The Lady or the Tiger
Posted by Julie in General Rant on 02 23rd, 2010I confess I’ve been watching more TV than I have in a long time, and now I remember why I stopped. It’s making me lose faith in humanity.
My most immediate frustration is with the whole Tiger Woods ridiculosity. As soon as the story starts to lose a little traction, we’re given a new set of pundits trying to deconstruct all the religious implications: would he have fallen to this level of licentiousness if he were a Christian? [Answer: Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, Thomas Weeks, Michael Reid, Jimmy Swaggert, Tony Alamo, Father James Porter and his merry band of pedophiles; it’s a long, illustrious list, people.] We all know Woods’ philandering has nothing to do with Buddha or even some ersatz sex addiction for Dr. Drew to fix up. It’s all thanks to our own over-indulgent star-maker machinery chugging out trash by the bucketful. Read the rest of this entry »
read comments (0)Great Yeastery
Posted by Julie in Food, General Rant on 12 10th, 2009I love good food. I love to cook and am pretty good at it. But I’ve always been afraid of baking bread.
First of all, the nature of yeast is confounding. Animal? Vegetable? Sea monkey? We didn’t do much real baking at our house, so the yeast packets were written in Aramaic. This should’ve been the first indicator of death, but who thinks about little grains of stinky sand as being alive in the first place? Even if the leavening was hale and hearty, I worried about the exact temperature of lukewarm. FYI, there is no ‘lukewarm’ indicator on a baby thermometer, which was older than me and probably didn’t work anyway. Proofing? Strange little verb. Chances are, I either cooked the rascals before they could start farting into my dough, or froze their non-existent nuts off.
Since the yeast was probably DOA, there was little rising and no real ‘punching down’ to be done. Kneading was a fun activity but I had no idea what should be happening or what to look for. No matter what I tried, every attempt came out like a lump of dysmorphic building material. Even the frozen dumbshit-proof Rhodes bread would break any plate or knife unlucky enough to wander into its gravitational pull. I was panne morte. Bread Dead.
Me, James Erb, and the nature of God
Posted by Julie in General Rant, Religion on 09 4th, 2009I spent most of my formative years as an active churchgoer. Then I pedaled off to college and was asked to challenge everything I knew to be true. In that process and in learning more about the many horrors we’ve committed in the name of faith, I lost mine. Not just because of the grandwizardmagicsantaclaus absurdity of it. Heck, two hundred years ago folks would have thought a trip to the moon was equally absurd. Nope, I lost my faith when I realized that religion is a purely human construct. It’s one more tool that the powerful have devised to control the unwashed masses. The corrupt prey on fear – fear of loneliness, of rejection, of the unknown. Because fear, if properly sown, can work to the benefit of those controlling the story. Scare the crap out of people and they’ll give you their last dime to keep the door bolted behind them. It’s the worst possible chicanery and it infuriates me. But that’s WAY off the point.
Snob Robbery, or The Reckless Elitist
Posted by Julie in General Rant, Politics on 08 2nd, 2009Right when we should have been concentrating on the healthcare reform discussion, along comes Officer Krupke and a strange case of life immitating art.
Well I suppose ‘art’ is a little generous, but there was an interesting movie released several years ago starring one of my favorite actors of all time, Samuel L. Jackson. I can’t think of another actor who can go so seamlessly from badass roughian (Jackie Brown, Pulp Fiction) to gentle sophisticate (The Red Violin). We got to see the softer Sam in 1993’s “Amos & Andrew” where he played Andrew Sterling, a successful black urbanite writer who buys a vacation home in a small New England resort town. One night, the local constabulary mistakes him for a burglar. Fortunately, the cop in the movie had slightly more sense than the one who confronted Professor Gates. The movie cop knew exactly what kind of mess he’d just made. Read the rest of this entry »
Lipstick Pit Bull Fact Check
Posted by Julie in Politics on 06 14th, 2009Toward the end of 2000 (specifically in mid-November when the election debacle was finally being resolved), I spent many nervous hours considering emigration to Canada. The idea of a George W. Bush administration was more than scary enough to make me consider leaving family, friends, and U.S. citizenship behind in favor of the relative peace and simplicity enjoyed by our northern neighbors. Then I thought, “Hell, America’s too smart for this. It can’t last. I’ll stick it out.” Eight gut-wrenching years later, we’re staring down the barrel of McCain/Palin: Possibly the only weapon that could be MORE destructive than Bush/Cheney has been to American life, liberty, and the pursuit of [reasonable] happiness.
Jesus Neutron
Posted by Julie in General Rant, Religion on 06 3rd, 2009Is there a more absurd way to spend a Wednesday morning than in pondering the nature of God and religion? I pulled into my driveway yesterday afternoon and saw some piece of silliness hanging from my front door knob. Typically coming and going through the back door, I recalled the flotsam this morning and went to investigate.
It was an intricately die-cut door hanger sporting a crazy cartoon test tube with goony glasses and a jet pack inexplicably spewing pink bubbles all over saying, “Calling All Funologists!” I immediately licked my mental thumb and started working through the calendar wondering if one of my nephews was having some party or event I’d forgotten about. Nope. Then I noticed what looked like a logo tucked in the lower right corner. This event was being put on by something called Group’s Power Lab. There, in 10-point Comic Sans nestled below the company name and inside a Jimmy Neutron-style cartoon molecule, was the real meat of the thing: “Discovering Jesus’ Miraculous Power.” Did our favorite Jewish carpenter load all of his magic into a pink cartoon jet pack? I would have been less surprised to see Him as Felix the Cat, (“…Whenever He gets in a fix He reaches into His bag of tricks!”). Read the rest of this entry »
Why I Hate Columbia House
Posted by Julie in General Rant, Movies on 10 2nd, 2008There’s no good reason in the world to expect a profit-driven company to send you a bunch of free stuff without attaching little strings to every item. Such is the paradigm vortex in which I find myself tonight.
Because I have a life, a career, and a social calendar… Because I see no particular need to set my clock to that of a major entertainment distributorship… Because there are so many more important choices to make every day when I roll out of bed, the very last thing on my mind is to tell Columbia House not to send me their absurd “Director’s Selection” every month. Read the rest of this entry »
Madison on War
Posted by Julie in Politics on 08 2nd, 2008A nationalist is someone who not only overlooks atrocities committed by his own side. He has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. — George Orwell
Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.
In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. War requires a physical force is to be created and it is the executive will which is to direct that force. Its influence in dealing out offices, honors and compensations is multiplied, and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people.
The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manner and of morals engendered in both.
No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venal love of fame are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.
James Madison, excerpted from “Political Observations”
April 20, 1795 in Letters and Other Writings of James Madison, Volume IV, page 491.
Cheney’s Warped View
Posted by Julie in Politics on 03 13th, 2007In his speech to the AIPAC convention yesterday, Dick Cheney laid out his thirst for literally endless war — and his equally intense aversion to war-avoidance — as unabashedly as can be. The towering question which America faces is whether it wants to continue to embrace this bloodthirsty and truly crazed vision (which many leading presidential candidates seem to share), or whether we want to repudiate it fundamentally. This is what lies at the core of Cheney’s world view:
An enemy that operates in the shadows and views the entire world as a battlefield is not one we can fight with strategies used in other wars. An enemy with fantasies of martyrdom is not going to sit down at a table for negotiations. Nor can we fight to a standoff — (applause). Nor can we fight to a standoff, hoping that some form of containment or deterrence will protect our people. The only option for our security and survival is to go on the offensive, facing the threat directly, patiently and systematically, until the enemy is destroyed. (Applause.) Read the rest of this entry »
Teach Your Children Well
Posted by Julie in Arts & Letters on 10 22nd, 2006From my earliest moments, I remember my mother telling me that there’s nothing I can’t do if I put my mind to it. I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant at first, but it sounded good. Later, the oversimplification would gall me. Particularly when scraping with math homework that neither she nor my dad could help me untangle. For the most part, however, her programming worked. I’ve never looked at anything and dismissed it as something I couldn’t do. It’s never even occurred to me that my womanhood might stand between me and my goals. If I never climb Everest or become an NFL quarterback, it’s not because I can’t. I simply don’t want to badly enough. Read the rest of this entry »
