Take these tepid glares
And learn to stimulate
Dum da-doo da dee
Taaaaaaake these tepid glares
I had missed (or forgotten?) until just now that Mr Mister's drummer later joined King Crimson.
HAHA TALL AND SKINNY
WHAT TERRIBLE THING TO BE
Well, an impeachment of Obama certainly would be an economic stimulus to the journalism and cable news sectors of the economy--which are in trouble, I gather.
Tepid glares
Plaited ergs
Piglets dare
Girdle paste.
Wow, that guy must be a huge Joe Biden fan.
There's a car I see in the work parking lot that has a bumper sticker that says something along the lines of "That Obama Sticker on Your Car Might as Well Say, "I'm Stupid"!". I keep wanting to stick a post-it on it that says, "Yeah, you are stupid!". But I don't want to destroy with such awesome burnage someone I haven't even met.
9 is funny. As are 2 through 4.
Um. That is all.
It belongs to a tall, skinny kid wearing a Heebie U sweatshirt. Punk.
Heebie, you academic communist leftist university elitist liberal you, if he's driving driving a giant black pickup (hopefully with a decal on the back of Calvin pissing on something), he's not a punk, he's a dick.
max
['Or an asswipe. Or both.']
I saw there was a tepid glare
that came from the Prius over there
But you don't really care for liberals, do you?
I dunno, man. This "tepid glare" thing just bothers me.
In this last of parking spaces
We glare together and avoid speech
Gathered in this car of tepid demeanor.
(This is the way the term ends,
This is the way the term ends,
This is the way the term ends,
Not with a stimulus but a tax cut.)
Talking about songs, I heard a Presley medley of Dixie and John Brown's Body the other day in a barber shop. Not the Battle Hymn, but 'a moulderin in his grave'. Strange combo.
14: Then take that sticker off your bumper, punk.
"Tepid glares" does seem to be unique.
I have to agree with parsimon, and I wouldn't hold it against HG if she exercised front-page privileges to edit the post title.
Extremism in the defense of cautious centrism is no vice, and tepidity in the face of asshattery is no virtue.
21: Don't bother me with details, man, I've got big ideas to think about—like a production of Hamlet, the entire text of which has been run through translation party.
Tepid, draw back your glare
Don't let your feelings bare
Straight to...whatever
Translation party seems to be distracted by Rosaline's legs.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by tepid glares. Fuck you, clown.
The new version is a little more upbeat, at least.
23: I love this idea. It would be a lot of terse surrealisms surrounded by oceans of please please please please. Value-added please.
Is that a place where you can check out rogues and peasant slaves, or a collection of texts belonging to your personal rogue and peasant slave?
Now, Horatio and the heavens and the dream of a different philosophy
Unfogged, the ugly glare is hot., Laydeez.
Monday I got to hear an Obama joke from a client. It wasn't offensive, just stupid (Employer will fire Obama voters so that they experience Change), but omg did the concept of "client services" come home.
Do liberals send around stupid email forwards? Not earnest, but stupid, petitions, but the endless reams of stupid anti-Other jokes that seem to be how Americans above the age of 50 get all their information about the world? Is that why conservatives think liberals are humorless?
Is that why conservatives think liberals are humorless?
We actually have a comedian in the Senate, but to be fair, the GOP does have a lot of jokes sitting in that chamber as well.
I've seen the occasional Bush joke emailed around -- that was where I came across "'Four Brazilian soldiers were killed in an accident, Mr. President.' 'Oh my God! How many is a brazillion?'" But I don't think there are as many.
Can you stimulate such-and-such from so-and-so? I would write it as "Provoke these tepid glares from the carful ..." But "these" isn't right either, since it makes the sentence lurch from first-person to third. I'm soliciting a grant to underwrite further study.
37: I remember the "Google 'miserable failure'" thing. And, um, pictures of that washing instructions clothing tag in French? Nous n'avons pas voté pour lui?
The "Make the Pie Higher" poem is the one I recall.
Ha! I just checked my laptop bag, and it has that tag!
I never noticed before. Rather less funny to discover it now.
Living here in la caroline du nord I see lots of horrible stickers on cars.
The worst one was in the parking lot at my old gym. I saw a sticker on a car that had CSA on it in big black letters. I was puzzling over what CSA stood for as I approached. Computer Scientists of America? Community Supported Agriculture?
But then a terrible apprehension gripped me. I crept up to the car and indeed my fears were realised. The doofus who owned that car had placed a Confederate States of America sticker on it. I still don't know what I should have done. Perhaps I should have written a snippy note and left it under the wiper.
44: I'm still trying to figure out the message in this one.
45:
1. So, buddy, is that true?
2. How many of those are on your car? I like the "Yankee Hunting Permit."
re: advertising tribal allegiances
I walked past a house this morning on the way to work, which, I presume, had been celebrating Thanksgiving. They had loads of triumphal USA stuff decorating the front of their house. Including a big home-made flag with "Born in the USA" in huge letters.
The battle flag of the army of Northern Virginia does not look well pasted over a silhouette of a naked large-breasted woman, that is for sure.
It makes her bosom look malformed.
45.1: Only one way to find out for sure, oud.
45.2: My car has been sticker-free since the Kerry-Edwards sticker came off. Roberta's car has one that says "Durham Love Yourself" and another that says "I Support Gay Marriage".
OT:
Dan Savage's podcast this week had a question from someone asking about Tongan fakalele -- men raised as and living as women -- and what that meant about the mutability of sexual orientation. And Savage didn't have enough of an idea to give him much of an answer. I wonder if I should call in and give him a rundown on the Polynesian men-raised-as-women thing based on what I know about Samoan fa'afafine. On the one hand, I know more than Savage does, and enough, I think, to answer the original question satisfyingly. On the other hand, I'm no kind of an expert on western Polynesian culture, and I'd feel presumptuous claiming to be one.
I did buy several people t-shirts of Munch's The Scream over the caption "Four More Years" for Xmas 2004.
I don't see why you couldn't tell him with the disclaimer that he should probably look at other sources for more authoritative information. It would give him somewhere to start?
50: I think you should at least educate us. Don't worry, we won't mistake you for an expert.
On preview I second 53, 54.
Also, judge not the Heebie U kid until he takes your math class, Heebie. As for obnoxious bumper stickers, political ones don't usually bother me, but I loathe the sports-college-God variety , e.g., "God must be a Tar Heel because the sky is Carolina blue," "God Made Notre Dame #1," or the immortal "God is a Bronco [Hoosier, Bear, Horned Frog, Mustang, etc]." I've been waiting in vain for a "God, if she/he/it exists, has better things to do than think about college sports" sticker.
"God Made Notre Dame #1,"
Slogans like this remind me that sports is to war as porn is to sex.
Okay, the deal is that the caller said that he'd always, like everyone else reasonable, believed that you can't make gay people straight through therapy and the like. But now he lives in Tonga, and in Tonga, if a family has too many boys and no girl to do the girl-identified household chores, one of the boys gets raised as a girl, takes a female role in the household, and ends up living as woman as an adult. And if you can do that sort of thing and it works, doesn't it seem as if sexual orientation really is mutable?
And Savage's response was (a) dunno anything about fakalele, but (b) research here shows that there's some relationship between being a boy with only male siblings and being gay -- boys with sisters are less likely to be gay. So maybe the all-boy families were likelier to have a gay kid in them, and the families were spotting that very young (he mentioned that his parents figured out he was probably gay when he was a little kid) and accommodating to it. While there might be something to that, knowing how the system actually works resolves most of the confusion, I think.
(Here, I'm assuming that what I know about Samoa applies equally to Tonga. They're really very close, and I'd be surprised at a big difference on this front.) The bit the caller missed is that a boy can be raised as a fa'afafine (Samoan word for the same thing) for household management purposes, but opt out of it when he grows up. One of our language teachers was a straight married guy who had been raised as a girl -- no trauma or particular emotional damage, he just had a different set of household skills than he would have had if he'd been raised as a boy, and some effeminate mannerisms. And you can opt in as well -- not all the adult fa'afafine were raised as girls, a fair number of them decided they wanted to live as women when they were teenagers.
I don't have any sense of percentages, and I'm sure that upbringing has at least some effect on the adult sexuality of boys raised as fa'afafine -- you probably get some kids with the potential to be bi who might have lived comfortably as men if they'd been brought up that way but who end up living as fa'afafine instead. But being raised fa'afafine isn't anything like an automatic determination of a kid's adult sexuality in the way the caller was assuming.
What's wrong with tepid glares?
A glare should be more fiery than tepid?
59: If you are glaring, we expect a bit more heat out of you. Glares should burn, or at least be warm. These lukewarm evil eyes just don't cut it.
RHC likes his glares like he likes his women coffee.
A glare should be more fiery than tepid?
But we're liberals! So the worst we can muster is lukewarm. If we were conservative, we would have a wider spectrum all the way to fiery.
At least that was the joke.
63: to be fair, a glare can be icy, too. But extremes of temperature are plainly required.
Thanks, LB. Fascinating stuff. Are fa'afafine expected to pair up with male partners who are male identified? Also, is there a category for women taking on male roles?
Come to think of it, I can't remember any married or quasi-married fa'afafine I knew - I'm not sure if that comes down to 'they didn't get married' or a fluke of my acquaintanceship. Probably the latter. Certainly straight/male-identified men had sex with fa'afafine some.
And the same thing did happen with girls on the 'household chores' level -- I had a student who'd been brought up as a boy, but it was less formalized and less connected to adult lifestyle. (There was actually a bit of a social invisibility field around lesbians -- at the school where I taught, the teachers engaged in a fair bit of prurient gossip about the students. They were always kidding around about which straight couples were misbehaving with each other, or who the fa'afafine kids were fooling around with. There were two senior girls, on the other hand, who were wildly obviously a couple: they were continually emerging from bits of shrubbery all rumpled and sweaty and rearranging their clothes, but no one ever cracked a joke about them or mentioned it.) (Also.)
66: Or smouldering, though I think that's more of a glance or gaze than a glare.
There's that Albanian tradition of women who become men, in order to fill the male role, too. Which has a lot of similar features, I think, except they are all usually celibate.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/31/gender.kosovo
PDF version with photographs [which are interesting]:
http://shared.ypu.org/publications/1208187529.pdf
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
but my Ma won't admit it
I'm a boy, I'm a boy
but if I say I am, I get it
hopefully with a decal on the back of Calvin pissing on something
In one of the parking lots here at work there is a happy little five-door hatchback that has two enormous decals on the back window: one of Calvin pissing on the Christian cross and another of the Christian cross with a red-circle-with-bar over it. On the rear view mirror is a great big fruity dream catcher. I keep debating leaving a note under their windshield wiper that reads, "I want to be friends with you but I'm a little scared you're crazy."
The cross with a bar through it often means a Bad Religion fan. I'm not sure if that is a plus or a minus for you, Robust.
It pushes the meter a little towards sane. I had no idea that was Bad Religion's logo and find myself inexplicably cracked up by their name for it ("the Crossbuster"). That plus the Calvin one makes me think I'd most like to give them a thumbs up from far enough away that they couldn't trap me in a conversation.
74.last: You basically you want to be a lurker supporting him in e-mail.
I just saw a minivan with plates reading "PRN MOM". I'm trying hard to assume that the driver has children in the Plains Reading Nation or something.
Did you stare at the car with tepid lust?
in Tonga, if a family has too many boys and no girl to do the girl-identified household chores, one of the boys gets raised as a girl, takes a female role in the household
I think this characterisation is pretty wrong too. And a little bit racist, as early anthropologists tended to be.
An ex-flatmate of mine works with the various PI communities here, I can ask him for more detail, but my understanding is that fakaleiti and fa'fafine are pretty different social phenomena from the inside, or at least see themselves as unconnected. From the outside they seem similar and I don't know how much that difference is substantive rather than identity-based. But all that should be tempered by the fact that I don't think there are many fakaleiti-identified people here at all, compared to a small but noticeable fa'fafine population. It may just be that he hadn't had to know much about them.
I think this characterisation is pretty wrong too. And a little bit racist, as early anthropologists tended to be.
I don't know much of anything about Tonga directly, just that it's close to Samoa and my impression is that it's fairly similar, so I was working on the assumption that it was pretty much the same phenomenon. But of course I don't know.
I'm not quite following what was wrong and racist, though -- can you spell it out a little so I don't make the same mistake again?
To be honest I'd say that as far as looking at the phenomena from outside goes they're extremely similar. But I don't know either, and I'll have to wait to hear back before I can be more definitive about it. It is interesting that there are many more fa'fafine-identified people here than fakaleiti though, which I guess points to some sort of difference. It's hard to extrapolate from overseas communities in any case.
I wasn't criticising you on the wrong and racist point, or really even the caller. That explanation (too many sons) arose during early Western anthropological contact, and I don't think it's seen as credible any more. Like you said later on, people enter and leave later in life, and there's a lot less pragmatism and more individual agency (or perhaps genetics) involved. It's the functionalist explanations of everything Other that bug me as racist.
Huh. You know, the too many sons (or really, not enough daughters) thing really is the explanation I got from Samoans of kids raised as fa'afafine -- someone's got to weave mats and do laundry rather than making sennit and cooking, and if you haven't got any girls in the family you're not going to have enough floor mats. Treating that as a full explanation of adult fa'afafine is, I'd think, a serious oversimplification -- agency comes into it when the kids get older -- but it's not something anthropologists came up with from outside.
is interesting that there are many more fa'fafine-identified people here than fakaleiti though, which I guess points to some sort of difference.
I wonder if it's a difference in Tongan and Samoan religious attitudes. Everything I know about Tonga is semi-hostile stereotypes I heard from Samoans, but I have the impression that, Christian as Samoans are, they regard Tongans as even more pious.
Or maybe it's as simple as the Samoan overseas community being bigger than the Tongan overseas community, and the fa'afafine/fakaleiti population being proportional.
It's the functionalist explanations of everything Other that bug me as racist.
I have a very similar complaint about evolutionary psychology. You can posit a functional reason for nearly everything I do, but as near as I can tell, I'm not very functional in the aggregate.
but it's not something anthropologists came up with from outside.
I don't know how reliably you can conclude that. In what language did they explain this to you?
In general, this sort of institutionalized gender-switching (known generally by the term "berdache") has been a point of considerable dispute among anthropologists. I wrote about one highly unconvincing book on it a while back.
Oh, true. Certainly, I can't speak for the entire population of Samoa, just the people I knew, and they were speaking to me in English. So I don't actually know how pre-contact-with-Europeans Samoans thought about fa'afafine; possibly everyone I'd met had either been taught and believed incorrect anthropological theories about their own culture, or thought that I'd find such theories more acceptable than what they actually believed.
While that's possible, though (and it really is possible), I find the household-chores thing really persuasive as a partial explanation (partial, because obviously there were alternative solutions like giving up on the gender segregation of the chores. Nothing's totally functional.) But given that my finding it persuasive is based on my beliefs about the people who told me, and about my observations of Samoan households, all anecdote rather than data, there's no reason for anyone else to find it persuasive.
I'll be very interested to see what I hear back then. What was described to me was more in line with Savage's explanation, especially "the families were spotting that very young", though not necessarily tied to homosexuality exactly.
There is a larger Samoan population than Tongan, but only by a factor of two or three. That could be the explanation, but I was thinking of it in rough proportion. It certainly seems that fa'fafine is much more common even allowing for proportionality - I don't think most people would even recognise the term fakaleiti, but fa'fafine is fairly well known. I do wonder whether it's that people here are more likely just to identify as gay than fakaleiti than they are in Tonga itself, which definitely could tie into religiousity. A little bit of Googling suggests that might be a factor.
In general I'm pretty inclined to believe what people say about their own reasons, so perhaps I'll have to rethink here. I'm still uncomfortable with these kinds of explanations though, and sceptical of how they became dominant, for some of the reasons teo gives and others. On this particular subject I might have been persuaded too far by exposure to someone with extremely strong views on the topic. And who's probably going to be on me for using the term "Pacific Island community" above too. What teo pointed to about Native American berdaches is interesting and not something I'd come across before. It is the sort of topic where it's hard to find reliable information about pre-contact societies and where that unreliability contaminates it now as well.
There's also probably a difference in the overseas community (this is pure speculation -- I don't know any Samoans in the US). The functional explanation only really makes sense for people living the traditional village life -- I'd be really surprised if Samoan households in the US were anything like as dependent on the labor of kids and teens as households in Samoa, and a lot of the traditional gender-segregated chores just don't apply: no one living in LA needs a steady supply of floor mats. A Samoan household in California probably doesn't have any practical problem even if there aren't any daughters to do girl chores.
At that point, I wouldn't be surprised if the fa'afafine thing changed somewhat, to be much more about identifying kids who looked like they'd be happy in the role (which I'm sure was also a significant part of it in Samoa as well), rather than serving a household-management function at all.
no one living in LA needs a steady supply of floor mats.
Have you been to LA? The floors are absolutely filthy.
It's also full of cars and smog and antisemitic lawyers.
And oranges! My god, the oranges, sweet as nectar, abundant as assholes on the 105.
93.last: Kind of an obscure Freeway to pick on. Did you perchance meant the 405?
Maybe '105' was referring to a radio station?
Traffic wise, often, yes. Are the people on it worse? I have no idea.
97: Just that ] "the 105" is much shorter, was not opened until 1993, services a much less well-known part of the area (although it *does* help in getting to LAX from some places, however) and s not a cultural reference generally known outside of the LA area unlike the 405. That is all.
The 405 is generally known outside of the LA area?
They've heard about it in Orange County, Ventura County, Kern County, San Diego County...
A question best answered by others. I am perhaps wrong in that assumption, but it is certainly the more prominent of the two roadways under discussion.
100: Whoa, slow down there, Professor. "LA area"?
102: I know that I, at least, know nothing about either beyond what I can see from looking at a map.
103: JP's term, not mine. Take it up with him.
Maybe Atrios has made the 105 more famous.
Um, we have a 405, too, and we even refer to it as "the 405".
If you really want assholes you're going to want to check out the 101 through the valley. Although the 405 is pretty awful, too.
I think we have met the assholes and they are me.
107: You could combine the two and drive around the 101/405 interchange all day.
Wait, there's a "Port" "land" now? Is that like a Disney theme wing dedicated to ports?
JP's term, not mine. Take it up with him.
Oh, I was just going for a dumb joke on the "Professor" formation (which, duh, Gilligan's Island, but I think, there's a joke like that in some recent-ish movie; can't recall). Don't mind me.
Does San Diego count as the "LA area"? I only bring it up because this, which I'm drinking at this very moment and which is awesome, is brewed there. Total non sequitur, basically, but holy crap is this some delicious stout.
I-405 lengths
CA: 72.15 mi.
WA: 30.30 mi.
OR: 3.53 mi.
113: People from southern California, and probably most people from outside the area would say no. Unlike Orange County, where you get a lot of people from southern California thinking it very important that you distinguish LA from Orange County, and a lot of people from outside the area figuring it's all more or less the same general region.
The OJ Simpson chase was on the (LA area) 405.
112: I thought you were referring to Chief Wiggum in that Treehouse of Horror episode where the professor tries to explain three-dimensional space.
116: No, but I had an unhealthy obsession with Professor Frink in high school, so let's just move on.
I thought the other one was "Port World."
119: They must have had trouble with the marketing.
120: I said we're MOVING ON, eb. [straightens bowtie]
119: We're the bigger, newer one, whichever one that is.
Wikipedia is telling me that the "Portland" franchise has expanded into like 15 states, including "Portland, Colorado, a place in Colorado."
Ah, google is my friend. Here's the "Professor" formation joke I was channeling (admittedly, not very well).
Yeah, there are a lot of Portlands. It is still true, however, that there are two of them.
Colorado is known for its coasts and lake shores.
Naturally. Because "Colorado," like all Native American place names, means "where water meets land."
124, 127: Apparently about the only thing in Portland, Colorado is a cement factory. Place-name etymology left as an exercise for the reader.
Jesus, have you ever tried Double Mountain IRB? I think they make it in Portland.
Because I've been working my way down the Maslovian hierarchy of needs and have arrived at whiskey-flavored beer.
IRB? I know the IRA, and the Hop Lava, which they have at the best rib joint in Portland, a mere four blocks from my house. Great beers. They're made not here, but up the Columbia a ways, in Hood River.
On preview: you mean the one they put in oak casks? WANT.
Casks that have until a short time before contained actual whiskey.
Um, I just wanted to make an LA joke, and I vaguely remembered a tense driving situation on "the 105" due to some assholes. (Prepending the definite article to the number of an interstate highway is not done in my dialect. Teo can confirm.) I also recalled a song about taking the 405, which I thought was Elliott Smith but Google suggests may have been Death Cab. So I decided to go with first-hand experience, and obviously I got whacked by the social construction of SoCal reality.
Teo can confirm.
Yep, Bave's right. I think we've discussed this here before.
135: OK, good. Now we have *that* cleared up.
Well, it seemed like I created a problem, and I was a bit Becks-style when I created the problem, and I'm a bit more Becks-style now (hi, Becks!), so, you know, I wanted to solve things.
I had a bourbon porter once—i.e., a porter that had been left hanging in a bourbon barrel—and it was delicious.
138: No problem just Becks-style meeting Becks-style, but now I'm less so, because I'm a lightweight.
I had to clean the apartment, so I needed more of the Becks-style. Is it bad that this is my second 4-pack of Boddington's pints-in-a-can this week? Should I tell my doctor? When I'm at the grocery store, I think, oh, nice, Boddington's in cans; that's so much nicer than Budweiser, and maybe I'll only drink two of them.
The apartment is now as clean as it's been since I moved in, so there's some good that's come out of all this. I also made the dough for refrigerator rolls.
Jesus, have you ever tried Double Mountain IRB?
They're naming beers after committees to protect the interests of research subjects now?
141: Is it bad that this is my second 4-pack of Boddington's pints-in-a-can this week?
Jesus Christ, no, drink away. Mine was sampling a Yuengling Variety case* in honor of navigating PA's anti-easy beer buying system. (actually, it just meant *finally* remembering to stop at the conveniently open fairly late beer drive-up place not to far from my house, but part of the law here is that you have to bitch about the system every time you buy alcohol.)
*Because the Penn Brewery holiday sampler was not in yet (and maybe won't even come out this year); the good news is that they are moving brewing operations back to Pittsburgh from a period of being outsourced.
142: If they flatter them enough they get to test their beer on human subjects.
speaking of racists, bugger phil goff.
(sorry, had to say that somewhere.)
Also, re: quality of police over time, holy fuck does this not fill me with confidence about Scotland Yard in the '70s.
146: I presume this is the private detective Taitz hired, among others, to spy on the judge in her most recent court battle. It doesn't surprise me at all that he was obsessed with Marxists even at Special Branch. MI5 did spy on the Labour government back then, after all.
146. Having been around and active during the 70s, I can assure you that the working assumption was that Scotland Yard was as bent as a nine bob note. That link is fairly horrific, but not totally surprising.
"IRB", especially in conjunction with "IRA", does not make me think of beer.
I got an answer, but it's not terribly helpful from our perspective here. The usual caveats about the local communities being different from those in the islands, and immigrants being self-selected. While he doesn't buy the "too many boys" explanation as a whole himself it isn't universally discredited, and it may be true sometimes - but he also points out that it's rare for parents to decide on that before the birth, even when they know the sex. Religion is another factor*, and different religious groups even within the same society behave differently around the area. Tonga and Samoa are apparently similar enough on this that it'd be reasonable for you to call in, LB. While they'd see themselves as very different from each other actual practice is pretty close here.
* This is a bugbear of his, so while it's probably true he may be overplaying its importance a bit. He's very big on not lumping groups together while there's another axis you could split on.
speaking of racists, bugger phil goff.
It's sad that he was apparently the best they could do (but then you look at the others, and...).