Young Soul Rebel

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

The room-mate and I went to Ikea today. I'm convinced that Ikea is a plot of the Swedish government for world domination.

We went there cos his mother said that the meatballs in the Ikea restaurant were really good — but we were disappointed to see that the "restaurant" was actually a canteen with a few very basic items — and cos Scott read this news story where somebody at the Vatican claimed that this really innocent photo in the latest Ikea catalogue of two men on a couch in a drawing room "endorsed homosexuality" and the Ikea company head said "Yes! As a matter of fact, they are gay! People living in the modern world don't have a problem with that!"

On our way out of the canteen area — cos it's designed in a way to make you forget the way you came in — we passed through a bunch of stuff and I wound up getting a lot of crap for $20. OK, it was all crap that I kind of needed anyway, but the fact that they've designed the store in such a way that you have to pass through this all, and these supposed "shortcuts" are actually few and far-between, meant I wound up getting a bunch of crap.

On the good side of Ikea, they carry a mechanical alarm clock and their mechanical alarm clock is $7 and has all-metal gears. The only plastic in it is the face. The old mechanical I had cost $10 at K-Mart in 1999 and is full of plastic gears.

Wait? Good side? IT'S PART OF THEIR PLOT! It's all a part of their plot, I tells ya'. A pack of eight wooden hangers for $3.50, compared to Target's price of $8 for six -- Swedish government plot!

The Swedes will take over either by our willingness to succumb to the Ikean lure of low cost quality home furnishings or by entrapping us in the labyrinthine hell that is their store design.

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

Man, I wish I could take credit for this, but no, sadly, I cannot. The author of this is __ from the rpg.net forum:

God said, "Fuck, that Sodom is full of wickedness. I'ma blow it up.", and then Abraham (who was God's co-pilot at the time) went, "WHAT?! My cousin lives in Sodom! Would you destroy the good with the bad!?" and God say, "Uh, yeah, that's kinda my thing. But I see you're upset by this, and so I'll said a couple of my angels down to scope the place out. If I can find 50 righteous dudes in the city, I'll spare it."

And Abraham thought to himself, "Uh, shit. Lot's told me about Sodom. Ain't no way these angels are gonna find fifty.", so he said, "Uh, how about, um. One? I can send you to his place, the angels can crash out." And God said, "Dude, this sort of haggling is why your people get a reputation. Twenty." And they haggle like that, until God and Abraham agree that if the angels find five righteous dudes, Sodom won't get nuked. Oh, and the angels will take Lot up on that offer of sleeping on his couch.

So, the angels go to Sodom, and it's worse than L.A. and believe me, L.A. is pretty fucking terrible. They don't find ANYONE who isn't being a dick to someone else; they decide to stop by Lot's house and warn him to get out of town. Lot, being nice, offers them hospitality - they can stay under his roof and eat his food and watch his DVDs for, I think the tradition was, three days or so. Well, the Sodomites noticed these angels going around and taking notes and looking haughty, and a bunch of 'em, men and women, old and young, said "FUCK THAT." and they went to Lot's house.

This MOB of creepy bastards all riot in front of Lot's house, screaming "LET US GANG RAPE THOSE UPPITY BASTARDS. THIS IS OUR CITY AND NO BLUE STATE GOVERNMENT ASSHOLES ARE GOING TO TELL US WHAT TO DO!". And Lot, he went to the window and said, "Um. I offered these guys Hospitality. It would be wicked and wrong to kick 'em out for you to have your way with, and MRS. HAVERSHAM I DON'T THINK THAT IS AN APPROPRIATE GESTURE FOR A WOMAN OF YOUR AGE.", but the Sodomites weren't having it. So, Lot, being a man of the time thinks, "Well, it's not like I offered my DAUGHTERS hospitality... What if?"

So, he sticks his head back out the window and says, "Hey, what if I let you guys savage my virgin daughters. One of 'em ain't even old enough for boobies yet! Would you leave us alone then?" And at this point, Lot's daughters break every "World's Greatest Dad" mug in the house. But the Sodomites have a hair up their ass, and say, "Nah, nah. We've got on our minds on makin' some Nephalim. Send those prissy little God-Botherers out here!"

And then the Angels struck 'em all blind, and called in the air strike.

It's really a lovely story about how the folks in the Middle East have done everything in their power to piss God off at every opportunity since the dawn of time. I mean, it ain't like Old Testament God to give your city and your non-Hebrew people chances. And, of course, Lot and his family fuck up THEIR chance with God not too long after the Apocalypse - with the incest and the drunkeness and the freunleven.

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

If you have any siblings, especially any within three years of your own age, I'm sure you understand that sometimes they'll just do annoying things for the sheer joy of it, especially when you're very young. Well, my sister was pulling some typical annoying-younger-sister shit while I'm drawing. I ask her several times to quit, be quiet, go do something else, all to no avail, because it is the duty of the younger sibling to annoy the older one within an inch of their life.

At some point, I just snapped and went to hit her in the leg clutching my pencil firmly in that hand, and wound up accidentally-and-not-on-purposely stabbing her in the thigh hard enough that the pencil-tip is bobbing around as she runs downstairs, screaming to our mother (she was wearing shorts). She's screaming along the way "I've got lead poisoning!! I've got lead poisoning!!"

My mother's shouting "Calm the fuck down (yes, my mother swore like that) -- let me look at it. Anyway, pencils are filled with graphite, so you don't have lead poisoning!"

Sister: "I have GRAPHITE POISONING! Ro's a murderer! Ro's a murderer! i feel myself dying!!"

"Will you shut the hell up and let me pull the pencil out!" My mother, being an RN, would have had complete control over the situation if my sister wasn't being such a drama queen.

In the meantime, I'm walking downstairs, absolutely mortified that I managed to stab my sister. I'm nine years old and have never even hit her (slap-fights in the back of the car and similar, sure, but that's not really hitting) or any other kid. When I get to the kitchen, I sheepishly manage "I... I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Molly's screaming "You'll get the electric chair for killing your own sister! You're a murderer! I... I feel myself dying!"

Mum: "We don't live in Texas, and executions are done with shots in Ohio. Anyway, you're not going to die, so Ro's not a murderer. Now will you sit still so I can pull this pencil out?"

"But I want him to DIE for what he's put me through!"

"Will you shut up! I heard you through the vent in his room and I'm surprised he hadn't done this sooner! I knocked my own sister's teeth in for less than some of the annoying shit you do to Ro."

At this point, my mother was finally able to pull the pencil out, then handed it right back to me, tip totally crusted in my sister's blood. "Here, I'm going to clean her up. If I were you, I'd keep it like this and pull it out the next time she starts bugging the hell out of you like that."

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

Maybe a year after I discovered Guns N' Roses, I discovered the music of Prince. I think, at first, I had found a copied tape at a yard sale for maybe 25¢ of Parade: Music from the film Under the Cherry Moon by Prince & The Revolution. The quality of the tape was pretty shitty, didn't even last me six months of regular playing, but I remember being very blown away for all sorts of reasons. "I Wonder U" was weird and minimalist; "Under the Cherry Moon" and "Do U Lie?" kind of reminded me of my grandmother's Noël Coward and Cole Porter records; the man can fucking sing, and musicially, when he writes songs he can pull from all sorts of multi-genre influences and make something both distinct and well-crafted — kind of makes up for the frequency with which he's lyrically insipid.

I think my father had a bigger problem with Prince's music than with Guns N' Roses — something that I've only really understood in retrospect. In fact, I know that my father was coming after my GN'R tapes after the fuck-head had already come for my Prince collection and dragged me out of the house with him while he tossed them all on the burn pile.

Aside from the obvious accusations that Prince was a "faggot" (something that has only ever been evidenced by the man's flamboyant attire and eccentric personality — which you gotta admit, is a pair of traits that seem disproportionately higher in gay men than most other demographics), my father was convinced this man was some sort of harbinger of the anti-Christ, an accusation that always struck me as incredibly bizarre, even today &mdash though now I can sort of see it, if I suspend personal beliefs for a second and try to see it through the eyes of a Christian zealot who can see "blasphemy" in a bowl of creamed corn.

There are several glaring examples from Prince's career where he's mixed Christian imagery, from the vague to the blatant, and highly sexualised imagery in the same album — and most of his albums throughout the 1980s are frankly "concepts with the concept removed", sort of like Appetite...: There's a theme, the soundtrack albums contain tiny bits of story interspersed with songs that can very easily stand alone, but even everything that wasn't specifically made for a soundtrack (all his 1980s albums, excepting Purple Rain and Parade:... — I'd include Batman, but he's practically disowned that one). To a man who got this look like he had just shit his pants when he discovered that one of his children (id est, me) knew what masturbation was, and who specifically asked my mother to Bowdlerise the "where babies come from" talk to the point of it being essentially useless, who specifically circumvented the "puberty talk" to myself and my younger sister despite our mother's rightful pointing out that we needed to know this before something happened and we freaked out (of course, at some point during their debacle over basic sex-ed, I had learned it all by reading books at the library, and some time after that, my mother got "permission" to talk to me, I told her that I knew everything already, and proved it, and she said "OK, that's great. If you can dumb it down and tell your sister so I won't have to, then your dad won't yell at me in a year when I was to tell her all this"); it's completely understandable why the juxtaposition of The Dirty and The Divine would drive this man up a freakin wall and then some.

When i first picked up Dirty Mind, I had no idea what half of this lyrical content was. I was a very "innocent" and unsullied eleven-year-old, and all of my knowledge of sex was in the most clinical terms about how reproduction, PIV coitus, and masturbation worked. I had a scant knowledge of a few popular slang terms, largely due to the fact that the other kids in my class didn't like me, so they never told me anything. I remember, at some point, my mind just naturally came up with the concept of oral sex all by myself when I was eight (around the time that I learned that genitals were used for more than masturbation — it just made sense to me that 1. it's sort of like kissing, and thus affectionate, 2. it would be an easy way to avoid pregnancy, and 3. this is "how two boys would do It"), but aside from thinking "sucking on penis" (after all, I knew nothing about "blowjobs" or "head") was some revolutionary idea that I didn't think was ever talked about by other people, I knew nothing, at eleven, about the most of the shit I do now. It was all just catchy pop songs to me.

Despite being "forbidden" to be a fan throughout the 1990s, I still watched his career from afar and influence still continued in some ways. I initially became attracted to his character (after his music) because, again, of similarities: He's short (still taller than I am, though), flamboyant, favourite colour is purple -- things that were already identifying characteristics of myself by the age of seven, much less eleven. Hell, I'm a shitty lyricist, even.

Anybody who listens to me talk long enough will realise that The Sacred and The Obscene are two driving forces in my creativity, and Eros cultus alone even prevents me from keeping the two completely separate. Granted, since converting to Jehovah's Witness, the man can't even bring himself to swear, but he's also been shrugging off his past abilities for more Zappa-like complexities — most of his early stuff, as my friend Jeff and I have suggested, plays out like kind of a "Black Marc Bolan: you can hear this intense genius boiling under there, but instead he's been very prolific at producing very good and very catchy insipidness, as if he isn't even trying." Hell, even Jeff said "all through the 1980s, I always felt that if Prince would take even an extra year between releasing albums, yeah, he'd produce a lot less in quantity, but he could write Quadrophenia or Tommy or even Joe's Garage, and each one would be absolutely brilliant and ground-breaking."

And, like Zappa, Prince has abstained from drugs and alcohol throughout his entire career — apparently, he's always felt he's weird enough without 'em. Of course, my room-mate says that I'm the only person he knows who can be up drinking whiskey all night and get progressively less weird, my friend Ben once even said "yeah, Ro's the only person in the world who can drink a fifth of whiskey and suddenly get morals". Maybe they're all four onto something.

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

Yes, I'm no longer a practising Catholic (not like I was ever a very good one to begin with, but that's besides the point), yes, my family is from Belfast (which is Ulster, politically Northern Ireland, meaning my family is technically British), and I'm a Loyalist as far as the Ireland/UK BS is concerned (though this is mainly to spite my late father's soul, cos I'm petty that way), but let's instead look at the fact that St. Padraig, at the very least, brought the Irish out of being a bunch of iliterates. It simply cannot be denied that the Keltoi are one of the few ancient tribes originating in Europe that did not develop their own written language. Nothing against oral traditions, I suppose, but in all honesty, as much as I hate the character of Delenn in Babylon 5, she was right about some things — specifically in saying "what is built, endures". Wars can be forgotten. Prayers can lose meaning. But that which is made physical and can be seen is remembered for generations after the intangible is lost.

That said, here's an amusing St. Paddy's Day story from my childhood:

I went to a catholic school, but we didn't do anything for special for St. Patrick's Day (well, aside from the occasional themed crafty shit or sometimes somebody's mum would send cookies) because the girls' uniforms were already green and the boys were encouraged to wear a bright green tie or a pale green shirt with theirs. One year, I think it was my fourth and she was a layteacher, the teacher said that if the class really wanted to wear something special, fourth through eight grade girls were allowed to wear more-ornate hair ornaments (it was considered "too distracting" for younger grades) and she'd allow boys to wear sequinned or novelty ties or even green "leprechaun derby hats". She also said that she'd allow kids to use temporary red or auburn hair-colour. Then she pointed to me and said to the class:

"Of course, if you've already got bright auburn hair and your name is Ruadhan McElroy, you have my total permission to come to school tomorrow in anything you want."

"That's not fair!" said a chorus of classmates.

"Well, I didn't name you or pick your genetics, did I?" she asks me.

"No, Mrs. Terry."

Fast-forward to Seventh year, I'm living in Adrian, Michigan, and attending a public junior high, where we can wear anything we want to school, few exceptions, no matter what time of the year it is. I'm in Phys Ed class, and as we're lined up to go to the locker rooms before the teacher gets there, a large group of other kids decides to back me in a corner. The little shits started pinching me cos I'm not wearing green. I tell them this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of and try to get away, but they then back me in harder and start pinching me, especially any exposed skin, harder than ever. I think some of them even managed to leave bruises. I start shouting for help and, of course, the rest of the kids start looking on, some even start cheering, and then the PE teacher rushes in, pulls some kids off me and demands to know what the hell's going on.

"Well, they're not wearing green!" a couple laugh, looking very proud of themselves.

The PE teacher then shouts "Wait, hold ON! You're acting like this cos RUADHAN MCELROY, the redhead with the most-Irish name in the whole school, isn't wearing green on St. Patrick's Day? Are you really that stupid? Next time you want to gang up on some kid for laughs, think of something better than this," and then she sent them to the principal's office and offered to let me out of PE for the day.

BONUS STORY:
At a Halloween party, a now-ex-boyfriend once said of me to another guest "[Ruadhan's] like an Irish coffee: Very strong, very sweet — but about one third of the contents are whiskey, so I wouldn't take anything he says all that seriously."

I respond with, "Well, you're like corned beef and cabbage: You might think you're Gael at heart, but the meat's still all Yid."

A mutual friend, the only person there who got my joke, then responded, asking my then-boyfriend, "Wait, you're circumcised? I thought Ro didn't date circ'd guys."

Cos I have to somehow make everything about penis.

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

300(film)#Reception; Wikipedia page section

300 opened two days earlier, on March 7, 2007, in Sparta, and across Greece on March 8.[53][54] Studio executives were surprised by the showing, which was twice what they had expected.[55] They credit the movie's stylized violence, the strong female role of Queen Gorgo which attracted a large number of women to the movie, and the MySpace advertising blitz.[56]

[sighs deeply]

OK, Legendary Pictures/Warner Brothers.... I want you to know about something.

That "large number of women" going to see 300 on the big screen really couldn't have cared any less about Queen Gorgo. You know why? Since six months into the film's production, they were on y-gallery, drawing the hunchback "servicing" Xerxes in a rather erotic manner. Since they first saw the trailers, they were disregarding any allegations from various leaks that this was going to come off as even more homophobic than Miller's original GN and were on fanfic.net giving detailed accounts of every virile and muscled orifice that Leonidas was putting his dick into.

Let me tell you something I've learned about women: They couldn't be arsed to give two tugs of a dead dog's cock about "strong female characters". You know what they want? Especially the 15-30 crowd with copious amounts of Internet access? Women want oiled men rolling around with other oiled men who then proceed to sixty-nine eachother while in the embraces of an Athenian gymnasia. Women want pretty boys taking cock meat as big as my arm up their tiny unlubed sphincters.

Think lesbians care more about "strong women characters"? Think again! They're the worst of them all! My gawd, Freud would die from orgasm over the pseudoscientific bullshit he could make up about the 50% of the male-male fic community on the Internet that claims to be lesbian-identified. I'm sure it would go something like "angry with what they perceive as patriarchal control, these young women seek to emasculate even the most potent symbols of masculinity in the best and most subversive ways they know how."

Women don't give a shit about "strong women". Trust me, women are just as sick as men; the main reason that they go see films is so that they can have sex fantasies about the characters. They might try and "save face", or keep up airs of respectability, or whatever by writing an eloquent blog post about "strong women characters", but that's not the reason they actually wanted to go see 300. No, they went to go see 300 because it's a film filled with half-naked men, most of whom actually look pretty good, all of whom are potential slash-fodder — yes, even the hunchback.

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times: 1: People need to actually do some research before flipping out. 2: People need to pay attention to what they're doing. 3: People need to read more carefully.

I recently got an invite from a friend on one of my Hellenic polytheist lists for a site called Grouply. Now, I must admit, when I first clicked the "accept" link and signed up, I did neither #'s 2 nor 3. This resulted in me clicking through the site, pretty tired, mind you, but fighting to stay awake cos the long distance and local toll calling wasn't working and I needed to tell my room-mate something important after he got home from work (and I don't always trust leaving a written message, since his cat shreds paper when he feels he's being ignored). Now, this resulted in me suddenly realising, about halfway through the sign-up-and-invite process that I had just sent a few dozen e-mails to people.

Notice that I said I sent those e-mails — cos that's what I did. It says right on the Invite pages that you, the user, are to select which groups' members to send invites to. All Grouply does is automate the process for you. If you want to skip that step, that is an option available to you, as well, but if you mis-click, do not blame the site.

What is SPAM?
Technically, by the loosest definition, electronic e-mail spam is any unsolicited e-mail arriving in your inbox — Facebook invites, Facebook application invites, MySpace updates, and so forth, technically, would follow under the loosest definition of "spam". Grouply, in that respect, isn't that different from my friend Alejandra sending me an invite to use Some Facebook Application™ — the only noticable difference is that Grouply has access to one's Yahoo!Groups subscriptions and can thus e-mail those groups in addition to individuals.

What is identity theft?
This is where I see so many misconceptions about what x-Internet phenomenon actually is that it makes me dry-heave at times. Or, well, I would if I wasn't so laid back. :-)

"Identity theft" is a very specific crime: It's when an individual or fraudulent company, usually by using a bot of some variety, though electronic means are not the only way to "identity theft" (they just make it easier), gains control of one's credit card or other banking account numbers and uses them for personal gain. Stealing one's ID or driver's license number, or even social security number, may also play a part in ID theft, but generally that information can't get a potential fraud much of anywhere these days — CCN and other account numbers are far more useful.

Grouply does not commit identity theft! Grouply does what Flickr and LiveJournal do:
On LiveJournal, you can "link" your Flickr account to your LJ. You do this by typing in your Flickr ID and password. Similarly, on Grouply, you "link" your Yahoo!Groups ID to your Grouply account by entering your yahoo!Id and password. Of course, Flickr also warns that by linking your Flickr account to a third-party account, such as LiveJournal, that photos marked "private" or as some "friends-only" level, those Flickr photos may be visible via the third-party site — Grouply, on the other hand, says many times on its site that its software is designed so that only a member of, say, EunuchPersonals can access the messages of EunuchPersonals via Grouply (assuming that EunuchPersonals has its archives set to members-only).

Facebook does something very similar with Twitter and YouTube — neither Twitter nor YouTube are affiliated with Facebook, as companies, but you can still plug in your Twitter and YouTube usernames and passwords, and these sites will automatically send updates to your Facebook "newsfeed". You can also "link" your LJ to Facebook in the same way. The concept is very much the same with Grouply. If you disapprove of Grouply waning your Yahoo!Groups name and password to function to its fullest potential, then make sure that you absolutely do not give your Twitter, YouTube, or LJ info to Facebook! If you approve of Facebook asking for this info simply to give you more features, but disapprove of giving Grouply similar info so that it can function to its potential, then quite frankly, you're a hypocrite cos the manner in which these sites both work by integrating with other sites is very much the same.

So what is Grouply, then?
Grouply is a site that offers the service of consolidating all of your groups into a "Smart Digest™", first and foremost. Immediately following that by a hair, it streamlines the web-only view of Yahoo!Groups amazingly well — I know because I'm using it right now.

Grouply also has a relatively new "social" aspect, wherein one can create a "friends network" across the various groups they're in. This is impressive with the personalisation. I, for example, blocked the view of all porn groups I belong to from non-members of those porn groups — now none of my friends get to know what kind of porn I look at! Unlike many social networking sites, you can view your profile as a friend or a non-friend member of X-group, with "X" being selectable from a drop-down list, so that I can make sure that only the porn group members can see that I look at porn. Grouply even invites people to either use one of their own or create a new "dummy account" (they call it a "test account", but I'm old, so I use antiquated speech) just to see how the site works and feels without using their "real" account — this is going above and beyond what any other social networking site does to prove they're legit, and the only reason they're doing it is because of the slew of libellous blog posts that confused people are making based on their own speculation and misconception.

Grouply is not a "scam", as I saw one person claim, either. For it to be a "scam", it would have to sucker financial information out of you, which it does not. Grouply makes its money from advertising, like Facebook and MySpace do, and that means that the more users that they have, the more that they can collect on advertising from advertisers. Unless you want to buy some adspace on Grouply.com, Grouply costs you nothing, nor do they ever ask for money. Grouply has been praise by Linuxchic on the Alternageek podcast, as well as TechCrunch.com and other sites. Grouply complies with Yahoo's Terms of Service, and you'd see that for a site that's been around since September of 2007, that if it truly *was* problematic that a warning would have long-ago been issued by Yahoo itself, the site it primarily works with — but no such official warning from yahoo can be found on the Web, just a bunch of irate speculation on Yahoo!Answers (a breeding ground for armchair "experts" stewing in their own stupidity, if you ask me) from people who have never even attempted to sign up for it, but instead have been spreading around the same blog posts from February of '08.

So let's see what we know at this point:

• You can use Grouply to read your Yahoo!Groups on the web (rather than e-mail) in a more "streamlined" manner than the Yahoo!Groups site offers.


• If you'd rather read via e-mail, You can have Grouply send you a "Smart Digest" of consolidated messages.


• If you got a Grouply invite, technically the site did not send on its own -- it was sent to you by a careless user who clicked "Invite members of these groups" or "Invite these groups" rather than the button that says "skip this step".


• Grouply is therefore not spamming people, it is careless Grouply users who are doing this.


• Grouply really couldn't care less about your financial identity, thus is not committing "identity theft": Grouply is doing nothing different from what LiveJournal offers to Flickr users, in fact, it does Y!Groups users a little better than LJ does Flickr users. Grouply does nothing different than what Facebook suggests that Twitter, YouTube, and LiveJournal users do in order to "link" those accounts with Facebook.


• If you don't want to use Grouply, don't sign up! It's really that simple. You won't be hurting anybody's feelings by not using it.


• If you are the owner of one or more Yahoo!Groups and you decide to "ban all Grouply users", you're an ass.

As stated above, Grouply is doing nothing illegal, and the way it works is no different from how Flickr links LiveJournal accounts or how Facebook links your Twitter, YouTube, and LiveJournal accounts. Don't want to your list to get Grouply invites? Want to disable your group from being read via Grouply? Grouply has given you an opt-out. Just go to grouply.com group owner controls, read through carefully, and then select "Please click here to proceed to Grouply Owner Controls" at the bottom of the page. You will be asked to enter in your Yahoo!Group owner-suffix e-mail (example: "eunuchpersonals-owner@yahoogroups....") and you'll be sent a confirmation code to make sure that you ARE the group's owner. Click the link in your e-mail, enter in the Admin confirmation code, and adjust the settings for your group as you like. Be warned, though, this process may get you to learn that Grouply is a pretty useful tool that can enhance the Yahoo!Groups experience of members of your Yahoo!Group(s).

[this post updated on 2009-03-07]

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

link to video, if the embedding is borked for you

I found this toy monkey from this woman on Craig's List who was giving it away because it makes this annoying screaming sound that she said was even annoying to her three-year-old daughter. I figured that I could use it as a musical instrument for my noise project, This Is Where the Fish Lives, and just have it in my collection of weird stuffed animals. No sooner did I come through the door with this little fracker, did my room-mate's cat, Fat Bob, get excited.

Fat Bob LOVES stuffed animals in the way that the sacred band of Thebes loved, in the way a Spartan soldier loved his comrade-in-arms, in the way that Hadrian loved Antinous. It is a beautiful and pure love when shared between two consenting men, but it is a strange and unnatural love when it is shared between a fourteen-year-old cat and a plush toy. In fact, I have many still photos of this cat making sweet, sweet love to my plush Cthulu and my plush yawning Bagpuss, and even one of those tart-shell shaped cat beds. Even the fact that this monkey is 1/4 the size of Bagpuss (who was already pretty small for Fat Bob's liking), this cat could not be stopped on his quest to rub his bright red little boner all over anything stuffed with polyfill.

And yes, this cat was neutered in 1996.

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

I have a notice that I post to CL/casual encounters/m4m periodically. I describe myself and describe the kinds of guys I'm looking for. My "looking for" description is always "young, avg or slender build, no Bears — no exceptions". Seems pretty self-explanatory, doesn't it? Here are some snippets from some of the responses I tend to get pretty frequently.

> hi, i saw your ad. I'm 45...

Oh hai! I've gone back to alter my advert to actually define "young" for the old and/or feeble-minded -- a description which fits you at least halfway.

> hello sexy. i'm not yr type, but i'd love 2 play wit u...

then here's a tip: forward my notice to somebody who *is* my type, or just move along

>...if you're into slim & smooth guys, then I am not what you're looking for. But if you want a big ol' Bear...

Actually, I'd prefer somebody who can read, thanks.

> hi! i'm a sexy married gal with tight perky breasts...

THEN STOP E-MAILING THE M4M ADVERTS! YOUR POON IS NOT SO AWESOME TO MAKE ME ROOT FOR BOTH TEAMS!

What the crap, people?

OK, the last one is almost definitely a spam-bot, but the rest are very apparently from real people. Is my request really that difficult to understand? You know, it's shit like this that reminds me that Why Women Hate Men is funny because it's true. My gawd, I have it in my right mind to start a complimentary blog called "You Make Fags Look Stupid".

Originally published at Searching for the Young Soul Rebel. You can comment here or there.

Me: Well, if this LibraryThing project has done nothing else, it's inspired me to clean my room just to find all the books I know are lurking in there.
Scott: So, what's the purpose of that Thing again?
Me: Oh, just to catalogue all my books on-line. And to wave my dick on the Internet.
Scott: A-ha! There's the real reason!