feminist blogs

It seems to me that the key point about the whole Wes Clark debacle is that the McCain campaign and their media enablers have now neutralized Clark as a spokesman for the Obama campaign and assured that he won't be Obama's choice for V.P.

Surely this was part of the purpose to the bleating on the right (repeated so readily by the talking heads) about Clark's supposedly mean, nasty, vicious attack on McCain?

The Republicans knew Clark could be effective in neutralizing McCain's so-called advantage based on military experience (how many stars did Clark have? kinda trumps whatever McCain did... even if Daddy was an admiral), so they had to take him down quickly as soon after he endorsed Obama as possible. Clark had been saying these things about McCain for a while, so doesn't it seem interesting that it's only now that the very same statements suddenly become so very objectionable?

Now maybe Clark as V.P. was never in the stars, and therefore it doesn't matter... And maybe the fact that Obama's gang threw Clark overboard so fast, rather than defending him (and pointing out how absurd and untrue the complaints from the Republicans have been), is a sign that they were never all that interested in him for V.P. in the first place. But I read this as a very well-carried-out maneuver by the bad guys, and not a very savvy response by our guy.

But feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.

Babies born by Caesarean Sections more prone to asthma.

I loved reading this article about modular homes in all of their flavors...

Encyclopedia Brittanica gets wiki with it.

Looking for a reusable water bottle that won't give you cancer?

I am totally getting this game. hahaha.

I don't think I ever linked this article about the winter soldier testimony on the west coast, but it's amazing to me that this hasn't been more widely reported on. It was especially troubling to see the video footage of the hearings...

Here's a fun site - convert any unit measurement into something more tangible. [via lifehacker]

I recently had to wipe a hard drive due to a crash. This little app would have come in handy...

This book looks interesting...

Stuart Sutcliffe Estate




That was Stuart Sutcliffe, the "Fifth Beatle." He was John's best friend and traveled with them when they were playing in German clubs. He left the Beatles just before they became famous because of ill health, his love of a photographer named Astrid and his desire to return to painting.

Stu and Astrid were, in my opinion, one of the great love stories of the 20th century. He knew that the Beatles were going to be big, but he also knew it wasn't the right path for him. Astrid is responsible for the "mop top" hair-dos that were popularized by the Fab Four, and her photography had a lot to do with the unique imagery characteristic of their early photos. There's a wonderful movie about their relationship and the rise of the Beatles - BACKBEAT. Stuart died at the age of 22, but left a body of work in the abstract expressionist style that can be seen here. He worked in red most of the time, but my favorite of his work is this untitled black and white image:


I'm feeling a little melancholy tonight, mostly from the ongoing saga with my mom. She's conscious for the first time in a few days, but she's back at the hospital that gave her 5 various infections over the course of 2 months and still hasn't fixed her broken leg.

So, I guess I'm distracting myself with pretty boys - the one thing that makes this life worth living, and I'm thinking about how they die too young, and there is never enough of them to go around. They're a rare and beautiful gift in a world that can be too ugly and too sad to bear. I need a margarita, but I have to be able to get up in the morning to go see mom, so it will have to wait.

Last night, Michael Turner, noted comic book artist, passed away. Turner was well-known for his gorgeous covers, though his interpretations of some of our favourite female heroines were pretty cheesecake. Nonetheless, I respected Turner’s stylized artwork and his attention to detail inspired my own art.

This poster, pencilled by  Turner, is hanging on my wall, and is one of my favourite images of Wonder Woman.

It’s been a weird week. Sunday, I saw what was, perhaps, the best show of my entire life: The National (playing, as it were, at the Richmond venue called The National). That show deserves its own post (delayed though it may be), but what I want to convey here, as efficiently as possible, is what happened afterward.

Namely, I kind of fell apart, for a laundry list of reasons I won’t elaborate on here, except to say that for me, extraordinarily awesome moments are often followed by the sense of getting bitch-slapped by the Universe (sorry, I mean Universe). Also, I become excruciatingly aware that certain of my (mostly verbal) excesses can attract strangers, while alienating friends.

That’s always going to be a hard thing for me to wrap my head around, but on Monday, after deciding to go on a week-long hiatus from Twitter (where most of my excess verbiage gets spilled), I started keeping a running list of things I wasn’t “tweeting” (in the peculiar parlance of the medium).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the list of things I wasn’t posting there became far more unmanageable than if I’d been posting them as I went along. In a way it was good, because while I have certainly erred on the side of non-self-censorship on Twitter, there were some things that were really freaking me out (some of them devastatingly sad, others just as devastatingly - and inappropriately - hilarious) which even I wouldn’t have been comfortable with posting publicly. That stuff had to go somewhere, or I was gonna lose it.

I made it all of two days into my intended week-long “hiatus” before realizing it had been rather ridiculous of me to even try. So, after a few friends had seen the crude list (crude in the sense of raw, but, yeah, there was certainly the other crude, too), I came back, I’m pretty sure, for good. I hope that in doing so I don’t alienate or overwhelm the people I care about most (on and off Twitter), but if that does happen, I’ll be a big girl about it and just deal.

And now, thanks to my pal Mogrify (@mogrify on Twitter, main website here), I have discovered Wordle, a tool via which I can share with you (at least a visualization of) the 74 things I didn’t post to Twitter. Without, you know, actually saying what all those things were, and causing all sorts of undeserved discomfort for the people I love.

Here, then, are some of the relevant words that arose (from which y’all had best not infer any particular thing or things)*:

__
* You can also click here for a larger image with easier to read words.

"Even if we vote for the opposition, Mugabe still wins." - Woman refugee from Zim (Zimbabwe) Hard on the heels of January's tragedy passing as Kenya's 'presidential elections', it is equally as nauseating to observe the speed and trajectory of...

I applauded when Discovery Channel's "Discovery Home" recently evolved into Planet Green TV - planetgreen.com - specialising in sustainable, ecological living. But the line's been crossed with Planet Green repeatedly airing promos that insidiously stereotype Black people and disappear and...

I do believe we just saw James Harding on The Daily Show. Meanwhile, Newsweek's Tony Dokoupil interviewed the (British) author of Alpha Dogs of London in the 26 May '08 issue: "In "Alpha Dogs," London Times editor James Harding investigates...

The-Goddess

Yes, dear readers, should you be out in the world and have a burning desire to know what I'm bitching about, point your phone's browser to

http://the-goddess.swiftmob.com/

which will give you access to the headlines from this blog, each of which is a clickable link so you can read my rants on the fly.

Now I have to decide whether to add content from the rest the site or not. Any comments or requests?