No doughnuts, just holes

What is it with wingnuts and doughnuts?
Admit it, you didn't think they could top the weirdness of the boycott of Dunkin Donuts over a scarf worn in an advertisement, did you? Sadly, you were wrong. This tops CC's discussion with a conservative for the funniest thing I have seen all year. And it isn't even intended as a joke.

KRISPY KREME CELEBRATES OBAMA WITH PRO-ABORTION DOUGHNUTS

Washington, DC (15 January 2009) – The following is a statement from American Life League president, Judie Brown.
"The next time you stare down a conveyor belt of slow-moving, hot, sugary glazed donuts at your local Krispy Kreme you just might be supporting President-elect Barack Obama's radical support for abortion on demand – including his sweeping promise to sign the Freedom of Choice Act as soon as he steps in the Oval Office, Jan. 20.

The doughnut giant released the following statement yesterday:
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American's sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies -- just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet "free" can be.

Just an unfortunate choice of words? For the sake of our Wednesday morning doughnut runs, we hope so. The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that "choice" is synonymous with abortion access and celebration of 'freedom of choice' is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand.
President-elect Barack Obama promises to be the most virulently pro-abortion president in history. Millions more children will be endangered by his radical abortion agenda.
Celebrating his inauguration with "Freedom of Choice" doughnuts – only two days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion – is not only extremely tacky, it's disrespectful and insensitive and makes a mockery of a national tragedy.
A misconstrued concept of "choice" has killed over 50 million preborn children since Jan. 22, 1973. Does Krispy Kreme really want their free
doughnuts to celebrate this "freedom.""

I know, I know, you read it and you think "Wow, the Onion is really pushing its luck." I wanted to invoke Poe's Law , but I checked it out and it seems to be a actual organization that is run by and caters to people who really need some professional psychiatric help. Seriously, the reeducation camps cannot open soon enough.
The somewhat popular diabolical conservative ridicule machine has more

The mind reels while Tom Waits

David over at Jim Dandy Goodness has thrown down the gauntlet, declaring that he does not like Tom Waits. I, therefore, in the spirit of Sam-I-Am, must poke, prod and otherwise annoy him until he gets his mind right.

Sure there's the music,


which continues to get more avant-garde


and the hypnotic and sometimes hyper-strange videos


But really, its the total package: the persona and the performer



and only Waits or Bob Dylan is the kind of subversive genius that would come up with this:



And as if that isn't enough, here is an entire concert from the same tour, from last July in Atlanta, that is stone gar-un-freakin'-teed to blow your mind.

Live from the Red Zeppelin 

Yeah, yeah I know, "Second Life -- geez, what a geek!" Well, you know what? Me and my cartoon friends have more fun hanging out in virtual space for an afternoon than you do in real life in a month, so just bite me. I get to hang out with Gen. J.C. Christian, Shini, Bookem & Dano Jackson, Deesue, Avedon, and many, many more from all over the world - play music for them, dance with them, plot revolution with them -- all kinds of fun stuff. And we're all young, good looking and thin in SL. And I get to live in a big scarlet dirigible, fly and wear a fez. How's your meat-space weekend looking now, reality slave?

Of course, you could join us (it is FREE -- all you need is a halfway decent graphics card and and a DSL connection) and come dance, watch movies, chat and plot, or at least listen in, on Sundays from 5pm  PST/8pm EST ...............................................................or you could watch TV.

Appalled yes, surprised no

"Truth is that the people of the administration are guided by no particular agenda other than the continued expansion of their own power for the sake of owning power. There's no fundamental reason for governing. They're not trying to accomplish anything"

--David Kuo

   former special assistant to President George W. Bush

Tonight, on a very special episode...

CC talks to a conservative who may or may not be Patticakes Ross. Unquestionably the funniest thing I've read this year.

Now ain't the time for your tears

And you thought it was just a song.

William Devereux Zantzinger, whose six-month sentence in the fatal caning of a black barmaid named Hattie Carroll at a Baltimore charity ball moved Bob Dylan to write a dramatic, almost journalistic song in 1963 that became a classic of modern American folk music, died on Jan. 3. He was 69.

Obviously, the song and the six months he served had a major impact on Zantzinger

In 1991, The Maryland Independent disclosed that Mr. Zantzinger had been collecting rent from black families living in shanties that he no longer owned; Charles County, Md., had foreclosed on them for unpaid taxes. The shanties lacked running water, toilets or outhouses. Not only had Mr. Zantzinger collected rent for properties he did not own, he also went to court to demand past-due rent, and won.
He pleaded guilty to 50 misdemeanor counts of deceptive trade practices, paid $62,000 in penalties and, under an 18-month sentence, spent only nights in jail.
Information on Mr. Zantzinger’s survivors was unavailable. Though he long refused interviews, he did speak to the author Howard Sounes for his book “Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan” (2001) , telling him of his scorn for Mr. Dylan.
“I should have sued him and put him in jail,” he said.

A tip of the Fez to Avedon Carol at the Sideshow for catching this

In case you can't be bothered with waiting for it to come up on the playlist on Radio Woodshed, here's the Dylan song with some other primo protest music.


SeeqPod - Playable Search

Truth & Consequences

As Dubya slithers from the White House, one vital question remains: Will there be any consequences for him or any of his evil, incompetent cabal of ignorant, blood-fattened henchmen?

The soon-to-be ex-president has asked for some television time to give a farewell address Thursday in which he will do his best to find a silver lining to the hurricane of the last eight years and try to burnish his legacy, using the blood and tears of Iraqi children and American soldiers to polish the turd that has been his presidency. "I've kept you safe" he'll bleat "I've fought the terra!" ignoring the fact that if he'd paid attention his national security briefings in 2001 he might well have really kept America safe and that for the last seven years he's been unable or unwilling to find a six-foot-seven dialysis patient in an area not much bigger than Rhode Island.

Thursday's speech will be all about trying to salvage some sort of credit, and I'm not really interested in listening to that crap. No, what I'm waiting for is the announcement to the press on Sunday or Monday about the pardons. Bush supposedly is generally loathe to pardon people, but I'll give you 10 to 1 that there are blanket, pre-emptive pardons handed out for misdeeds that "may or may not" have been committed in the service of the Bush administration. The only question is who gets one and who doesn't.

As has been pointed out in many places this week, the few decent, competent career civil servants who have survived the last eight years of relentless dimwittery and hyperpoliticization are bound to have amassed container-loads of smoking gun memos documenting the both the petty douchebaggery and massive criminality of the likes of Alberto Gonzales, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Monica Goodling, John Yoo, Douglas Feith, Michael Brown ----oh, the list goes on and on and on. Can Bush afford to leave his people exposed to the possible rigors of justice? Is he confident they won't turn on him? How low on the totem pole will the whitewash brush be applied? Will he pardon the torturers or just their bosses? Or will he throw his underlings to the wolves and scurry off into the sunset with just his inner circle granted immunity?

And if he has the hubris to declare that neither he nor his minions have done anything wrong, will Barack Obama do anything about it?

What part of 'crazy' didn't they understand the first time?

Andre Thomas is clearly not quite right in the head. How else would you explain the horrific crime that landed him on death row in the first place? As if tearing the hearts out of his estranged wife, and young son and daughter wasn't enough to get him an appointment with a shrink. while in jail awaiting trial he tore out one of his own eyes and started spouting Bible verses.

But since this all happened in Texas, and folks there wouldn't want a little thing like being crazy as a shithouse rat to get in the way of a good execution, Thomas was sent to death row rather than a mental hospital. In fact, he's apparently received little or no psychiatric care whatsoever during the last four years he's been on death row. Until last month that is, when he plucked out and ate his remaining eye. 

 

"Thomas was treated at East Texas Medical Center in Tyler after the Dec. 9 incident. Then he was transferred and remains at the Jester Unit, a prison psychiatric facility near Richmond, southwest of Houston.

"He will finally be able to receive the mental health care that we had wated and begged for from day 1," Bobbie Peterson-Cate, Thomas' trial attorney, told the Sherman Herald Democrat. " He is insane and mentally ill. It is exactly the same reason he pulled out the last one."

So just how nuts do you have to be to kill and not be executed in Texas? Sometimes it's accident, sometimes it's not. But people end up just as dead. And what does it take to get to see the prison shrink? It seems in Texas, they've decided its cheaper to kill than to treat.

First I bring you radio, now TV


Life imitates Seinfeld, not that there is anything wrong with that. I wouldn't normally post an entire article like this, but the archives are not always open, and I would want to lose this gem. You think you know the people you work with. You think you know the kind of organization you work for. Surprise!

THROUGH OTAKU EYES

Men's bra stimulates otome (girlish) side in men

Kanta Ishida / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

Asuka Masamune is a high school kendo champion. Everyone acknowledges he is a cool, good-looking guy and a truly manly man. But he has another self, a side that cannot help being attracted to cute and otome-like, or girlish, things.

This is the protagonist of Otomen (Hakusensha Co.), a girls' manga by Aya Kanno. The manga is brilliant in depicting the otome, or girlie, side in a man. But the reality may go further than the fiction.

In November, Web site WishRoom became a top story on Internet news sites and in weekly magazines when the online lingerie company sold 700 bras designed specifically for men--the first product of its kind in the nation--just in the first month after the launch of the lingerie.

WishRoom said it was not certain whether the bra would sell well when it put it out in response to customer requests. But orders for the bra, purposely designed in a very plain style, surpassed its production capacity.

Freelance writer Mari Aoyama, who published a book titled Buraja o Suru Otoko-tachi to Shinai Onna (Men who wear bras and women who do not, Shinsuisha Co.) in 2005, said men started wearing bras as a secret source of enjoyment in the 1960s, when the widespread use of bras among women took hold in the nation. But those who have bought the WishRoom product are believed to be different from the existing core of male bra users. The new product seems to have stimulated demand among men who wanted to wear bras but had not been able to buy them.

E-mail feedback from WishRoom bra users has included comments that wearing the bra puts them at ease, helps them understand the feelings of women, or makes them more gentle to the people around them. Bras may be an annoying item for women,
bringing a sense of confinement, but it must be a rather fetishistic item for the men as it ignites a girl's mind inside them.

Terms often heard nowadays include soshoku-kei danshi ("herbivorous" boys) or ojoman (girlie men). According to Soshoku-kei Danshi "Ojoman" ga Nippon o Kaeru, (Herbivorous-boy"girlie men" change Japan, Kodansha Ltd.), written by Megumi Ushikubo, who specializes in marketing-related themes, the term "ojoman" refers to a category of men aged 20 to 34 who became adults after the end of the bubble economy. They have little interest in sex, like to do cooking and sewing, and prefer pretty (kawaii) things to cool (kakkoi) ones.

Ushikubo said they are a demographic group that cannot be neglected in understanding consumption trends among young people.

Philosopher and Osaka Prefecture University Prof. Masahiro Morioka also explains in his Soshoku-kei Danshi no Renaigaku (Love study of herbivorous boys, Media Factory Inc.) what kind of views the new generation of gentle-mannered men with feminine sensitivities have toward love. He says they are unlike nikushoku (carnivorous) men who chase after women. Rikei-kun, meaning men who study or work in the math and science fields, another term enjoying a popularity in recent days, can also be viewed as a type of soshoku-kei men.

As I have written in this column before, I believe there is a change in sensitivities at the root of the otaku culture in Japan, one that can be described as a fluctuation in masculinity or the so-called otome-nization of boys. The otaku term "moe" (pronounced "mo-eh")--which literally means "budding" and describes the sensation of being blissfully overwhelmed by cuteness or attractiveness, is already a very otome-like idea.

Therefore, it has symbolic meaning that the men's bra was launched right here in Japan. The country of otaku also is the country of otomen. Don't ever call it gross. I even hope men's bras will continue to spread if all it takes is one garment for men
to become gentle to others.
(Jan. 9, 2009)

The funny part about this story is that it appeared in the Japanese media's bastion of conservatism, The Yomiuri Shimbun. I imagine the equivalent would be George Will or Robert Novak enthusing about their favorite pair of stilleto pumps or lace panties and how wearing them made them feel "pretty." Again, not that there's anything wrong with that-- consenting adults, whatever floats your boat and so on. You have to admit, it would certainly raise a few eyebrows to see a columnist at the New York Times or Chicago Tribune, to say nothing of a staid conservative publication such as the National Review, Washington Times or Wall Street Journal not merely publically embracing transvestitism, but giving it a hearty reccommendation.

Killer cops strike again


Police respond to a report of a brawl on a train platform in Oakland on New Years Eve. In the process of rousting a group of young men, the cops take one man, who is telling is friends to settle down, lay him down on his belly, and somewhere along the line shoot him dead.



What is really chilling in this video - and there are several others out there on the internet - is the total lack of reaction by the cops to the gun shot. For the most part, they don't even bat an eye. If the shot was accidental, what was the cop doing with his gun out in the first place? The man who was killed, 22-year-old Oscar Grant, was clearly not resisting. Even if, as some have suggested, the officer, Johannes Mehserle, a two-year veteran of the Bay Area transit police, was reaching for his taser not his gun, what the hell was he doing reaching for a weapon at all?


How long will police officers continue to be given the benefit of the doubt when they assault or even murder people -in front of dozens of witnesses in this case- simply because someone challenges their authority or otherwise annoys them?



Mario Pangelina, Mesa's brother who was riding on the same train, two cars behind Grant on Thursday morning, said Sunday he saw Grant beg police not to Taser him because of his child.
"He kept saying, 'Please, please don't Tase me,"' Pangelina said. "He was not acting hostile."
Other witnesses said Grant was lying on his stomach on the station's platform when he was shot.

Update: This case isn't going to go away. Over 100 arrests were made at this protest-turned-riot Wednesday night in Oakland. Reading the newspaper accounts, it sounds like coverage of the Watts riots.

On the air -- Now 24/7!

As you can tell from the big thing over there on the right  - I am now a radio station, at least on the internet and Second Life anyways. Click the radio picture to listen on your computer. We will not be broadcasting 24/7 just yet, but and I can promise you a couple of things - live broadcasts on Sunday nights from 8 p.m. to past midnight EST/ 5 p.m. to 10 p.m PST and the tunebot that lives in my electronic record collection playing stuff at random over the weekends. Starting NOW!

Update: Thanks to everyone for tuning in on Sunday, sorry about the technical meltdown that occurred at about midnight EST -- apparently someone forgot to put fresh hamsters on the treadmill that powers the servers at Shoutcast. Better luck next time, I guess. Leave comments/requests in the comments if you so desire and keep listening, this will get fixed in time.

Upperdate: thanks to the patience of Mr. PB Recreant of Second Life, the stream is fixed and Radio Woodshed is now a going concern 24/7!!

Every picture tells a story, don't it?

Crappy Rod Stewart tunes aside, check out the best photos of 2008:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Peas in Middle East


I betcha the folks at Mossad are wetting their pants in terror over this guy.

(Hat tip to Dr. Dawg)

Best of the year

If you are looking for some swell holiday reading, the ever trenchant Jon Swift - the man who puts the "arch" in "archconservative" - compiles the best of the year from his lengthy blogroll.

Been there, done that



I've been tapped by Chet over at the Vanity Press with the latest blog meme: List all the paying jobs you've ever had in roughly chronological order.



Paperboy (bet you didn't see that coming)

Fastfood burgerflipper

Newspaper reporter (first paid byline at age 14)

Babysitter

Strawberry picker (which quickly became...)

Independent door-to-door fruit and vegetable salesman

Dishwasher/delivery driver at Chinese restaurant

Newspaper reporter (covering Rotary Club meetings for local paper)

Forest Ranger (Jr.)

Electric motor winding assembler/shipper

Roadhouse cook

Technical writer at IBM

Mechanic's assistant

Pizza delivery driver

Reporter/Photographer/Darkroom technician/layout monkey for weekly community newspapers in Ingersoll, Caledonia, Port Dover (Ontario)

Photographer (theatrical publicity stills)

Freelance PR copywriter and photographer

Radio reporter

Baker

Line Cook in Italian chain restaurant

Acting Editor/Reporter/Photographer/Darkroom technician/columnist/ main layout monkey for weekly community newspapers in Listowel, Ont.

Reporter/Photographer for community weekly newspaper in Napanee, Ont.

Editor-in-chief/Reporter/Photographer for twice weekly newspaper in Picton, Ont.

Folksinger

Industrial temp

ESL teacher in Japan

Private language tutor and education consultant

Staff writer at English language newspaper in Japan (duties include book, music and film critic, page editor, copy editor, rewriter, reporter)

Freelance writer and editor



Volunteer gigs include:

Farm labourer

Artist's agent for singer/songwriter

Wedding celebrant/clergyman

Folk Festival organizer

Union president

Santa Claus

Internet DJ/projectionist/virtual clubowner in Second Life

Record producer/political fundraiser



I'll pass this exercise in nostalgia on to David at Jim Dandy Goodness, Dan at Jackson Street Books, Shini, No Blood for Hubris and Willy Loman

My favorite Christmas story

This song always brings a tear to my eye.

Merry Christmas - peace on earth and goodwill toward all mankind, even conservatives.

Radio woodshed is on the air

At least for Xmas day anyways. Tune your browser to http://janefinch.serverroom.us:4930/listen.pls  

or try 

http://janefinch.serverroom.us.4930/index.html 

and click "listen" in the bar at the top of the page and enjoy the best of seasonal podcasts and music -seasonal and otherwise- from a dramatization of "A Christmas Carol" from 9 in the morning on the East Coast of North America straight through to holiday storytime starting around 7 pm EST featuring stories from Dylan Thomas, Stuart Mclean's Vinyl Cafe,O. Henry, Paul Auster, Tom Waits, Dr. Seuss, Steve Martin, David Sedaris and others and lots of music. And no cursing or punk/heavy metal/free jazz during prime time, I promise.

Stay tuned for more in the new year, there could be a weekly show/podcast coming.

Truer words were never written in any paper called "The Sun"

And lest the cheesy new age music and the daily affirmation self-help Stuart Smally video imagery lead you to think the writer, Frank Church, was some touchy-feely fancy pants, think again. He reported from the front lines in the American Civil War, so he'd been around and seen some things. Charles Bronson played him in the movie

Christmas wishes

"What Christmas means to me"

From Paul Simon and Steve Martin