Pat Robertson Abides

Apparently CBN got in touch with Raw Story and corrected the statement – the article is now one long shill for Pat’s “smoke Jeebus instead of chronic” programs, which I’m sure he’s LUVE to get more government cash for.

In other craniorectally-inverted conservative news, House Republicans change PAYGO so that tax cuts don’t have to be offset. Reducing revenue apparently no longer increases deficits – that’s some doubleplusgoodnewspeak there, Boner!

@al2o3cr: Clarified, not corrected. And I ain’t giving a flack precedence over an on-the-record statement by his boss.

TJ: Gahdammit, someone vandalized the awesome Kittenzilla mural on Divisadero Street. All that is now visible are the blue eyes of the kitty at the bottom of the mural.

@SanFranLefty:

(Also: we will politely refuse to engage in any arguments about what constitutes “art” and continue to be outraged, thank you very much.)

Only in Frisco.

@nojo: Not.Gonna.Take.That.Bait.

Sheryll got a Viking funeral.

@SanFranLefty: I am heartbroken. We just can’t have nice things.

@Mistress Cynica:
i heard those exact words many many times as a child.

@baked: I too had those words directed at me my entire childhood.

@SanFranLefty: Ditto. I broke everything within reach.

@SanFranLefty: I kinda like the bulls. Not necessarily on Kittenzilla, but they’re not bad street art. Plus you’ll be able to buy prints of the original. Must be mobbed up. ;-)

@JNOV: The bulls are cool, and they would have made a nice mural by themselves. But it’s a real dick move to paint over someone else’s painting. Especially kittehs with lasers and rainbows shooting out of their eyes…

@SanFranLefty: Trufax. That’s why I think the original artists did both.

ETA: They were careful to avoid the best parts: the dragonfly and the wee peeking kitteh. Something smells fishy…

@karen marie doesn’t want to know: He didn’t wear a Viking Hat. >:-/ The NT is 17,000 years old. Look. I really try to overlook his nuggets of misinformation, and I’m thinking someone else made those slides, but really?

@karen marie doesn’t want to know: Thank you for sharing. While there did you happen to see his demonstration of jumping from ladder moves? Or the James Bond walking down the street exercise? I’m going to have to try that out when I can walk again.

@JNOV: I know. I try to be a good person and not cause Mrs Cyn to avert her eyes but PUT ON SOME PANTS, DUDE! At least buy a dance belt. And yes about the NT. Plus he doesn’t believe in evolution. That did not come as a surprise, BTW. Poor Sherryl and all but why does he have her body? You know that ‘cremation’ did not go well. I’m just saying, we don’t want no barbecued Yorkie. That is why you take the dog to the vet to let her deal with it.

Oh, and Pat Robertson. Anyone check on the state of hell? Frozen?

@Benedick: We don’t want no BBQ’d Yorkie! I’m putting that on a shirt.

ETA: I was hoping Sheryll would be on a little ship in a kiddie pool, and Spike would shoot flaming arrows at. Wait. That’s not Norwegian, is it? I think I saw that shit in Arthur (not the Dudley Moore one).

EATA: Yeah, that pyre looked a little too unstable. You know the box slid down the logs. Repeatedly.

@Benedick: I also wondered if there were creationists who believe there was an Earth 17,000 years ago. I’m kinda confused.

@JNOV: I know what you mean. I want to be supportive of a fellow dog lover in his time of mourning but he’s making it so difficult for me to hold back the snark. I mean, the dog died of food poisoning and he put it in a cake box for the funeral.

COME ON!

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: There’s also the whole issue of posting one’s mourning on youtube.

I just had a thought and need help: is there a difference between posting one’s mourning on youtube and writing, for example, A Year of Magical Thinking then giving permission for it to be acted as a play? Not for one moment bashing Joan Didion but it strikes me that the major difference is one of tone. Or is it truly different? Does the fact that poor Spike is so Spikelike change it in some way?

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: That was a cake box[interrobang] I thought it was his momma’s hat box or something. Oh, man.

@Benedick: I never read it, and I didn’t know it was a play. I heard her interviewed by Terry Gross, and I was like, “I don’t think I can read this.”

I dunno. I have a love-hate relationship with Spike. He does and says many things that would really piss me off if I didn’t suspect that he’s got some sort of cognitive issues. So, I give him a pass for that. Homeschooled — he gets another pass. Still making videos after public derision also lands in the positive category.

BUT

My God! He’s sometimes able to come up with cogent ideas and clearly knows how to search for information (like his PSA about human food poisoning — animal food poisoning would have worked better, but he’s trying). So, he sometimes seems totally in his right mind, and then he makes a “Jew Hat” out of a towel. Ugh. But he did a great job fashioning that towel into some sort of headwear; I don’t have those skills.

I dunno. I see this isolated fellow who is displaying all the classic behaviors of someone who has been sheltered from the real world, but he also has the capacity to learn. I just want him to learn something. He’s not stupid. Not by a long shot. There’s just some sort of misfire going on in Spikeland.

@Benedick: Yes. There is art, and there is exhibitionism. There is Hamlet’s soliloquy and there is Spike (bless his heart).
@JNOV: I did not have the opportunity to see the play, but Year of Magical Thinking is one of my favorite books, and the best description of grief I’ve ever read. It’s bearable because of Didion’s cool, detached style–she reports on her own actions and reactions as an observant journalist would. One never has the sense that she is exploiting or sensationalizing her grief. Vanessa Redgrave did the one-woman play.

@Benedick: I just chalk the YouTube thing up to generational differences. The kids today are living their lives online. Alas, the days of dead tree diaries and porn staches under the bed are gone.

@Benedick: Oh, and about public mourning: I’m all for it. Wailing, rending clothes, not stuffing those emotions down — I think public mourning can help. New Orleans funerals — wonderful.

I’m a huge fan of Six Feet Under, and they often address how we’ve sanitized death. It totally depends on the person and the culture, but I can understand the need to let those emotions flow. I also understand those who mourn in private.

I’m not having a traditional funeral (unless Jr thinks it would help him deal with my death if I did). I’m having a home funeral and a green burial. And about a month after I die, I want all of my family and friends to gather at this place near Big Sur and have a kick ass party with party favors (a mix CD, natch) and lots of food and booze.

@Mistress Cynica: Then I’ll give it to myself for Festivus. Thank you. :-*

@JNOV: We had a bit of a crisis chez Cyn this week, when Mr Cyn’s 89 -yr-old grandmother had to have emergency surgery for intestinal blockage. When I got home from work, I heard wracking sobs the moment I set foot on the front porch. The poor man was in hysterics. I have never seen a member of my family take on like that over anything–you do NOT shed a tear at a funeral, however many xanax you have to take to remain stoic. We’re WASPs, god’s frozen people. I had no idea how to respond or comfort him, other than to give him a hug, and part of me was really repelled at what seemed to me overly dramatic and self-indulgent behavior. It was a struggle to be supportive of a way of mourning very, very different from my own (which involves a number of xanax and curling up into a fetal position in the privacy of my bedroom; crying, if absolutely necessary, is done in the shower, where the water would drown out any sounds one might inadvertently let slip).

@Mistress Cynica: Is she okay now?

Yeah, I understand. We’re all conditioned in some way or another, and when someone reacts in a way that is alien to us, we don’t know how to respond.

I’m sure that your hug was very meaningful, because I’m sure that Mr. Cyn understands that you express grief differently. I don’t see it as a value-laden issue; we each have our own coping mechanisms for pain. It’s when those coping mechanisms stop being effective, as they have in my life, that we might consider another way.

@Mistress Cynica: Very sorry to hear that. Living, as I do, with a bedouin tribesman without a camel I can find myself blinded by the volume of emotion that can be generated. I can get crazy myself, however. But holding is good. And generally being there. I understand the feeling that there is a need to ‘do’ something but mostly it’s a matter of listening and making sure there is food. And allowing whatever is going to happen to happen. Noisy crying is, in my opinion, a good sign.

Re the art thing, that’s sort of my question. Does it actually make a difference? Or is that our own prejudice? I’m only talking about extreme confessionals. They make me squirmy but that’s just my own p.o.v. I read excerpts from Didion’s book which seemed very fine. I just wonder how different the underlying motive is and is the difference the degree of skill involved in its expression.

Hamlet is, of course, fictional. I use that soliloquy quite a lot in the piece I’m working on that we just performed for the first time in NY. It’s about a man dying and how that might be experienced. In my play it makes him dance. And given Spike’s entirely irrational acting out via what he thinks of as dance it makes me think I might be on to something.

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: Generational, of course. Still, my nephews and nieces and great nephews and nieces aren’t doing that. I think the homeschooling isolation is an interesting observation. Being an only child, as I am, is isolating enough. I can only guess what the homeschooling deal is like.

@Benedick: Yes. I think you are on to something.

ETA: I hope I’ll be dancing while I’m dying. Even if I’m just moving my head some.

@JNOV: @Benedick: She is doing better, thanks. Out of ICU and demanding banana milkshakes.

@Mistress Cynica:
Good to hear.

Yeah, my family is the Korean equivalent of god’s frozen people. Stone faced stoicism is the name of the game.

@Mistress Cynica: Oh shit, how’s the grandma-in-law doing? I was definitely in the WASPy don’t let it show tradition of mourning/showing emotion, I usually manage to pull it off at the time actually called upon, for example at the funeral or memorial service, but then it will spring on me at inopportune times when my mind is wandering. This summer when thinking of loved ones who recently died I wound up bursting into racking sobs while sitting on the subway [awk-ward! though given the crazy shit that happens on MUNI, not that out of the ordinary…], or having silent tears uncontrollably leak out of my eyes when sitting in the back of a room during a presentation at a conference.

@JNOV: Loved SFU for all the same reasons.

@SanFranLefty: She’s much better. I know what you mean about unexpected triggers at weird times. I was once standing in line behind a woman who was wearing the same perfume my grandmother wore, and I nearly lost it right there.

He really tried to burn his own dead dog? I wasn’t going to clack the link but…

@Tommmcatt is with Karin Marie on This One: I refuse to click the linque.

@SanFranLefty: I’m afraid of the terrible, terrible things it might force me to snark…

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: When Desdemona died of Old Age Rat, I buried her in her favorite box of Milk Bones.

Shaggy, meanwhile, is fertilizing the neighbor’s ivy. Not that the neighbor knows.

@Tommmcatt is with Karin Marie on This One: That shitty little fire would barely cook a hot dog.

@redmanlaw: You tempt me, but I am strong.

Is his outfit horrible? His outfit us usually horrible.

Okay, I finally peeked…

“Dogs were first domesticated over 17,000 years ago. That is almost older than the New Testament.”

The debate reopens: Are we all being taken for a ride?

@nojo: Well there is that. And much passion is devoted to the issue of his authenticity. I don’t think he’s a fake. If this happened in print I would most likely agree but his videos seem to me to be just too depressingly real. Someone ‘acting’ Spike (and the name, I know, and plus Sherryl. Sherryl the Yorkie?) would be making it clear he was nuts or whatever. Spike, it seems to me, is a kind of Dostoevskian idiot who’s been homeschooled and then let loose on the world. But he has a new roommate and I think we can all be glad of that.

@Tommmcatt is with Karin Marie on This One: You owe it to yourself, as a gay man, to see the James Bond Walking Down the Street Workout. Whether it’s real or not you might want to incorporate it into your own fitness regimen. First you will see the Jumping From Ladders Dance Moves but stay with it. If he is a phony he’s very brilliant. He’s sort of the new Brando.

@Tommmcatt is with Karin Marie on This One: He looks pretty good, especially his hair. Remember, he knows how to dress for church…

@Mistress Cynica: Good. Banana milkshakes might keep her pipes clean. :-)

@redmanlaw: The funniest thing I’ve read all morning!