Completely Unnecessary

I don’t read the Huffington Post very often. Despite their sometimes informative content, they often resort to tacky, lefty-Drudge headlines.

Ironically, I had clicked over to HuffPo for an article on why the online mag can’t replace the NYT.

(Oh, and speaking of which, the NYT took umbrage with the Atlantic article I quoted yesterday. Perhaps rumors of her death have been greatly exaggerated - or NYT’s communications dept has a vested interest in not appearing vulnerable. Updated: Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan takes a crack at the latter point.)

Anyway, the Huffington Post would like you to know that Africans are backwards, barbarous freaks:

The actual story explains that Obama’s grandmother wanted to bring a spear and shield amongst other gifts for her grandson on the occasion of his inauguration. It’s unclear from the article if she’ll check it, but it seems likely that she fears it being damaged during the flight and wanted to carry it on.

“But I have been told that due to security reasons I will not be allowed to board a plane with it,” she explained.

Hopefully, she and the airline can work out a compromise. (God, I’d love to see what today’s TSA would do with my grandmother; she packed everything… She also used to pack up all the bread rolls from the restaurant table into her purse, but that’s a separate issue.)

Needless to say, I did not click through to ‘Read HuffPost’s Inauguration BigNews Page’.

I made an angry noise and took a screen capture.

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Not much of it on this blog these days. My sincerest apologies to both of you.

I mean, sure, I can get excited about things like Ted Stevens indictment, but the general election is missing a certain je ne sais quoi.

This is coupled with high levels of unforeseen busyness and my crazy upstairs neighbors. There have been more coffees, but less blogging. (There’s also the fact that I don’t have anything I’m desperately trying to avoid, like my work.)

Seriously, my upstairs neighbors have reached a fever pitch in their nocturnal stomping/shifting of furniture. Last night’s activity included five hours (from 11:30p til at least 4:30a) of door slamming, running, the dropping of numerous items. Shocking, last night was missing the ritual 1:45a leaving-the-faucet-running-for-five-minutes!

It’s like the two minute hate, but longer, and I do the hating.

Anyway, I’m going to try to step up the blogging again. I miss it and I feel like it makes me pay more attention to the world. I’ve got some women’s issues, but they’re on my laptop and I can’t find them, because of the tired.

Also, I missed the finale of Farmer Wants a Wife, about which I’m totally gutted. How will I ever know who ‘larrikin’/jerkface farmer James chose? How will I know how many times he was referred to as ‘larrakin’ farmer James?

Fun Times: Gawker’s video rundowns about TV journalism are some of the best things I’ve seen in my life:
The Dangers of Being a Television News Reporter
Best of TV Lip Slips
Top Ten Angry On-Camera Meltdowns

Also Gawker-related: I really enjoyed this video of average guys attempting Olympic sports.

Maybe I’ve just been spending all my online time watching videos.

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I was way too hungover to blog today. [Ed. Note: Why, why do I never learn not to mix wine and beer? It is like this every single time. It's not rude to reject a beer on the grounds that you've been drinking wine all night...]

Yeah, so it was great. I spent most of the day at State Library doing newspaper research. The Canberra Times is a broadsheet, which means I had to turn it sideways to scan the articles I needed. Being lazy (and be-headached), it was just far too much effort to right the pages each time, especially as I was generally scanning every other page.

Now I haven’t tested this theory empirically, but I think fast-scrolling is far more nausea-inducing when it’s scrolling up, rather than to the left. Trying to read words coming from below as they whizzed past me did not help the pounding in my skull.

Five and a half hours I did that today. Pleasant. Which is probably why I just looked blankly at the sushi lady when she informed me that my only non-mayonnaise-containing choices were kimchi or seasoned squid. I didn’t say anything - just turned and walked out the door.

So I give Slut Machine a lot of credit for making me laugh hysterically in her attempts to make a chocolate cast of her own vagina. I feel that I shouldn’t need to add that this is highly unsafe for work.

Also, my friend gave me a link to Garfield Minus Garfield, which I have been checking nearly obsessively since yesterday.

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Along with probably about a million other people today, I’m going to mention the story about 95-year-old blogging Spanish grandmother, Maria Amelia Lopez. While I suspect that this tagline:

“Today it’s my birthday and my grandson, who is very stingy, gave me a blog.”

was created by the grandson, it sounds so strikingly like something my grandmother would have said that I find it really charming.

I don’t have time to read it today because I. am. dutifully. working. on. my. assessments., but thought you might enjoy. There’s an English translation button that more or less works.

ps - I also like her because she has an Inspiron, though it appears to be a different model.

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I was talking to my new/old friend, Meredith, about blog traffic because we are both a bit sad. And also because blogging is the new route through academia.

Meredith’s doing some interesting work about women, pregnancy, celebrity and technology, which can be explored here and via her blog. She was talking about writing for audience - using your stats to see what your audience wants to read about (what they search terms they use to find your blog/which entries are most popular), and throwing a couple posts their way to drive up readership.

It’s a fair point… except that most people link to my blog through some permutation of three terms: “dog” “licking” and “vagina”. Today we also have “public grooming” and “douche telecom” amongst the group, but the general trend stands.

While I’m totally down for people reading about Juniper, the only entry to which those search terms can possibly lead, what the hell? My utility in the blogosphere seems to revolve around one entry I wrote over a year ago about the opera and my dog’s newly-spayed vag. Somehow I don’t think the sixteen people that went to that entry yesterday were expecting it to begin with:

Dowdy mom-types and aging lesbians flocked to the opera tonight.

Yet my bounce rate is down, which means that some of my dog vag visitors are sticking around to read up on such important topics as hilarious advice from my mother in 2005 and Washington State’s anti-gay marriage ruling.

Thanks for reading, new people. As for your dog - it may be a UTI.

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So my rant just below about the hubbub surrounding the Moveon/Limbaugh thing got picked up by two sites yesterday - The Moderate Voice and a right wing site that thinks Muslims have a 20-year plan to take over America.

To both of them I say: Huh?

While I’m flattered, the only reason why any readers you directed my way yesterday didn’t get a youtube link to John Cusack holding a Peter Gabriel-spewing boombox was because I was too lazy to post last night.

I presume that since I’m generally awake late enough in Oz to read and write about early morning US news, I got bumped early into the technorati queue. I have no other explanation for not one, but two sources noting my writing as of interest. The right wing site had me listed just after ThinkProgress. Okay!

To celebrate my impending blogosphere-wide notoriety, I am going to provide you with what you all missed last night.

This clip comes with a very special note to every heterosexual male on Earth: if she grew up in the 80s, any woman you’ve ever dated wants this to happen at some point in her life.

Finally, to any readers conservative enough to believe that Muslims will take over America, please enjoy this link my previous post about full moon sex dreams.

Confidential to Spree - I deleted your comment because I initially thought it was spam. While I think you missed the point of my post (among other things), in the interest of free speech, I’ll approve it if you re-submit.

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Wonkette isn’t liveblogging the Dem debate - presumably because they’re still hungover from Saturday night and can’t break out the bottle again - so I got lured into HuffPost’s liveblog. I skipped the insipid opening commentary and got into the meat. If you can call it that.

I am not kidding - this is their coverage (ellipses in original):

THE DEBATE

Glynnis (9:05:37 AM): Welcome to the first Democratic debate …from Iowa. George runs through the lineup by talking about Iowa poll support Biden and Kucinich are tied at 2%. Gravel has none.
Rachel (9:06:40 AM): Which gets a rather uncalled for laugh, I think. Shame on you, George.
Glynnis (9:05:55 AM): Stephanopoulous goes straight for the jugular. The big question is does Obama have enough experience? Hillary?
Glynnis (9:06:10 AM): She’s wearing a taupe suit. Not showing up so well on the background of red white and blue.
Rachel (9:06:40 AM): I know - her first fashion misstep!
Rachel (9:06:47 AM): Where is the Vogue-sanctioned Huma when you need her?

Wow. First comment and only forty-three seconds to mention Clinton’s fashion faux pas.

Not only that, but there’s a certain something that seems to be missing. In HuffPost’s coverage, the candidates are referred soley by last name, the exceptions being Richardson and Biden, with whom the first and last name is occasionally used.

There’s one more exception: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

She is referred to as ‘Senator Clinton’ once and ‘Clinton’ four times (she also has a mention as ‘Clinton’ in a Richardson quote).

By my count, she is referred to only as ‘Hillary’ thirty-one times.

But she’s just a some fashion victim, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter.

There’s a certain amount of intentional overreaction in this (and most of my blogs while I’m at it) - I certainly refer to her on occasion as Hillary, as I might use ‘Barack’ or ‘Bill’ - but it tends to be when I’m not taking them very seriously. It’s the disparity I find interesting, not the use of the name itself.

To that point, however, the Clinton campaign can’t have it both ways. They can’t criticize the cleavage coverage and then turn around and use that ‘I’m your girl’ nonsense. She’s a US Senator, not a ‘girl’ - she and everyone else should know the difference.

The thing that’s missing is respect. And worst part is that her campaign seems willing to forsake it to make her more palatable to Middle America. I don’t want a girl for president - if she’s going to win, she should be running as a strong Senator and as a strong woman.

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By the way, I’ve started writing for Metroblogging Melbourne. I imagine that most stuff I write for them (like sushi reviews) won’t be that fascinating to my primarily US readers (and to the person from Istanbul who visited the other day). All both of you will probably want to read more about my nearly broken ankle and my interest in the sex lives of Army recruiters.

The deal is I’m not supposed to crosspost; so things I think might be interesting to (the possibly three) of you who aren’t going to be frantically checking the Metblog for each new post, I’ll post a link to it here.

And to celebrate that convoluted sentence and my blogging-in-a-quasi-official-capacity deflowering, here is the link to my first post.

Who’s surprised it’s about history?

I’m researching the people in my neighborhood who signed the Monster Petition of 1981 for women’s suffrage (I’ll write about that some other time). Turns out the neighborhood didn’t so much exist before 1873 because it was both a jail (which in aussie is spelled “gaol”) and an asylum.

Well I think it’s cool.

Hey, if you’re here from the Metblog, welcome and thanks for showing enough interest to navigate through at least a couple of pages. You’re the best.

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