The Tory Party

Abortion. And stuff.

Ye-e-e-eah. `Cause I know all you hard-working people were slogging into your Friday thinking, y`know what I really need to kick off my weekend? Some under-informed Internet yokel’s rambling opinion on abortion.

Far be it from me to deny you.

Now, I realize that abortion rights are not the most important political issue — hell, not even the most important women’s issue. Poverty, HIV, health care, education, even ol` contraception maybe, but not abortion. Abortion is what the GOP dangles in front of people to distract them from what’s really going on. It must be very shiny.

We’re getting somewhere now, aren’t we?

And I realize that *everybody’s* opinion on abortion comes from a good place. So if everybody takes sides and screams “You hate babies!” “Oh yeah? You hate women!” at each other, everybody just gets more hurt and angry and it ends in tears and upsetting billboards on I-95. And yet *everybody* fundamentally agrees that they want fewer abortions to happen in the world. The dirty hippies want to do this with education and prophylactics. The conservatives want to do this by making abortion illegal. Okay. This is called “killing the messenger.” But if *everybody* has the same objective, then why can’t we get together and work on making it happen?

Now *there’s* a bunch of guys I`d trust with my pachinko.

I say this and yet… there’s one kind of abortion opinion I just can’t hang with.

If you feel like abortion is between a woman and a doctor, and the law has no business in it no matter what the circumstances, then I agree with you. Maybe you and I can sit down over chai tea and Frookies and talk about how great it is to agree completely and what great progressives we are and maybe not mention how little we’ve done to actually effect change in this regard.

If you have the position of the Catholic Church — that in matters of conception from A to Z it is a sin to interfere with God’s will — then I respect it. Maybe you and I can have a vigorous conversation about whether religion should shape public policy. Maybe you might get aggravated when I suggest that a condom is no match for God’s will, so what’s the harm? But I`d shake your hand coming and going because the Catholic position is consistent and crushes gray areas like Kurt Angle does Eddie Guerro OMG!!!1

And most of the life-begins-at-conception people fit this bill, too. If you don’t believe contraception is a burnable offense, but you still think abortion is no never nothing no time never acceptable, then you’re still good people and we’ve got a lot to talk about.

But if you’re one of these people who is against abortion except in cases of rape or incest — GET OFF THE FENCE. The “rape or incest” exception is for people who haven’t thought about it too hard and want to sound moral without being unreasonable to women who, you know, *just experienced felonious assault.* Lemme break it down for you: the “rape or incest” exception means you don’t think abortion should be an option for a woman unless *it’s not her fault she got pregnant.* You don’t care about life and babies and stuff. You care about women who consent to sex getting what they deserve. I`m not even going to get into how you would want rape proven to your satisfaction, or how long you think that would take (goodbye morning-after pill). If you really feel a life is a life is a life and deserves a shot no matter how it got here, then be pro-life. If you really feel like childbearing is a private issue between a woman and her doctor (and Roe v. Wade was a right to privacy finding), then be pro-choice.

I think I`m done.

Of course, I realize there are more ways to think about abortion than these few, but these are the funnest!!!1

Big Arnie`s Plastic Surgery Freaks Me Out

I`m getting the drop on Awful Plastic Surgery. I rule. Just thought it was time to give the Governor his due.

Once upon a time, Big Arnie had a normal face. He was even — I hate to say it, since the bizarre and cocky Pumping Iron-era version of him reminds me of nothing so much as my last ex’s younger brother — kinda good-looking. Even cute. Yecchy, but cute.

Oh, Chester the Molester, you dashing rake.

What I want you to pay attention to here are his eyes. Yes, he’s squinting in both pictures, but he’s under 40 and he’s got under-eye meat and crows-feet. That’s how people look when they squint up. It’s nice and normal. Also note that the meat above his eyelids angles down, and you can’t seen ANY eyelid underneath it.

Somewhere between Commando and Junior he had a little work done. I can’t even say what or how much, which means it was good work, but things are sleeker and the crows-feet have all but disappeared.

You can see a little eyelid on the outside corners of his eyes in the second picture, which is new, and something mysterious has happened to his hair color in the last picture, but generally all is well.

The photographers must have surprised him.

EWWW! He just looks so… alert. Scope out the picture in the middle — what the CRAP. He’s smiling, but nobody told his eyes. Nowadays he’s got this demented Parkinsonian look in his eyes all the time. Upsetting. Also, that is one shiny face for a fifty-year-old dude. My dad’s Big Arnie’s age and in the 95th percentile for aging well, but his cheeks and forehead have never gleamed like the hood of a Pontiac GTO.

Just for fun, compare how different his smile is from 1980. Don’t even worry about the dental work, and how he doesn’t show as much gums on the sides anymore. Those nasolabial folds, so prominent in his youth, have mysteriously vanished. And it ain’t just the lighting — in his Pumping Iron 25th anniversary interviews, the band of flesh from cheekbone to chin *doesn’t move.* Very upsetting.

Also, not-so-plausible hair color is in full effect. He’s gone from dirty blond to total Endora.

Please, darling, I would never wear that much makeup.

BUT WAIT THERE`S MORE! The above stuff is Collateral Damage Arnie. Governor Arnie — RNC-speaking Arnie — is even worse.

How do dudes get eyelifts that make their eyes look *smaller*?

Ew ew ew ew ew! So shiny. So sleek. So much makeup. Check out the weird bad draping on the sides of his lower lip in the last photo. This is one of many reasons dudes shouldn’t get facelifts. Speaking of bad draping:

EW!

By the way, the short beard screams “hiding facelift incisions” to me.

Maybe you`d like a side-by-side comparison? Okay…

Don’t fire until you see the OH HOLY CRAP!

Whoa! Looks like eyes that used to be almost trangular are now mysteriously trapezoidal. Somebody’s doctor hit the Caribou Coffee before surgery. I would say — with great reluctance — that the Arnie on the left is kinda cute. The Arnie on the right is scary as hell.

Hmm… There’s a resemblance here to someone else in the f*ck-the-poor carpool…

Old Timer’s disease makes you Republican!

Ha ha ha, I get my jollies offa tormenting feeble tragic old farts! I`m Michael Moore!

No, seriously, all Charlton needs is some Paul McCartneyTM brand orange pomade for his hair and eyebrows and they are clones.

Ew.

Random Thoughts IV

• Well, I’ve just had $1900 of dental work and I`m looking at $1100 more in the form of a gum graft. Not worried about that so much as I am the $1000 annual maximum benefit. Thanks, Blue Cross Blue Shield. I guess you can airlift some dude out of Jakarta but you can’t shell out $2000 for someone who has no health issues outside her mouth. Also, thanks for taking at least a month to refund costs paid out-of-pocket. I know I shouldn’t have such a bad attitude about this — since millions of Americans ain’t got no health insurance at all — but I sure did start crying uncontrollably in the middle of my periodontist consultation anyway. (The assistant handed me some tissues that were on hand, so I said, semi-joking, “Oh, so this happens a lot?” And the periodontist said, “Uh, no.”)
• Have y`all heard those Saudi Arabia ads on the radio? I heard *about* them, but I hadn’t actually heard one until the other day. Something odd I noticed was that the ad cited the 9/11 Commission as finding 1) that there were no flights out of the US while planes were grounded on 9/11, and 2) there were no Saudi nationals on those flights. WHAT? Did I hear this wrong? WHAT?
• When I visited my parents the other day, Jackie the Dog was very happy to see me and did a little dance. Says mom: “She likes you more than she likes me.” Says I: “She likes me because I don’t have to discipline her. I`m just fun all the time.” OWOWOWO. Too late did I realize I was speaking the eternal truth about *my relationship to my parents*! Two demerits for leaking the awful truth. My mouth still burns.
• Hey — when you watch football and they say something like “ball on the forty-third yard line,” do you hear it to the tune of the Civil War song from EPCOT’s “American Adventure” — “All on a beau-ti-ful mo-o-or-ning”?
• When I get aggravated I start talking to things. Sunday I asked my dad to show me how to change a tire (heh heh — what would Tony Soprano do?) I was having a hard time with one lugnut so I started talking to it, right in front of my dad. Like, “All right, dignity. Let’s get all your dignity friends from down in Dignity Town and do this.” Also, I may or may not have called the tire “a dirty slut.”
• Hey — remember that time Luke Wilson played Billy Loomis opposite Tori Spelling’s Sidney Prescott in Scream 2? I popped myself on the forehead when I saw him. Then his character did the same, so it was super funny. Portia De Rossi is in it too, of course, sidekicked to Rebecca Gayheart. Talk about two careers meeting in the middle — now Portia’s on the best show on TV and Rebecca kills little kids with her car. And then there’s David Warner as Sidney’s drama teacher — his path really took a turn from the Ian McKellen. prolly ri-i-ight around Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II (I blame it on Billy Zane cooties from Titanic). Wait — OMFG. Did you know the voice on the phone (”Hello-o-o, Sidney…”) is also the voice of Mojo Jojo? BRAWWK! I just blew my own mind.
• I`m renting a U-Haul to move my meager amount of crap from Durham to Winston-Salem, just because I got a stupid queen-sized mattress that has to either come or moulder endlessly propped against my bookcase. Stupid mattress. My sister had a bad rent-a-truck experience (Ryder), and so did my roommate (U-Haul), so I`m really thinking the law of averages means my move Satiddy gonna be smoove as silk. My heckling partner volunteered to help, which is insane, and I can only imagine the amount of heckling that’s going to go down between the two of us.
• Remember that Simply Red song “Stars” (”I-I-I-I wanna fall from the stars/Straight into your arms”)? Very 1991. Taped it off the radio with the Lightning Seeds` “Life of Riley.” I shouldn’t be sharing this.

Raw Deal (the movie)

While typing up a treatise on Pumping Iron (which may take a while to appear here, since I typed it on the PowerBook I had to get for school which doesn’t have a floppy drive nor an owner with the initiative to get some writable CDs for it), I discovered “Day of the Schwarzenegger” on the USA network. Terminator 2 was on, and it was up to where Linda Hamilton’s attacking Dr. Dyson. Cool, let’s watch. Some notent notables:

• Edward Furlong’s wearing a Public Enemy T-shirt. Who needs cyborgs from the future? Surely SOMEONE at his high school wants to beat the ass of white kid wearing a Public Enemy T-shirt — especially if he’s got a sheaf of bangs in his face like that one goth kid in the Raisins episode of “South Park.” (By the way, someone totally had to explain “Raisins” to me.)
• S. Epatha Merkerson (of “Law & Order,” but then again 90% of all actors are of “Law & Order”) plays Dr. Dyson’s wife. Not exactly a plum role — pretty much just crying and screaming — but still.
• Robert Patrick is underrated and good. Even if he were overrated he`d still be underrated. Kind of like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Kind of the opposite of Duke University.
• Linda Hamilton is underrated and good. But I can’t think about her too much or it reminds me of James Cameron, whom I hate. I wonder if he meets with Tom Cruise and John Stamos down at the “Show me a beautiful woman and I`ll show you a man who’s tired of f*cking her” club. Mojitos and mid-life crises for everyone!

I enjoyed T2 and its weirdly poignant ending (sneefiest robot thumbs-up ever), so I decided to stick around for the Big Arnie movie that followed it: Raw Deal (1986).

Oh, my frippin` frip. Monty, this seems strange to me. I wanted to watch all of it so I could provide a full heckle, but I just couldn’t. It was so Grade Z and inscrutable — traits exacerbated by the fact that EVERYBODY is in this movie. As in, “That’s that dude from Law & Order — normally the stuff he says makes sense.” I facepalmed twice from the cast alone.

Steven Hill, the dude on the left, is the one from Raw Deal. S. Epatha Merkerson is on the right.

(Quick sidebar about this picture: Separately they are dude from Raw Deal, chick from “Baywatch Nights,” Lumiere, Sam the Eagle, dude from Catwoman and Reba the Mail Lady. But together they are the Best. Cast. Ever. Also, Angie Harmon burns my eyes with hottness. Also, no one puts Baby in the corner. )

Okay. Back to Raw Deal:

• I went to IMDb to check out some things. The plot summary says something about Big Arnie having to be the sheriff of a small North Carolina town and crossing and double crossing and shenanigans. Yeah, I didn’t get that at all. I pretty much couldn’t tell who was good or bad or double agent or triple agent, but verily I wasn’t trying too hard. And if anything was supposed to be North Carolina I`m going to have to give that a big no. The whole movie looked shot in Vancouver before “shot in Vancouver” was invented — replete with Degrassi High film stock.
• Here’s an idea — if your star has a huge Austrian accent, why not give him an Austrian name? Mark Kaminsky? Pirates.
• Big Arnie has his hair slicked back like Renaldo the Heel. Every time he appeared in a scene I had that complete, fully articulated thought in my internal monologue: “Big Arnie has his hair slicked back like Renaldo the Heel.” It was very distracting.
• At one point he robs a woman at gunpoint in the back of a car, and she just reacts like, “Oh, you dashing rake, here’s all my jewelry.” But wa-a-a-it, I know that redhead from somewhere. Also, she looks like Mischa Barton, fulfilling today’s “hey, she looks like Mischa Barton” quota. Thanks to IMDb, I see she is Micki from the “Friday the 13th” TV series! BRAAAAAWK! This is a series that needs to be released on DVD in a big way. Cursed antiques, people — CURSED ANTIQUES. Of course, the part before the opening credits was always the best part of the show — except maybe for the spooky tinny trumpet Tower of Terror credits sequence (owowo cursed antiques!) And the dude was totally proto-Xander. But I digress.

  
  I snarfed this image from Olaf’s F13 fan page. She made this face in *every episode*.

• A kingpin refers to “smack” and “junk.” I dunno — seems like a big drug kingpin wouldn’t talk like a community college narc. Maybe you shouldn’t write a screenplay after a latte and a reading of “Naked Lunch.”
• It had Robert Davi in it. Prolly you don’t know him by name — I sure didn’t, so here’s a picture:

  
  Okay, don’t freak out? But you’ve got some DiCaprio on your shoulder.

  So he sort of looks like Edward James Olmos without all the child molesting. (Ha ha, oh, nothing like that child molestation humor.) He and Big Arnie have these pointless Grade Z manlier-than-thou zing-offs:

  Big Arnie: I`m sure Max has made many mistakes.
  Robert Davi: Never the same one twice.
  Big Arnie: That’s what she said.
  Robert Davi: Takes one to know one.
  Big Arnie: “I Know This Much Is True” by Wally Lamb.
  Robert Davi: “I Know This Much Is True” by Spandau Ballet.
  Big Arnie: Faced.

• It had Joe Regalbuto in it — you know, Frank Fontana from “Murphy Brown”? And I didn’t have to resort to IMDb to find any of that information. So if it’s wrong feel free to mock me. Hell, feel free to mock me regardless.
• This movie supports my conviction that Arnold Schwarzenegger is not a bad actor. All the actors here are hung out to dry — whether it’s Steven Hill fake bad golfing or Darren “poor man’s Gene Hackman” McGavin strolling in and out of a poorly-blocked and poorly-framed scene. And yet Big Arnie holds his own. The dialogue, with the Austrian accent that wouldn’t die, is as through a glass darkly, but for a dude that took up acting by force at 28 he’s really kind of a natural.

There is much more to say about Big Arnie but I`ll save it until I`m master of this Mac issue.

Bush, sheep, gay marriage, and Leviticus…

Since Tory added this nifty new feature, I thought I would try it out. This is an essay I published on my livejournal a few months ago when the Republicans began squawking over the attempt of Gavin Newsome to actually respect the rights of LGBT individuals to actually have some of the same rights when it comes to love as the rest of the world…

If sheep love grass, why hasn’t Bush legalized marijuana?

Perhaps because he’s too busy poisoning Eros’s arrows.

I cringe at the possibility that we may once again end up with the Republican version of fascism and destruction of individual rights holding our presidency…

In place of “It’s the economy, stupid!,” I propose that we adopt the slogan “It’s about the love, stupid!” You know, put it in simple terms the sheep can understand. Short sentences. One syllable words. You know - completely eliminate the need to analyze, interpret, or otherwise *think* about the written material that is presented.

Heaven forbid they have to *think* or *analyze* or *interpret*! These *are* after all, the people who believe that we should take the Bible literally, with all its rules written some-odd thousand of years ago, and SMACK! apply it straight to our current society.

And Leviticus is always the favorite weapon of choice - those little bits about not lying with man as with woman…

I’ve always been fond of Leviticus. Lots of good stuff in there. Let’s examine, shall we?

Leviticus 4:27-29 - “If a private person commits a sin inadvertengly by doing one of the ghins which are forbidden by the commandments of the Lord, and thus becomes guilty, should he later on learn of the sin he committed, he shall bring an unblemished she-goat as the offering for his sin.”

Hmm. How many dead Iraqis, killed in the war? I`m remembering a bit about “thou shalt not kill.” That’s a lot of goats to sacrifice, Mr. Bush - hope you’ve been breeding them!

Leviticus 7:23-25 - “…You shall not eat the fat of any ox or sheep or goat…If anyone eats the fat of an animal…such a one shall be cut off from his people.”

Banish all the mutton-eaters!

And among the animals you can’t eat: pigs, rabbits, all non-fish marine animals, any animals with paws (and there are about 100 others listed, too!)

Leviticus 15:16 - When a man has an emission of seed, he shall bathe his whole body in water and be unclean until evening

Would completely take the fun out of masturbation, now wouldn’t it?

Leviticus 19:19 - …do not breed any of your domestic animals with others of a different species; do not so a field of yours with two different kinds of seed; and do not put on a garment woven with two different kinds of thread.

Mules and rayon are tools of the devil!

Leviticus 19:26 - Do not eat meat with the blood still in it.

Rare meat is the devil’s handmaiden

Leviticus 19:33 - When an alien resides with you in your land, do not molest him. You shall treat the alien who resides with you no differently than the natives born among you; have the same love for him as for yourself…

Don’t forbid illegal immigrants, welcome them! All of them! Completely open borders! Full benefits!

And things that carry the death penalty:
–cursing one’s mother or father
–adultery
–male homosexuality (but not female! It’s okay to munch the carpet, just not bugger the hole…)
–bestiality

Lotta people better make their amends with their maker, cuz Leviticus says God is coming for ya, and he is pissed!

Gotta love translating for God. Because men do *such* a better job of it than God does.