lately Dusty has gotten to like shrimp (which are fed to him by tossing them one at a time onto the blue throw rug at the edge of the kitchen) so much that he'll come trotting over any time I'm in the kitchen and I call him.  Or even if I don't call him, and he's in the area.  He gives up and goes back to squat in a corner pretty quickly though, unlike Jinxie, who will wind around your ankles and sprawl right in the middle of the tile floor, or perch on top of the snake's aquarium or the seldom-used kitchen table, and stare at me tirelessly, while I cut vegetables and cook things.

Dusty's other amusing yet pathetic food trick is to come trotting over any time he hears the can opener, despite the fact that we seldom use the device, and very very seldom use it to open up anything he gets to eat.  Malaya adopted him from the pound, but he'd been raised by someone for a couple of months before he was donated, and apparently just that brief time was plenty to imprint his brain with "can opener = num."

And no amount of letting him sniff and be disappointed by corn, peas, refried beans, black beans, chicken chili (which neither cat likes), or anything else will keep him from trotting over the next time a can is opened. Hope springs eternal.

The really sad thing is that we've got this manually powered food processor, sort of a prequel to the Salad Shooter.  It's basically a round plastic thing about 6 inches across, with a central spoke and a wheel that turns it from above.  There are three metal blades on the spoke, and when you turn the lever they rotate quickly enough to chop firm things into very small pieces.  About 8 or 10 fast rotations will pretty well dice most vegetables, and it's great for lettuce, peppers, black olives, onions, etc.  Not so good for tomatoes, which it just turns to mush.  I use it to chop up ingredients for nachos supreme, super tacos, taquito platters, and other things, and apparently it sounds something like the manual can opener to Dusty, since he always comes hopefully plodding over and looks around and sniffs and rubs my ankles while I'm using it.

This despite the fact that we have never, at any time, chopped up anything in it that he has any desire to eat.

Remember this the next time some cat owner (such as myself) tries to persuade you how intelligent their feline is.

¤ This editorial from the great sci fi writer Orson Scott Card shows that he's pretty much an idiot, socially.  Even if you agree with him and are against gay marriage, you can't help but think his reasoning for it and his explanations are just utter nonsense and foolishness.  The whole thing is so bad that I'm almost moved to wonder if it's meant as sarcasm, sort of along the lines of Jonathon Swift's A Modest Proposal. He is strongly against any changes in law to allow marriage to include anything other than male/female pairs, and explains why at great length.

This first quote starts off with him saying why courts and judges are wrong to make changes to the law.

By declaring that homosexual couples are denied their constitutional rights by being forbidden to "marry," it is treading on the same ground.

Do you want to know whose constitutional rights are being violated? Everybody's. Because no constitution in the United States has ever granted the courts the right to make vast, sweeping changes in the law to reform society.

Regardless of their opinion of homosexual "marriage," every American who believes in democracy should be outraged that any court should take it upon itself to dictate such a social innovation without recourse to democratic process.

Well, let's see, social changes by the courts would include such things as abortion rights, female suffrage, school desegregation, anti-discrimination laws, laws prohibiting child labor, and so on. Pretty much the whole point of the courts, when it comes to social issues, is to advance individual and minority group freedoms and protections when they're being oppressed by the majority. And there's simply no way an educated, intelligent man such as Card doesn't know this.

His reasoning only improves further down the line, which is where you begin to wonder if he's joking, or what.

In the first place, no law in any state in the United States now or ever has forbidden homosexuals to marry. The law has never asked that a man prove his heterosexuality in order to marry a woman, or a woman hers in order to marry a man.

Any homosexual man who can persuade a woman to take him as her husband can avail himself of all the rights of husbandhood under the law. And, in fact, many homosexual men have done precisely that, without any legal prejudice at all.

Ditto with lesbian women. Many have married men and borne children. And while a fair number of such marriages in recent years have ended in divorce, there are many that have not.

So it is a flat lie to say that homosexuals are deprived of any civil right pertaining to marriage. To get those civil rights, all homosexuals have to do is find someone of the opposite sex willing to join them in marriage.

So by his logic, a loveless, farce of a marriage between a gay man and a gay woman, executed solely for legal and tax reasons, would be just fine. But he's opposed to marriage between two men or two women who are deeply in love and who want to spend the rest of their lives together and raise children together, etc.  Interesting "logic."

I have to confess that I didn't read the whole thing to see if he was putting in winks and nods of sarcasm later on, since I just lost interest.  He goes on and on and on about the decline of American society, the loss of married families, the problems for single mothers raising children without a father figure.  I don't see how any of that has anything to do with gay marriage though.  He's certainly not saying that an unhappy and necessarily adulterous marriage between a gay man and a gay woman is better for raising kids than a gay marriage, is he?  So what's his point then?  It has nothing to do with his opening, "Gays can get married if they want." argument, and actually undermines it.

He eventually takes his swing at explaining the "de-legitimizing marriage" meme that the conservatives are still trying to reanimate, but it still makes no sense to me.  Since I've never seen any objective logic in it, I keep wondering if anyone really believes this, or if it's just the best they can do to defend marriage as an exclusively heterosexual option without saying that gays make them unhappy.

Let me put it another way. The sex life of the people around me is none of my business; the homosexuality of some of my friends and associates has made no barrier between us, and as far as I know, my heterosexuality hasn't bothered them. That's what tolerance looks like.

But homosexual "marriage" is an act of intolerance. It is an attempt to eliminate any special preference for marriage in society -- to erase the protected status of marriage in the constant balancing act between civilization and individual reproduction.

So if my friends insist on calling what they do "marriage," they are not turning their relationship into what my wife and I have created, because no court has the power to change what their relationship actually is.

Instead they are attempting to strike a death blow against the well-earned protected status of our, and every other, real marriage.

They steal from me what I treasure most, and gain for themselves nothing at all. They won't be married. They'll just be playing dress-up in their parents' clothes.

This is just lunacy.  How does anyone else being married affect your own marriage in any way? Plenty of men/women are in loveless marriages.  Does that make you not love your own wife, Orson? How is denying homosexual marriage not "intolerance" against homosexuals?

He gets nuttier:

If America becomes a place where the laws of the nation declare that marriage no longer exists -- which is what the Massachusetts decision actually does -- then our allegiance to America will become zero. We will transfer our allegiance to a society that does protect marriage.

We will teach our children to have no loyalty to the culture of the American elite, and will instead teach them to be loyal to a competing culture that upholds the family. Whether we home school our kids or not, we will withdraw them at an early age from any sense of belonging to contemporary American culture.

We're already far down that road. Already most parents regard schools -- an institution of the state that most directly touches our children -- as the enemy, even though we like and trust the individual teachers -- because we perceive, correctly, that schools are being legally obligated to brainwash our children to despise the values that keep civilization alive.

And if marriage itself ceases to exist as a legally distinct social union with protection from the government, then why in the world should we trust that government enough to let it have authority over our children?

Pretty much what the South said back in the 1860s, when those Northern bastards tried to take their slaves away from them, eh? And then in the years after that, we know how well "separate but equal" worked out, when it came to the rights of the minorities.

If you get through the whole thing, there's a link to a letter the paper received in reply to Card, and then a long reply by Card to the letter, but I didn't think either of them really advanced the debate much. It is enough to at least prove that Card really believes what he's written here, and that he's not just doing it as a joke or satire or something.

What I'm left wondering after this, and other examples of Card's Neanderthal social conscience, is what to make of his writing.  He is sporadically a hack, but Ender's War is still the best scifi I've ever read, and I think the rest of the series is brilliant as well.  The really weird dichotomy of his writing, as I see it, is how lucid and balanced and intelligent he is when it comes to religion and philosophy and cultural interactions.

He's obviously a student of history, and especially military history, but personally he's very primitive along the "man naturally dominates woman" theory of marriage and society.  Yet he often has intelligent, strong female characters in his novels, and while he's a very conservative Mormon in his own faith, he presents very balanced and nuanced looks at religions interacting, often non-human races and their religions and faiths as they deal with future versions of various human religions.  And he's not at all of the "Christianity will conquer all" theory; he's got future planets based entirely on weird forms of Shintoism, Buddhism, and other things you wouldn't really think of.  Plus they're presented fairly and equally; it's not like the good Christians are doing everything with the silly primitive other religions sitting on the sidelines.  And his main characters are often not religious at all, though they're usually at least somewhat spiritual.

So he's clearly able to write interesting scifi worlds without ruining his work by proselytizing, and he's very good at presenting differing views of God or even atheism.  I don't think we can expect to see any gay characters presented positively in his upcoming work, or gay marriage as other than an evil delusion, but he's certainly fair (as far as I've seen, from reading just a small percentage of his novels) when it comes to religion and philosophy.  Odd that he can step outside his narrow world view in that area, but he's so utterly unable to do so when it comes to homosexuality.

My point here is that knowing how he feels about gays and gay marriage, how does that affect my and your enjoyment of his writing? I've never seen Mel Gibson-like tendencies in him, to call anything gay disgusting, or to use "fag" as an insult, or to make any gay characters scum, so I think Card is probably being honest in his editorial.  He doesn't feel too much personal animosity towards gays, and he doesn't want to kill them or anything, he just doesn't accept their state of being, and wants to (continue to) deny them access to things that heterosexuals take for granted.  Like being able to marry someone you love and want to share your life with.  I'll feel weird when I read his work from now on, knowing what he's like personally, and I imagine that any gay readers have to feel very conflicted at this point.

It has to be weird, to find out that an artist whose work you enjoy would hate or disapprove of you personally, for some deep seated reason you can't change.  What if your favorite musician came out in an interview and talked about how much they hated men, or women, or blacks, or whites, or whatever you are?  Can you still enjoy their work and get past their opinions about you and people like you?

This is probably a good illustration of why most artists should just keep their mouths shut when it comes to political or cultural issues.  A lesson I'm unlikely to ever take to heart.

¤ Speaking of near satire, this may be the funniest blog entry ever. Here's a brief sample; it goes on and on like this for paragraph after paragraph.

After telecom I did what I always do after telecom go to Religions of the west. To watch by godless professor speak his blasphemy digging him self in to the next realm of hell. But that is between him and God.

I have other things that I have to worry about. Like were to sit in class. If you read my post from yesterday you would know that the night before I went with Stepha girl in my class to see Miss Saigon. The smart natural and polite thing to do would be to make sure to sit next to her the next day in class.

So when I sat down, I sat in an area with a bunch of open seats. But the problem was that a lot of my fraternity brothers were also in the class. And when they came in the quickly filled up the seats around me. The smart thing I should have done was to put my coat in a seat by me. But that would have required me to have been paying attention. And not talking with my big brother about how much our basketball team sucks this year.

Once I realized what happen I moved to where there was an open seat by me. My brothers did not say anything at first. But after class when they saw why I changed seats. And found out what happened the night before led them to make some very hurtful accusations. Specifically that I was starting to be wiped.

The problem is that I can't tell if it's serious and authentic by some guy in college who really is that stupid, or some sort of Neal Pollock-esque sarcasm, where someone is writing the entries and posing as an ignorant, sexist, childish frat boy.  So it's either a frightening example of how stupid a man can be, or it's a very involved example of blog humor.  Either way, I was laughing so hard I lapsed into a coughing fit by the 3rd time he spelled "whipped" as "wiped."

The rest of the blog is full of stuff that's ideologically identical, if a lot less inspired in its stupidity, so I'm thinking, with much dread, that maybe there really is some frat boy at Indiana University who thinks this stuff and has grammar this atrocious.  Did they just that him out of ice and give him a blog as a way to help him overcome his innate fear of bright colors and flashing lights, or what?

Oddly enough, a few hours after I wrote the above, Malaya checked out the site, and saw that it had been updated with a notice on top that it was indeed a joke, and that the guy who did it was writing it as part of a project for his Telcom class where students had to create a website and try to be the first to get to 5000 hits.  He won, no doubt greatly boosted by semi-credulous links like mine.

I'm relieved to find out he was a fake, I guess.  Still hoping for similar news on the editorial by the author of Ender's Game, though. =(

<-- Previous  --  Next -->
Archives Index Page