Aaaah.  Social networking.

Authorities say there were at least five attacks on red-haired students at a Southern California middle school after a Facebook group announced “Kick a Ginger Day.”

Investigators say the Facebook message may have been inspired by a “South Park” TV episode that satirized racial prejudice by portraying a campaign against red-haired, fair-skinned “ginger” people.

Investigators have not made any arrests and don’t consider the attacks to be hate crimes.   –Miami Hurled

I have this thing about redheads.  It’s probably a sickness, and it seems to run in my family among the males.  They leave me cringing with desire, stupid with lust.   I wasn’t even aware of it until my 20s, when it struck with terminal force, and I married one.  So this sordid little episode resonates deeply.

Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but I’m no gentleman.

All I’ll say here about redheads is, they really are different.  They not only look different, they’re constructed differently.  They even smell and taste different.  Wonderfully different.  Blindfold me and lead me into a room, and I’ll pick out the redheads.  I can even taste freckles.

So — Why isn’t this a hate crime?  These individuals were selected for abuse precisely because of their hair and skin color.   The attacks were motivated by hatred of these beautiful people’s surface characteristics; they were targeted for who they are and what they look like.  Isn’t that the definition of a hate crime?

Redheads are in this year, by the way.  You’ll find them in print ads, on billboards, and in teevee commercials.  Not all are born redheads – we aficionados can spot the difference, and the one sure test is NSFW – but even the fact that Hollywood and Madison Avenue are using artificial means to mimic the look tells you about the fashion and the marketing power.  Great!  I’m ahead of this trend, and I’m already sold.

The last thing the world wants is a militant redhead movement, even though the vision of battalions of redheads, male and female, angry and arrayed in battle gear, presents an enormous erotic influence on some of us.  Hell.  I’ll sign on as an Auxiliary. They’ll make war.  I’ll make love.

Red is the new pink.

(see more here!)

Thanksgiving is a Very Big Deal around Squathole Manor, at least to Guido, who takes this opportunity every year to push the earth out of orbit.

Guido will cook.  Christ on stilts will she cook.   The holiday brings out the Dago and sets free the hounds of gluttony.

But even before she cooks, she cleans.  She has devices for cleaning surfaces one rarely sees outside commercial buildings; some direct streams of searing steam deep into bathroom walls and tiles, others exhume archaeologically embedded particulates from soft cushions and hard walls.  Then there’s the array of deadly chemicals, astringents, and applicants with their specialized engines of delivery, ostensibly to purify surfaces on which 4-legged creatures pis and puke up hair balls, and husband-critters parade with filthy stained (cloven) hooves.  She climbs ladders.  She crawls under furniture.  She does windows, not the Bill Gates kind.  She peels, polishes, and sometimes re-paints.  She washes the soap.

One Christmas I got her a Zamboni machine.  Why fuck around, right?  Her sister got her this vacuum cleaning device I dubbed “The Monica” – it can suck gasoline out of the car’s gas tank from 60 paces.  It roars like a 747 in need of a ring job.

Trust me, I’m not complaining.  Guido shines this time of year.  When she starts cooking, strangers stop their cars and stagger up to the kitchen window, sniffing like hounds.  The letter carrier starts grinning in anticipation as she begins her rounds.  Neighbors ask her for recipes and advice.  The neighborhood Ginzoid is back in her South Philly element.

Today she calls Delaware Chicken, as usual, to order her two 12-15 pound birds.  “We don’t take orders any more,” they tell her.  “Come by today.”  Guido says she can’t: “I’m working,” she says, “and besides, I don’t have anywhere to put them.”  “Shove them up your husband’s ass,” says Delaware Chickens.  Guido pauses.  “How do you know my husband?” she asks.

I get no respect.  But I get fed.  And laid.  Not just on holidays, either.  Happy Turkey Day, Pilgrims.

Here’s the kind of week it’s been.  Starts with a very early morning meeting, one that requires me to haul my groggy ass out of bed at before 5.  The only positive about that hour of the day is, I don’t need to worry about pole-vaulting over  my morning wood on my way to the crapper.  It’s usually up before I am, but at that hour, it –- and I — are still asleep.

(Think about it.  Under what other ghastly circumstances is it a blessing NOT to sport a hard-on? The doctor’s office?  The locker room?  That depends.  But I digress.)

Worse, I need to get dressed up.  A pressed shirt under a crisp suit.  Socks and shined shoes.  And underwear, ferchrissake!  Savage!

I stumble outside, start the car, and head off for the meeting at a local Marriott.  I have a pretty good idea where it is, but the challenge  is to avoid pimpled hot rodders speeding through the dark, text-messaging obscenities and gossip to their litter mates.  C U Next Tuesday, bitch.

I make it to the Marriott about 5 minutes later than I want, which is 10 minutes after the meeting officially convenes (but it starts late to allow attendees to saturate themselves with seas of caffeine, cholesterol, sodium, and sucrose).   I ask the uniformed factotum behind the desk – a hideous hag whose insincere corporate smile transforms her face into a cracked plate – where the meeting I seek can be found.

“Second floor,” she advises, checking the calendar.  “The Smegma Room, second door on the left.”

I mumble thanks and climb the stairs.  Something isn’t right here.  I sense a vacant vibe, a misplaced priority, a dry heave.  A young Hispanic pushes a vacuum cleaner in the hall.  The meeting room doors are ajar, revealing laundry bundled on stripped tables, chairs stacked, lights too bright (ouch).

I retrace my steps and confront Hazel Witch. “Is there another second floor in this hotel?” I ask.  She looks confused.  “Because there ‘s no meeting going on the one I just went to.”

“That’s the only second floor,” she beams (dully), honest to god.  “Please wait.”  And trundles off to the back room, where I crazily visualize a GPS, or a patented Marriott Find-O-Meter or something.  I’m close: she comes back with this large print-out that evidently lists all the meetings in every Marriott in the southeastern US that day.  She asks me again what meeting I’m looking for.

“Aah!” she bleats.  “You want the Courtyard!”

“There’s a courtyard?  I only saw a parking lot.”  Thinking, how do you get a courtyard on the second floor, anyway?

“No!” she explains.  “The Marriott Courtyard.  This is the Marriott Residence!”

Constipated Christ.  “This seaside berg has two separate Marriotts?  Where’s the other one?”

She gives me directions which I forget even before I get back to the car – I’m good at that; ask Guido – and before it occurs to me I should have asked why she dispatched me to the second floor of HER featherbedding Marriott if the meeting was in some other building miles away.

Which I have trouble finding, of course, and by the time I roll up, park the car, and find out which room I need, I know I’m not going in.  Unlike your average defensive replacement,  I heartily dislike coming in during the late innings.  It’s rude, and I feel obligated not to say anything insulting during the Q&A, which is difficult for me.   My decision is reinforced when I see that the coffee urn outside, in the hallway, surrounded by bagels .  I help myself to one not too badly chewed, then stroll around the personality-free hallway for a moment before oh so coolly wandering out.   I scarf the bagel and finish the coffee on the long slow ride to the office, farting.

I am asked upon arrival how the meeting went.  “It happened,” I reply.  “But I’m glad to be back because I have a ton of crap to complete before the deadline.”  And slither away.

Later, somebody tells me “I look very nice” today.  It doesn’t help.  I take that to mean that I usually look like I report to work after sharing a tent and some King’s Tokay under the Julia Tuttle.  My kind of people, if not my kind of drink.

TGIF.

But I learned something valuable today.  Never start your day before your dick does.

This is one of the weirder things I ever read about the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. From an interview in 1971 with John Gerassi, a political science professor at Queens College in New York:

Sartre: Yeah, after I took mescaline, I started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class. I got used to them. I would wake up in the morning and say, “Good morning, my little ones, how did you sleep?” I would talk to them all the time. I would say, “O.K., guys, we’re going into class now, so we have to be still and quiet,” and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang.

Gerassi: A lot of them?

Sartre: Actually, no, just three or four.

Grassi: But you knew they were imaginary?

Sartre: Oh, yes. But after I finished school, I began to think I was going crazy, so I went to see a shrink, a young guy then with whom I have been good friends ever since, Jacques Lacan. We concluded that it was fear of being alone, fear of losing the camaraderie of the group. You know, my life changed radically from my being one of a group, which included peasants and workers, as well as bourgeois intellectuals, to it being just me and Castor. The crabs really began when my adolescence ended. At first, I avoided them by writing about them — in effect, by defining life as nausea — but then as soon as I tried to objectify it, the crabs appeared. And then they appeared whenever I walked somewhere. Not when I was writing, just when I was going someplace. … The crabs stayed with me until the day I simply decided that they bored me and that I just wouldn’t pay attention to them. And then the war came, the stalag, the Resistance, and the big political battles after the war. – NYTimes

Serves him right for having mescaline with crabs. He’d be better off with horse radish, melted garlic butter, or cocktail sauce. But what’s the sense in talking to a Frenchman about anything at all, let alone food?

Thanks to Ms Calabaza for alerting me to the following:

[A] study found that more than two-thirds of female short-nosed fruit bats (Cynopterus sphinx) performed fellatio on their sexual partners, and that they were rewarded with longer bouts of intercourse as a result.  Science magazine reported: “Both sexes groomed each other during courtship. But then came the shocker.

“After the male mounted the female from behind, she bent over and began licking his penis.”

The research found that the longer a female licked for, the longer the intercourse: on average, a second of fellatio gained six seconds of intercourse. On average, mating lasted four minutes for fellators, twice the average of non-fellating females. –Telegraph.co.UK

I encourage you to refer to the original article, which includes a video of fruit bats in action.  To the best of my knowledge, there hasn’t been a as visual a demonstration of BatSex since the first Batman movie – which led to Robin’s career in Europe as a spokesman for tooth-whitener.

I can’t remember my high school biology teacher mentioning that a career in Life Sciences might lead to opportunities to watch winged mammals get it on, but I suspect if he had, my career would have been changed, and enhanced significantly.

As it is, I can’t help but observe that IRL, I’ve favored short-nosed females myself, whose tendency to perform orally may or may not be related to the length of their proboscis.  (Insert Pinocchio joke here.  Punch line: “Lie to me!  Tell the truth!  Lie to me! Tell the truth!”)    Maybe there’s anthropological evidence –  short nose, active tongue, deep throat, etc.

And while I never  — NEVER –  climbed into bed armed with a stopwatch, I think it’s fair to say that when I or my partner went down, the sexual encounter lasted longer.  Well, duh.  It’s called foreplay, guys.  Try it.  She’ll love it.  Improves the flavor, too.

This whole experience has me looking at Bela Legosi in a whole new way.  As for Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, well, Be Still My Heart.

Wait, there’s more:

Paul Vasey, a behavioral scientist at the University of Lethbridge in Canada, said that there could be evolutionary reasons for fellatio, and that the fruit bat discovery could allow scientists to test it. He warned, however, that the bats could just be doing it for fun.

Bats just wanna have fun.  I mean, really, what else is there for them to do?  You hang around upside-down all damn day in a dark wet cave, you gotta cut loose, you know?  Meet me down at the Wings & Wangs at midnight.

This finding will upset those members of the clergy and government who for years have condemned fellatio as an “unnatural act,” prohibited as sodomy, a punishable offense .  Not that anybody with a two live hormones to rub together  ever takes that crap seriously (including allegedly celibate clergymen).  But if what birds do, and bees do, and now bats do is part of the master plan, who are we mortals to condemn it?

Actually, some of those bats are kind of cute.  I never noticed that before.

Odds are most readers have never heard of Carl Ballantine.  However, once upon a time he lived.  That time has ended.

He was the worst magician in show business – so his act became a bumbling magician who once in a while pulled off a successful trick, much to his own feigned surprise.  He was funny as all hell.

My friend Larry, a publisher in Massachusetts (hence the name, “The Mass Pube”), remembers one of Ballantine’s routines:  “At one point in his act, he’d tear a newspaper page into strips, boldly claiming that he would restore the paper to its original state. Then he’d stop to read the want ads.”

He worked with a pathetic, sad-eyed Bassett hound named Louie, “the Smartest Dog in the World.”  He’d enthusiastically issue commands while Louie sat there inert, expressionless, ignoring him.  Drove him crazy!  He’d turn his back or face the audience, and Louie would sabotage the magic trick……by the time Ballantine turned around, Louis was back to zombie mode, the trick totally ruined.

Maybe you hadda be there.  It was hysterical.

BTW – he took his stage name from the Scotch, not the Ale.

In and out of hospitals his entire life, [Ian] Pearl has lived the last 18 years on a ventilator hooked to a tracheal tube. Although the procedure is known for helping those with muscular dystrophy live longer, it can come with a cost: the need for 24-hour medical attention.  The insurance policy purchased by Ian’s father in 1981 provided for such care.

But Guardian Life Insurance, which is based in New York, notified the Pearls that it was dropping Ian’s coverage in December as part of a companywide restructuring of its insurance policies. This past year, Pearl’s medical expenses totaled almost $1 million.

A memo unearthed by Pearl’s attorney referred to costly cases like Pearl’s as “dogs” the company needed to rid itself of. — Miami Hurled

Read that closely, wingnuts, as you wave placards likening universal health care to Nazism.  You gullible pathetic lickspittles, you.

What you’re reading is proof positive that in fact there exists the “death panels” you rant about, faceless bureaucrats who determine, using dollars and cents, who among the insured will live or die.  Except they’re already here, and they’re not your socialist government.  They’re insurance company executives modifying their policies to ensure profits for the company’s stockholders.

This is Exhibit A of the private insurance companies’ thinking about health care you’re so concerned about preserving, certain that the American health care system (”the World’s Best!”) will tank if we remove its control from enlightened executives like these.

And that sniveling rat bastard writer of memos called somebody else a dog?

Caught with its corporate trousers ‘round the ankles, Guardian apologized to the Pearls and restored coverage, but not without regret. “We tried to do what is best for all concerned,” explained Stewart Drewel, speaking for the company.  “Dumping a handful of expensive terminals would have allowed maximizing care for the majority, including investors.  What’s another dead cripple, anyway?  What, there ain’t enough already clogging the system, particularly with two wars going on?”

Maybe we DO need death panels.  I volunteer.

Since retiring from the House in 2003, [Dick] Armey, like legions of other former elected officials, has burrowed into Washington’s establishment, never fully returning home to his 89 acres north of Dallas, his “ranchette,” as he calls it. For most of the last half-dozen years, he has worked in the lobbying shop of the giant law firm DLA Piper while also serving as chairm an of FreedomWorks, a nonprofit organization that in 2008 paid him $550,000.

Armey and his organization have operated nimbly, seeding and supporting protests against policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress while taking care not to be seen as controlling the dissent from on high. The march on Sept. 12 was largely organized by FreedomWorks, which secured the permits and opened the podium to a range of speakers — including those from the like-minded but separate Tea Party movement.

FreedomWorks staff members have been studying the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the community organizer from Chicago whose thinking has influenced, among many others, Barack Obama. Adam Brandon, who accompanied Armey in North Carolina and is the press secretary for FreedomWorks, told me he was excited by the prospect of more direct action — like that undertaken by antiwar demonstrators in the ’60s or, more recently, anti-abortion and other social conservatives.  –NY Times

Would that be the same Saul Alinsky, whose name was breathlessly linked to candidate Obama’s by Wingnut Nation to prove the Dems had fallen in thrall to a commie leftwing American-hating radical?  I guess it’s okay, though, if Dick Armey and his acolytes study their new master’s texts on community organizing and motivating political actions.  It doesn’t mean anything when THEY do it.  I guess.

Funny.  This was mentioned in a short article in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine.  Did anybody see anything about this on Faux news?

Marilyn Wann is an author and weight diversity speaker in Northern California who has a message for anyone making judgments about her health based on her large physique. “The only thing anyone can accurately diagnose by looking at a fat person is their own level of stereotype and prejudice about fat,” said Ms. Wann, a 43-year-old San Franciscan whose motto in life is also the title of her book: “Fat! So?”

“Basically,” Ms. Wann continued, “we want to be treated with respect the same as everyone else.”  — NYTimes

Fat is the new smoking.  And like anti-tobacco measures, now there are movements to make fat asses pay for their appetites: they’re “over-consumers of health care,” and inflate costs for those of us capable of pushing back from a dinner table before devouring everything on the plates including the patterns.

Dangers of the Garlic Diet

Extra weight brings with it an increased risk of chronic disease, medical experts say, and heavier people tend to have medical costs that are substantially higher than their leaner counterparts. As a result, Congress is considering proposals in the effort to overhaul health care that would make it easier for employers to use financial rewards or penalties to promote healthy behavior by employees, like weight loss.

How’s that for respect, Ms. Wann?  It’s about all I can muster for somebody who calls herself a “weight diversity speaker.”

But she’s small potatoes (heh) compared to these two:

Peggy Howell, the public relations director for the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, said she had been on the phone delivering her group’s message and answering more news media calls this year than ever before….The message is simple, she said: “We believe that fat people can eat healthy food and add movement to their lives and be healthy. And healthy should be the goal, not thin.”

The “National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.”  These are people who, unwilling or unable to shed excess poundage, go on the offense and cry discrimination.  Why haven’t they appeared on Orka Winfrey yet?  Seems she’d welcome them with open, flabby arms.

And now my favorite:

“I get so angry when I feel people pushing a weight-loss agenda,” said Linda Bacon, a nutrition professor at City College of San Francisco and author of “Health at Every Size,” a book published last year whose title has become the rallying cry of the fat pride community. “What we’re doing in public health care policy is harmful. We give a direct and clear message that there’s something wrong with being fat.”

That’s right, her name is Bacon and she represents the “fat pride community.”  If I could make up crap like this, people might actually read my blog.

Not every porker is unhealthy, just as not every slender body is healthy.  Not every smoker develops cancer or heart disease.  Not every sun freak grows skin cancer.  Not every newborn of an alcoholic suffers brain defects.  That’s not the point, and says nothing at all about the dangers of the practices and conditions.

But what cracks my aggots is the way these larded whiners wrap their avoirdupoidically challenged asses in the diapers of victimhood, and react by blaming the rest of the world for our insensitivity and unfounded bias.  Don’t talk while you’re eating, dammit.   Eat up and shut up!  Enjoy your food if that makes you happy, don’t whine about your waistline!  You hear people like me complaining just because our horns and tails make it tough to buy hats and pants?

I recommend we have them slaughtered, butchered, and pulped, then force-fed to bulimics.  Oh, excuse me: “the voluntarily nutritionally challenged.”

[C]oncerned that Mickey has become more of a corporate symbol than a beloved character for recent generations of young people, Disney is taking the risky step of re-imagining him for the future.

The first glimmer of this will be the introduction next year of a new video game, Epic Mickey, in which the formerly squeaky clean character can be cantankerous and cunning, as well as heroic, as he traverses a forbidding wasteland. — NYTimes

This might be Disney’s most radical image revision since Annette Funicello grew tits.

I can tell already this is the wrong direction, but it might be worse.  Imagine the lobotmized creative geniuses in the Disney Corporation, fearful for their jobs, the financial health of the corporation, and of course their own medical health insurance.  The eye up the nation’s cultural trends and remake Steamboat Willie into Joe the Plumber, a movement conservative.  Glen Beck with round ears.  Sean Hammity plus one octave.

“Socialized health care,” squeaks the New Mickey, angrily.  “Who needs it?  What kind of Mickey Mouse system are we talking about, anyway? ”

The perfect spokesmouse.  Macho Mickey toting a handgun, patrolling the San Diego border on the hunt for Joe Carioca-style Mexican illegals.  Christian Mickey condemning abortion, pointing out that his pal Donald Duck’s illegitimate nephews Huey Dewey and Louie wouldn’t be here in a pro-choice society.  Scrooge McDuck as the Ayn Rand ideal, a capitalistic success embodying the virtues of selfishness and ethical egoism.

And remember — Mickey is Black!  A dusky rodent as a post-racial wingnut!

The Polyester Booboisie would embrace their revitalized icon anew.  Tea party animals in mouse ears, screaming epithets against un-American socialists who condemn our freedom and way of life.  Mickey Mouse as country music hero.  Is this perfect?

The best news is, if it catches on, Florida is sure to be Ground Zero.