The masterpiece above is Picasso One Eyed Wing Ding Thing by Deeci from tamponart.com, which has a great mission statement:

Tampon Art is a transformation. Our history has been women bleeding, being isolated, being shamed, and being diapered in rags. But now, we have the opportunity of utilizing an internal absorbent, not just for convenience during menstruation, but for having fun and making art. Out from the mud comes the lotus flower. From the blood and pain comes Tampon Art, an alchemy of the human spirit. It is rare for a process that has such a profound negative, even taboo status, to transform its control mechanism into art. Who would have guessed that such amazing creations would be possible from a tampon?

[ via Geisha asobi ]

From Mitsu’s account of the blizzard:
“… I said to her “At first I thought he didn’t know what he was doing, but he did.” She remarked, “In New York, it’s the crazy people who know what they’re doing, and the normal people who don’t know how to do anything.”

Sorry for the late recap, I think I’m still a little starstruck, but for those of you wondering how the William Gibson reading went: it was great. As Jessamyn said when she saw him in Seattle earlier in the month:

Gibson is poised and interesting. He’s a good reader, he’s used to crowds, and he tells funny stories and deftly answers even the most stupid questions. I am always happy when I see writers treating the peanut galleries that show up at these things with respect. I mean, it’s sort of wry and hip to be snarky when the hundredth person asks you where you get your ideas, but it takes a special talent to answer that question in a way that is not only interesting for you, but interesting for your audience. Everyone feels richer for the experience. Gibson had that kind of class.

Only ten people or so got to ask questions because the B&N people were determined to hurry things along—half of the questions were just plain dumb, the worst of all from a guy who suggested Gibson should change the way he writes his dialogue; he hadn’t been talking for five seconds before everyone realized what he was up to and a massive collective groan rolled through the room. I’m sorry, Mr Gibson, but New York being New York we have a surfeit of self-absorbed idiots, their numbers only rivaled by those in Los Angeles and D.C.
Anyway, I got to talk to him after all for a few minutes while having my books signed, amazing because when confronted with people I’ve long admired my brain usually turns into mush and I become incapable of conversation. I asked about the wild tie he was wearing (“It’s apophenia,” was the answer) and apologized because I knew his hand must be cramping already, but I brought some other books along and would he mind signing them as well? Especially Idoru, my favorite of all his books. He said no, actually he was very glad to see them and especially happy because Idoru‘s his favorite one too. Which I already knew from reading his blog but it was still nice to hear that from him in person.
I finished reading Pattern Recognition when I got home that night, having picked it up at the store and gotten halfway through it while waiting for the reading, and after one read through I think it’s safe to say it’s my second favorite Gibson, sandwiched between Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties. The denouement was a bit disappointing, too fast and rather too easy, but I liked it nonetheless and recommend it highly, even if you’ve never read any Gibson before, and especially if you’ve never read any good science fiction before or are one of those silly people who totally avoid the genre because you think it’s all about men in space suits tinkering with gadgets and fighting aliens. Pick it up, you won’t be sorry you did.

Sometimes people are so dangerously ignorant it’s frightening:
“I accidently left the same tampon in for a month. I don’t know how I did this. Is anything going to happen from this? Do I need to see a doctor?”

Operated by the Sisters of the Magdalene Order, the laundries were virtual slave labor camps for generations of young thought to be unfit to live in Irish society.

who had become pregnant, even from rape, who were illegitimate, or orphaned, or just plain simple-minded, who were too pretty and therefore in “moral danger” all ran the risk of being locked up and put to work, without pay, in profit-making, convent laundries, to “wash away their sins.”

They were completely cut off from their families, and many lost touch with them forever.

Stripped of their identities, the were given numbers instead of names. They were forbidden to speak, except to pray. If they broke any rule or tried to escape, the nuns beat them over the head with heavy iron keys, put them into solitary confinement or shipped them off to a mental hospital.

Over a period of 150 years, an estimated 30,000 women were forced into this brutal penance, carried out in secret, behind high convent walls.

The last Magdalene laundry finally closed down in 1996. 1996!
As Zed said, “I really should get around to getting myself formally excommunicated.”

One thing that fires up the bulls never changes: the bellowing of the Carabao anthem, “The Soldier’s Song.” At the 2002 Wallow, the room was already thick with smoke—every place setting had been adorned with (forget that embargo) an authentic Cuban cigar—when a voice said, “Gentlemen, please turn to your songbooks,” and the U.S. Marine Band, seated to the side, struck up a tune. The Carabaos, most of whom seemed to know the words by heart, lustily sang the first stanza’s story of the dreaded “bolo” (the Filipino revolutionaries’ machete—they had few guns) and deceitful “ladrones” (“thieves”):

In the days of dopey dreams—happy, peaceful Philippines,
When the bolomen were busy all night long.
When ladrones would steal and lie, and Americanos die,
Then you heard the soldiers sing this evening song:

And then the bulls and their guests rhythmically banged their fists on the tables during each rendition of the chorus:

Damn, damn, damn the insurrectos!
Cross-eyed kakiac ladrones!
Underneath the starry flag, civilize ’em with a Krag,
And return us to our own beloved homes.

That’s from Ian Urbina’s piece in this week’s Village Voice, “The Empire Strikes Back”, about the super exclusive Military Order of the Carabao (formed in 1900 during the Philippine-American War), and the people singing happily along are among the U.S. military’s most elite officers.
I’m not sure what bothers me more about the Order of the Carabao, the racism or the imperialism. No, wait, it’s that these people have access to so much power between them¹, and positively thrive when their country is at war.
Oh, and that while everyone was up in arms about Trent Lott last year and cheered when he was forced to resign from his position, this is probably not going to make the nightly news or the front page of any of the national newspapers, even though this is about a group of people who have so much more influence than Lott ever had.
Why does it feel like most people in the US don’t know or care to know that racism isn’t just about hating blacks? Look at how little media attention was paid to Shaq’s racist taunts towards Yao Ming, how quickly that went away and how it isn’t likely to follow Shaq around for the rest of his life². If Yao Ming had been the one to say something racist about Shaq or any other black player, people of all colors would scream for his blood and he likely wouldn’t be able to continue playing in the U.S.
If we found out tomorrow that top officers of the German military threw yearly parties to sing happy songs about slaughtering Jews during the Holocaust, how would we all react? How about if the Indonesian military did the same thing about all the years they slaughtered the East Timorese, or the Chinese and their continuing occupation of Tibet? How about if the Japanese celebrated all the Americans that died during the Bataan Death March?
It doesn’t matter what the color of your skin is or what nationality you are, we should all speak out against it whenever we see it because racism is wrong and it affects all of us. If you were outraged by Trent Lott and Shaq, if you had a blog and posted about them, why haven’t you written about this?
[ via caterina.net ]
Further reading:
1) Rebuke for the Society of the Carabao from 1914 on Jim Zwick’s BoondocksNet. I emailed Zwick the VV article and he wrote back surprised, saying he didn’t even know the group was still around.
2) these comments from a MetaFilter thread: 1, 2.
¹Don’t believe me? Check out some of the Distinguished Service Award recipients they’re most proud of: Strom Thurmond, William Perry and George H. W. Bush. Generals and admirals are among their members and Colin Powell (!) has attended more than a few of their annual dinners.
²Meanwhile every article that will ever be written about Fuzzy Zoeller will have to include “fried chicken and collard greens”.

Choire from East West presents Sordid Gay Mac OS X Icons, “tacky gay flair” for all your personal computing needs!

Gift of the Book

lights go off
all over rhode island
everyone falls
into bed
I stay awake
reading
rereading
the long-awaited
prose
of your
body
stunned
by the hunger

— C.D. Wright, Tremble (also in Steal Away: Selected and New Poems)

Great piece on David Rees of Get Your War On fame, “The Accidental Artist” by Judith Lewis:

Rees has no illusions about the strip’s importance; in fact, he almost gave it up altogether after the summer, but started again when the Bush administration made the staggeringly vulgar decision to hire Henry Kissinger to investigate the events of September 11. “When that happened,” Rees recalled, “I sat down and said to myself, ‘Okay, let’s see if I’ve still got it.'”

He did: “Does Bush even know who these motherfuckers are?” asks one of the strip’s generic office workers while talking on the phone. “Didn’t he get suspicious when he saw Kissinger and John Poindexter licking the blood off each other’s hands?”

[ via randomWalks ]
There’s a Get Your War On event here in New York on the evening of the 16th, drop me a line if you’d like to go with.

I popped Jarvis into his bag this afternoon and we took an hour-long ride on the A train, all the way down to JFK to pick my mom up.
Later on in the day while I was showing her around my apartment, I asked, “So, it’s messier than you thought it would be, right?”
And she said, “No, this is just about what I expected.”
*sigh*