Going on temporary hiatus, as I'm working at a sleepaway summer camp and any precious time I might have to myself will be spent recuperating, rather than snarkily blogging.
Regards,
Alex

G. Gordon Liddy is a riot

"I understand that they found out today that Miss Sotomayor is a member of La Raza, which means in illegal alien, “the race”... Let’s hope that the key conferences aren’t when she’s menstruating or something, or just before she’s going to menstruate. That would really be bad. Lord knows what we would get then." -G. Gordon Liddy on Sotomayor

Wait, isn't that whole "women can't be leaders because they'd arbitrarily bomb the Netherlands when they're on the rag" argument a little archaic by now? Aren't there quite a few successful pre-menopausal female leaders in the world who don't seem to totally lose control once a month? I know the G-Man is a major D-Bag (my journalism class interviewed him once!), but honestly? This has to be the worst argument ever. Talk about pinning inferiority on biology. If this is true, if a menstruating Supreme Court justice would unravel the nation's judicial system with her crazy weeping and eating, then we're pretty much fucked, huh? Because my body's not going to stop menstruating anytime soon, and I didn't have a say in whether it started, so I guess biology is destiny after all.

Hopefully, my future employers will understand that I'll be out of commission for a week every month. And, since that's a week in which my crazy hysterical femaleness renders me sub-human and a threat to society, it should probably be a week in which I don't have to pay any taxes or, for that matter, follow any laws. Good thing we have people like G. Gordon Liddy, a man who has never and will never actually experience menstruation himself, to keep all of our crazy in check.

(Sorry, I'm a little bitchy because I'm about to get my period. I just really feel like I want to... I don't know, mastermind a DNC break-in or something! Is that crazy? I also want to eat some red meat.)

I direct you to the cute essay, If Men Could Menstruate, written by Gloria Steinem.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/29/liddy-sotoyamor-menstruating/http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

USA still a scary place for those seeking, providing abortion services

I haven't been a very competent blogger lately. Being home for summer, there's less exciting urgent stuff I want to write about. But I was deeply saddened today to learn about the murder of Dr. George Tiller, a late term abortion provider, in Wichita, Kansas. In '86, Tiller's clinic was bombed, and in '93, Tiller was shot in both arms by radical anti-choice advocates. Today he was killed on his way into church. In addition to providing abortions, Tiller was a defendant in a number of abortion rights lawsuits. It's a tragic loss of a pro-choice medical professional, and a heartbreaking reminder of how fucking stupid some people are.

President Obama is "shocked and outraged." I agree with that sentiment.

Wichita abortion provider George Tiller shot to death at Wichita church


Abortion Doctor Slain by Gunman in Kansas Church (nytimes)

(For my final project for a journalism class this semester, I wrote an article on the New York Abortion Access Fund, and learned a lot about the incredible hoops that many women still have to jump through to access affordable, safe, legal abortion services. There is still SO MUCH legislation in this country (most of it state by state) that limits access to abortion; often an unavoidable consequence of laws restricting abortion funding, forcing women to travel to other states, etc. is that women must wait until later and later to terminate their pregnancy. While I understand the controversy surrounding "late term" abortions, they're so frequently the only option for women who spend months trying to obtain and afford abortion services. I'm so sad the pro-choice community has lost an abortion provider who understood this.)

This makes me relieved that I'm an anglophone

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:

Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,

Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.

Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

"I'm a guy, guys have one track minds"

I am over this excuse.

Treating a person, in a way that suggests he (or she) is not so much a person as a potential sexual partner is not something that you can excuse as biological destiny.

If that were the case, I would have to conclude that my boyfriend, my father, and many close male friends are of a different species than the myriad of sexually frustrated little boys who solicit me (or my roommate, or anyone else) on Facebook chat, pretending they know me from somewhere maybe have I seen you at bar x/y/z wow you're so hot do you have a boyfriend. I am sick sick SICK of conversations in which nothing I say or think that doesn't precipitate some kind of sexual activity is completely disregarded. I'm done. Not humoring it anymore. I officially deem it an infringement of my inherent right to be a person and no longer see any reason to spare these individuals from getting ripped a new one at 110 wpm (no lie, even with a broken "k" key).

Something On The Internet #2425920

I can't really say enough good things about livemocha.com. As someone who really enjoys learning new languages, I'm so glad someone put this together. It's a social networking site for learning a foreign language. You take rosetta stone style courses online to learn vocab and grammar, then write and record yourself doing little exercises, and people in the community who speak the language you're learning correct you and provide you with that kind of unabashed enthusiasm you can only find on the Internet. Basically, I correct people's English and French exercises, and native Spanish speakers correct my awful Spanish and don't even care that I butcher their beautiful mother tongue.

And it's all free. (look me up-- I'm alexandrak814)

Home!

Being halfway done with college is pretty incomprehensible.
This movie is getting really good reviews.

I know what you're thinking. If you've seen the film, spill it already. So who does he out? Dick's targets include Florida's current governor, Charlie Crist, who was viewed for a time as a front-runner to be John McCain's vice-presidential pick; David Dreier (R-San Dimas), who was once a leading candidate for the House majority leader post when the Republicans still controlled Congress; Ken Mehlman, George Bush's campaign manager during the 2004 election and former Republican National Committee chairman; former New York City mayor Ed Koch; the now-retired Idaho Sen. Larry Craig; Jim McCrery (R-La.), a ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee who retired last year; Ed Schrock (R-Va.), who retired in 2004; and -- gasp -- the prominent Fox News anchor Shepard Smith.

--http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2009/04/outraged-kirby-dick-kicks-open-washingtons-closet-door-.html

I'm writing this article for journalism, and I'm having a really interesting realization.
"Funding is at the heart of the third-wave feminist movement. NYAAF is providing access to safe, legal and affordable reproductive health care that is rightly ours, it’s just not accessible by other means—it’s incredible feat of the second-wave to have secured abortion as a legal right for all women living in the US and their work has allowed the third-wave to focus on equality within a social justice framework. And I think now our job now is to focus on providing all women with affordable access to that legal right today."
-Constance DeCherney, Chair of the New York Abortion Access Fund

This is my new response to people who believe that the fight for reproductive justice is over, that having Roe v. Wade and a democratic president means our access to the umbrella category of "reproductive rights" is entirely secure. What good is possessing these rights if, in reality, not everyone has equal access to them? What good is any one woman's individual right to her own body, if restrictive legislation in combination with socioeconomic circumstance denies hundreds of thousands of other women that right? What "choice" is there if we live in a society in which choice is only really accessible to white, middle-class women in certain states?

waah waah waah school is hard, read about how my fave former employer is getting sued, AGAIN or learn about singledom from Sarah Haskins or something until I come back.

an ode to a backpack

Any NYU girl worth her double-digit weight in style savvy knows that carrying a backpack is a one-way ticket for total social ostracization. Why not just wear a giant sign around your neck that says "I'M A BIG LAME STUDENT." Burdens should be carried under the arm in a big, slouchy purse, not on the back like you're some kind of urban sherpa.

I reject this reasoning, because 1) I do not like being assymetrically weighed down and 2) I have the world's greatest backpack. It's a JanSport brown corduoroy backpack I bought in approximately 2005. I adore you, crappy old backpack, you and the rainbow patch I sewed on you in 10th grade.

Sadly, it's not waterproof.