Thank you for being a friend

Bea Arthur, the acid-tongued but endearing comedic genius after my own heart who was known by my generation primarily as Dorothy on "The Golden Girls," died today at 86. It really seems like just yesterday I was cracking up at her signature one-liners with my mom, my aunt and my grandma on Saturday nights in the 80s when GG was part of that line-up that began with "227" and ended with "Empty Nest." Even at age 10, I found her crusty deadpan inspiring.

Twenty years later and I'm a devotee of the reruns on Lifetime. Just hearing that opening theme song is like downing a bunch of comfort food. I'm not embarrassed to admit ... OK maybe a little embarrassed to admit ... that my friend got me a bona fide "Stay Golden" Golden Girls t-shirt for my birthday. I've seen every episode dozens of times but they never seem to get old-- a feat owed largely to Bea's brilliant portrayal of 6-foot tall Dorothy and the timelessly wicked onscreen chemistry she had with "Ma," played by 5-foot tall Estelle Getty (another recently fallen Golden Girl). Definitely one of the great female comics of all time, as evidenced by the tens of thousands of mourners who have lamented her passing on YouTube and all throughout cyberspace.

I love you, Bea! Thank you for being a friend!

Some of her most memorable lines as Dorothy:

Sophia: I'm saving the money for my old age.
Dorothy: Old age?? You don't leave fingerprints anymore!
-------
Rose: Well, I'm here if you want to pick my brain.
Dorothy: Rose, maybe we should leave it alone and let it heal.
-------
Blanche: I'm jumpier than a virgin at a prison rodeo.
Dorothy: That's . . . pretty jumpy.
-------
Rose: Can I ask a really dumb question?
Dorothy: Better than anyone I know.
-------
Rose: I'm concerned about nuclear war!
Dorothy: And just yesterday, her biggest concern was whether Bubbles the Chimp was traveling with Michael Jackson against his will.
---------
Rose: I couldn't sleep, so I whipped up a batch of Sverhoeven Crispies. It's a traditional midnight snack from St. Olaf dating back to Viking times.
Dorothy: Well, I guess after a hard night of pillaging and raping, a Viking would want a little something to go with his cocoa.
-------
Mr. Haha (the clown): Well, it says here on my “Haha Birthday List” that Bobby is 7, Jeanie is 9, and Dorothy is...
Dorothy: I’ll punch your heart out, Haha.
---------
Blanche: I was once told I bore a striking resemblance to Cheryl Ladd... but my bosoms are perkier.
Dorothy: Not even if you were hanging upside-down from a trapeze.
-------
Rose: I don't think lying is really a good idea. I once cut school and that proved very bad.
Dorothy: Oh, Rose. We've all cut school. It couldn't have been that bad.
Rose: Oh, yes it was. That was the day they taught EVERYTHING.
Dorothy: The final piece of the puzzle.
-------
[Sophia wants a new TV, but Dorothy plans to use the money to pave the driveway over]
Sophia: And what will I do when every other old lady on the block is watching The Cosby Show?
Dorothy: Well, Ma, I guess you can sit on the new driveway and hope an amusing black family comes along.
---------
[Discussing a bad actress who played Anne Frank in a community theater play]
Dorothy: I mean, for the entire second act, the audience kept yelling, "She's in the attic, she's in the attic!"
---------
Rose: I just found out that baked Alaska can actually be made locally.
Dorothy: Rose, I have an even bigger scoop for you: Mars Bars are made right here on Earth.
---------
[Introducing her ex-husband, who she hates and who always wears a bad toupee]
Dorothy: This is my ex-husband, Stan. And this is his hair.
----------
(knock on door. Dorothy opens it, and it's Stan)
Stan: It's me, Stan.
Dorothy: Oh, really? With that hair I thought you were Ted Danson.
---------
[Plumber knocks on the door. Dorothy opens the door and sees the plumber standing there, holding a toilet]
Plumber: You called for a plumber?
Dorothy: Could I see some identification?
---------
[Rose and Dorothy are attempting to move a new toilet into the bathroom]
Rose: Oh, don't give up, Dorothy. If the ancient Egyptians could move 20-ton stone blocks to build the pyramids, we can move a toilet.
Dorothy: Fine, Rose. Get me 20,000 Hebrews and I'll see what I can do.

fuck off, grandpa

I've been taking it up the ass from a lot of old men lately.

The first incident occurred a few nights ago while my friend and I were sitting in a movie theater watching "The Wrestler" (a phenomenal flick by the way). We were whispering back and forth, admittedly, when this prickly old bastard in a white-collared shirt who was sitting by himself in the row in front of us spun around and shamed us. He didn't "shush" us exactly, but he definitely threw his hands up in the air and let out this sigh of unbridled rage, like the red-faced Dad at the Little League game who disagrees with the ref's call.

Why am I the one who's miffed when I was obviously talking during the movie like an asshole and probably deserved to be chastised, you ask? Because a). We weren't talking that loudly and b). the breach of etiquette in question took place during a pivotal moment in the film when literally everybody else in the theater was talking, too. I mean, I'm sorry, sir, that I can't watch Mickey Rourke fish staples out of his bleeding flesh without uttering a single sound. And I'm sorry that you're obviously such a repressed automaton that you have no higher-level emotional reaction to a scene like that.

Whatever.

The second incident, the one that really provoked violent sex offender fantasies involving fish hooks and deep-fried scrotum in me, took place a couple nights later in Berkeley. I had just finished shopping and returned to my parked car on College Avenue. There I was sitting inside with the motor running, rifling through my purse trying to find my cell phone before I drove off, when I was surprised by a rap on the window. It was another angry old man, this time some professor-looking motherfucker in a tweed jacket. I couldn't hear exactly what he was saying through the window, but the gist of it was that he wanted me to shit or get off the pot. I guess he had been waiting for me to pull out so he could take my parking spot. He had this look of total righteous indignation on his face, like I had deliberately wronged him. His angry-old-man eyebrows were knitted together like two fat, gray caterpillars locked in a death match over a maple leaf.

Now granted, driving in any city sucks ass and Berkeley is no exception. College Ave. in particular is so irritatingly congested at all hours of the day and night that, at times, I myself have felt like beating the shit out of someone for their parking space. And yes, it is especially annoying when there's a long, angry line of cars forming behind you and you're double-parked with your signal on, waiting for the dipshit whose space you're after to stop jerking off and get the fuck out of there so you can park your damn car. But that said, when did it become a socially acceptable practice to actually walk up to a person sitting in their vehicle and demand that they move for you? I mean, how did this guy even know I was planning to leave my spot, anyway? What if I had just returned to my car for a second to grab a condom from the glove compartment and was about to head back inside the bar? Or what if I was waiting there for my paraplegic mother to finish using the ATM machine and roll back to the car in her wheelchair?

Anyway, my point is that he was a pushy, presumptuous old prick. And if I had had a copy of "War and Peace" handy, I would have turned off the ignition, rolled down the window and started reading aloud just to spite him.

Whoa . . . I never even knew Megan Mullally was a Republican (Part II)

I heard a lot this month from the Right about how Sarah Palin is a brave, ethical leader who stood up to her own party to battle corruption in Alaska and who should be lauded as an inspiration to decent, down-to-earth, hard-working American women everywhere. And I heard a lot from the Left about how she is a gun-wielding, racist psycho who will send us back to the Dark Ages with her views on war, global-warming and abortion.

All my ass really wants to know is,

how many Alaskan Amber Ales do you think it would take
for this . . .






. . . to turn into this?





I intend to find out on Halloween.

To test my working theory that the reason Sarah Palin rocks the same hair as Karen from "Will and Grace" is that Karen is Sarah Palin's secret alter ego, I have decided to dress up as a Palin-Walker Transformer for Halloween. My plan is simple -- to drink until Sarah Palin is unmasked as Karen Walker. Without giving too much away, let's just say the costume will involve an NRA badge, a martini shaker and a breakaway suit jacket.

It's really anyone's guess how many Tequila licks it will take to get to the horny-drunk-evil-socialite-on-a-sitcom center of my Palin Tootsie Roll Pop, but I truly can't wait to find out. I also can't wait to find out how many times at the Halloween party I can hum the Transformers theme song and obnoxiously overuse the line, "I'm more than meets the eye!"

A Teacher's Address to the Nation

This is an entry I've been wanting to post for awhile, and what better time than the start of the new school year? I can't take credit for it. It comes to us from my cousin Samantha -- a wife, mother and schoolteacher living in North Carolina, and the only woman I know with as much unbridled acrimony clogging up her veins as me.

The most delightful thing about these emails is that they answer the age-old question we all pondered as children: "Does my teacher hate me?"

EMAIL I:
I just took it up the ass today from a parent who was appalled about the number of grammatical mistakes included in a reading passage that I assigned. Technically everything she included in her lengthy e-mail was correct (she noted every single spelling error and punctuation mark, thank you very much). However, I would hardly call a comma splice an "appalling disservice to our kids". In truth, I should have read it over more carefully. Silly me for attending more to the content than the sentence construction. I e-mailed her back and apologized for my simpleton attempt to teach her child (choking on every word I wrote). Would he ever recover? Alas, only time will tell.

Her response? Not a simple "Thanks. Glad we took care of this." No, no- that would be too civil. Why berate me once when twice is just as nice. I got another long e-mail AFTER my apology, lecturing me on the responsibilities of my apparent role as the grammatical Pied Piper. Believe me when I tell you, a single tear rolled down my cheek when she told me about the harrowing bout young Ben has been forced to endure thanks to my callousness. And oh, the inner turmoil she went through as she debated on whether or not to e-mail me.

I hate white women who forgo their careers to devote their lives to their inconsequential little brats. Get a fucking life. Kick me in the uterus if I ever suggest my kid is more important than he really is. Did I mention this mother home-schooled her children until last year? Yeah.... that's totally normal. I'm sure a grammar mistake is the reason why your son can't open his mouth other than to suck on your tit.

This bitch should be glad I'm giving up slashing tires for lent.



EMAIL II:
It's just unbelievable how thankless both our jobs are. Not that I expect a pep rally in my honor, but a simple "You don't suck, Mrs. S." would do just fine. I received that e-mail on the heels of a kid telling me to shut up and a girl throwing a tantrum in my class because I had the nerve to bust her for skipping class. Excuse me if my head wasn't into proofreading that day. Maybe it's hormones or something, but I just can't take another person who doesn't have half the responsibilities that I do telling me how to do my job. I am so sick of criticism being guised as a question or a "helpful little hint". Who knew the "daily grind" was literally going to mean the grinding of my soul.

You know John gets shit on just as much as we do, but he at least has the consolation of having the title of "Doctor". People automatically treat him with a level of respect, and one day his pay will be equal to his efforts. I would like to see some ignorant jackass try to enlighten him on the finer points of surgery. I will forever and always be a "school teacher". My salary will never commensurate with my effort. I tell people what I do, and their response is "It must be nice to have your summers off." Parents treat me like I'm an employee who needs to taught how to teach. You must be infallible in order to be worthy of spending 50 minutes with their blessed kid. Their idea of showing me respect is re-gifting a sample pack from Bath and Body Works or a pin cushion in the shape of an apple that says "#1 teacher" at Christmas time. Do I look like a 75 year old spinster with a hairy mole and 13 cats?

I can't stand that I am held accountable to some idiot parent who believes Harry Potter shouldn't be taught in schools because it promotes witchcraft. The prospect of a job with no boss (or in my case, 1 boss as oppossed to 100 self-appointed ones) sounds like the Holy Grail. I really, really hope that you find a job where you are your own boss. At least one of us deserves to be happy.

Whoa . . . I never even knew Megan Mullally was a Republican

I mean . . . ?

Come on, don't pretend like I was the only one who initially thought John McCain had chosen Megan Mullally, the actress who played Karen Walker on Will and Grace, as his running mate.

OK, so maybe it is a little ludicrous in hindsight. But when the announcement that McCain had named his No. 1 was made last week, I was overly tired, decompressing from another hundred hour work week at the toilet paper factory, kind of comatosely staring at the TV, possibly buzzed off a novelty liqueur . . . you get the picture. Not to mention that I hadn't actually heard the name Sarah Palin mentioned yet -- all CNN kept saying was that McCain had made this left field pick, and that the person was a woman. So in my jacked up state, I thought for a split second I saw Karen up there at the podium, rockin' some cleave and drunkenly waving an American flag around. And I was like, "What the fuuuuuuuuck . . . ? When did Megan Mullally get all political?"

And even though I was consciously aware the whole time that Karen had just been a persona Mullally played, not . . . . an actual . . . person . . . I still half expected her to tip back a martini, turn to Laura Bush, frown at her outfit and say in that absurdly high-pitched voice, "Honey, what's that, what's going on, what's happening here?"

Aww, hell. I'll admit it -- as far as sitcom reruns on Lifetime go, for my money it doesn't get much better than Karen Walker. Shit, I love her so much I (tried to) dress up like her for Halloween a couple years ago. So imagine my disappointment when, on closer inspection, I saw the vice presidential nominee was actually this four-eyed Walker wannabe from Alaska.

Still though, note Gov. Sarah Palin's hairdo, her bone structure, her clothes . . . if those glasses ever came off, the resemblance to Karen would be uncanny, wouldn't it?

WOULDN'T IT????

Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.

I know I'm not alone here when I say the only thing this foxy politico from the Igloo Sate is missing from her repertoire is a gay sidekick, an El Salvadoran servant and a bottle of Bennies.

Elantra gives "Zoo," a film based on the Washington horsefucking incident, 2 very disappointed teets down

PRE-RAMBLE: OF ALL US JOURNALIST SOBs, I THINK MOVIE CRITICS ARE BY FAR THE MOST CONTEMPTIBLE. A MORE UNDESERVEDLY SMUG, SELF-IMPORTANT GROUP OF HACKS YOU WON'T FIND, AS THE VAST MAJORITY OF THEM COULDN'T MAKE A FILM ABOUT PAINT DRYING IF YOU SPOTTED THEM THE CAN OF PAINT. LET THE RECORD SHOW I NEVER CLAIMED TO BE AN EXCEPTION TO THAT RULE; I AM, IN FACT, FULLY AWARE OF MY HYPOCRISY IN POSTING THIS WRITE-UP:

If you are thinking about seeing "Zoo," the new semi-documentary about the Seattle man who in 2005 screwed an Arabian stallion and died of a perforated colon, don't. It sucked big hairy horse balls -- and not in a good way.

I am still marveling at how it is even possible to make a boring movie about a real-life secret coven of professional family men who risk everything to hook up with farm animals on the weekends. But damn it if "Zoo," which was based on the biggest news story to come out of the Pacific Northwest since the serial killer Ted Bundy, wasn't the most tedious thing I have sat through in ages.

Now for the obligatory backpedaling. I commend director Robinson Devor and writer Charles Mudede for taking on material which can safely be described as difficult. To recap: A man, barely conscious and bleeding from his anus, was droppped off at an emergency room in rural Enumdaw, Wash. He died within hours of, for simplicity's sake, serious ass problems. Authorities soon traced Kenneth Pinyan, who had been an otherwise normal engineer for Boeing, to an underground group of "zoos," short for "zoophiles," aka folks into hard core bestiality. When it turned out Washington didn't technically have any laws against man-on-animal sex, the public went apeshit and a few opportunistic politicians started pushing for legislation. Pinyan's case became late night talk show fodder and the Seattle Times' most read story ever.

Mudede, who doubles as the editor of the alternative weekly "The Stranger," told reporters about his and Devor's project, "We didn't want to focus on the tawdriness. That had been done. We wanted to look dispassionately into a world that exists here, but prior to this case few had ever known about."

So the two went the arty route, leaving out déclassé descriptions of Arabian boners and filling their reels instead with endless graceful silhouettes of horses and dreamy shots of dawn breaking on Washington farms. The filmmakers never put Pinyan's fellow zoophiles in the hot seat; I got the impression that Mudede and Devor thought it would be too rude to subject the "zoos" to a bunch of questions--especially the ones I was most jonesing for them to ask: Why are you attracted to horses? What does it feel like to have sex with a horse? How do you, uh, get the horse, you know . . . warmed up?



Instead, we get a handful of zoos whining from afar about how unfairly they have been treated since their story broke. I say from afar because we can't see them; we can only hear them (reportedly a condition of their participation in the film). Their disembodied voices float over reenactments of Saturday night card games and other see-they're-just-like-you-and-me activities Pinyan and pals supposedly shared in addition to their unsavory pastime of choice. All this set to a score that sounds like a piano being tuned. The result is a very tasteful, very serious, very high-brow film . . . about horsefucking.

Hmmmm.

Watching this movie, I felt like I was back in Catholic school, fighting the urge to make fart sounds with my armpits during morning prayers. As it is never explained to us why the film's subjects are being treated with such reverence, the reverence just feels absurd. These are, after all, horsefuckers--one of whom admits to having used the Internet screen name "Mr. Hands."



Not that I couldn't have been persuaded to care about Mr. Hands. As an indie flick frequenter, I have been suckered into feeling sorry for all sorts of sickos: drug addicts, criminals, transsexual Filipino immigrants living in Tel Aviv . . . (the latter are the subjects of the 2006 documentary "Paper Dolls"). But the burden of making people give a damn about their characters is on the filmmakers, and in this case they failed to deliver the necessary goods.

For one thing, we never find out very much about Pinyan; his family refused to participate in the film and none of the other zoos seem to have been particularly good friends with him. What's worse, I was disturbed by the unmistakable manure stench of a hidden agenda to portray the surviving zoophiles as the newest misunderstood minority group--the implication being that society is denying them their freedoms to have sex with whomever, or whatever, they choose. That is not a position any responsible person could possibly endorse after learning how Pinyan died.



"Zoo"'s biggest sin of all is its refusal to get off its high horse, so to speak, and answer some of the basic hows and whys. The easiest way to do that would have been to simply show the footage of barnyard romps shot by Pinyan's circle. Yeah, that's right--it turns out the zoos not only enjoyed making videos of their sex acts, they had an entire library collection worth of horsefucking on DVD. This infuriating fact we learn about halfway through the film. That Mudede and Devor had this stuff in their possession and didn't push to include it in their movie is akin to burying one's head in a textbook about long-necked mammals when there is a giant purple giraffe standing in the middle of the room.

If you remember nothing else from this blog entry, remember this: when I fork out ten bucks to see a movie about a bestiality accident, I expect to see some goddamned equine cock.

Welcome to my blog

I created this site mostly as an outlet for myself: a broke, lovestarved, soon to be 28-year-old reporter who can't afford new tires for her Hyundai but who can tell the shit out of a poop joke. (For proof of the latter, just read through to the end. I promise you won't be disappointed). For the privilege of making less money than a parking meter on an Amish compound, I write for a once proud daily newspaper now owned by another greedy soulless bloodsucking hippopotamusfucking corporate media mercenary. This sweltering syphilitic sore embedded in Satan's ass hair who shall remain nameless is exceptionally notorious in the newspaper world for starving his employees and bleeding their publications dry, as his multibillion dollar conglomerate spreads across the country like 'The Nothing' in "The Neverending Story."

Like most journalists I know, I am trapped in a psychological and emotional purgatory of my own making. I teem with a combination of smugness and self-loathing; depression and mania; disgust for and jealousy of the upper class. I balance my heartfelt longing to effect change through objectivity with my thinly veiled contempt for anyone whose views differ from my own. To suppress the fear of my own extinction in the Digital Age, I drink a lot of rum on the weekends.

Since I will probably never host a late night talk show on HBO, I am hoping this site will serve as venting grounds for everyone who is just one more sexless night or suffocating workday in their suburban business park away from popping open a vein in their stepmom's kitchen sink. Say what you want about the Internet: it fills a need. What we can't publish in the mainstream media we can write here--toxic, uncensored and free of charge. In fact, I'd like to establish a real forum for unhealthy open hostility.

So bring on your thoughts and commentaries. Like movies? Write a review. Hate your brother-in-law? Post an original cartoon of him licking the shit streak off the thong of a 50-year-old stripper. (See? I told you I'd deliver).

In short, welcome to my blog!