Sand vs. Machinery attempts to cure verbal diarrhea!

It’s been a good while since I’ve kvetched about the embarrassment the English language has become. So I’m going to do so now. I know for too many years it’s been “fashionable” to speak like someone who spent more time sniffing paint thinner in the woods behind the school than in an actual classroom.

And I know we (and by “we” I mean everybody and me) like our slang and when used properly colloquialisms make language richer and can turn communication an art. But most modern slang is simply displeasing to my the ear. To the point where I have to turn up my ipod to drown out the garbled verbiage that seems to follow me everywhere I go.

First off, we need to get rid of “vajayjay.” Honestly, did we need another childish euphemism for the female sex organ? “Sick” when used to describe something cool*, also needs to go. Anything shortened to webspeak (OMG! LMAO!) said aloud is just stupid for stupid’s sake. Do you really have so many vitally important things to express that you must speak in abbreviations?

It also pisses me off that “gay” is still being used as an insult. It makes people sound more even more like rednecks than they look.

But rather than deride our poor word choices (any more than I already have), I humbly offer some suggestions for new buzzwords. Not new in the sense that I invented them (if I were that clever I’d be ruling the verse by now) but resurrections of a few classics and one from the future as envisioned by Joss Whedon.

1 Zounds: popular in the fifteenth century, “zounds” is a fun word for expressing a sort of horrified awe. It is short for “God’s wounds” according to Ned Flanders. Used in conversation it might sound like “Zounds, I can’t believe Pip turned over all the wastebaskets and still had time to squeeze in a power nap in a space of four minutes!”

2. Pish-posh: first used around the 1590s, it is mild cry of contempt. It is so damn cute that it should both express one’s displeasure and also diffuse any tense situation. “Pish-posh! Justin Bieber is not the new Beatles! You take that back!”

3. Cat: as in “cool cat.” When a person is labeled a “cat,” he or she is clearly a creature above other humans, much like an actual cat. Originated in the Jazz Age. One clever variation is “cat’s pajamas.” “That cat just walked through the door wearing skin-tight pleather trousers like he owned the joint!”

4. Bamboozle: to deceive or puzzle someone, eighteenth century style. Additionally, it’s just fun to say. “Ack, I’ve been bamboozled! Curse you Taco Bell!”

5. Gorram: a version of “god damn” useful for both agnostics and those who don’t want to take their lord’s name in vain. I first heard this word on the brilliant television series “Firefly,” uttered by Captain Malcolm “Tightpants” Reynolds. Sadly, the show lasted a single season and “gorram” did not get a chance seep into our daily vernacular, but it really should. “The gorram power went out in the middle of Glee and it looked like Mr. Shue and Neil Patrick Harris were about to make out!”

I humbly ask that we all do our part to bring these words  into common usage. Please, before I destroy my hearing due to explosive ipod volume.

* The word “cool” is timeless, and always will be.

Stamp out mean (and meaningless) traditions!

Before I start, a bit of housekeeping:

Yeah, sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I spent most of my energy trying to find new accommodations and moving from my dank, cramped, shared flat into a cool basement bachelor. Then I couldn’t remember where I packed my wit and indignation (or what little energy I had before).

But the Calgary Stampede has just thundered away in a cloud of dust and ignorance and all signs point to it returning again next year despite the well-publicized deaths of six horses.

A little background for my foreign readers who may be wondering what this madness I speak of is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calgary_Stampede

Let’s break this down, shall we:

Stampede: a sudden, headlong running away of frightened animals, esp. horses or cattle.

That was from Websters New World Dictionary, not PETA or the Animal Liberation Front. An impartial, mainstream source used the word “frightened” to describe a stampede. And of course the horses running at distressingly high speeds in the chuck wagon races under the threat of whips are frightened. 50 horses have been killed in this event since 1986 from either cardiac arrest due to stress or by crashing. The baby cows dragged by ropes around their necks, often kicked and endured electrical prods, damn straight they’re frightened too.

And yet polls suggest that majority of Canadians (most of whom have never even attended) are in favor of the Calgary Stampede stamping back next year.

Why? Because “it’s tradition.”

Tradition is a funny thing. It has the power to cause otherwise rational humans to ignore or justify acts we would otherwise never abide. We see it happening when smart, modern young women recite sexist wedding vows because that’s the way her (or maybe his) church has always done it and we musn’t rock the boat. It makes things that should frighten and anger us (like female genital mutilation) seem quaint and seeped in something deep and meaningful and mysterious.  And we use up a good deal of energy defending them or ignoring them.

Traditions are scared cows (unlike the poor Stampeded cows) and people will try and justify them any way they can, even if it makes no sense.

“Well that cowboy on the news said the animals are treated well and we didn’t grow up on a farm or a ranch so we musn’t be ignorant city folk and just let them prove their manhood by jumping on a steer from a moving horse, twisting its neck and wrestling the poor thing to the ground in front of a stadium full of hooting knuckle draggers.”

I don’t care if they sing those calves a freaking lullabye and kiss their foreheads before they put the ropes around their necks and let them writhe in terror while taking their victory laps. No living being should be subjected to fear and pain for any reason, especially not entertainment. Cruelty is cruelty, no matter how many decades or centuries it has been allowed to go on.

I’m not against tradition per se. Heck, I look forward to cake and presents on my birthday. They take the sting out of getting older and everyone gets to have cake. But too often it is used as an excuse for atrocities to keep perpetuating when we should damn well know better. And the Calgary Stampede is one of them.

I have long accepted that most people are not going to be revolutionaries and just want to go about living their lives with a minimum of conflict and aggrievation. I get that. But just blindly following traditions when you know in the back of your mind that they are cloaking pain and cruelty, they are a dead stupid substitute for thinking.

Know Your Douchebags: A Public Service Message

The word “douchebag” is finding its way into our conversation more and more. Some people will throw it around as a sort of all-purpose insult. But in the interest of not misusing words and educating the public of the dangers actual douchebags pose, I’d like to explore the world of douchebaggery for a moment.

My search for the origins of the term began, as they often do, with Google. But the search just led down the path of silliness so I broke down and consulted the Oxford English Dictionary. Turns out, “douchebag” was originally an insult used towards women, first recorded in the 1930s.

There are essentially two types of douchebags (and probably sub-types, but we’ll just leave that for now). Both should be avoided by women at all costs.

Type A Douchebags are awkward looking plastic contraptions sold in boxes featuring watercolour images of women gambolling through spring meadows in white dresses. Their hygiene is beyond reproach, presumably because they have already hosed themselves down with the contents of said box.

Type B Douchebags don’t look sterile at all. On the contrary, most look like they could use a good wash. They may try to compensate with gallons of aftershave (curiously, these guys are rarely clean-shaven).

Appearance-wise, they tend to favor shirts with garish designer labels (purchased during covert missions to Costco), popped collars, Oompa-Loompa tans, ball caps and big-ass sunglasses (sometimes indoors). Douchebags like to accessorize with hair, whether it’s superglued into spikes on their heads or peaking out of their half-buttoned shirts.

Convinced of their animal magnetism, they strut around looking filthy and stupid, trying to get laid.

Type A Douchebags were created by men to cover up the natural, healthy aroma of a woman’s nether regions. Apparently vinegar is a much more enticing fragrance. The fallacy of this insulting invention is that it has convinced too many women that they are somehow “unclean” and must use this snake oil to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. What it does is corrupt the self-cleaning process of a healthy vagina and lead to nasty infections and possibly Pelvic Inflammatory Disease.

If you do have that “not so fresh” feeling, get yourself to a gynecologist STAT.

Type B Douchebags will go out of their way to convince women that they are indeed filthy creatures in order to erode their self-esteem and get them between their unwashed sheets. This type of douchebag can also give a woman nasty infections.

They are usually not very bright and are ignorant about women, and those whose brain cells have not been killed off by the chemicals in their styling products will use whatever they have to try to convince women that going back to their place is a good idea.

Type A Douchebags are typically found in grocery or drug stores. To avoid them, simply avert your eyes when shopping in the Feminine Hygiene aisle.

Type B Douchebags are much harder to ignore. This is because they feed on attention, whether good or bad. They can be found anywhere from convenience stores to street corners, but it’s a safe bet that any given nightclub on any given night will be playing host to at least a small cluster of douchebags. Aside from never leaving your apartment, there’s not much you can do to avoid them.

They cannot be reasoned with. Even a message as clear as “please go away,” will be taken as “I am a woman of low standards, please pester me with asinine pickup lines because this is your lucky night, stud!”

We do not have to put up with douchebags. In fact, it is your duty to womankind to put them in their place (the guter they crawled out of). Don’t be polite. Manners are a foreign language to douchebags.

Though ignoring them is difficult, you must. It is the only way they can be stopped. If they won’t go away, alert the bouncer or cops or simply bugger off.

Now that you know, you can keep your life douchebag free. Your girl parts, and the civilized world, will thank you.

What the world needs now is Free To Be…You and Me!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the 1972 children’s album, Free to Be…You and Me and ABC Afterschool Special that went with it, I’ll let wikipedia give you the nuts and bolts of the matter:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_to_be_you_and_me

But if you were lucky enough to get a copy of the album (I think I got mine from my Auntie Sharon) when you were a kid, you grew up listening to That Girl Marlo Thomas and Friends sing about a world where we would not be judged by the contents of our pants, but by the contents of our character. A world not too far in the future if we did our best.

I want to know what happened to that future. We’re living in a world where boys are still made to feel that in order to be men they must shame or harm other men (or women or children). A world where girls are told in grade school that it’s important to be sexy otherwise you wouldn’t need a clothing line designed by Billy Ray’s “other daughter”, the little nine-year-old that looks like a prostitot (and I’m devastated that such a word has seeped into our popular culture).

While I do not and never will want children of my own, I very much care about the children that are in the world. Childhood as a time to discover everything you can and discover at least a bit of what makes us who we are is shrinking rapidly. Whether it’s the fault of the media or parents themselves or some unseen evil forces, we owe it to these poor kids who never asked to be born to put a stop to it.

Seriously, all you parents of school age kids need to go out and buy the album (except it’s now on CD). Don’t have any kids? Go out and buy a bunch for your nieces and your nephews and for your friend’s kids. Trust me, they’ll bug you much less later in life if you do!

Need further incentive? Some of the biggest and bestest stars of your childhood feature in both the record and the After School Special.

Wouldn’t you love to see kids finally get that kind of world to live in? A world where boys can cry and play with dolls without being teased or pummeled, and girls can grow up and go out and see the world and perhaps never marry. And be blissfully happy.

Who knows, we may even live to see it happen.

**

Thanks to my beloved subscribers! Everyone else will have to stumble upon this entry accidentally but you’ll get it hot off the interwebs!

Mere hours before all the major magazines release their cover stories as they do every Thursday…J.D. Salinger

Like most disenchanted young people, I was obsessed with the novels of J.D. Salinger. It began, typically with Catcher in the Rye and I became convinced that the man behind this book was the patron saint of teen angst. Hell, I wanted to lose my virginity to Holden Caulfield at one point.

When I turned twenty I explored the brilliantly dysfunctional Glass family in Franny & Zooey and some of the Nine Stories. I’m a little frightened by how much of a kinship I felt with the Glass kids, particularly little Franny.

And every so often I imagined what I’d say to Salinger if I ever stumbled accidentally on his lair while berry picking on an abandoned farm somewhere in Maine. I even deigned to think he might invite me in for tea or whiskey. More likely, he’d have hucked pinecones at me. And to be honest, that made me admire him even more. In an age where everybody broadcasts the squickiest details of their personal lives on television or the internet, we hear of fewer and fewer genius hermits.

So yeah, I was sad when he died last week, even if he did live to the ripe old age of 91.

Though I’ve grown a lot less disenchanted over the years (thank you J.K. Rowling!) I still live with the bad brain chemicals that first bitch-slapped me around puberty. Though Salinger’s characters tended not to be gifted happy endings (especially poor Seymour), I still find it oddly comforting that even clever people from dynamic well-to-do families can end up telling their story to a shrink.

From time to time I wonder what sort of man Esme married. Did she end up in squalor and was it as romantic living in it as it was speculating about it? What if I had grown up in a family of geniuses living in Manhattan. Would I have ended up on the same anti-depressants or wound up in a mental institution?

As for J.D. Salinger, I hope he found peace and happiness giving the rest of society the finger. I’m glad his early success allowed him to live out his life writing for no one but himself.

I can’t even begin to fathom how he lived his everyday life or whether he threw pine cones at groupies who tried to approach his house. But I do hope that the phonies leave him alone in the afterlife.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/books/01/28/salinger.obit/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn

Stop the Inanity!

A fresh new decade blah, blah, blah…

The oughties had very little to recommend it. Face it, other than the internet explosion which allows  me to avoid most of the human race and keep an obsessive eye on the 1% I can actually stand, it was defined by large scale  stupidity. The media is ruled by morons and skanks, and dumbassedness has become the new wit.

The following five trends illustrate the slippery slope civilization is on perfectly. They must not be carried into the next decade. They need to be hurled into a pit by someone screaming “begone foul decade!”

1. Dumb trousers: Enough with the droopy drawers! Granted, the trend towards excessively baggy pants began  more than ten years ago, but it seems to have exploded (snerk) in the last decade. What designer think tank decided it was cool for guys to look like they’ve crapped themselves? And how do these same guys manage to date? There are very very few guys out there whose underpants we want to see and for those we do, we can arrange for private viewings or attend certain movies, thanks.

And just how desperate for validation does a woman have to be to go around with “Juicy” or “Sperm Dumpster” emblazoned across her arse? Get some dignity, babe!

Skinny jeans. No one with more than 12% body fat can successfully wear these. Yet few stores stock anything else and clerks look at me like I’m speaking Chinese when I suggest this might not be a good idea. Hence, I buy only vintage until designers bring back stretchy flares that will accomodate an adult female backside.

Will we ever have a happy medium with pants?

2. 80s Retro: Bloody hell, are things that bad that we have revive neon leg warmers? Okay, that might be a bit of a head scratcher.

Is there a twenty year rule when it comes to nostalgia? Personally, I came of age during the Greedy Bastard era favoring 60s retro but that’s different (it is so!) Why the 80s? Why can’t we rock flapper dresses or elbow gloves. Or even disco. At least disco was funny.

3. Over-the-Top Tans: Honestly, with all we know about melanoma and how too much sun causes your face to look like a catcher’s mitt by the time you hit 40, why are we still tanning? And the sprayed-on orange skin is only sexy in LoompaLand. And we don’t live there, do we?  Be pale, be proud, I say! (Unless you’re black or Asian or are just predisposed to having a darker complexion, natch). Doing something that’s both bad for your health and makes you look like you’ve been dipped in a vat of burnt sienna paint…epic dumb!

4. Bad Spelling- I know there are lots of very smart people who never got spelling down for whatever reason. I’m talking about people who deliberately misspell words we were introduced to in kindergarten and think capitalizing and basic punctuation are for nerds. It’s bad enough to be stuck on a bus without your ipod and having your ears assaulted by shrieky and pointless conversations in which every third word is “like.”

But when people start spelling it “liek,” without the slightest trace of irony…teh suxor!

I’m not a grammarian, but if this trend towards garbled gibberish continues, I may turn into some cranky old Aunt Josephine that goes around with a giant bag of socks to shove into people’s mouths. Please don’t make me do that!

5. The following facial expression: http://antiduckface.com/

No one over the age of three should EVER make that face. It is neither sexy nor dignified. Yet it’s everywhere. A number of (usually inexperienced or just clueless) photographers have tried to get me to make that face in the five years I’ve been working the camera. Do people not get that Zoolander is a comedy?

Just take ‘em all, stuff them into a time capsule and shoot it into space where they will just explode already.

Happy New Year!

Memoirs of a Cat Mum

I don’t care what my breeder friends say, raising a kitten is just as challenging as having a baby. Possibly  more so.

Sure, I didn’t have to expel this adorable foundling from my nether regions. My breasts haven’t gotten all huge and uncomfortable and leaky. And I don’t have to change any nappies because cats are superior beings who are litter trained practically at birth.

But human babies can’t jump two feet in the air while play fighting with resentful siblings.  They also can’t jump on the kitchen table and lick the frozen lasagne you just heated up for dinner. And human babies don’t attack your hand when you try to break up said fights.

The kitten known as Pip Squeak Festivus Brian Dumbledore is here to stay (for a physical description see my last post). I’ll spare you the etymologies that make up his name, and 98% of you probably deciphered them inside a nanosecond anyway.

My cat Maggie is nine years old and for most of her life she was the baby of my small and changing family. And for the past year and a half she has been an only cat and my closest companion. Naturally, my sweet girl feels threatened by the presence of this adorable but obviously evil little punk. And Pip does not soften the blow when he jumps on her head, even though he means no harm.

Pip is a typical kitten in the sense that he’s cute and charming and has no boundries. But I don’t remember Maggie being this bitey when I first brought her home and she was almost exactly the same size.

Emotionally I’m somewhere in between awe over how Maggie is holding her own against the little rapscallion and worrying  that she thinks her mummy is punishing her by brining the tiny nut home.

True, there are no bags under my eyes and I’m not worried about how I’m going to lose my kitten weight. But I am pulling off a rather tricky balancing act these days (rather shakily). How do I make the little guy feel welcome while still making sure that my eldest still knows she is very much loved?

Much like human babies, cats don’t understand why the world is the way it is and why it does not revolve around them alone. Actually, they don’t really understand the second concept at all.

But I am a little sleep-deprived. Perhaps that’s why I sound a little weepy and might be worrying a little too much–oops, must go and give Pip a time out.

Pictures to follow!

In a show of seasonal self-restraint

Today is Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us.  The time of year when we battle our heads-of-household in Feats of Strength, stare at an undecorated pole and participate in the Airing of Grievances where we let everyone know how much they have pissed us off this past year.

And many have pissed me off in various degrees. But I’m feeling sentimental so I will air but a single grievance this year.

As I write this, a little gray and black tiger striped kitten lays all tuckered out on my bed.  Or lies. I’m not sure which.

He has been hanging out in my room for the past few hours. My nine-year-old cat Maggie keeps looking at me as if to say “and when is his mummy coming to take him away?” No, she is not amused. But at least she’s stopped hissing at him for a while.

But even if Maggie will have nothing to do with him, at least he is stretched out all warm and safe indoors with good holistic kitten food and clean water.  About a week ago, this was not the case. My friend Becca found him shivering in the street by himself.

The grievance I need to air is with everyone who is responsible for him being there.

Everyone who has decided they cannot be bothered to spay or neuter their cats should kick their own arses for being so bloody ignorant. Everyone who has ever abandoned an animal in their care in the streets should spend the night freezing  in a dumpster fighting with countless other cats for a bit of garbage.

And those individuals (who for now shall remain nameless) at The Toronto Humane Society whose atrocities against those they were paid and entrusted to protect resulted in the whole operation shutting down and have resulted in the needless deaths of countless animals.  I hope you are shown the same compassion and mercy when your fates are decided, be it by the law or by karma.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/toronto/story/2009/12/22/ths-warrant-search464.html

All right, grievances aired somewhat. Happy Festivus!

Too Many Vampires!

Hey, I like my dark, broody and mysterious men as much as the next gal (actually, probably more). I’ve envied Buffy the Vampire Slayer for getting vamp lovin’ from both Angel and Spike as much as for her wit and slaying abilities.

But vampires have permeated literature, film and television so heavily that these increasingly sexy creatures of the night are venturing into overexposure territory.

And werewolves and zombies are not far behind.

On the crest of a new decade,  we need a new monster.  And since no one can come up with a good monster from scratch anymore, I figured we could revisit some classic feature creatures.

I know in order  to profit off a monster these days, there has to be sex appeal. No one ever writes fan fic about Killer Tomatoes. Failing that, there must be undeniable coolness factor.

For the consideration of every writer, producer, film maker and advertiser who may come across this blog, I offer the following suggestions:

The Creature From the Black Lagoon

True, the original creature (or “Gill” as fans often call him) was far from a hit with the ladies. When he got lonesome he had to make do with dragging the rare pretty girl who crossed his path down to his dank and watery lair.

Word is, there is already a remake of CFBL in the works. It doesn’t look like anyone has been cast, so may I suggest Gerard Butler. Imagine him covered in black body paint (and imagine the lucky makeup artist who gets that job!) with a few strategically-placed latex gills.  Mmmm…

Plus, he played the Phantom of the Opera so we know he can pull off the complexities of the lonesome freak of nature isolated from the world who pines for an unattainable female.

This time though, girls will be running and screaming towards the Black Lagoon for the chance to love this misunderstood and alluring hunk of man-beast. Line forms to the left, ladies.

The Invisible Man

This one could be tricky. How to get women excited about a man they can’t see (even if he is a stud in the first few scenes before he becomes invisible)? We would need an actor with a very sexy voice. Alan Rickman would do nicely.

And lots of women have fantasized about being with some invisible lover. After all, one could have all sorts of worldly experience being invisible, and you’ll never see any of it coming. Plus, he sounds hot so he must be hot, right?

Lepus

Not sexy at all. But the public loves killer bunnies (especially Monty Python fans).  We’d root for them!

And bunnies have many reasons to be angry at people. They have poisons dripped in their eyes and get skinned for their fluffy bunny fur. What if some crazy scientific  experiment went horribly wrong and produced genetically altered giant rabbits with a strong sense of vengeance? Oh, those bunnies would be hopping mad and have the size advantage to take down their white-coated oppressors.

Maybe I should write this one myself.

The 50 Ft. Woman

Admit it, guys. You love the idea of some scantily-clad Amazon swooping you up and carrying you back to her giant house like you were a sack of potatoes.  Plus with the height thing, she’s bound to attain supermodel status. That is if she can avoid stepping on all the other models and crushing them into super-goo.

So Hollywood, if you please, don’t run the vampire thing into the ground. A good epic bloodsucker flick every few years will suffice. Otherwise, we risk destroying their mystique. Or worse:

Pardon my French, Mr. President

But your holiday traditions suck ass:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091125/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_turkey_pardon

I’m not a fan of tradition, myself. Just aping what has been done before is a poor substitute for original thought.

So this one day a year one turkey will be spared the fate of the hot oven and get shipped to Disneyland. What the hell is a turkey going to do in Disneyland? Most turkeys aren’t even tall enough to go on the rides.

But to the 72 million other turkeys slaughtered for the traditional holiday meal who spend most of their lives (all 5-6 months)  living in filthy, cramped conditions , Disneyland might look pretty damn good.

Instead of posing for pictures with Mickey and Donald, those other birds got crammed full of growth hormones that often leaves them unable to stand under their own weight. Then they got shipped on crowded trucks to slaughterhouses where their feathers were burned off, their throats slit and stomped on by workers. Often while still conscious.

All to end up on a platter being hacked away at by families who will cram as much of the carcass (and accompanying cranberry sauce and dinner rolls) into their gobs as they can before passing out, unable to do anything but grunt at football (or, if you’re a woman, cleaning up all the mess).

But it’s tradition, people. And truth has no place in that.

<embed src=”http://www.petatv.com/swf/video.swf?v=Grace_39_Thanksgiving_peta_high” quality=”high” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”335″ height=”255″ allowScriptAccess=”always”></embed><br /><a href=”http://www.peta.org/FeatureGrace.asp?c=ptggvid”>’Grace’: PETA’s Thanksgiving ad</a>

Honestly, I’m thankful to be human. I may be part of the most arrogant and destructive species on the planet, but we’re also by far the luckiest.