Giga Puddi

Is there much I love more than Weird Japanese Stuff? (Oh. Wait. Rockets, Neil Gaiman, dogs, and chai lattes. )But I do love strange Japanese confectionaries a whole lot. Mochi ice cream? Daifuku? Pocky? Bring that shit on, son. Delicious! And, fortunately, yours truly lives near one of two M2M Asian Grocery Stores in all of New York City. So if this stuff exists anywhere in Manhattan, it should not be too hard to find.

I propose we make this stuff, and do a reaction video. It'll be fun!

ALSO, Christoph Waltz as an angry Austrian Jew in the Water for Elephants movie? Be still, my fangirl heart! Oh Hollywood, you have redeemed yourself from the curse of Robert Pattinson in this truly wise casting choice. Christoph Waltz is a perfect August, all suave and debonair. I am now officially excited to see it!

STOP CARRYING YOUR CIGARETTES AT HAND LEVEL (And other things)

On multiple occasions I have been walking down a crowded street, ostensibly paying attention to where I'm going and trying to stay out of people's ways, only to feel a sudden stab/burn/shock to one of my hands. Invariably, when I look behind me, I discover that some dumbass has stabbed me in the hand with a cigarette that they are nonchalantly carrying at hand level, on a crowded sidewalk.

I am sure I am not the only person who has managed to get stabbed with other people's cigarettes.

I mean really, what the hell.

In happier news, I made the school paper.

But really people please be more careful with your cigarettes.

Hey Sarah Palin,

Leave my first lady alone.

You, Sarah, are a washed up hack hanging onto her fifteen minutes of fame, who can't even raise her own children to understand that calling people faggots on facebook isn't socially acceptable behavior, let alone possibly be qualified to run a country. Your own relatives on the record saying you dropped out of U. Hawaii because there were "too many Asians" and you're currently in a fight with Alaskan Fish and Wildlife over getting too close to a family of bears, on national television. Your political track record consists of making embarrassing social gaffs, pandering to your competition ("Can I call you Joe?"), exposing yourself as an inarticulate ass on national television, and quitting halfway through your term as governor of the least densely populated state in the union. You advocate fear and misinformation.

The list goes on.

Michelle Obama, on the other hand, is classy, intelligent, well-spoken, educated about her causes, and stylish as all get out. You quoted her out of context and frankly your remarks about her hating white people only make you sound like an ignoramus. You didn't even actually say half the one-liners people attribute to you - Tina Fey did. You aren't even half as witty as she is.

In short, Michelle Obama is a better mother, politician, and all around human being than you could ever hope to be.

So shut up.

"It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt."

-Abraham Lincoln

If I could explain it to you in a venn diagram...

Actually, I can.

"The Broker" is a sort of late addition to a piece I've been revising continuously over the last few days in preparation of starting to draft this weekend. The basic idea being that he is a "man on the inside" - the original description of him, before I realized he might be a cool person to actually see, was. "I have a man - he's a clerk in Moscow - he gets me new papers, a new name, a new life - every ten years." But when I actually started messing around with the idea of this character, he started to sound too much like Izaya-kun from the anime I linked in my last post - kind of smug bastard, playing all the sides - which he very well may be, but I need a better idea of him besides being an expy of an anime character before I'll feel good about him.

I think I probably need to, first of all, decide if he himself is a mythical creature, or if he simply likes to help them. I'm thinking a look into russian mythology is in order, because I get the feeling that he is - He also needs a new name, because "The Broker" doesn't even describe what he does - I just kind of slapped it on him for the sake of having something to call him. And knowing my track record with placeholder names (Gary, Joe, Garrett...), if I don't change it soon, it's going to stick. :|

This post took a while to write because I'm multi-tasking watching BBC live coverage of the Chilean mine rescue.

The fact that....

Roger Ebert 'ships Jacob/Edward totally just made my night. Also just kind of furthers all previous arguments that Twilight is the most unintentionally hilarious series ever when it comes to sexual tension. Like, there's these, and then there's Twilight, which isn't the result of any actual purposeful subtext, just the fact that the author is absolutely clueless. (Also Mormon. Can we talk about how Twilight is pretty much just an excuse for SMeyer to push a mormon agenda? Actually, let's not.)

Anyway, that's all I've got for tonight.

Also I spent my four-day weekend working my way through this and I have to say it is one awesome piece of work. Crazy random gems like this make me happy I watch anime.

Well this has jumped the shark.

I never really watched Dancing with the Stars in the first place, but really?! Bristol Palin? The Situation? These people aren't celebrities, they're hicks with overly televised private lives. I would also like to point out that there's a difference between a "Star" and tabloid fodder.

At this point, they should just change it to "Dancing with D-List Socialites, and the occasional singer/actor/comedian from the 1980s."

So I did a little research...

Most of the quotes and accusations in all of the articles on Caster Semenya come from two sources: Jemma Simpson, aged 26, and Diane Cummins, aged 36.

Now, really, it's easy to imagine this sort of thing evolving from locker room talk:

1. "Ugh, she's just so fast! It's not fair!"

Becomes,

2. "Too bad she's got a face like a dude. At least we're prettier than her."

Becomes,

3. "Did you hear she's really a man?"

High school bullying. Pure and simple. It would be understandable if all these girls were actually anywhere close to being in high school. However, instead what you're looking at is two grown women picking on a teenaged girl because they're pissed that she's better than them. So Caster Semenya gets put through a humiliating ordeal on the international news because she's not some blonde haired blue eyed anglo saxon and they get off scot free?

She's looking a bit girlier at the Berlin world championships this year. How much of that do you think is personal preference, and how much of that is her trying to bend to public opinion of what a female athlete should look like?

"Essentially we are running against a man."

Y'all are just a bunch of sore losers.

Keep running, Caster. Haters gonna hate, but you rock.

Bromance is officially in the dictionary.

Along with these other bits of lingo: Muggle, blamestorming, Gaydar, Grrrl, Threequel, Mini-me, Screenager, Cyber-slacking (what I am doing right now - sort of), Lookism, Frankenfood, Riffage, Bouncebackability, Prebuttal, Ego-surfing, and Meatspace.

Now, I can sort of see a use for muggle as a word, but I don't totally like the way they've chosen to describe it - having heard it used to describe "non-theater people" in the company of "theater people," I would rather see it defined as "an ordinary person, as opposed to whatever exclusive group that is describing them." Or something like that.

But really - Meatspace? Riffage? Threequel? Grrrl? Most of these words are such transient internet slang that in ten years no one will even remember what they mean! Let alone imagine using them in an actual sentence.

Metrosexual had better not be in the dictionary. Or at least, if it is, please let it be listed as a synonym for "fop."

Also, their definition of "gaydar" does not explain why it is also possessed by like 90% of straight women. (C and I have narrowed this down to a factor of natural selection - possession of gaydar assists in selecting a mate; back when our ancestors were living in caves and couldn't waste energy courting a male if he was more interested in playing Hide-the-Salami with another dude it was helpful to know in advance. I wonder how you say "homosexual" in Neanderthal?)

Clarification: I know that modern humans are not direct descendants of Neanderthals. (Most of us, anyway.)

New York Man loses pants, gets an article in the Times.

This is news? Really?! I would say it was a slow day but even that doesn't excuse human interest pieces about misplacing your dry cleaning.

Back to school in eight days (by our counting method.) Start spreading the news, I'm leaving next week! I'm going to be a part of it! New York, New York!

The 'Tane diaries: conclusion

Dear Accutane:

It's been a great five months but I think we're done here. It's been great.

Leez.

(Took my last pill this morning, yay!)

Also, I really hope this is just a cosmic viral ad for next season.

I don't remember what I was doing online at eleven...

But it certainly wasn't this.

While I was never exactly "well-supervised" in my online privileges, I like to think my parents knew what I was up to for the most part. I got my first (and so far, only, since we've switched to Bellsouth) AOL screen name when I was nine, and I remember mostly using my connection to

1. Look up Pokemon stuff.
2. Troll Neopets (in the most innocent sense of the word "troll).
3. Read Digimon fanfiction.

By the time I was eleven, I'm pretty sure I was using it to.

1. Troll Neopets (still in the most innocent sense of the word).
2. Obsess about Star Wars.
3. Sneak into boards.theforce.net under-age and write shitty star wars Fanfic.

I don't think that parents need to be "helicopters" monitoring every second of their children's online time, but I do think they should be aware of what their kids are up to. In the case of "Jessi Slaughter," her parents were clearly not only clueless but also oblivious - where does an eleven year old learn to talk like that?

The other thing is that these kids place a huge emphasis on being "e-famous." When I was eleven, there was no such thing. Blog was a neologism, webcams were $100, "YouTube" hadn't been invented yet, and we were all on dial-up. Giving someone your AIM SN was a big deal: it meant that no matter "who" you became, they'd still be able to contact you.

We were sort of like the dream-hackers from Inception, but instead of layering on dreams, we were layering on identities and shedding them like snakeskin when they were all used up. A friend of mine admits to pretending to be three sisters sharing an account on Neopets, chalking it up to being "a lonely only child." I would usually claim to be twelve, which I found people would typically take more seriously than my actual age (somewhere between nine and eleven) but would still allow for the occasional moronic jag or horrendous spelling mistake. We made user names, sock puppets (back when they were called sock puppets and not mules), more user names... It was easy to abandon one, pick up another, and the social circles were small enough that even on the same site, no one would ever realize you were someone else - you might not even ever encounter someone who knew your other self, and even if you did, they'd never know.

This was a more innocent time to internet. Your mistakes could be erased just by changing your username. We were warned to never give out personal information, so we didn't - instead we made up varied and vast alternate personas and explored who we were and who we wanted to be. No one was counting how many "friends" we had, how many "view" our profile had accrued, or how many "comments" we'd racked up.

And then came Myspace. Originally, when I joined, it was mostly used by high schoolers as a way to communicate (and also stalk that cute boy in your algebra class.) By their official rules, you must be fourteen to join "social networking sites" like Myspace and Facebook. Most parents don't know these rules, and most kids don't follow them. In this late day and age, Myspace is populated by "scene" kids - rich suburban kids deeply steeped in self-isolation, listening to shitty electropop, dying their hair neon colors, and painting their nails "black as their souls" while they carve their favorite bands names into their arms. T

hese are the same kids who get into trouble on Stickam, who inspire the ire of the so-called "internet hate machine." Their focus on "e-fame" starting in their early tweens, combined with the amount of personal information they disclose through their nicknames, their photos, and their videos, builds a paper trail that most of us weren't ready to handle at that age. I'm not saying Ms. Slaughter can't re-invent herself, but it will be harder for her to abandon her old net presence since she's made such a racket.

At age eighteen, I use the internet to:

1. Research useless information, read People, and lurk on reputable news websites.
2. Browse Facebook.
3. Waste time on Gaia/TVTropes/Various webcomics.

America, what are you doing to your youth?

Didn't own a webcam until late 2008 and has probably only used it three times since,

Leez.

PS. This week, Onemanga shut down its servers and Hulu announced that they're turning into a pay site. It's the end of an era, ladies and gents.

These people are disgusting.

I'll just leave these articles about "celebrities" behaving badly here.

At the low end of the "horrifying" meter, Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston Want Full-Season TV Deal. Uhhhhh... are you guys high?

And at the totally opposite end of the spectrum, the nuclear bomb formerly known as Mel Gibson continues to explode in slow motion, and things are still picking up, according to this piece: Mel Gibson's Alleged Triple-Murder-Suicide Plot Revealed. Really, I don't know how much of what's been said is and isn't true, but the tapes themselves are pretty damning, even if this turns out to be a fabrication. The guy seems like he's gone off the deep-end, and needs psychiatric evaluation, followed by being committed to an inpatient facility or doing jail time. Either way he gets locked up.

And I'm not even going to start on Lindsay Lohan.

Mass media headscratchers

I'm pretty sure there are more exciting things going on in the world for people to talk about than Sarah Palin's breasts.

There's the oil spill in the gulf. There's the mess in the Middle East with the flotilla. (I have never known how to pronounce that word. Is it Flot-ee-uh? Like, is it Spanish?)

I've been back from California for nearly a week... depressing. I keep trying to get ahold of the people from my internship but I've left phone messages and emailed and they haven't responded to either, so I figure that's the most I can do. The bestie is in tropical hell for the summer and begging me to rescue her, so I might be going to Key West in July... we'll see.

This is pretty wicked:

I'm about to get started in earnest on a new script, an idea I've been tossing around since second semester (when it was originally a proposal for a twenty minute screenplay... of course I realized pretty quickly that it takes place all in one little room, so maybe I shouldn't use it as a screenplay.) So I'm going to give it a shot as a play, see if it turns into anything worthwhile, and we'll see what happens. It's about sibling rivalry and my dad says it sounds a bit like King Lear, which I disagree with and don't think my dad has read that play recently... I would know, I had to study it not once, but twice last year!

But, then, TV Tropes says Shakespeare is the originator of a lot of tropes, so its sort of impossible to escape from him entirely.

Anyway, that's all for now. Gonna head out to the beach now... it's like a hundred degrees outside. Gotta love Florida heat.

Warmly yours,

Leez.

Crist nixes six!

Go him!

Though the real question here is "What kind of idiots to we have in Tallahassee who would propose this kind of lunacy in the first place?!"

Nix Six

South Florida Teachers Call in Sick to Protest Bill Six.

Go them! Really, as if the Florida education system couldn't get any worse. The FCAT assumes a one-size fits-all style of learning that doesn't work for every student. Furthermore, the majority of the kids who fail the exams are living at or below the poverty line without a support system outside of school. Teachers, the american public seems to forget, are not substitutes for mom and dad - once their students go home, they have no control over what happens to them.

My aunt works at an inner-city elementary school. More than half the students who come into her class are not reading at level at the start of the school year - this isn't her fault. But the expectation that she will undo eight years of neglect and get these kids up to speed in the course of eight months is unrealistic - A class of fifteen to twenty, at least eight of whom are basically guaranteed not to pass the FCAT, combined with kids with learning disabilities and behavioral problems...

In the words of my 11th grade math teacher, "Some days I want to go flat out crazy so they'll give me a cushy job at the book depository." The problems with the FL education system don't start with the teachers. They start with a bunch of bureaucrats being paid too much to push paper around Mr. H. reckoned that if you cut out all the people whose jobs are basically to do nothing, you'd save millions of dollars a year.

Despite the fact that desegregation was carried out with a vengeance in the 60s, Florida schools are still largely, unofficially segregated. When you have a high school that is 90% anything, whether that 90% is a bunch of rich white kids or made up of the urban poor, what you have is not an "integrated" population, because the lines of race and economics are enforced by the zoning.

Anyone can teach in a classroom full of well-behaved WASPs. But driving, day after day, into the sketchiest part of town, to teach a rowdy bunch of fourth graders how to read is a calling. Grade-based pay will only serve to discourage teachers from taking jobs at poor, urban schools where, despite their credentials, they will be subjected to wages even more lousy than what they already earn. The fact is that Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds are more fiction than fact. It is unrealistic to expect teachers to be able to "fix" kids in a single year who the system has failed since pre-kindergarden, but grade-based pay will serve only to discourage them from even trying.

And this is why ultra-orthodox jews terrify me.

What the...?

Welcome to the sad but true world of Jew-on-Jew violence.

“His followers are really so dedicated to him so that they would do anything to protect him,” said the guest.
Another party guest called Rabbi Aderet’s followers “very fanatical and brainwashed” about the magnitude of the rabbi’s wisdom and said that his congregants seem to fear his alleged magical powers.

Yet some of Rabbi Aderet’s followers believe so much in his abilities that they call him a “messenger from God,” capable of saving them from both health and financial catastrophes.

“Rabbi Aderet has saved a lot of lives that were very close to being dead, and he has helped tremendous amounts of people when they have bankruptcies or any other financial differences in their life —and I’m one of them,” the main supporter said.

This congregant cites a 2007 incident in North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital where his aunt had just suffered a stroke; doctors recommended against life support because the patient had no chance of recovery beyond a vegetable-like state. But when Rabbi Aderet arrived to perform Havdalah at her bedside, sprinkling wine on her forehead, the woman allegedly awoke and lived to see her son get married and two grandchildren grow, according to the congregant.

“I believe that Rabbi Aderet has a very big connection [to God] because I’ve seen it with my eyes,” the supporter said.

I think that, probably, my biggest issue with this variety of Judaism is, as demonstrated by the above quote, their cultlike qualities. Of the groups I am familiar with, most of those tend to rally around their rebbes and treat him like he's their own personal messiah, capable of feats of magic and miracles (see above.) In effect, these groups become like messianic sects, except they still get to call themselves "Judaism" because their rebbes/personal messiahs aren't a second coming, but rather a first.

Bearing in mind that I, as a little conservative Jewish girl whose observance has rapidly declined over the past year, I really have no right to talk about this, but really? Really? Breaking up a party and terrifying small children because they don't agree with your religious beliefs? This is CRAZY. You are CRAZY.

So yeah, as a general rule I'm not the world's most fond of frummies, but that's okay, because I know from experience that they don't like me, either. In my (admittedly limited) interaction with them, I have generally been looked down upon and treated as being worse than a shiksa, because I'm practically sacrilegious.

Of course I full well admit that I'm a hypocrite in complaining about frummies being rude to other people while I'm hardly favorable of them. :|

I

Uh

I got nothing.

I'm not saying I'm a fan, but...

Sarah Palin never said "I can see Russia from my house." That was Tina Fey. Dear American Mass Media: if you're going to refer to it, at least attribute it right.

I'm not a fan of Palin's by any stretch of the imagine (she scares the shit out of me), but this really gets on my nerves.

Wait, the olympic weirdness gets better!

They did perform it at the Olympics, as part of the "folk dance" competition.

The Australians were not amused. The Canadian First Nations aren't either. (Bonus points for pissing off the olympic co-hosts. Not.)

I

Uh

I got nothing. What made them think that was a good idea?

All the things I would have spammed C with if he were not grounded.

I tend to spam things like news articles and music videos back and forth with my friend "C" over AIM. Unfortunately, C is grounded and has not been online in weeks, so I have this huge backlog building up of things I meant to spam him with. So I'll dump it here instead.

Evolutionary Biologists hypothesize the benefit of gay uncles.

The Safety Dance - literal video version.

GLEE. (Arty can walk? GASP!) <--Sarcasm.

NEIL PATRICK HARRIS on GLEE.

(No, seriously, we're obsessed with this show. And Neil Patrick Harris.)

Actually at this point I think this post is less things I wanted to spam C. with and more things I just kind of wanted to spam, period.

They cancelled classes at 12:30 on account of there being a blizzard, which meant my teacher let us out at 1:00, but not before we watched An Andalusian Dog (WARNING: Linked video not for the faint of heart). My dad made me watch this about a year or two ago, so I knew what was coming, but everyone else in the class got a bit of a shock... I looked away. Ugh. It's actually a calf's eye, apparently... I don't know if it was already dead or if they just didn't care about cruelty to animals back then.

Anyway we got like 13-20 inches of snow today and it was glorious and I really want it to keep snowing forever. A friend pointed out that New York City would shut down if this happened, and I am honestly 100% okay with this. I have homework due tomorrow that I really don't want to turn in and I am 100% ready for the weekend.