Brain Farts: March 2005 Archives

What a smart, smart thing to say to the fuzz.

The cops came to see my neighbors about three seconds ago.

Which is great, I hate my neighbors.

Their music sucks.

Be evicted, plz.

UPDATE: My thin walls have explained what's going on.

White Dude and Black Dude live together, blaring shitty R+B and banging on the wall whenever we try to play Marvel vs. Capcom 2.

BD called the cops, because WD hit him. OMG ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP.

WD was looking through BD's email, and found a suspicious-looking message that apparently read a lot like BD setting up a romantic rendezvous. Which was especially shitty, on account it's WD's birthday.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

Anyway, there was a confrontation, BD was smacked. BD immediately brings in 5-0, then is very shy and reluctant to admit doing so. BD explains away the email as a meeting with a client, as he is a dietician. They quieted down from there.

The end.

Matt tried to record a little audio for your enjoyment, but they stopped screaming before he could get his camera ready. Sorry.

DOUBLE UPDATE: AHAHAHA THEY JUST WENT DOWN TO THE STATION. Good. Fuck off, th' botha yas. Guess who's playing MvC2 and listening to Andrew W. K. until 4:00 AM tonight.

Schadenfreude: smoooooooth goin' down.

I wonder how many of the Republican House representatives that just nullified the Florida court ruling to remove the feeding tube and bumped Terry Schiavo's right-to-die case up to the federal courts have ever breathed a word about the evils of "activist judges" in California, or the erosion of state's rights.

Funny.

The moral of the story? Better get that living will in order.

A new "Playing with Dolls," my ridiculous little The Sims 2 soap opera, is up in the Misc. section. Chapter Eight: At Home with the Pleasants.

SO IMPATIENT.

Lucas & Odessa will be a day late, this week. It'll go up, in all likelyhood, Wednesday night.

That's the bad news.

The good news is that, now that my workload's lightened up a bit and I've got a little wiggle room, Blikada will start updating again.

Also, now that the Sims 2 expansion pack Sims University is out, I can start adding new chapters to "Playing with Dolls" again. I haven't done that, lately. Cuz, uh, Coda needed to go to college.

I care about these things, you see.

Yeah.

Finally, a meme I have an interest in. Stolen from Reinder's blog.

Below is a list of books that either are, or some point were, banned by various governments for various reasons. Books I've read are in bold. Books I've partially read are italicized. Commentary added where I feel the need for it.

#1 The Bible (All good little atheists have.)
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran (Ditto.)
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (Been meaning to get to this one.)
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (Oops.)
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (Didn't everyone get this one chucked at 'em in one high school English class or another?)
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx
#37 Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (Why have I read all the OMG DYSTOPIAN FUTURE books on this list?)
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (Don't see what the fuss was about. Found it dull.)
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (Gotta get to this one.)
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (This one managed to fuck up my entire day when I was, like, ten.)
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl (Who banned this?!)
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright (Pretty sure this was assigned to me at some point.)
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig (WTF, the kiddie book about the donkey? Someone needs a hobby.)
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (...Yipes. Yeah, I remember this one.)
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (No thanks. Turned off of Heinlein forever by Starship Troopers. WATCH ME MAKE A NOVEL OUT OF MY POLI-SCI THESIS!!!)
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

What, no Turner Diaries? I don't even get that one? Come ON, people.

All in all... Kinda anemic. Maybe I oughta cut back on the Discworld and Song of Ice and Fire novels.

Preferably, these. But my own would be good, too.

Couldn't you picture cute little vinyl Mairas an Drimmers and mudmen, available in both anatomically correct and Hedwig'ed versions? I can. But then, I'm dangerously delusional.

I found Strangeco there after asking Google what Jim Woodring's been up to, lately. Seems like everyone gets thier own action figure these days, doesn't it? That's kind of nice, considering I'm just about self-important enough to want a couple. Hey, it might be a reasonable prospect in ten years or so. Y'never know.

In the meantime, I think I'll start saving up for a bunny van and the Forever Sensible Motorcycle Club.

So.

If you're going to accept that gender dysphoria... that is, that thing that makes people uncomfortable with their chromosomal gender, and gets treated with gender reassignment... is a congenital condition, that has to necessarily mean that there are gender dysphoric children. Cuz, y'know, there would have to be.

Interesting. Something you don't usually think about.

I was considering this today because I have a friend who works with children. He's a grade school teacher, and the other day, he was telling me about a little boy in his class.

The little boy likes to pirouette like a ballerina, and he calls himself Princess Butterfly and Mr. Mermaid. Regularly.

Golly.

With all that in mind, I goofed off a little with Google and I found this, which is something that's just perfectly logical if you think about it, but somehow never even occurred to me as a possibility.

In a nutshell, gender dysphoric kids transitioning from one gender to the other while still in childhood, with the support of their parents and doctors.

I get the sense from the various articles that they're still not allowed genital surgery until they're much older, but they take hormones, dress as their preferred gender, and get their new names early on, which is fascinating. The guy-turned-girl at the top of the page is 26, which seems a little typical as transsexualism goes, but you can scroll down for nine and ten-year olds.

I guess those parents who say "I always knew he was different" weren't kidding.

You usually hear about transsexuals getting kicked out of their houses at 15 by hysterically weeping parents, not being driven to their pediatrician appointments by mom for a refill of Premarin. But I guess everything really does have its own bell curve.