The two-hour premiere of the "No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency" on HBO last night was full of exposition and was beautifully shot in Botswana. I've never read the novels by Alexander McCall Smith, but Jill Scott as Precious Ramotswe is charming, resourceful and master of observation and deduction. Shortly after opening shop, she lands five cases and solves them all, although as her secretary notes, not one of the clients actually paid for her services. I really enjoy how the show subverts the audience's expectations about gender as well as what life in Africa's really like.
Idris Elba shows up briefly to play yet another sexy gangster.

You're aware of my little tradition of crawling onto the couch to watch a film the morning after hosting a dinner. I didn't have anything lined up but found "The Wackness" on cable.

I was expecting a stoner comedy.

Instead, it's about a depressed pot dealer who loses his viginity.

*Yawn*

I kept thinking, dude, what the fuck do you have to be depressed about?

It's 1994 and you have an ice cream cart full of weed.

Cheer the fuck up.

Then there's Method Man sporting a seriously heinous Jamaican accent.

Mary-Kate Olson's bug-eyed hippie character was equally annoying.

Hannah Betts must be operating under the delusion that Samantha Jones' sex life is aspirational when she counsels women to fuck men that they don't even like.

"In a sense, sex with someone you actively dislike is the purest form of intercourse, untrammelled as it is by impediments such as emotion, or a desire to make oneself in any degree likeable. As a sexual scenario, it has all the upsides of a one-night stand without any of those dispiriting anxieties that said individual may, in fact, be a serial killer."

What kind of wacky mars and venus shit do you have to swallow in order to believe that "the purest form of intercourse" exists without any emotion or that views an affective connection as only "impediment" to doing the nasty? Feelings have nothing to do with it!
As long as they've a pulse and a stiffy go get 'em ladies!
It's not difficult to see this as a thinly disguised insult for women which really just benefits men.

I can hear the faux cawfee-clatch banter Betts has going in her head:
"You don't like the guy? So! Fuck him anyway, the sex could be like totally hot!"

We shouldn't even expect to like a dude before we hop into bed with him.
Yep.
This is good advice for women.

Wouldn't you know that "Earth Hour" is scheduled right in the middle of my dinner party this weekend? Now I'll need candles on top of everything else.
I'm going to give the blood oranges their swan song for this year's season in a sauce.
I've posted the recipe before, but it bears repeating.

Medbh's Blood Orange Sauce:
1 cup blood orange juice (strain the juice to get out the pulp. You'll need 8-10 blood oranges depending on the size)
3/4 cup veggie stock
1 cup heavy cream

Put the liquids in a sauce pan on simmer for one hour.
Don't let it come to a boil.
After the hour's up, whisk in a stick of butter one piece at a time and serve.
Best over fish or chicken.

I may not get a chance to post again until Sunday.
We've first timers coming over so there's to be no slacking.

This dress from Nordstrom's caught me eye today since I'm always on the lookout for one that will accomodate my impossibly narrow shoulders and general frog-like physique.

Chevron stripes are bold yet not loud here, and the hint of orange keeps this from being overly neutral.

Scrolling down to the hem, I stopped with an abrupt "hell no."

The hem's uneven, tattered and makes the whole bottom half look stretched out of shape.

Such potential.

One of the popular stereotypes from the mars and venus gender mythology maintains that women don't like the Three Stooges, that the trio are to men's taste only. You can't imagine how many dudes have engaged me into some cockamamie dispute on that very point.

Bullshit.

I watched them obsessively everyday after school and at the weekend as a child.

I would guesstimate that I've seen each one starring the original Moe/Larry/Curly team at least 100 times each.

Shemp's okay, but he's no Curly. Joe sucks ass entirely.

The Stooges' short films are an uncanny mix of unparalleled innocence and pandemonium.

The New York Times reports that the Farrelly brothers have a production in mind.

What? The Stooges never did fart and dick jokes!

What to make of the casting announcement?

Benicio Del Toro as Moe?

Sean Penn as Larry?

Jim Carrey to stuff his pie-hole to play Curly?

Physically, I can see each dude dressed for the role with no problem.

I just have trouble expecting that Del Toro will actually open his eyes wide enough to get them poked. Or that Sean Penn will drop the scowl for Larry's winsome smile. How will Jim Carrey stop being Jim Carrey in order to play one of the foremost men in comedic history?

I wonder.

I cast a gimlet eye on a piece of promotional material from a local department store in the post today advertising "Ageless: The First Anti-Age Fragrance."
Le sigh.
This bottle of distilled woman-hating claims to be "the first anti-aging scent in the world, a patent-pending blend of pink grapefruit, mango, antioxidant rich pomegranate, jasmine and musk" designed to make "women smell more youthful. Sample this revolutionary scent today; in tests, men estimated women wearing Ageless were 8 years younger."

It retails at $98 for 100 ml.
With added tax, you can piss away more than a hundred clams in order to avoid the spectre of smelling like an old bitch.

It's not enough that we have to police our appearances according to the tenets of compulsory femininity, now we also have to fret senescence in our scent.

I had to pause while writing up a lecture on Benjamin Franklin to scream out the lyrics "I'm a bad motherfucker"along with Mos Def.

Franklin would totally approve.

This video clip illustrates what benefit public speaking classes had for local Councillor Karen Stintz. The headline in today's paper reads "City paid $4,500 to fix politician's 'shrill' voice."
Shrill?
That's code for women sound like strident harpies squawking to disrupt the dudely peace.

If the city paid just under $4,000 for Adam Giambrone's French lessons as well as a human spray-painted Elvis statue for Glenn De Baeremaeker's picnic, then why begrudge a woman who wants to deflect the contempt held for women in public office?
High-pitched rapid speech gets dismissed as girly and incompetant.
Remember when Tucker Carlson asked with a straight face if we could actually stand to listen to Hillary Clinton's voice for 8 years?
What he really meant was why we have to listen to any woman at all.

Just look what voice lessons did for Mia Farrow's character in "Radio Days."

Diana Joseph’s essay collection “I’m Sorry You Feel that Way: The Astonishing but True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man and Dog” caught my eye with the promise of a subversive contemplation of how women’s lives are mediated by their relationships with men, especially so for heterosexual women. My distaste for and disappointment in the fifteen compositions largely resides in how eagerly Joseph recedes into the background of her memoir. The men, whether her father, boyfriends, brothers, husbands, son, boss or neighbours stand in the foreground, leaving me wonder how far the author’s perspicacity regarding male privilege extends. Why do the dudes take over her story? Is it to hedge bets that folks would rather hear all about the men in her life? That she’s not as interesting in her own right? What about the women in her life? Does she not consider them to be important in her own identity formation?

The closest the collection comes to a feminist epiphany is in “It’s Me. It’s Him. It’s Them,” the eleventh in the book. She describes her friend Andrew Boyle as a "pervert" for 12 pages. He’s fashionable, cultured yet obsessed with getting just-legal young women to pose naked for his camera. He continually offers scathing evaluations of any women in his proximity according to his large breasted and otherwise skinny ideal. It’s a mystery why she would retain such a friendship. Then for a page and a half at the end, she reveals that the reason that she’d like to kick him swiftly in the nut sack is because she developed into a D-cup when she was twelve years-old and suffered continual shame and harassment from boys and men when in public. Joseph observes:

“It seemed to me all I was doing was walking down the hall, or down the street, or home from school, or I was looking for a book on magic tricks at the public library, but obviously I was doing something more. I was doing something dirty and wrong. I’ve never quite gotten over the idea that the body I live in could invite such attention. That something about me—the way I walked, maybe, or the way I chewed gum, the way I dressed, or those really great high-heeled shoes, or that I was such a little girl with such an enormous chest—invited men into thinking it was okay to let me know they wanted something from me, something I didn’t want to give them, but since I brought it on myself, maybe I had to.”

Even though she’s spent her life second-guessing everything she wears because of men’s sexual advances, the author steps into the shadows all too frequently so we can be reminded that men’s interests, actions, desires, advice and position of authority are all of central concern. By the end, I was just depressed by her willingness to disappear and make it be all about the menz. In “The Girl Who Only Sometimes Said No” she puts her own sexual promiscuity on discussion after lamenting that her son pointed to a girl in his yearbook and referred to her as a slut. She’s unapologetic for smooching boys or flashing her tits as a young woman, but then ends the essay with the analysis that sluts are really sad and looking for someone to love them:

“I could try and change his mind about sluts, like me, like the girl in his eighth-grade yearbook, like so many girls he’s yet to meet. I could tell him that he shouldn’t call a girl a slut because someday she might be somebody’s mother. I could tell him maybe she’s a slut because she’s lonely, she’s sad, she’s hoping someone or something will make the lonely and sad go away.”

Oh, brother.
We shouldn’t denigrate women because they might be someone’s mother. Promiscuous women are all damaged or pathological. I’m choked on the slut-shaming and gender essentialism on offer. Let’s start with the recognition that a woman’s worth rests not in the condition of her hymen or amount of sexual partners, but who she is as a human being. How are we still investing any linguistic or moral relevance into the terms slut or virgin?

Joseph doesn’t completely ignore women. She reserves scorn and ridicule for a certain type, the ladies who have cats, wear Patagonia, listen to NPR and enjoy the outdoors are mocked outright. She pulls a classic move by cozying up to the man who turns out to be her common law husband by joking about this group of women. The fastest way to gain approval by lots of dudes is to bitch about what terrible cunts women are so that you can assure men that you’re not one of them.
Shitting on women and giving men centre stage is exactly how you get a book deal.
It’s sure to be a bestseller.

The Simpsons went to Ireland on last night's episode.
Sure, there are stereotypes, but then they riff on them as well.

When Grandpa and Homer buy a pub (or "pube" as Colm Meaney refers to it) they make it a success when they re-introduce smoking.
You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

The terror twins are finally knocked out.

It's maddening that Winslet's Nazi pedophile scored the Oscar when Kristin Scott Thomas' gut-wrenching performance didn't. There's a scene where her sister (a literature professor) starts yelling at her students when they offer a simplistic reading of murder in a Dostoyevsky novel. Lea, played by Elsa Zylberstein, barks at the youngsters that Dostoyevsky didn't know shit about why people commit murder and that they had to "stop treating books like bibles."
She lost her shit entirely.
It's a complete taboo in university to yell at your students or even to tell them that they're wrong, so I particularly enjoyed the dramatic heft of the scene.
Scott Thomas' Juliette moves in with her sister after serving a 15 year prison sentence.
She has to explain her prolonged absence several times in the film, each encounter underscores the emotional toll of such a long isolation.
A social worker gets all nosey having read up on her file.
She pokes her for answers about why Juliette remained quiet throughout the investigation and trial. She snaps appropriately, did the woman really think after all this time that she'd open up to her. Juliette doesn't spare any feelings, just as after she has sex with a guy she meets in a pub, and he asks her if it was any good, she replies "no, not at all." He slinks out the door.
I won't tell you why she went to prison for so long.
Watch it and see for yourself.

It occured to me this afternoon as we were leaving with the dogs that these tights are probably too "young" for me.

Blee.

This promotion campaign for "TrueBlood" in New Zealand rocks.

The whole time I was reading this article I knew what was coming and felt like I'd read it many times before. What a predictable pile of hateful crap.
Simon Jones' dudely lamentation "Where Did My Sex Kitten Go?" reads as a completely fabricated story to remind us what awful cunts women are.
Here's his conundrum:

"I’d never wanted to get married, and I was surprised when, after five years, Frances said she wanted to. But I agreed, and for the next couple of years nothing changed. Apart from work: Frances was really starting to make a name for herself.
I was delighted when she told me that she had been headhunted for an extremely prestigious post, but stunned when she said she was unsure if she wanted it, because she was nearly 30 and wanted a child. We’d always agreed we didn’t want children, so this came out of the blue. She said it needn’t change anything, but there was no way a child wouldn’t impact negatively on our lifestyle and I said as much.
I’d never seen Frances react as she did then. She completely lost the plot, screaming that I owed her a child. She admitted she’d lied about not wanting children — she said it was because she loved me and didn’t want to lose me. The next two weeks were dreadful, full of late-night talks and tears. Eventually, against my better judgment, I agreed to go for it. "

Poor man, he's forced into marriage and having a child even though he never wanted either.
We shouldn't blame him for not having enough spine or sense to walk away; we should blame Frances for being a manipulator and a liar. He was just a defenseless poor man victimized by a demanding woman. Women call all the shots afterall, and Frances screaming that he owes her a child is just how all men get roped into having children.

Jones goes on to explain:

"Don’t get me wrong, I love Anna, but I also get on with the rest of my life — work, relationships and other interests. I’m the same person I’ve always been. But for all the talk of multitasking, it’s the mothers who become completely one-dimensional. It’s ironic, when being sexy and attractive is what got them pregnant in the first place. And it’s not only Frances who’s become a boring frump — it’s depressingly common to see clever, attractive women become parenting bores. You can spot them at parties, in baggy clothes and making no effort to be interesting to men. Surely the ultimate mummy could still be a sex cat, if no longer a sex kitten?"

He has a range of interests outside his wife and daughter to be getting on with.
"Real life" resides outside the family home, folks.
How dare women focus on children or fail to be interesting to men?
Holy fuck, that's why women are here afterall: to dress up for and amuse men.

But wait for it.
This prick isn't done yet.
Regular readers here can see it coming.
He has an affair with Maria from work.
Then Maria starts telling him to leave his wife.

"The next morning, I moved in with Maria. But it wasn’t long before she also suggested marriage. I couldn’t believe it. I had a strong sense of déjà vu. She’d often decried the way Frances had become so maternal and domestic, claiming that wasn’t for her — now she was heading the same way. We got married. Then she said she wanted a baby. I repeated all the protests I’d made to Frances. The arguments raged until Maria eventually said she would leave me and have a child with someone else, and I gave in. "

Another woman bullies him into marriage and a child.
Women!
They all conspire to make unreasonable demands upon men and will use an underhanded tactic to get what they want.
Men are doomed, I tells ya!

Look, I call bullshit on this fluff piece of male moaning just as much as the defense used in a local murder trial this week. In the gratuitous "Boy Meets Girl, Horror Ensues" over at the Toronto Star we learn that the defense for the teenager who stabbed Stefanie Rengel to death last year claims he was a victim of "sexual blackmail" by his girlfriend.
That headline is drenched in misogyny. You have to google it because I couldn't get the link to work.
All week I've heard that fucking phrase "sexual blackmail" on CBC radio while the girl was on trial. Not once did I hear anyone object to the very concept.
You cannot argue you were victimized by a girl who threatened to withhold sex.
This is patriarchal nonsense, that we are asked to assume that men are just powerless to the lure of pussy and bear no ability to retain moral judgments when sex is in question.
What this says is that men are fucking zombies who have no moral compass.
Why aren't men offended by being characterized as witless slaves to pussy?
He was not "her weapon" as the article suggests.
The dude in question should have had a moral compass in order to recognize that you don't kill someone just because your fuck-nut girlfriend asks you to; you walk the fuck away instead.

The girl who ordered the murder was found guilty.
By all accounts she was.
But the dude who actually stabbed poor Stefanie Rengel should not have a leg to stand on with this concocted and fraudulent defense.

If you had to select a single film to use in order to teach folks how to make superior films, as an example of what they should aspire to create, it should be "Sullivan's Travels" (1941).
It's fucking perfect.
I laughed!
I cried!
Oh, the humanity!
Veronica Lake is a sex bomb with deadly comic timing.

What the fuck is with dudes using dominance and cruelty in dog training?

Last night we watched two episodes of a local programme "At the End of My Leash" which had me more horrified by the host Brad Pattison than I am by Cesar Millan's techniques. I found the clip above on YouTube even though what I saw last night makes the assembled scenes pale in comparison.

Not only does he harp on the line right from the patriarchal playbook about dog owners existing as the "alpha" to dominate the pooch, he used untoward aggression by pulling the dog by the neck on his hind legs until he submitted. At least Millan engages dogs on the ground in order to "master" them. The dog on last night's programme was suspended on two legs for several minutes and was clearly in wild-eyed distress. From that exercise, dogs learn that agression is part of the human bond and to fear you as a result. Many years ago the monks from New Skete explained why the "alpha rolling" maneuver puts dogs in peril.


In another episode, he punished a woman for not walking the dogs regularly by making her sit alone on a chair in her basement for a prolonged period while he continued training the dogs with the husband. So bullying women is part of his agenda as well.
Man's on top and everyone else better follow orders and fall in line.
The dude clearly has issues about domination and control that extend beyond dogs.

We're teaching our dogs with positive reinforcement to exhibit manners reflective of polite pooches. I would never raise a hand to them or allow anyone else to do them harm. Pattison would not be let in any proximity to Omar and Kima, or any other dogs if folks understood how damaging his brand of training is.

I wouldn't touch a glass of orange juice even if it were the only liquid available and I'd just eaten a bag of salted nuts on a hot day.

The last popsicles in the box are always the orange flavour.

Orange sherbet tastes like gutted upholstery from my grandmother's house.

Oranges remind me of St. Joseph's aspirin and all associations with sickness and discomfort.

But oh, the splendour of blood oranges!

They're a magical mix of grapefruit and berries by proxy of the carrion orange.

Packed with more Vitamin C than you need in an entire day, just eating one makes me feel instantly restored and healthy.

They're a harbinger of spring and of better food to come after all the subterranean knotted veggies of the winter.

I'm eating two of them everyday, because any more than that would seem unreasonable.

James Franco playing Allen Ginsberg?
What.
The.
Fuck.
Worst casting choice in recent history.

The film about the obscenity trial which followed the publication of his poem Howl is in production and slated for release next year.

Check out two upcoming rom-coms laced with a heavy dose of misogyny.
One wonders what woman wants to go to the cinema and pay to eat shit for two hours.

Uma Thurman learns that she can't be an expert in "The Accidental Husband."
Her uppity bitch character gets taken down a peg and tricked into marriage.
Aw, but his rancor transforms into love, so it's sweet.
They have absolutely nothing in common, but hey, everyone loves a firefighter.

Then there's Matthew McConaughey (a man who's made a living making male privilege look whimsical and charming) in "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past."
Those cum-dumpsters won't leave a dude alone!
The legion of women he's fucked and tossed aside come back to haunt him briefly until he's rewarded with the one that got away.
Amoral predators who fail to regard women as human beings usually find a happy ending in Hollywood.
I'd rather tear my eyelashes out than see either one.

In 1986 I walked into a theatre with a boyfriend prepared for a boring costume drama about how Mary Shelley came up with the idea for "Frankenstein."

Instead, I was floored by Ken Russell's interpretation of the Romantics as drug-addled libertines.

It was Natasha Richardson's first film.
Wide-eyed, dewy skin, serpentine tresses.
I was captivated by her performance.
She went on to star in two of my other favourite films, "Patty Hearst" and "The Handmaid's Tale."

Who knows what her medical condition really is right now.
Blessings to her and the family.

This ad from a firm in Zurich was appearing at a few blogs the other day.
Now it's up at Ads of the World.

It features a vampire with tampon-fangs, followed by the copy "very absorbent."
I doubt it will ever actually run in a campaign to sell OB tampons.

The ad's funny and actually prettty smart considering how many women have a thing for the vampire genre and have probably wondered if they could get their monthly flow sucked out.
Did I say that out loud?

All the comments online saying this is offensive sound as though they come from folks who think vaginas are dirty and gross to begin with.

Birthdays are all about the presents, right?

I'm getting this in the post soon and cannot wait.

Elaine Showalter is one of the best feminist scholars out there.

I'm rubbing my hands together in anticipation of her latest work "A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx." Bradstreet's included in my lecture for this week so I wish I had it in my hot hands already. I taught for this professor once who had 300 undergraduates mesmerized by his insights on the Puritan poet.

He was like a rock star in the lecture hall.

Me, I'll be lucky if they look up from their laptops long enough to throw me the stink eye.

Gah.

It's my frigging birthday today.

I'm off to go shopping for a hawt dress for this evening.

Naturally, I'm coveting this teal number worn by Scary Sadshaw.

Chances are there won't be anything out there for me, in which case I'll wear the dress I wore to the Irish Blog Awards.

Christ, Penelope Cruz knows how to work a cigarette.

It doesn't carry as much flourish here like when Johnny approached her at the wedding in "Blow," but still, she's pretty hot with the smokes.

My eyes rolled at Scarlett using the most hackneyed gesture to signal passion when she bit her lip while in bed with Javier. It's such a cinematic cliche, it drives me nuts.

Who chews on their lips when aroused?

Javier's a complete dream dude.

He's accomplished, interesting, articulate and likes women without any of that macho posturing bullshit.

There are two things that annoyed me about "Vicky Cristina Barcelona."

One: Voiceovers generally drive me nuts and it seemed particularly pointless here.

Two: I know that Woody Allen was trying super hard to be sophisticated and cosmopolitan in his meditation on love and relationships, but he's locked into a narrow view of women.

Vicky can't know her own mind and seems like the life-long student.

Cristina is a perpetual seeker and dabbler in the arts.

Maria Elena was called a genius as an artist and could have been a concert pianist yet couldn't manage to do either.

Juan's the "real" artist getting exhibitions and acclaim while the women are still primarily muse. Women can't be experts; they should just aspire to fuckability.

Critics said that they adored Allen's film because he stepped back from himself in this one. He may not have a corporeal presence in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" but he's projected all through it.

Mr. M booked us into Canoe for tomorrow evening.
It's regarded as one of the best restaurants in the country.
I popped over this morning to have a look at the menu.
Not good.
It lists overly fussy food at outrageous prices.
There's really only one entree posted that I can even eat, yet it comes with cauliflower, a lumpen fungus abomination masquerading as a vegetable.

But fuck it.
We'll go anyway.
I want to check out the view of the city which is supposed to be grandiose.

Why am I not able to watch Zoe Bell's new web series "Angel of Death" on crackle.com?
Do you have to be in the U.S. to access it?
Wah!
I need to see her kick some ass!

This is what happens when you think you have a birthright to pussy.

Tim Kretschmer, the 17 year-old gunman in Germany murdered 8 girls and 3 women at his former school, mostly with execution-style headshots.

When women generally won't hook up with you, you may want to entertain the idea that you are the fucking problem. Posting signs bullying women into doing their "natural duty" to fuck you, or going on a psychotic rampage to punish them when they don't are just two common expressions of twisted masculinity.

You don't deserve to automatically have sex just because you have a penis; it's not your due as a dude; it's not what you have rightfully coming to you by the sheer nature of your existence.
Instead, strive to engage women as human beings rather than as barely sentient cum-dumpsters or penile targets. Build your listening and conversational skills. Look to activities or hobbies that you can share in interest with a woman.
He's just another Marc Lepine, the man from the École Polytechnique shooting in Montreal.

While the atrocities of femicide grow steadily, the media commits to the dead-end analysis of what made the dude "snap."
In patriarchy "snap" is the norm, the dudely prerogative that the media traditionally explains away as an exception.
When really, it's not about the reason.
The discussion should be about the systemic privilege that shapes boys into men who harbour a hyperbolic sense of entitlement and the freedom to life without impulse control in regard to the subhuman female. Boys are socialized to be cruel, competitive and violent.
Gender privilege allows men to grow into amoral predators.

Patriarchy depends on destabilizing all human relationships into a base hierarchy of domination and submission.
It does men no real favours.
How can privilege or power be all that attractive when it makes you utterly loathsome to those you desire?

Everytime I teach a text, I have to re-read it.

I'm doing "King Lear" next and it must be a sign of age that I identify with and am trying to redeem or at least humanize Goneril and Regan.

Even among feminist literary critics, it's difficult to find a reading of the two daughters which doesn't simplify them as conniving bitches or worse yet, monstrous witches.

Perhaps since I'm closer to the age of having to cope with elderly parents, I sympathize with the experience of the elder sisters. Lear loved the youngest above them, he gleefully stirred up sibling rivalry, attempted to control them through arranged marriages and then forced them to profess saccharine sentiments publicly in a bid for base flattery just to get their inheritance.

When Goneril respectfully and articulately explains why his drunken riotous entourage disrupts the domestic harmony, Lear launches into an irrational rage, curses her fertility, and then damns her with a rotten child.

You can't even say "boo" to the man or ask him to be accountable for tearing up the place.

He's full of histrionics and he doesn't regard his daughters' own humanity.

He's fully the fool and the child in the drama.

Then he plays the "mad" card to avoid responsibility further.

Each time I read this, I pity him even less.

Lear illustrates a cautionary tale of the tyranny produced by the unchecked authority held by dudes over women who exist as "nothing."

But Shakespeare didn't mean to question patriarchy since it's restored at the end.

There was a production scheduled to begin filming this year with Anthony Hopkins as the titular patriarch, Naomi Watts as Goneril, Paltrow as Regan and Knightley as Cordelia.

Meh.

Apparently they had fundraising problems and shut it down.

What with the baby boomers retiring, we're going to see revivals of this play regularly for the next two decades.

Here's another one of those signs telling women that they mistreat men when they don't spread their legs.

Oh dear jeebus.

I don't pay enough attention to what's going on in this city.

Remember the voicemail messages left by "Dimitri the Lover" circulating online a while back?

The creepy stalker dude?

Well he lives here.

He runs a monthly seminar instructing men how to pick up "sluts" as young as 16 for a triple orifice penetration.

I shit you not.

He calls it the Toronto Real Men club.

It's horrific.

Since he's holding a meeting tomorrow I'm tempted to fill balloons with dog piss and head over.

In the most recent episode of "The United States of Tara" her husband Max (John Corbett) verifies that there's a new "alter" or alternative personality in Tara's psyche.
I've stuck with the show even though it's full of woman-hating because Toni Collette is fantastic.

The new alter made an appearance when Tara's parents were staying over.
Max caught the alter pouring water over her dad while he slept so that he would think he wet the bed.
You only catch a glimpse of the new personality.
The figure wears a rain slicker with a hood.
Max describes the character as id-based and animal-like.
Alice lets it slip that the fourth alter to join the mix goes by the name of Gimme.
AHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Brilliant.
I think I shed a tear while laughing.
I'm waiting for the pouffy hair to appear.

AMC had a marathon of "Breaking Bad" going a few days ago, so I watched three episodes and then saw the season premiere of the second season last night.

As much as I like Bryan Cranston, this show is another exercise in the fantasy realm of "oppressed" white dudes who find the means to "liberation" as an opportunity to engage in morally bankrupt behaviour. For Tony Soprano, the excuse was that his mommy never loved him. For Michael Douglas in that awful film "Falling Down," it's that he's unemployed and divorced. For Cranston's character Walt White, his diagnosis of advanced lung cancer gives him the complete freedom to act without any consequences.

In one episode well into the first season, he finally tells his wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) that he has cancer. Even though the plot frame has him cooking meth so that he can squirrel away cash for his pregnant wife and teenage son, when the revelation about his disease occurs, he understands it as a great awakening. Walt explains that he's never had a say in anything his entire life, but now, oh yes, now that he has a terminal diagnosis, he's going to have all the say and power he's always been denied. Truly, the middle aged white dude without privilege is as mythical as a fucking unicorn. My nose wrinkled with scorn during the scene because the obvious blame here falls on his wife and child for Walt's perceived powerlessness rather than more appropriately on patriarchy. We hear many references to Walt's low salary of $43,000 teaching chemistry at the high school level in New Mexico. This seems unrealistic (what secondary school teacher with over twenty years tenure makes so little?), just as it's strange that his wife doesn't also work outside the home. The plot points are designed to make Walt the big victim because he has to martyr himself as the sole provider for his family. He has no choice but to sling drugs and kill folks along the way.

At the same time that this show paints him as the honourable man doing all he can to support his family, he's completely unwilling to communicate with his wife in any honest or meaningful way. It would be more accurate to say that he hates Skyler. She's presented as a spying manipulative bitch in tracing his phone calls and then in asking his wealthy successful friend from university to take pity on Walt and give him a job in charity. Skyler's trying to thwart him at every turn.

In the season opener last night, not only did he rape his preganant wife, he slammed her face into the refrigerator as he was doing it.

Great guy!

He has cancer, you see.

He can do whatever he likes.

This instructional film on the wonders of menarche cracks me up.
What girl actually fondles a maxi pad for fuck's sake?
Her mother seems fairly modern about the whole thing, but what about the school nurse in the second part? The gender police informs her declaration that menses "is just the natural normal process leading up to being a mother."
Yep.
Have vagina = blood and procreation
The best part is when she says that the blood flows through the hymen, a clear nod to the virginity cult fetish. Then she tells the girls that they should pay special attention to their hair and nails, and to wear their prettiest dress during that time of the month.
Compulsory femininity has to go into overdrive when you have your period in order to compensate for being on the rag.

My "food issues" are legion.

Today at the market, I picked up a takeout sushi roll for Mr. M to go with a piece of salmon.

While I was plating it up, a shudder of revulsion crept in at the memory of one of our first trips on the subway here in Toronto, when I saw a woman pull out a boxed roll, which she ate with one of those white plastic forks. There's also a scene from "The Wire" where Jay eats a roll the same way for lunch. There's something so fundamentally wrong about spearing sushi with a disposable fork.

I cannot explain why the sight fills me with horror. It just does. I'm off sushi altogether now as a result.

Oh, yeah.

A kiss from David Bowie would make me fall back in a faint as well.

I tried to find the scene where he mimes the shave, but couldn't find it.
Truthfully, I dated a guy who could do the bit on command perfectly.

The dogs are ready for Ireland.

After the photo-op they were up for playing in the park as always, even though it was pissing rain and nary another pooch to be seen.

Hard to believe we've had them a year already.

Years ago I concluded that Henry James wasn't much to my taste because he seemed far too ghoulishly invested in creating tragic women who are doomed to suffer, much like David Lynch does in the contemporary cinema. They're dudes who get off on abused and degraded women.

I may have to revise my opinion of James' work after watching "The Heiress" this afternoon, the 1949 production starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift, based on his novel "Washington Square." Besides going absolutely gooey over Montgomery Clift, the film was just brilliant and an absolute treat. I'm tempted to go back and watch it again this very minute.

De Havilland won Best Actress for her performance and it's easy to see why. Playing Cathy Sloper, she's pure chrysalis onscreen, evolving from a wallflower browbeaten by her flinty father to a woman in full bloom of lust and love. The seduction scenes are drawn out with exquisitely small gestures, such as Clift's Morris Townsend leaning in closely to the shy little rich girl.

You can tell she's never had a man in such proximity.

He captivates Cathy with his affections and soon gets her to agree to marriage.

From the beginning, we hear her father make a variety of disparaging remarks about his daughter. He laments her lack of beauty, poise and charm when obviously that's not the case. Hollywood always registers "plain" women as brunettes sans the face paint. She also has some soggy braids to mark the character as ordinary. Her father idolizes the beauty and accomplishments of his dead wife to the extent that Cathy or any other woman could never compare. When she turns up in a cherry red gown of her mother's, daddy says dismissively, "but your mother was fair, she dominated the colour."

It doesn't take long to understand that he despises his own daughter.

When he learns of her engagement, he appears to extend the same contempt towards Morris for finding any attraction to his daughter. The rich old dude clings to incredulity, surmising that the young man must be a fortune hunter. It's an absolutely toxic scene when he tells Cathy that there's no other reason than her inheritance for a man to deign to take her hand.

What an epiphany, to learn that your father hates you.

After trying to appease the old man with a six month delay on the marriage, the lovers decide to elope. Cathy tells Morris that she will live quite comfortably on the ten thousand a year provided through her mother's will, but she won't take her father's inheritance, preferring instead to be cut out entirely now that she understands the old man's animus.

Morris waivers slightly.

He's to return in two hours with a carriage to deliver them to some clergyman.

That's as far as I'll go with the plot points.

The question that carries the dramatic arc is "does Morris really love her?"

It's a superior film and highly recommended.

I'm buried under work, part of which is trying to get twenty year-olds to give a shit about Raymond Queneau's "Exercises in Style," the book where he tells the same story 99 different ways.
Anyway, I didn't get to read the paper yesterday until midnight, but then I saw this story about Michou the poodle on the front page.
Pascal Bellon, the dog's fuckface owner left him in the car at the airport while the dude flew off for a trip.
The dog was locked in the cold car without food or water for 19 days.
No one knows how the 12 year-old pooch was able to survive.
When found, he was covered in shit and his eyes caked up with an infection.
Police say that they couldn't prove any intent to harm the dog because the owner claimed he didn't know the dog was in the car, so they only issued a $100. fine.
I say lock that turd up for the same duration and see if he makes it.

The dog now lives with a retired couple and is on the mend.

Twenty Major's recently released second novel "Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder" carries a more confident premise than the debut novel "The Order of the Phoenix Park" probably because the author's in his element within the genre of hardboiled fiction rather than say Magical Realism. The opening takes a page from "The Big Sleep" or other noir classic set up around a father's desire to protect his daughter. In this case, Tony Furriskey, a legendarily cruel gangland boss asks Twenty to return a favour by going to his future son-in-law's stag weekend in Barcelona for the sole purpose of gaining evidence which will put his daughter off the wedding. The intended groom, Coleman Darcy-McNeill, is an insufferable bourgeoisie rugby player from Blackrock. Tony can't stomach having his family joined to the swells, so he sends Twenty on the mission for incriminating evidence. He takes Jimmy the Bollix, Dirty Dave and Stinking Pete to get the job done.

There are several questions itching behind your fingers as you plow through the novel:
How will they stage Coleman's downfall? What would put a young woman completely off her fiance?
How will Dave and Pete fuck it up?
Why did Twenty abruptly leave Barcelona years ago? What bad blood waits for him?
How many drinks does it take to put Coleman down?
Why does Big Ian sound so familiar?

Twenty's novel is hilarious and expertly paced.
Go buy a copy.

Warnings about compulsory femininity are everywhere, even in advertisements for environmental organizations.

Biocorner's ad uses the 'ol before-and-after scenario with the tag line "No need to be ugly to save the planet" to remind bitches that our sole purpose in life is to be fuckable.

This made me fucking sick to watch.
An American cop beats the shit out of a 15 year-old girl in custody for throwing a shoe at him.
Yeah, he's such a hard cunt. She totally had it coming.
Beating up girls is his birthright.