Ick

A few years ago, I wrote this about Amy Robach, a former anchor at MSNBC:

Speaking of perverted values, one thing I noticed today about Amy Robach, former beauty queen current MSNBC anchor, is her wedding ring. I can't think of a time when I have seen such a vulgar display of materialistic pride as that golf-ball sized rock she's lugging around on her left hand.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I understand the urge to buy such baubles of vanity (thanks, Dracula). Her husband is marking his territory, challenging all the other males who might have designs on his woman to "top my rock, bitch." Robach, herself, of course gets to parade it around saying, "See? He really loves me. He spent twenty grand on my ring."

Then I asked:

How strong is her marriage if it must be propped up by pretentious status symbols?

The short answer?

Not very strong.

Come to find out, she's already divorced from the dude that bought her the Rock of Gibraltar and now she's married to Andrew Shue. Yeah, the guy from Melrose Place. (I ain't saying she's a gold digger...)

Just goes to show you, fellas. If you're going to mess around with married women, go for the ones with the big rings. Find one with NO ring? Forget about it. That woman isn't going to cheat on her man. You see one with a big vulgar "look at me" ring? Go for it.

Chances are good.

Happy New Year!

I leave you with some funny (depending on your sense of humor) words from Oderus Urungus, the singer from GWAR.

myYearbook: I'm going to see you guys for the first time in New York in December. How would you recommend that a first-timer prepares for your Bloody Pit of Horror?

Oderus: I would say drink heavily, to the point of stumbling unconsciousness. If you don't want your clothes to be ruined, wear a trash bag over your head. Hide underneath the corpses of your dead friends, that is how you will survive

On a related note, there's a deli tray rotting in the office fridge. No clue where it came from or how long it's been sitting there.

But every time I see it, I think "This deli tray is unacceptable!"

Movies that Never Get Old

Die Hard.

Yeah, I watched it on Christmas. It's my It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer all rolled into one. Here's a great line that you can use in your everyday life, one of many, which is why the movie is immortal.

"Whoo-Ah! Just like fucking Saigon, eh, Slick?"
"I was in junior high, dickhead."

Public Transp

They said it was going to snow 5-10 inches, which if you think about it, is quite a range. I didn't take any chances. I went through the old routine...walked to the bus stop, took the bus, took a train, took another train, walked a mile down one hill and up another (no shit!) to work.

Ten hours later, did it all again only this time in reverse, up one hill and down another, train, train, bus, walk home.

I listened to Baroness's Red Album twice, once on the way to work and once on the way back. It's the kind of record that just keeps on giving, adding new dimensions and textures with each listen.

Check this one out. (And listen for the interesting percussive elements later in the song.)

So this snow...it's technically the first big snow we've had. It's sprinkled a bit here and there, and maybe one morning we woke up with frost. For the most part, though, it's been a relatively warm and dry winter. It's been nice, I think, but I am glad to see the snow. Better late than never.

The reason I took the arduous bus route by choice today (as opposed to my year in public transportation exile) is contained in this story:

Although there was only 2 inches on the ground in Fort Collins Thursday morning, it made for treacherous driving conditions during the morning commute. About 30 accidents were reported Thursday morning, two of which were rollovers.

It's not clear if that was 30 accidents in Fort Collins or in the general Front Range geothermal area.

But still, that's a lot of people having a bad day to say the least, and probably a bad next couple of months too. I don't want to join them.

Four bucks and a couple hours isn't too bad a trade for having life and limb --and truck-- intact.

Fun With Random Commenters

Some random dude found an old post I wrote about A Serbian Film and chewed me a new one:

You liar, I hate people like you, you haven't watch a movie and talk about it like they have seen it.

There's no such thing as "The main character, a former porn star, is forced to rape and kill a baby. His baby."

This is untrue. The main character is forced to watch a movie by the director, a woman giving bith to a baby then a dude raping it...

No such things as killing and raping is own BABY.

My response:

Oh for fuck's sake. I got the details of the baby raping wrong? Sue me.

I didn't see the movie. I'm not going to. And even if I did, I'm not going on some guy's blog to tell him how much I hate him for not getting the details of the baby raping scene right. Jesus Christ.

Assholes

Think Progress is off my Christmas card list. They simply cannot be trusted.

Here they are alerting the world to the possibility that Georgia may "require all transactions with the state....to be paid with U.S. minted gold or silver coins." Clearly a dumb idea, and as Think Progress notes:

Were Franklin’s bill ever to become law it would have immediate and catastrophic consequences for Georgia’s economy.

Ya think?

But I'm not going to take Think Progress's word for it. So I looked for some more sources, a source with more journalistic integrity and less zeal for political advocacy.

Which brings me to this article in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, which explicitly states:

The bill, filed on Feb. 17, is unlikely to become law, observers said.

“We’re monitoring the legislation and do not see much appetite from the General Assembly for Georgia to be the only state in the Union to adopt such a standard,” said David Oliver, spokesman for the Georgia Bankers Association, in a prepared statement.

“I have a lot of sympathy for the gold standard and the role it played in our country’s history,” said George Selgin. Selgin is the BB&T Corp. chair of free-market thought at West Virginia University.

Selgin is an expert on the history of currency standards and monetary theory.

“But after reading over it, I have to think this bill is a bit kooky,” he said.

And this is from a guy who's sympathetic to the gold standard!

I think it's safe to say this bill has zero chance of becoming law and the only people supporting it are the bill's sponsors and about ten loyal Glenn Beck listeners.

Case Closed - This Book Sucks

I was listening to Cornwell's Jack the Ripper book on the way home this morning, and not only do I think her case is flimsy, I'm starting to think the whole thing is just sexist dreck that doesn't make any sense.

Her suspect is a guy with no penis, who is so enraged by being unable to function sexually that he's driven to kill. And yet she imagines this man as being a devotee of London's prostitutes. She imagines him meeting up with the first Ripper victim, enduring some drunken taunt, and then unleashing his rage at her, stabbing her 39 times for laughing at his angry inch.

And yet...why would a man with no sexual function visit a prostitute? Here's a man whose penis was sheared off in childhood. Sure, there's probably shame, anger, a whole mix of emotions brewing inside him, but there's also experience. He knows he can't perform. Surely, it must have occurred to him that the prostitute may say something unkind about his little Vienna Sausage. Is this the world's most naive dickless killer?

I don't buy it. I think this guy stays the hell away from prostitutes. He redirects his energies into other things...like painting.

(As it turns out, there's not much evidence that Walter Sickert was, in fact, missing any of his penis.)

And this, I think, is where the sexist stuff comes in. Cornwell seems to assume, perhaps for good reason, that the Jack the Ripper killings are sex crimes. And yet, even she admits that they're not. The lack of rape in the Ripper killings, you see, is evidence that Dickless did it! Sickert's knife was his penis!

Knife/Penis/Knife/Penis (You see what I'm trying to do? I'm trying to couple these two concepts in your mind.)

As the dark fantasies of a lesbian terrified of the sexually dominant male, I get it. As a plausible solution to the Jack the Ripper killings? No way, dude.

I suspect the Ripper went after prostitutes because they were easy pickings. If there was anything sexual involved it was probably just a ruse. "Oi, fancy a shag in the alleyway?" Then slash.

Motive? A sadist maybe, but probably something more mundane like an ambitious pimp clearing out territory he wants to take over. Maybe a gangster who wasn't getting paid. Someone called somebody a ho and bitches got slashed. You could come up with all kinds of explanations, some more plausible than others.

Most of them more plausible than this one.

Jack the Ripper - Case Closed?

I've been listening to Patricia Cornwell's book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed, and though I'm not very far into it, I'm not that impressed.

Something struck me as "off" almost from the get-go and the more I listen, the more it becomes obvious that, well, it has major problems.

The first of which is the terribly weak case it presents. You might think she found some evidence that points to a suspect, but from what I can tell, she fixated on a suspect then went around looking for evidence.

Among the reasons why a painter named Walter Sickert "may" have been Jack the Ripper:

a) He supposedly had a botched operation as a child that mutilated his penis.
b) His mutilated penis left him with an impotent hatred of women.
c) Which was displayed in his "misogynistic" paintings.

I hope to Christ she presents more evidence, because that's mighty thin!

The psychology doesn't even seem right. I'm assuming if you lost your penis before you knew what you could do with it, you'd won't feel much loss. You'll feel a kind of abstract regret about experiences not had, perhaps, but you won't really know what you're missing. How are you going to develop strong enough feelings to hate women?

And why hate women? Why not hate....doctors?