Ha!

Dan Brown ruins every thing!

Dan Brown's latest book takes down freemasons.org

Ha! So true...

In other news, now that The Gothic Novel has reached it's stunning conclusion* I've begun a new genre-parodying e-novel.

This one takes on the historical-mystery-thriller genre, which I both love to hate and hate to love.

I hate the dumbed-down scholarship and the way they put wild conjecture on the level with actual fact so that they're indistinguishable to the average reader (something scholars are quite capable of doing on their own without the help of fiction). I get annoyed with the way the protagonist, always a supposed genius in his/her field, will randomly forget hugely important information when convinient for building suspense**

But many of the genre's silly conventions appeal to me. I like the location-hoping, where every clue has to be visited in person at some famed historical site. I like the idea that great discoveries are just sitting there in plain sight, waiting for some one to accidentally figure them out. And I like an academic protagonist whose superpower is obscure knowledge. Especially, I like the character of the distinguished British gentleman with the sparkling wit and endless knowledge to turns out to be evil, usually.

The first chapter is currently underway. Stay tuned for...

When mild-mannered professor Nick Harris accepts a job at small college in the Midwest, he doesn’t expect anything more challenging than trying to interest a room full of teenagers in Early Modern history. But St. Mary Francis College holds the key to a centuries-old secret so powerful, so shocking, that the quest to unlock it sends Nick racing across the globe. He soon discovers that he’s not the only seeker interested in ancient truths. There are others following the same path, and some seem willing to kill to see that Nick never makes it to the end...

*I initially wrote "is done" in place of "has reached it's stunning conclusion," and whenever I do that (replace a simple word with a more hyperbolic statement) I imagine Winona Rider in Beetlejuice, writing her suicide note. "I am alone [scrtach scrtach] I am utterly alone. By the time you read this, I will be gone, having jumped [scratch scratch] having plummeted..." Just thought I'd share that. Incidentally, I learned the meaning of "utterly" from that scene.

**Interred with their Bones, which I'd otherwise classify as "pretty-not-bad," provides a particularly irritating example, in which the heroine totally forgets about Cardenio and then, when the plot requires it, it all "Oh, right! Shakespeare wrote some lost plays!"

Sunday Poem

The Longest Poem in the World

Of course I fall asleep and a girl asks to hang

All I had to do was tweet and the door bell rang.

got a bloody cold and im living in an ice box!

so happy both my teams won this weekend! Tide and cocks!

Going to the fair for some rides, food, animals, and cute guys I hope...

Listening to a bunch of Who the Hell is Jane? ish and it is DOPE!

I spent hours cleaning my room and only half of it is clean now. Sigh. ):

What came into existence was Life, and the Life was Light to live by.

The sun goes down, and so does she.

And I'd love for you to join me.

things got a little bit crazy and somehow i lost my pants

seriously need to start applying for scholarships and grants .

Can't believe we've seen Serena, Nadal and Venus play today.

boy we've had a real good time, and I wish you the best on your way. ?

FOLLOW ME, AND TWEET ME!! :D

so watch, and you shall see!

And no, i don't, I don't care what you say ♪

Callum and I were very brave today :o)

Brain food = coffee and cake.

And it's all, all so fake~

Best Thing Ever?

Just when you think it can't get any more amazing, about three minutes in, it transcends to a level of amazing so amazing there are no words to describe how amazing it is.

Something Worth Reading

I missed this when it first came out, because I was in NYC, but there is a quite thought provoking post on Shakesville: The Terrible Bargain We Have Regretfully Struck, about the difficulty of dealing with mysogyny from men we otherwise love, like, respect.

I never know when I might next get knocked off-kilter with something that puts me in the position, once again, of choosing between my dignity and the serenity of our relationship.

Swallow shit, or ruin the entire afternoon?

[...]

This, then, is the terrible bargain we have regretfully struck: Men are allowed the easy comfort of their unexamined privilege, but my regard will always be shot through with a steely, anxious bolt of caution.

In particular, I was reminded of my father. Everyone, I think, has someone in their life resposible for sending them irritating forwarded email, and Daddy Pimms is mine. He either doesn't think (or doesn't care, I go back and forth on this) "Hmm... perhaps my daughter, being a woman, will be less than amused by this email about the hopeless folly of womankind," and sends me something like this:

---

From: daddypimms@thisisnotreal.com
Subject: Thought you'd like this...
To: kittypimms@girlishwhimsy.com

With the high rate of attacks on women in secluded parking lots, especially during evening hours, the Minneapolis City Council has established a 'Women Only' parking lot at the Mall of America Even the parking lot attendants are exclusively female so that a comfortable and safe environment is created for patrons.

Below is the first picture available of this world-first women-only parking lot in Minnesota ..

---

You know what's even more hilarious than the fact that women can't drive? The idea of women being sexually assaulted in parking lots!

I mean, you'd have to be a total humourless scold to find the framing of this joke really creepy, right? You have to totally miss the point, which is about driving and how women suck at it because they're probably putting on make-up or like, baking cookies in the glovebox. I mean, why would a man who has a daughter who often parks in parking lots at night (not to mention a wife who is also wont to do that) be at all turned off by that first paragraph?

And then there was this:

---

From: daddypimms@thisisnotreal.com
Subject: IT help...
To: kittypimms@girlishwhimsy.com

I think of you as my IT expert. [nonsensical question about his computer edited out]

---

Now, this I might actually find kind of funny, if he was saying something along the lines of "This is ironic, because I use you as my IT expert, a job many think women are unable to perform." But in fact, he was attempting to pay me a compliment by pointing me out as exceptional*. Because this image is a pretty accurate representation of a certain type of woman, but I should be able to laugh at them because I am not that type (i.e. not skinny, blonde, straight). In fact, I should want to laugh at them. He was giving me a golden opportunity to mock women who are prettier than me, and isn't that a favorite pastime of the ladies? When they aren't shopping for shoes and nagging their husbands?

And finally:

---

From: daddypimms@thisisnotreal.com
Subject: This is worrying
To: kittypimms@girlishwhimsy.com

Beer contains female hormones

Last month, Wits University and RAU scientists released the results of a
Recent analysis that revealed the presence of female hormones in beer.
Men should take a concerned look at their beer consumption.
The theory is that beer contains female hormones (hops contain
Phytoestrogens) and that by drinking enough beer, men turn into women .
To test the theory, 100 men drank 8 pints of beer each within a 1 hour
Period.


It was then observed that 100% of the test subjects :
1) Argued over nothing.
2) Refused to apologize when obviously wrong.
3) Gained weight.
4) Talked excessively without making sense.
5) Became overly emotional
6) Couldn't drive.
7) Failed to think rationally.
8) Had to sit down while urinating.

No further testing was considered necessary.
Send this to the men you know to warn them about drinking too much beer!

---

And so:

---

From: kittypimms@girlishwhimsy.com
Subject: Re: This is worrying
To: daddypimms@thisisnotreal.com

why in the world would a woman find that amusing?

you know, mom always tells me to just delete your email forwards without reading them, and I won't do it because it seems so incredibly rude.

and while it baffles me how anyone who has the slightest respect for the women in his life could be amused by this email, I can accept that it's the sort of thing guys enjoy amongst themselves without really thinking about it.

however it doesn't seem to me to require more than a millisecond of contemplation to realize that whatever you and your buddies might think it probably won't be entertaining to women, so sending it to me is at best an example of how little thought goes into your emails and a worst a deliberate attempting to be insulting (especially when i've already mentioned several times that i don't find that kind of humor cute).

either way, i'm left to ask myself why i don't just listen to my mother and delete your emails without reading them.

---

And so, he refused to email me for a week. Daddy Pimms is perhaps the world's most powerful sulker. Finally, as I always do, I apologized, because I would rather have a dad who talks to me than a dad who doesn't.

To quote Shakesville again:

There are the jokes about women, about wives, about mothers, about raising daughters, about female bosses. They are told in my presence by men who are meant to care about me, just to get a rise out of me, as though I am meant to find funny a reminder of my second-class status. I am meant to ignore that this is a bullying tactic, that the men telling these jokes derive their amusement specifically from knowing they upset me, piss me off, hurt me. [...] I am used as a prop in an ongoing game of patriarchal posturing, and then I am meant to believe it is true when some of the men who enjoy this sport, in which I am their pawn, tell me, "I love you."

*Ugh, how I hate exceptionalism "compliments." It's okay that I wear lots of dresses and don't know about sports, because I'm not "girly" to the point of being annoying. I've been praised many times for not "seeming" gay. I'm not one of "those" fat people (the kind that do nothing but eat donuts all day, presumably) so it's cool to engage in rampant fat-hating right in front of me.

My New Acting Strategy

According to A.V. Club critic Nathan Rabin:

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, [Nicolas] Cage’s primary criteria for choosing roles seemed to be:

How ridiculous will my accent be? Will it sound like a dialect never spoken by anyone, ever, in the history of time?

How about facial hair? Can it look like fake hair haphazardly placed on me by a blind man with an odd sense of humor?

Will I be called upon to shamelessly overact or go completely fucking nuts?

I've totally got the first one going on in Comedy of Errors and the last one in Julius Caesar, (though no one will ever let me have facial hair).

But I think that I need make a greater effort to cram all three into every role I play.

The whole article is pretty hilarious.

Mesmerizing

...if you ever want to turn your brain off for a little while, just take a look at this.

Happy Sunday!

Love,
Kitty Pimms

Two Vomit-Inducing Love Stories

40 Years after Woodstock, this couple is still together:


And even worse: Lost love letter reunites couple after 16 years

I mean, really. That sort of thing doesn't actually happen.

Probably both of these couples are fighting over, like, toothpaste right now.

Yes, I am Jumping on this Bandwagon

So, now that this market has been opened up, I'm pretty I need to exploit it. Perhaps I'll focus on Dickens.

Anyone interested in Oliver Twist, but With Werewolves?

I Strongly Identify with this Stick Figure

When I lived in San Francisco, there was a sign on the door to the roof of the building that said DO NOT ENTER, and a bunch of handwritten signs taped around it with things like "If you go on the roof you will be FINED" "This means YOU" "Stay the crap off the roof, guys, for serious!" "The roof is totally covered in scorpions and whatnot and will KILL YOU!"*

God almighty did I ever want to go on that roof! And as someone who's terrified of heights,** roofs (rooves?) are not generally my favorite place to hang.

You could totally Tom Sawyer me into doing anything with a DO NOT [BLANK] sign.

In fact, let's try it now:

DO NOT DO LAUNDRY! (Kitty Pimms, this means you)

Screw you, man! I'm gonna separate those delicates SO HARD.

THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID*


*I may have gotten a little carried away toward the end, there.
**My head is not meant to be more than 5'5" inches off the ground... tippy-toe is as high as I go.

Just a Link

No comments.

Just click here.

I promise, you won't regret it.

Happy Belated Canada Day!

Why do I always think Canada Day is the second? Perhaps because Canada is only half as cool as America?


O Canada

Just kidding, Canada! I kid because I love! Here are some Canadian things that make me happy:

Margaret Atwood

A major inspiration for The Gothic Novel

Hark! A Vagrant

Always a good time

The Stratford Festival

(even though our Caesar is way sexier than theirs)

And, of course

I Have Not Words...

...to describe how awesome this is:



I'll just quote Jezebel's intro, because seriously. I have not words.

"In this brilliantly edited clip by Rebellious Pixels, Edward shows up at Sunnydale High and tries to put the moves on Buffy Summers, who sees right through his sparkly bs, shutting him down at every opportunity"

Some highlights:*

In the cafeteria part, there is a brief glimpse of Alice (from Twilight) and she totally has the same hair as Willow. It's fitting since Alice is the only Twilight character I mildly approve of.

The use of one of my all-time favorite Buffy quotes: "What are you doing? Here? At this table, talking to me, like we're some kind of talking buddies?" Oh, the many times have I wanted to say that (substituting "table" for "any place I go in my life").

The "Are you sure this isn't some fanboy thing?" line from "Buffy vs. Dracula": especially great because, had that episode happened within the last year or so, she totally would have said "Edward" instead of "Lestat"

And that reminds me: Some one in an A.V. Club discussion of the latest episode of True Blood** pointed out how the now-classic "brooding dark haired vampire+fun blonde vampire=good homoerotic times" was clearly at work, and attributed that convention to Buffy (Angle/Spike). Had I not been a good five days late to the discussion (having just totally legally watched that episode online), I would have had to point out in the most pompous manner possible that Angel and Spike are so obviously ripped off from Louis and Lestat... something that used to bug the crap out of me when Buffy first aired.

Aaaaaaand I'm going to just stop right there, because this may be the nerdiest post I've ever written. Which is an achievement.

*Perhaps the only downside is that I could identify which episode almost every one of those Buffy clips was from.

**Which was also pretty great... the vampires are really hitting it out of the park this week. UPDATE: The trend continues at Go Fug Yourself, where they say of Kristen Bell's outfit "That is saucy. I feel like this might be the uniform they put the waitresses in over at Twilight McLestat's Vampire Bar and Grille" and of Eva Green's "BLAAAAAAH. This woman is not particularly interested in draining the blood of the innocent, or interrupting the sleep of the just, or disturbing the dinner of the holy, or stealing the mail of the virgins, or trimming the bangs of the uptight, or anything even REMOTELY sexy and vampiric. And ergo, I have no use for her."

Best Thing Ever?

I think so...



From The Hope Chest, which posts scans of old newspaper articles. Vampires seems to be a recurring theme. Also a lot of the articles seem to be from the Chicago Tribune. Represent.

(Ignore the site's comments about Chicago drivers. We are the only people in this country who know how to drive. Everyone else is wrong).

Weightier Matters

Let me link to Shakesville once again. There's an open letter to President Obama about the murder of D.r George Tiller.

There's not much I can add to that. Here's the comment I left:

Thank you. Thank you for once again refuting the position that this is a debate between two equally valid positions, in which extremism on both sides prevents the reasonable moderates from finding a solution. When one side argues that women haven't the right to control their own bodies, when they favor intimidation over peaceful protest, when their rhetoric, even when distancing themselves from acts of violence, is laced with hatred and with smug satisfaction, it seems to me that those reasonable moderates should be asking themselves how a cause that is served by such methods can be worthy of debate.

Perhaps then, the reasonable and decent people who oppose abortion (and, because of incidents like this, I found it hard to believe that they existed until I met some of them) can focus their efforts, not on limiting the choices of women, but on improving them, on working to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.

I was raised by liberal parents in a very Catholic family, so I've been spoon-fed both sides of this debate for pretty much my entire life, and even as a small child it was obvious to me that the solution was simple. If you don't approve of abortion, don't fucking have one.

I can't even begin to tell you how much it pisses me off that these people get to go around calling themselves pro-life.

Favorite Finds

I'm a daily Found visitor, and keep a folder of delightful finds on my hard drive, to look through when I need cheering up. I never thought I'd find one better than this:



But then, this happened:

Some Randomness

We used to have one of those cheap plastic piano-rugs when I was a kid, and I could totally play the first dozen notes of Fur Elise on it, but then ran out of keys. If I were ever rich enough to be utterly ridiculous, instead of a bowling alley in my basement I would have one of these, with a full-sized pianosworth of keys.

(the "pianosworth" is a fabulous new unit of measurement I just made up, and might also double as my butler's name. Should I ever be rich enough to be totally ridiculous).

Also, enjoy some bug porn.



Finally, while browsing e-cards for various neglected friends and family members I came across this:


Which is totally true, as I dislike both Dan Brown and Tom Hanks with a pair of fiery passions, but also amuses me because I rather enjoy movies that rely heavily on the occultish aspects of Catholicism for eerie atmosphere. I was never more proud of my Catholic heritage in my goth days (though back then I was officially a pentagram-wearing pseudo-pagan). In grad school, I wrote many a paper on anti-papist plays and pamphlets of the 16th and 17th centuries. Basically, on the list of things I'll pay to see in a movie "Catholic-themed creepiness" comes just after "Edwardian costumes" and before "people trapped on a spaceship with mysterious evil."

I should actually make that list someday. Number one is definately "dinosaurs." But is number two "adaptations of Shakespeare" or "immaculately stylized quirkiness"?

Food for thought.

Who Hasn't?

If you have ever yearned to own a Victorian shopfront, an old tin chapel, or a box of glass eyes (assorted colours), then an auction in the Forest of Dean could be too tempting to pass over.

Victorian Museum Auction

Doodles

In addition to being my birthday, Thursday was also National Doodle Day, which means I get to enjoy a little glimpse into the minds of celebrities and semi-celebrities, and it doesn't feel like weird fame gawking because it's all for a good cause.

My favorites are Steve Martin's ode to the famous arrow gag which my grad school professor would disown me for not mentioning first appeared in 1607 in Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle:




And this one, by Cat Mihos, who I guess works for Neil Gaiman in some capacity:

Cat!

(via Boing Boing)

Meanwhile, one of the children just informed me that she's hiding from a mosquito that lives in a beehive, because it's a mosquito-bee. Apparently, it plans to eat her and is big and hairy.

So, you know, keep an eye out.