Day: January 6, 2006

Crankypantsing

TeeVee Commercials

Shelly

I’m home sick again today[1], so I thought I’d share a few thoughts on daytime television commercials. First, Wilfred Brimley needs to learn how to say diabetes. The word has four syllables, not two, and the last one is long, not short. It gives me flashbacks to when Kate Jackson was the spokesperson for Mercury cars. She used to pronounce it Mer-cree, which annoyed the shit out of me. What the hell did she think that u was for, decoration?

Another commercial that makes me cranky is the laundry product (dunno if it’s for detergent or fabric softener) that features the song Baby Boy. The mother (it’s always a mother) picks up her son’s clothing while the song plays in the background. She sniffs it and wallows in it, in a manner that screams “Innappropriate!” and “Bad Touch!” Squick!

And, speaking of all things squicky, the new Hardee’s taco salad commercial is bad, bad, bad. No one eats their food like that unless they’re being paid to do so, IYKWIM AITYD[2]. I’m sorry, but if that’s your kink, it is Not Okay. Please get help and God bless.

In totally unrelated news, a couple of dump trucks of gravel were delivered this morning, so it looks like our alleged driveway will soon be mended. Again. It could be fixed for real, but that would take time, money, and an ass load of work, so I’m not holding my breath. In lieu of actually fixing it, Ralph occasionally throws gravel at it as a stop-gap cure.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to get out there and take pictures of just how spectacularly messed up it is, so I figured I’d best hop to it before it was covered up with a new strata of rock[3]. While I was out, I also took some photos of the surrounding landscape that I haven’t photographed before (I really hope they turned out, because they’re quite pretty in a barren, wintery sort of way). I’ll resize and upload them as soon as I finish brunch and I’ve cleaned the kitchen.

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[1] It never fails that I get some sort of respiratory plague after I’ve been around the barbarian hordes. I don’t know whether it was going to the ISM on Monday, or that I was in a car for three hours with someone who was sick, or if I caught it from someone at work, and it really doesn’t matter. All I know is that I may never leave my house again. It’s just not safe out there!

[2] If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

[3] Ahh, yes, here comes Load o’ Gravel #3.

Art, Collage, Crankypantsing, Journals, Ladybusiness, Poetry

Hemp Bound Journal

Shelly

Hemp Bound Journal: PWT
PWT

This page was an off-shoot of the discussion about the phrase “poor white trash.” I finally spoke up, and called the original poster on her demeaning comments. After having gone to great lengths to describe what she meant by “poor white trash,” and her qualifying how she is supperior to “them,” she had the nerve to reply that she hadn’t really meant it as a slur, because, hey, it’s all a matter of semantics. Um, no, it’s not semantics, not when you’ve precisely qualified and quantified your position. She made a lame attempt at claiming that there were all sorts of meanings for the word “trash” and that “poor” is a state of mind. Neither of those points, even if they were true in this context, addresses the fact that she’d spent umpty words describing a certain group of people, and how they are inferior to her. I had to laugh at her parting shot, though, that she’d suffered discrimination, too, when she was younger, because she had been called a poor, little rich girl. Now, that takes brass ovaries!

Because I thought the “it’s just semantics” defense was a laughable cop-out, I decided to consult Mr. Roget for alternate suggestions. The column spacing sucks, which is one of those things that unreasonably vexes me. I’ll probably add something else to the far right margin of the left-hand page at a later date, just for visual balance

I’d totally forgotten that the phrenology model was on that page, because the coat of gesso makes it blend into the background. It used to be thought that you could judge a person’s character by the structure of their skull. This theory was used as the basis for racial discrimination, as well as for the theory that you could tell just by looking at some people that they were wrong ‘uns. I guess some prejudices die hard, eh?

Hemp Bound Journal: Backbone & The Direction of Last Things
Backbone & The Direction of Last Things

Hemp Bound Journal: Letter from a Muse
Letter from a Muse

Hemp Bound Journal: Vessels
Vessels

No matter how much I think it’s wrong to kill another living being–and I do–I cannot get past the fact that we do not legally require one person to save another’s life. It makes no more sense to mandate that a woman must carry a baby to term than it does to force people to give over their kidneys or bone marrow or livers for transplants. I can certainly choose to be an organ donor, but I cannot be forced into it. But, some people think it’s okay to force a woman to carry a child to term against her will.