quacky: —–+—+—–

Hey Quacky! is a Tumblr “blog” I just opened up.

” Tumblelogs are like blogs with less fuss. Tumblr is your friendly and free tool for creating tumblelogs. ”

Which is sort of a way to say, if you wanted your mom, or your seven year old or your teletubby to have a blog, this would be the way to have that. And nobody would be afraid.

I’m not gonna say that thinking in this nation or in this day and age is swinging back around to something that makes sense or works better in a Leave it To Beaver kind of way… But I like to read stuff like this. Just good solid thinking about how things and people really work, unclouded by dogma and politics.

Just the other day, I read a news account of an 8-year-old schoolboy from Arkansas who was punished for pointing a cooked chicken finger at another student and saying, “Pow. Pow.”

…. “Thinking about violence and playing about violence is not the same thing as being violent. When we tell them not to pretend to shoot things, we don’t teach them not to do it, we teach them to lie.”

— Peg Tyre, Opinion: Let’s Not Demonize Boys’ Play - Newsweek National News - MSNBC.com

On a related note, this classic: Tornado Violence.

Hi. So I went to the Barber yesterday. I love my barber. He is an awesome kid, and he takes the traditional barbering gig really seriously. I kind of wish they had more of the whole combs in a jar of blue fluid aspect in their shop, but whatever. It’s a nice vibe nevertheless.

But the point of this story is for me to tell you this exchange:

Me: Yeah. I took the day off to do a bunch of errands with my fiancee.
Barber: Oh, what do you have the day off from?
Me: I work at the main headquarters of the library, out by the airport.
Barber: What do you do?
Me: Really, hardly anything. I’m one of those assholes on the internet.
Barber: Haha.
Me: No really, my job pretty much consists of making sure the internet keeps running for the people in the library. So, I pretty much have to use the internet as hard as I can, and just kind of sit around making sure that the internet works. The harder I use it, the better it works for everybody else. It’s a pretty cool job.
Barber: Wow.
Me: Except when the internet doesn’t work, then everybody gets really mad and calls my phone. That sucks. Then I hate my job even more than I do the other 100% of the time.
Barber: I know what you mean. Usually I’m just an asshole sitting in here reading my book. Until Saturday.
Me: Then everybody and their kid needs to get a haircut right NOW DAMMIT, right?

I thought it was cute and funny.

So, anybody who has some internet in their work, if you need somebody to help make it run better, I’m your asshole! Give me your internet job, okay?

Erotic catfood? (naughty post - don’t read if you’re easily offended) from Play Like a Girl [ who you should read right now because she is featuring more wacky Swede products like ‘SPUNK’ and ‘Plopp’ and ‘Pricks’!!! ]

In Sweden you can do things like name catfood suggestively. I don’t know if there’s anything to this, but “med Tonfisk” is that meant to mean “flavored gently of tuna”?

Over here, we express our shock at such things, and would never be so suggestively hilarious. Rather, we just need to package everything with amply displayed cleavage, and we’re fine.

Reminds me of a cat-patient at my sweetie’s workplace who was named ‘Punani.’ Which we thought was just gross and wrong.

At no point is a man more sure he’s ready to commit to a lifetime with one woman than when he’s buried neck deep in the crotch of a stripper so filled with cocaine her vagina looks like a snow drift.
— – Dethroner does Bachelor Parties

It’s finally reached the point that everything I ever wanted to know about getting married, I learned off Internet.

If anyone is listening, please let my Best Man know this is essential reading, and while your at it PayPal him a few Benjamins.

Making Blogging Pay over at The Nation has some of the same thrust I was making on Saturday about grabbing this whole left politics things by the balls and pulling hard. You have to PAY people to make powerful moves that actually work, no matter how much the left thinks this is stinky and bad. Money moves mountains. No group of volunteers ever moved a mountain.

It’s interesting to read stuff like Money is to Liberals as Sex is to Conservatives … if only to see that some of those netroots folks understand these things.

Just find your local Demo Burger stand at the county fair or wherever community-organized fundraiser food is sold. Compare the effectiveness of the Lions club or Kiwanis burger stand to the one run by the Left. You’ll quickly see what I’m talking about.

I’ve decided to leave SiteMeter for the time being, unless they publicly announce that they’ve refused noxious spyware partnerships. I’ve heard of larger blog networks that depend on free SiteMeter service for stats threatening to leave as well.

Cf: NetWizard’s Blog: SiteMeter and Spyware (Sort of).

Oh hell, of course everything is a spectrum, often in several different directions.

In my previous thingy, I was all talking about polishing up the old elephant gun. Well, never content to leave things be, I did some searches on Amazon. I’d be a fool if I said I was surprised to find :

Gun Oil - the premium, condom-safe lubricant that keeps a man’s most important weapon well oiled. If the military issued a lube, this is what they’d distribute with the condoms and artillery. During Operation Desert Storm, Marines jacked off with actual military-issue gun oil while hunkered down in the trenches of Kuwaiti battlefields. A group of those marines has developed a high-tech, condom-safe formula for smooth, rapid-fire action. This silicone-based lube keeps a Private’s parts well-lubricated with added Vitamin E and Aloe Vera for longer lasting, slicker ride and minimized skin irritation. The ultra-concentrated formula is designed to out-perform comparable top-shelf products - a few drops lubricate thoroughly without breaking down or drying out. With a suggested retail price significantly lower than its competitors, Gun Oil is a certain bestseller on your lubricant shelf.

That’s NOT what kind of masculine strength and triumph I had in mind. Not at all.

And I didn’t want anyone to get the impression that I was extolling the virtues of this Muscles either.
Anyways…

In a Wikipedia entry on Physical strength, one learns that “[w]hite meat is fast-twitch fiber, while red meat is slow-twitch fiber.” So what’s the difference physically?

Red meat from an animal would indicate that it came from body component that is expected to operate for extended periods of time, such as the legs. While white meat conversely comes from body parts that operate for extremely short periods, such as the muscles involved in chicken flight, an activity which doesn’t last long.

That’s really interesting to me, because I’ve been thinking lately about strength, and muscles, and meat, and politics.

I’ve had in mind a sort of manifesto about these topics, especially as they relate to Left Politics. There are a whole bunch of metaphors I want to try to draw together into sort of a formulation about what I feel are the shortcomings of the Left in recent American politics.

I’d call it something like Eat Red Meat For Strength: The Sissified Wussitude of The Vegetarian Left.

What I have in mind is that there are a whole host of problems or liabilities inherent in recent Left-wing political ambition, which have a causal relationship to the Left’s inability to triumph politically. What’s missing from the left is simply the notion that triumph is even something a politics should attempt.

Instead, American leftists seem preoccupied with gentleness, and sympathy toward the weak. We have very little hard strength of leadership; we placate; we embrace the soft; we replace red meat in our diets with vegetable protein; we’re shy of drawing blood or harming our adversary. Remember: “chicken fight” vs. “expected to operate for extended periods of time.”

If you are at all literary — which of course as a liberal, you’re almost required to be — you’re no doubt familiar with the notion of The Left being identified with weakness, oppression, and the sinister. Whereas The Right is linguistically identified with “correctness … authority and justice.[1]

And indeed, our American Leftism tends to embrace weakness and oppression.

I just think this should change around a bit.

I have friends who laugh at fitness and strength, who seem to despise confrontation and competitiveness. In conversation I’ve gotten the feeling that being a manly man in a relationship with a girly woman, allowing what seem to be natural masculine and feminine tendencies to develop and define our roles, is tantamount to a kind of Liberalist heresy.

I guess, if I were a proper Leftist, I should be more inclined to let the woman drive and own the car, bring home the (tofu)bacon, and wear the pants. A proper leftist guy would be slightly harder to distinguish from his burly life-partner womon.

I don’t mean to completely robe myself in good old-fashioned male chauvinism here, but it just seems to me that what’s missing from the motivations of the American Left is some genuine red-blooded, Teddy Roosevelt style, saber rattling, Progressive masculinity in the political realm. [Aside: I really lust loved typing all those <strong> tags in that last paragraph.]

What I think we need to do is set aside the soft-spoken gentlemanly ways of the peanut farmer, and instead polish off the elephant gun and go hunt us down some red meat.

YesButNoButYes: First!

Second would be much harder to pull off, I think.

I don’t know if I’d predict that these Danish guys are set to break big stateside, because I’m not the kind of guy who has a chance of pulling shit like that off.

I just want you all to know, you should really be loving Mew. It’s pop, of the power variety, like if you put a big shot of ABBA, a big shot of Toto, a big shot of freaky euro disco, some Bee Gee sprinkled on top, laced with Special K.

or in guitarist Bo’s words, “the world’s only indie stadium band”

Bonus!! It’s the sound a kitten makes!!

Having worked on the internet most of its adult life I have more than once groaned about how there really needs to be a license or proficiency test you had to pass to “go online.”

Matthew Baldwin, the Defective Yeti guy, and hero, thought up a much more elegant solution:
Internet Access CAPTCHAs