Small Town Wren

I didn’t watch the Super Bowl. Is anyone surprised? And while the internet is all abuzz about how misogynistic the Super Bowl Ads were this year…I’m not going to discuss that either. Yes, shocking! How could I possibly resist the intersection of media and gender?

Because Riese over at Autostraddle wrote the most amazing takedown of Taylor Swift and the Grammys. That’s how. And oh boy, it touches on virgin/whore complexes, and copycat songwriting, and the perpetually perceived purity of childhood. And she’s got awesome charts and awesome comparison pictures between Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, and has quotes like this:

Let’s bring it back around to the lady that obvs should’ve won: Lady Fucking Gaga. Lady Gaga is viscous hungry sex in hellfire. She’s more theatrical than Broadway and every night she sings in romantic open fists. Lady Gaga opens her dress, extracts her gut, assembles it in shapes splashed in sinister glitter and then shatters her dangerous violent diamonds onto the piano and screams FIRE and it sounds like bad romance. She wants your ugly, she wants your disease, and she’s everything Taylor Swift will never be. Punks don’t win awards, they eat awards.

Yeah. I don’t need to talk about the Super Bowl. Or anything else. Just go read it.

Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk.

I spent some time at the local library this weekend getting some work done. I took some time to graze through some periodicals, including the Utne Reader. It’s been several years since I last picked up the Utne in a tiny Michigan town, and that’s a decision I have come to regret. The January/February 2010 issue has some fantastic articles and dispatches.

In particular there’s a quick dispatch from the IEEE Spectrum on the coming streetcar revival. Considering I’ve been planning a move to the stereotypical trolley-land of San Francisco in two years, the timing is interesting, to say the least. Nevermind that the true trolleys are the land of tourists and real transportation is on subways and trolley-busses (far less romantic).

I’m sort of passionate about public transportation. While driving is convenient (and a necessity for my current locale), it stands in stark contrast to my ethics. Cars are perhaps, among other things, a hallmark of American consumption and consumerism. They’re also terribly inefficient in terms of resources, and time & energy waste. And I’m aware that most people who have never lived in a public transport mecca will go on and on and on about how that is false, cars save so much time, blah blah blah.

I hate to break it to you, but no. They don’t. I’ll concede that they do in public transport black holes, but anyone who’s lived in cities where transportation is essential to the entire population will understand my point. When implemented effectively, public transportation is superior and reduces pollution and the need for resources. It’s why I’m such a huge fan of the bicycle.

But back to the trolleys. I find them to be exciting. It could potentially be a way to get an effective public transportation system in place without the crazy high costs associated with them. Smaller metropolises could utilize a streetcar system to great effect. The more people we get on mass transit the better. Driving a car is political, and it’s not politics I endorse.

I’m probably going to regret posting about this when some of my friends start hacking off their limbs, but! This month’s National Geographic has a fantastic article on bionics. We are officially living in the future. We might not have flying cars, but my god, we have cyborgs. Legit cyborgs.

This is completely awesome. I’m having trouble expressing just how much glee this brings to my life. The Editor’s Note of the issue, I think, states it well:

But the bionics of modern medical engineering has little to do with enabling someone to run 60 miles an hour or use an eye like a zoom lens. It is more about the quiet miracle of holding a fork or seeing the silhouette of a tree. [...] “It made me feel I was just Ray again”

I know what it means to lose part of yourself. Perhaps not in the physical, corporeal sense, but in no way less painful and traumatizing. It’s really difficult to regain that footing, that sense of “this is me.” The fact that these new technologies are giving some of that back to people is simply beautiful.

In some ways it is a touch creepy. Reading about the rewiring of nerve-ends gives my skin the crawlies. I couldn’t read the section on how bionic eyes work. The details are gross, but the big picture is amazing. And I hope that this doesn’t become corrupted in too quick a fashion. I know some of my cyberpunk fanboys are drooling over the idea of that arm with a weapon attached. In the technological dream, such fantasies are cool and fun. I just hope they never enter reality.

Photo courtesy of Mark Thiesson via National Geographic.

My excellent friend Bora “Max” Koknar pointed me in the direction of Lawyers, Guns and Money’s Terrorball.

Our national government and almost all of the establishment media have decided to play a similar game, which could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts until there are no longer any terrorists, and;
(2) If terrorists manage to ever kill or injure or seriously frighten any Americans, they win.

Ah yes, the awesome game played by American politicians and American media outlets alike. It’s a game designed to keep all of us living in fear of ridiculously unlikely things. It’s the same mindset that leads to what counts as “good parenting” (ie nothing short of placing children in plastic bubbles).

It’s also the same reason why our healthcare system is broken and not going to be fixed by any healthcare reform that might pass. Keep the masses scared and distracted so no one can ponder what is truly scary in our country. Like our uninsured and unemployed. Like our rampant destruction of our environment. Like a million other things. Focusing on terrorism lets us ignore the mirror we should be examining. It excuses us from fixing more pressing problems

Which, of course, benefits big media and politicians. As long as we remain scared, politicians retain their power and media retains it captive audience. If we actually focused on real issues and not imaginary ones, we might actually go outside and do good work that will transform our society. Transform it in ways that demands accountability and shuns consumerism for the sake of consuming.

It’s a little old, but very relevant to my life at the moment. Seeing as my recent reading selection has had a lot to do on the subject and I’ve been dealing with this stuff in my personal life, it feels appropriate to link it. A diary entry over at Daily Kos discusses Rape Culture. Here are some pretty disturbing statistics:

According to the findings, around 25% of people believe that women who have been raped are at least partly to blame because of how they dressed, how much they drank or how many sexual partners they have had.

The survey revealed that:
-38% believe that a woman is partly to blame for rape if she walks through a deserted area.
-37% think a woman is partly to blame if she flirts extensively.
-30% think a woman is partly to blame if she flirts with a man at all or fails to say no clearly.

It also found that 10% of people feel that a woman is completely to blame for rape if she has had a number of sexual partners.

Read the rest of it here.

Here’s a steampunk turkey!

This comes courtesy of my wonderful friend John. He listens to this so often that I cannot think about Carl Sagan without thinking about him.

I still have my ode to Halloween in the works, but I’m still quite exhausted from all the antics. I do, however, have bruises, and how I love them.

I look like a battered woman, and in some ways, I am.  A lover or dis-affectionate friend did not give these to me, however.  The best party in the world did.  I spent Halloween in a mosh pit, and I fought hard.

I found these today, and I find them quite stunning.  There’s so much right with them, that it’s hard to isolate any one of thing that stands above the rest.  Hilda was first painted by Duane Bryers in 1958.  That may, in fact, be the best part.

Via 4otos. Way more examples there, too.