Worst Weather of the Year

Sideways icy rain, wind gusts and a temperature around 1C means no beach time.

I squeezed the water from my gloves at the shops and brought them home a chewfest to compensate.

"Having a Laugh: Great Moments in Irish Comedy"

It was worth staying up for the TV 3 programme charting the history of Irish comedy, even if most of it was a thinly disguised act of fellatio for RTE. What a treat to hear so many actors and stand up comics reflect on the rise of staged Irish humour. The "Live Mike" show with Mike Murphy looked particularly funny, especially in getting to see a clip of Dermot Morgan playing a priest before his incarnation as Father Ted.

Tommy Tiernan and the lady known as Twink both needed a smack, however.
Tiernan recalled filming a guest spot on "Father Ted" where he was somehow unable to get the scene done right. As he's talking the programme splices in the shot he's referring to where Ted thinks he's going to America and puts "Shaft" on the turn table. He does a kicky little dance while singing and hovering over the depressed priest character Tiernan played. There were multiple takes until they were satisfied with Tiernan's response. The hack goes on to explain that he flew home to Dublin after filming, and when he got into a taxi, the driver asked him if he knew that Fr. Ted had died. My jaw was on the floor when Tiernan laughs that he killed the man. He's made a fucking career on being the epitome of bad taste and cheap insults. How that's considered comedy is far beyond me. Morgan remains a national treasure while Tiernan rates as a mere splenetic coulda-been. Fuck him and the shitty wool cap he wore trying to affect the airs of the hipster hippie set.

Then there was Twink. (Does she even know what that means these days?) She was shown in a clip from the 80s performing as Gladys Knight with the Pips behind her. All in fucking blackface. Not only was she doing a minstrel act, but she broke off into unbelievable Ebonics mid-song in order to complain about why her back-up singers "gots ta keep repeating what Ah say." It was toe-curlingly horrific. Then inexplicably, during the segment on "Father Ted," she interjected to say that she took offense with that brand of "Paddywhackery" in the show which wasn't funny, and only served to make the Irish look like foolish oafs. Hmmm. I see. She can dish it out, just don't touch upon any national stereotypes. It's always a head-slapper when you see someone fail to recognise an act of othering when they should know better.

Put the Garlic Down, Folks

Before we went to Italy last month, I knew that the overuse of garlic in recipes was not a traditional part of the Eye-tie cuisine. You also won't find black pepper mills and caesar salads regularly featured when dining out. Yesterday I had my head buried inside "La Cucina: The Regional Cooking of Italy," a compendium of dishes collected in the 1970s and then translated finally into English in 2005. It proved the point. When garlic does show up in a recipe, more often than not the technique calls for cooking it in the pot until golden brown and then removing it before you add the veggies, fish or meat. Got that? Traditional dishes generally make little use of the demon bulb.

The point of this exercise in garlic-shaming was part of my preparation for a dinner party this weekend to recover my losses from the TrueBlood fiasco, with the opportunity to do a themed menu. It was nice to get verification that you don't need to choke food with the smell of the grave in order to produce authentic Italian flavours. The book failed, however, to provide a useable meatball recipe which I want to serve as antipasti for starters. "La Cucina" did offer one, only it was with horsemeat (ugh). It's been years since I've cooked meatballs due to Mr. M's aversion to mince, but this time I'm going to have proper steaks ground down at the butcher's to bypass his food taboo. Then the carnivores at the table won't feel put off by having fish for the main course. Trouble is, there are more than 3 million recipes available online, with a tremendous variation among proportions and list of ingredients. I did consider the Goodfellas method until I remembered that I've never purchased veal and pork is vile. Epicurious is often one of my go-to sites. Imagine my horror at this recipe which calls for a total of 16 garlic cloves between the meat and the sauce. Six-fucking-teen. Now, I'm not even eating the beef balls, but simply the idea of having to handle and smell all that garlic turns me ashen and weak at the knees in revulsion. Also why use so much milk and eggs?
Are you baking a fucking cake or making some meatballs?

Matinee Cringefest

There's this periodic need I have to catch a film on my own during a weekday afternoon that has remained a constant ever since my first solo matinee when I was 15. Back then, I thought "Liquid Sky" was the height of alternative-scene sophistication. For a teenager, that shit was deep in a way that your standard megaplex fare could never anticipate. Everyone onscreen poses and snarls much to the delight of my first year in secondary school rushing to grow-the-fuck-up self.

Now I have to cringe at the line delivered in the so-called climax when the leading lady deducts that her lovers keep dying because "I kill with my cunt," rather than in sussing out the aliens living inside two glued together dinner plates, beings
who are perched on her roof and collecting the orgasms in order to make some blend of cosmic heroin. The protagonist herself, like lotsa ladies having promiscuous sex, fails to enjoy any of her own orgasms, so she gets to live as a conduit for the space dope fiends. Among the dozens of films that I am embarrassed to admit having liked at some stage, "Liquid Sky" tops the list. The music makes me want to rip my eyelashes out and the lady-hating gets the prime "artistic" treatment, a dudely glossing over of some otherwise straight up hateful shit,as featured in its contemporary "Risky Business." Both films position women as cum dumpsters.

Shampoo Invites Strange Men to Grope Your Hair

Really?
Why would any woman want to use Head and Shoulders shampoo if it means that strange dudes take the liberty of raking their paws through your tresses?
She's flattered, of course.

This commercial stopped just short of him rubbing out a load on her nape.
Yack.

1997 feels like 1987

Scouting for movies in Laser Video on St. Andrew's Street, I paused over "The End of Violence," for a tie-breaker over my divided opinion on Wim Wenders. "Paris, Texas" held so much contempt for women by setting Ms. Kinski up as an empty cipher and champion masochist that the film just about put me off the director for good. But what about the time in 1987 when I dragged a friend and our dates to see "Wings of Desire" after putting in three back-to-back double shifts waiting tables? The film's oneiric quality lifted me into this odd state where I blanked on the aches of my body to be instead nourished by the play of light and shadow against Peter Falk's voice cooing angels into corporeal form through the lure of a hot cuppa coffee. It was the closest I've ever felt to being alone in a fully packed theatre. Hell, we select movies for far less positive associations based on whimsy, plus it features Bill Pullman and Gabriel Byrne, so there was the promise of eye candy if nothing else.

It's not that "The End of Violence" plays out like straight up bad film. The film does ask us to consider the relationship between fictional and real-life violence. Those artsy-fartsy scenes where folks share poetry in a loft serve as a palpable middle ground for folks to negotiate the residuals of life in a hyper-aggressive culture, and I can dig that. Yes, the film has a purpose, except it gets blindsided by a clumsy script which loads everything with artifice and an emotional distance.

More to the point, "The End of Violence" hovers on the edge of cheesy because the film just seems dated and out of sync with the time. If you asked me to guess the year it was made, I'd have said 1987, the same year as his other film which transported me out of my own worries for a spell. The hair and costumes share more in common with the Reagan than Clinton era. Go figure that "The End of Violence" was made the same year as "L.A. Confidential" in 1997 and it wrecks my head a little, since even though the latter is a period piece, it still screens as timeless, without the capacity to become a hallmark of a cringeworthy period in cinema.

Andie MacDowell's character tips the audience's ear to the pedestrian use of figurative language in the script when she bleats on about how her husband (Bill Pullman) commands an intensity over others. "His love is like a rocket" she intones more than once, meaning he's a force compelling those around him into the future, with him in the cockpit, in control when everyone else's just along for the ride. MacDowell gives one of the worst performances I've ever seen here (not that I'd single her out for achievement in any film), she was so poor in fact that I had no idea whether to spit at the television or mock her with a few deep hearty snorts. She's the queen of pouty, lip-biting, I'm-a-model-posing-as-actor squadron. In another scene, she's batting her eyes at a cop looking for the missing husband, asking does he think that accidental prayer would help the situation. With absolute confidence, he responds that it would, that everything is connected; heck you can even change something just be looking at it. How does MacDowell's character take this bit of dime store philosophy? She licks and bites her lip.

In addition to the boorish peen connotation behind the simile "his love is like a rocket"; the new-agey nonsense of "everything is connected" (isn't that the whole point of "I Heart Huckabees"?); demands for characters to offer pithy definitions of such sweeping concepts as "love" or "violence"; viewers are insulted with another nugget of wisdom written for simpletons: "you can't go home again." There's also one scene where the G-Man heavy threatens Gabriel Byrne's character who was a former dude at NASA and now a covert surveillance technician with the observation about his new job description in the Big Brother enterprise boils down to "you're not watching the heavens from the Earth. You're watching the Earth from the heavens." Why does every motherfucker think he can pose as Oscar Wilde?

Wenders is 1 for 3.

Torture Porn Wrapped in Magic Realism

*Spoilers*

How much did I want to love "Sympathy for Lady Vengeance"?

Beautiful violent femmes reserve a considerable fraction of the overall pleasure I have gleaned from the screen. Not so much the witless harridans fleshed up enough to serve as patriarchal boogeybroads designed to demonstrate how awful women are, the likes of which we have seen most recently in "Fatal Attraction," "Basic Instinct" or "Obsessed." There are a host of female characters onscreen who are static cardboard cut-outs in their acts of violence, a bit of the old refrain "bitches be crazy." Although Park Chan-Wook's leading lady (Lee Yeong-Ae as Geum-Ja) gets a backstory set up to provide her character with plenty of motivation to settle the grudge against the dude who railroaded her into a 13 year prison sentence for a murder she did not commit, the plot washes out as a load of implausibility further exacerbated by a lurid celebration of torture. And wait, she's a glowing saintly type who gives away a kidney or nurses the sick while she plans the revenge in prison, and then once released she's shooting a poor pooch for no other reason than to turn the audience's stomach. There's no moral highground for her to claim. She's almost as limp and ineffectual as Jodi Foster in "The Brave One."

One could revise the title to "Lady Facilitates Vengeance" because during the payback scene, she lets the families of his victims tear the dude apart. All she gets to do is shoot the corpse in the face. But before they get to exact the pound of flesh, Geum-Ja subjects the families to video footage the killer took of each child's death. We see crying children begging for their lives. One shot lingers on a hooded girl in a noose perched on a chair until the killer kicks the chair out.

What kind of a sick fuck would have grieving parents endure such distilled torture?

Park Chan-Wook has so much talent, yet I am baffled by his eagerness to create sloppy moral simplifications laced up with with stylish cruelties.

In the final scene, she's face-down in a white cake (symbolism!) in a desperate attempt to have a conscience as white and stainless as snow.

There's heavy-handed and then there's this sledgehammer to the face.

Funny, Too.

Notice the snipe about which husband La Liz was on when it was only the second dude.
Meee-yow.

Gender Mythology for Three Year-Olds

Lest they forget for a second that they were born to be servile and fuckable, there are no shortage of gifts for girls that remind them of their lesser status. One has to wonder why folks still give insulting gifts such as vacuum cleaners and a play laundry station. It's such a "fuck you" move to make light of the domestic toil that plagues so many women across a lifetime. No one has ever yet said it was fun to wash clothes or suck up shit from the floor as an adult. The worst of it is that all these toys are stamped with suitability for three year-olds.

Three!

This housewife shit looms early for the poor girls.

Do them a favour.

Don't buy this trash to poison girls.
And if someone buys it for your child, send it back, get it out of the house, just as if you were Jimmy Conway trying to cover up spoils from a big heist. These toys are not fun, creative play. They are instruments of enculturation which prime girls to be passive drones of servitude.

Also to be avoided are the toys which teach them that compulsory femininity begins at birth.

What the fuck is that Hannah Montana wig doing on the market?

Or a style station which features a bowl to mix hair dye?

The pressure for each girl to be a princess or the idea that life is a beauty contest happens soon enough. No need to rush it and fuel the gender mythology by wrapping up these hateful products and giving them to innocent girls.

There's an Irish Link Everywhere

Mr. M will be realising a long-held dream next month when he gets to participate in a Cyclo-Cross race at the sport's Belgian birthplace. We'll be staying in Geel, which we learned had been the targeted asylum spot for St. Dymphna. I knew her story only as the patron saint of the mentally ill until I read the rest of her purported biography.
Holy cheese and crackers!
Her daddy wanted her to replace his dead wife.
She would not submit to his incestuous designs and fled to Geel.
The dude tracked her down and chopped her head off.
Let's hope this was just one of those stories circulated to illustrate the propaganda that the pagans were corrupt and immoral.
Dymphna's story reads so similar to the Italian St. Maria Goretti's.
The church says better for women to lose their head than hymen.

This Could be a Recipe for a Stroke

Look at this winking bullshit acting as a clarion call for a return to patriarchy.
Because clearly, all that shit's in the past.
We live in a gynocracy where dudes are castrated at birth according to this thuggish worldview.
The director for "Male Domination" explains:

"I want spectators to argue when leaving the movie theater," Patric Jean said when shooting Male Domination. Is it possible, in the 21st century, that men demand a return to patriarchal ancestral values: women in the kitchen and men holding the reigns of power? Is it possible to imagine that young, educated women search for a "dominating companion?" What do we make of men who undergo a penis enlargement operation "as though buying a bigger car?" Although these trends may initially seem marginal, the film shows us that our attitudes rarely adhere to our views. The illusion of equality hides a plethora of daily injustices that we no longer wish to see, in which we all play a role. Through amusing, incredible, and sometimes dramatic sequences, the film forces us to take a position with regard to a domain where everyone thinks they possess the truth. Male Domination provocatively stirs up trouble through the feminism of a man who takes a hard look at himself.

Women who routinely surrender themselves to male domination are not really ethically comparable to a dude who wants his junk enlarged. The power differential is beyond apples and oranges, dude. And since the submissive woman operates as the cultural norm, I'd say any dude is but a few clicks away from having that fantasy taken care of. Then there's this unaccountable switch in his logic, as if this French dude is going to show us that equality is a rouse, that we are in fact not blessed with an egalitarian society. Do, tell? Then he ends with the "male feminist" who can always be relied upon to set shit straight and save the day. What would we do without a man to solve the problems of feminism and male domination?
The mind boggles.
I'll need to see this on an empty stomach, for sure.

Puppet Masters in Disguise

The copy for this PSA from the Irish group Positive Options Crisis Pregnancy Services reads "Some pregnancy counseling services want to manipulate your decisions, imposing their will upon yours. For impartial advice with no strings attached talk to Positive Options today."

I'm a cynical bitch and had to go to check their website to see if by "manipulation" they meant those evil feminists who'll goad you into an abortion. The site's saturated in girly pink, not a good sign that you take women's reproductive choices seriously. All the reassurances of "post abortion care" worry me; it's as if they're saying the medical procedure is dangerous when they suggest you can get an ultrasound afterwards, or that abortion will be physically or psychologically damaging. Why the fuck would you get an ultrasound after an abortion except to assure women that they aren't "ruined" to have future pregnancies? Of all the women I know who've had abortions, this is the first time I'm hearing this bit of pearl-clutching posing as medicine. Compulsory pregnancy for women rears its ugly head yet again.

Children's Hour Redux

Jordan Scott's directorial debut "Cracks" commands surefooted pacing and composition in a film set in 1934 at a British boarding school for girls. The actors are brilliant, most notably Eva Green as the diving coach dubbed Miss G, Maria Valverde as the Spanish exchange student Fiama, Juno Temple as Di Radfield and Sinead Cusack as headmistress Miss Nieven. The film was shot here at the Headfort School in County Meath, among other Irish locales as a stand in for the British school. It's a lovely looking film for the fashion and setting alone.

*Spoilers*

How unfortunate the audience is invited to gasp at predatory lesbianism.

There are so few representations of lesbians onscreen, so I wonder why Scott crafts such a retrograde and vicious portrayal of female sexuality, which even trumps the pathologized characterization of gay women in "The Children's Hour" (1961). "Cracks" demonizes lesbians more than the role of Mrs. Danvers in "Rebecca" (1940), the repressed lady in "Night of the Iguana" (1964), or Sharon Stone's deadly lady-lover in "Basic Instinct." If this film were about a gay dude preying upon a 14 year-old boy, then gay dudes would be protesting the theatres in outrage.

Really, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, this rates as a serious movie about relationships between women and the girls in their care?

Miss G appears as a master study in arrested development, a woman who still functions as a 14 year-old schoolgirl. In one scene, she's heading to town chanting three sentences under her breath while her eyes and limbs dart around in an apprehensive clutch for safety. When she gets to the shop, we get an audible version, her order for some cakes and sweets. She's so terrified of the world outside the school that she throws her money on the counter and floor to run off with the purchase. Miss G is wholly damaged and ill-suited to the adult world, and yet she fabricates the most worldly sense of self to thrill her students, much of it lifted from books, as Fiama detects.

As the only person in the theatre, I wanted to scream foul at the screen during the denouement.

This film had so much promise, potential in the grasp of the cruelties of adolescence until it choked the audience with a hobgoblin of predatory lesbians.

Boo hiss.

Beauty Must Die

The first scene suggests a take on the theme of plucky career gals trying to make it in the big city, a variation of "Sex and the Single Girl" (1964), the adaptation of Helen Gurley Brown's book about the balance between a woman's ambitions and her personal life starring the ever luminous Natalie Wood.
Not even close.
"Valley of the Dolls" (1967) offers another exercise in the master narrative which determines that although beauty serves as the ultimate aspiration for all women in patriarchy, the pretty bitches be doomed. Whether on celluloid or in real life, folks love to see alluring dames suffer and croak. Often the enchanting actors get to do both as with Marilyn Monroe or this pile of poo featuring Sharon Tate. From Greta Garbo's plea to be left alone to die of consumption in "Camille" (1936) right up to the shitty musical with the lifted plot headlined by the most famous self-hating ginger, audiences have been primed to watch beautiful women expire.
The comely maidens are lined up for a grisly end, whether it be overdose, madness or a lonely exile in some colonial-era hicktown.
This type of demented fare usually gets filed under the "camp" genre, the likes of which also include the stomach-curdling "Grey Gardens." Self-destructive beautiful femmes never go out of style in patriarchy.
Sample dialogue: "I'm not nutty. I'm just hooked on dolls."
Then there's the heterosexism on top of the lady-hating:
"You know how bitchy fags can be."
Yack.

Impertinent Question #10

Why aren't you also a cycling enthusiast?

Number 1-9.

Damn, Donegal's Pretty

This one's on the 8km loop to Gleanveagh Castle. Cold but dry the whole trip.

Duh. The castle.

There must be more sheep than people in Donegal. The cottage we rented was surrounded by sheep paddocks. Why didn't I have the camera to capture the moment when Kima encountered her first sheep? Jesus, she knew why she was born then and it killed her. Mr. M proposed she write a philosophical thesis on whether it was better to have beach gulls at the ready or surrender to a life where she could push sheep around without ever laying her mouth on one.

A rare family photo for the blog. This is on the Slieve League cliffs, the highest in Europe at 1,972 feet. We had to walk the final 2k plus up to the lookout because the road was closed to cars. Our hosts were the only other folks in sight. Spectacular.

That's the route to above the lookout. Omar ate sheep shit as though it were bon-bons.

Kima could chewber the skull we found on the property.

Pristine county, but I could never live in such a remote spot, even if you can find Parmigiano Reggiano in the Supervalu in Ballybofey. We also had our first coal fire in the cottage. Coupled with the pewter coloured brick thingy as fire-starter, the stove smelled like we were burning Hephaestus' hemorrhoids. Utterly vile. My eyes tinged from the molten petroleum combustion for a full day after the landlady's bid for hospitality.

Off to Donegal with the dogs for a few days.
My new Brasher "Pemba" hiking shoes may indeed be the most comfortable cradle I've ever had on my ugly feet. They resemble the shoes boys wore to my C school in the 70s.

Nobody knows anybody. Not that well.

There's a reason to stop by Hodges Figgis (the city's best bookstore) each week.

It's browser-friendly and staffed by smart folks who love books.

Nary a book snob on the payroll.

When I asked a clerk weeks ago where I might find Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse novels, she smiled and led me right over, unlike the three different staff members for Chapters Indigo in Toronto who sneered at my requests for books in the series as if I were asking for one of those Chicken Soup for the Soul titles. Book snobs hold such a narrow outlook and inherent lack of curiosity towards reading. They're also the folks who, to paraphrase A.A. Gill, would rather piss in their soup bowl than admit they don't know where to find the bathroom.

(Today Mr. M peered over the lap top to inform me that Stanley Fish just complained about the same strain of book snobbery among clerks. Take a number, Fish.)

A charming gent directed me to what I was looking for thirty seconds after I was inside the shop today.

On the way to the bus home rounding Nassau Street, a man in a grey wool coat exited a shop and stopped me dead in my tracks.

It was Gabriel Byrne!

So much taller than you'd guess.

Dapper from crown to feet.

Somehow I held my tongue and continued.

My favourite of his performances was as Tom Reagan in the Coen Brother's "Miller's Crossing" (1990).

*swoon*

Snake Poo on the Table!

Best episode of "Come Dine with Me."
Ever.

Kiss Your Chocolate Goodbye

Cadbury's a staple and much beloved sweetie-treatie, right?
Chocolate ain't my personal thing. My new gag inducing ploy to get a barista to hold back on the umber sprinkles on my coffee rests in my assurance that I'm already sweet enough.
See: Gag Provoking.
Whatever.
They laugh and my coffee escapes the saccharine dusting.

My lack of preference for the cocoa confection aside, it was still with a gasp that I read the story about Kraft Foods offer to buy Cadbury.
Start stocking up the minute the ink is dry.
I shit you not.
Because once the folks who think that cheese should be flavourless, bear only a trace of dairy and have the consistency of industrial plastic take over, your favourite candy bar will be a goner.
Mark my words.
The makers of bomb shelter cuisine (powdered cheese and macaroni) will ruin Cadbury's 195 year-old tradition in an instant.

Dudes Abridge Muliebrity in the Sunday Times Style Mag

The Style magazine insert in the Sunday Times is one of the guilty pleasures I anticipate each week. Before I was able to indulge my full blown writerly, prose-envying crush on A.A. Gill in his "Table Talk" column this afternoon, there was much gender mythology to wade through by two dudes young and old. To be fair there was also a woman contributing to the identity fables concerning how simplistic and silly women are. Stephanie Theobold's "The New Party Bores" consists of a guideline for folks you should avoid at parties this holiday season, two of which boil down to cheap stereotypes of sad women over forty. Only two of the five are men, "the late-start druggie" and "the lovelorn gay boy." No other type of man would be worth avoiding, folks. Just the druggie and the gay dude. No, I've never been trapped at a party by a dude assuming too much conversational space about his work, his hobby, his portfolio, or his opinions on how feminists ruined his Playboy fantasies. There will never be a shortage of column space dedicated to listing all the ways women suck and should be avoided at all costs.

Moving on to the dudes, Eoin Higgins chimes in with his illuminating "What I (Now) Know about Women," an account of his time helming the Irish fashion mag "Image." The one major stereotype missing from his tawdry assemblage is the shoe fetish. Must be that "Sex and the City" made it passé. Otherwise his article reduces womanhood to lots of chattering, chocolate snarfing, passive aggressive maneuvers, along with a slimming fixation. The magazine inserted a riposte by Dawn Porter on Irish men that also trots out a lazy formula about them being mean booze hounds with mommy issues. Porter's lazy logic fails to match the level of contempt Higgins reserves for professional women. Higgins may think he redeems his low estimation of women who work on the glossy by saying that he found love among the feminine snake-pit, only the reasoning that fuckability acts as some get-outta-jail free card hardly erases the derisive commentary on muliebrity. We get it. You are a credentialed journalist who was forced to stay afloat in the simmering cauldron of oestrogen. You totally have cooties now, dude.

Taio Cruz's "The Trouble with Women" reads like a first year university personal narrative that I hope to never have in my grading pile again. The trouble with women, see, is that we're all infinitely jealous creatures. We ruin relationships with demands that our romantic partners not comment on how hot he thinks other women are at any given time. He's not being an insensitive asshole, mind you. He's just being honest about another woman's fuckability. He closes his treatise on love with all his worldly insight at age 26:

"I just want to be as open and honest as possible in a relationship. Basically, it's like me having a beautiful Aston Martin. If a Ferrari drives past, I want to be able to say, 'Oh my God, that car is so sick,' without my Aston getting jealous. I never wanted a Ferrari, but it doesn't mean I can't say it looks good."

To point out to this prick the problematics around equating women to an inanimate object that men own and drive or that women are in fact human beings would be fairly futile. Instead, may I try another tactic and ask women to stay the fuck away from Taio Cruz, privileged musician douchebag?

Behold the Perfect Sandwich

Two eggs over medium.
Topped with melted white cheddar.
Spinach.
Salt and pepper.
Folded inside ciabatta from Carluccio's.
Done.

Tom Ford Makes My Skin Crawl

Ford possesses a career bent on misogyny of the highest order. He's like a contemporary Andy Warhol or similar type of dude who insists on an abiding love of women which they can only seem to realize through objectification and marginalisation. Consideration for women never moves beyond the surface aesthetics. Bitches are decorative and not good for personhood or much else.

The trailer for his film "A Single Man" comes off as some sort of Calvin Klein goes retro commercial for an acrid perfume marketed to teens.
However, getta load of Julianne Moore's glam emsembles.
Her hair and cosmetics are divine.
You can bet that audiences will have to endure lots of lady hating mixed in scenes featuring Moore's stylish beauty.
I'll take a pass.

Guffaws over Grub

Years ago when my bestie from university came for a visit to have us meet her new boyfriend (I remember little about him other than his obvious discomfort and disbelief when he asked me a question about the ending of "Ulysses" and I explained that Molly was masturbating. Dude, you have to be able to take an adult response and not fall over in a crumple at my dinner table) and when she left, Mr. M had remarked "You're different around Fiona."

"Oh? How so?" was my tender reply to his observation.

"You're giddy. Rather schoolgirlish."

Imagine!

Me? A tittering femme?

Inconceivable!

Fiona worked at that shitty steakhouse where I put in four years. She loved changing the lyrics to songs on the radio to pass hours slinging prime rib. Most memorable was her revision of Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" to "Black Eyed Nun."

She even came over for a month when I spent a semester here in Dublin in '96. We went to Belfast to see "Riverdance," saw the premiere of "Nothing Personal" with the yummy John Lynch at the Dublin Film Festival, and went to the food fest in Kinsale among other adventures.

Fiona's a sweetheart.

But I never feared choking to death in a restaurant as a result of her company as I did yesterday in Peploe's with the matchless Ms. Cat. Peploe's is one of the lower level restaurants along St. Stephen's Green that I've passed countless times with not more than a glance of "stuffy place for the senior set." Perish the thought. Peploe's boasts one of those effortlessly cool vibes from the minute you enter. We had no reservation, news of which they took without a sniff or an attitude. All the staff were confident professionals bearing no accent of grin-fucking in the perfect two hour lunch. Things just appeared when it was time from a waiter who flitted around careful not to disturb the ladies who lunch. My salmon crab cake was the size of a small can of shoe peg corn. My one fault to find would be that LWL enjoy the aesthetic service of two crab cakes rather than a single tower. It lends the illusion of a bigger meal and fuller tummy. Ms. Cat had a bountiful bowl of mussels. And frites for each. Peploe's was so stylish, urbane, unpretentious. Dining there makes you feel like you're rubbing elbows with the smart set.

No matter how much experts tell you laughter is the best medicine, it's probably safe to say that hysterical giggling is not conducive to digestion.

Office Space

This had me chuckling over my tea.

The person who wrote the last one deserves a pint.

Eat Shit with Your Cornflakes, Kids

Check out this Brazilian campaign for Kelloggs, those flakes frosted with a heaping dose of the 'ol mars and venus mythology for the kiddies. Sporting the tag line "The Important Thing is to be Healthy," the copy belies the gender normative message present in both.

The first ads tells girls that life is always already a beauty contest wherein the ug-ohs can forget about it already. Real life doesn't play out like "Little Miss Sunshine."

Compulsory femininity for all.

Except kids with a penis, the second ad scolds.

Any trace of girly play de-sexes boys into swishy limp-wrists.

Put down the dolls and set something on fire right away, little boy.