Keith, I'm Leaving You

I tried to ignore the "keeping tabs" segment of your show, wherein you and the odious Michael Musto indulge some creepy middle-aged guy compulsion to pick on Britney, Paris, and Lindsay for the imagined offense of being young, female, and visible.

I grimaced when you bent over backwards to kiss David Schuster's ass while supposedly apologizing to Chelsea Clinton and her entire family for his obnoxious remarks.

Because I thought you were a journalist. One of the rare few in the mainstream media that would say outright "George W Bush is a criminal."

So imagine my dismay that you can't even pause your personal segment of the MSNBC kingmaking spin machine to observe that over the weekend Pres. Bush vetoed legislation that would have barred the CIA from using waterboarding and other means of torture ?

Not that Bush's actions suprise me, but your silence certainly does.

the love affair with your own reflection is getting old Mr O'Reil-- oops, Obam-- oops. Olbermann.

Prostitution Sucks

I have a hard time with sex work and porn. The social libertarian in me says people should be allowed to do whatever they want with their bodies, even sell it. But it isn't that simple.

Sex work and modeling are the only two professions where women consistently make more money than men. And that is where it gets complicated.

I've been offered substantial amounts of money to do porn. I have only ever considered doing it when I was broke as hell and wasn't sure if we were going to lose our home, etc. That is how it works for a lot of women (not all, yes some choose to do it happily and others don't choose to do it all but are forced into it). In the end, I've always turned it down because while I might not leave my day job for a million dollars, porn is one of those things that I wouldn't do if I had an extra $500, hell even $200. It is a job of desperation. It is physically much riskier than almost any other job. There is disease and violence. There are the mental health issues (most drug addicted prostitutes become that way after- not before they start working). Without the combination of a big payoff AND serious desperation, there is no incentive to do it.

But does that mean prostitution should be illegal?

No.

Right now the majority of people who get arrested for prostitution are prostitutes. Not Johns, not pimps. We have to stop punishing the victims of sex work and it starts by decriminalizing what they do to survive. When prostitution is legal (and not in the Nevada brothel rape houses kind of way, but simply not something you can be arrested for) then the price tends to go down, making it less rewarding for the girls and giving them more incentive to get out. Then we can concentrate on doing things like busting human traffickers.

So all this is on my mind because of the Elliot Spitzer case, of course. He's not my governor, but had it merely been a case of him getting some action on the side, I don't think it's a big deal. But he wanted the woman to do something risky. General consensus is that he wanted to have sex without a condom. For a guy with a wife visiting a prostitute, that's pretty low down. You're not just risking yourself, but two other people. One who needs the money from you and may have to put herself in danger to pay rent, the other who is a probably unsuspecting wife. NOT COOL.

But none of this fixes the most basic problem, the reason why the only 2 jobs where women make more money than men are jobs where they sell their bodies. Women are not fuckholes, they are human beings. Until we are treated as human by all of society, then we will continue to be looked at first and foremost as fuckable or not fuckable before anything else about is acknowledged.

I hate French President Sarkozy

He is pretty much the European version of Guliani, but......

I have a massive girl crush on his new wife, Carla Bruni. She's got the same problems with monotony, I mean monogamy that I do.

After Sarkozy's very public break up with his ex-wife, who had been cheating on him for years, and with his new wife who would rather be poly, I am starting to think the little man has a wee bit of a cuckold fetish. I can fault him for a lot of things, but that is not one of them.

The great debate demystified.

It is "Hear hear", not "Here, here".

The more you know peeps. The more you know.

And I'll be damned, I've heard the Stephin Merritt gum commercial 3 times in the last hour.

RQ bitchez about music sellouts even though she knows she shouldn't

I was mortified awhile back to hear a bastardized version of an Of Montreal song as the new Outback Steakhouse jingle. I don't have a problem with artists letting their music be used in commercials per se because well, I like downloading free music and musicians need to pay the bill somehow. Better to make scary corporations pay than make both artists and music buyers subject to the evils of the price fixing RIAA.



But................

Changing a song, or writing a straight up cheesy jingle makes my ears hurt. Even though it shouldn't. I know it shouldn't. But it hurts me (and not just because I've been trying to wear earrings in my tender little earlobes for the last 24 hours)

So I keep seeing this ad for gum.



And the voice, the musical phrasing, the piano- it can't be Stephin Merrit of the Magnetic Fields? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Not my favorite go to angry gay for break up songs (I don't believe you being one of my favorites).

So kids, how do you feel about hearing your favorite bands music in commercials? Does it make you sad? Does it make you dislike the band for being sell-outs? Does it make you maybe a wee bit smug cause you recognize a song or singer that no one else would? (I have to admit to having that feeling on a few occasions, like when the awesomely beautiful Adrien Brody did a Diet Coke commercial to the Lyrics Born song Callin' Out)

Society hates you

It's obvious to us girls, and has been for a long time, that society hates us. We are told we are to dumb to be in charge of anything important, so we might as well stay home and have babies. We are told we are too shallow for caring about our appearance, but then we risk losing jobs, money and social status if we don't play the beauty game. We are kill joys if we are smart and bimbos if we are not. We are empty vessels, but we are in charge of making sure none but the right kind of man fill us up.

But society hates you boys too. I know, you get a lot of privileges from this society, but you have to be willing to be stereotyped as an asshole. If we went by what society tells us a man is, then you are all sex crazed mad men who can't think of anything but pussy when a woman is around. You are stupid, lazy buffoons when it comes to children or houses or even dressing yourself, yet you're supposed to shoulder all of the economic burden on a family despite this. You are an emotionless machine except for anger and lust. You can't put a sentence together to save your life because of your paltry verbal skills. If left to your own devices, you and all the other men would spend your days in brutal fighting competitions over fertile females. You don't really care about children, but you do get to own them. You can't be trusted with food processors or ovens, but you can be trusted with firearms and barbques. Your taste buds only register red meat and beer. You can engineer a vacuum but you can't use one. You don't parent your own children, you babysit them. You cannot be trusted not to cheat on your partner.

Feminists don't hate men. We hate that you have been as stupidly stereotyped as we have.

OCD packer strikes again

SO after much laundry doing and outfit changing, I have finally come up with the perfect 8 outfits for Paris that will all fit into my backpack. The bad news is, there is no possible way for me to later stuff a couple of bottles of wine in there too. So I am taking a really ugly but checkable tote bag on the plane with me that will hold laundry later so that wine can be imported. Yay wine.

I also figured out which purse to take with me. I have two awesome travel purses. One is a dark red beaded hobo I got as a Hong Kong import special. For years I was the only person around with this bag and got lots of comments, but lately I keep seeing the same bag in green. The other is a pink, brown, red, green, black handmade bag covered in roses that I got in Mexico. It is really gorgeous and has awesome pockets, but it is too much for this trip. The good news is that my red hobo has been to Europe before, so it's been road tested.

I'm also trying to wear earrings. I made a pair of lever backs out of a set of vintage rhinestone clipons. They are very simple, chic and not able to fall out of my ears. The problem is that my ears don't like earrings. I have spent the last 24 hours way too conscious of my ear lobes. They hurt and I keep rubbing neosporin with pain reliever on them. But i want to wear earrings, I look cute in earrings. What is the good of having pierced ears if you can't use them? Besides, I did not suffer through the torment of an at home ear piercing with a safety pin and a potato at 15 just to not be able to wear earrings now.

Any piercing freaks out there? How long must one suffer through aches lobes before the nerve endings give up the ghost?