Posts

An Audience Member’s Manifesto

  We went to the Kitsap Home and Garden Show at the Fairgrounds Sunday. We were there to find helpful community businesses. Mom enjoyed it, overall. We are in need of services like a handyman and such. The vendors were personable and friendly. She wanted to give the people from her insurance company cookies for arranging a bundle. However, things took a sharp downturn when we visited the Van Zee Building to check out the food and beer garden. We were told there was a rock band. Nothing could be done about it. A band had taken up residence in the structure, which meant they’d reside there til someone called the type of exterminator who was bonded to handle rock bands. And that was . . . fine, I guess. The band in question was a Tom Petty cover band. Which was. . . fine, I guess. The most immediate issue was that the mixing was poor. In particular, the bass was too loud. This matched the theme of the band being far too loud. They were shaking the building. It was like shaking the shack,
Post a Comment
Read more

Different Year, Same Rubbish

Image
  Brand New Year, Same Rubbish   Over the weekend, I received the third booster shot. It was not easy to receive, exactly. We are told to go to pharmacies rather than any hospitals. The hospitals simply refuse, though some clinics, such as Kaiser, which my mother uses, do. I ended up at Walmart. Since Mom adores Walmart, I invited her to accompany me. I’ve heard of people passing out or puking after a COVID-19 vaccine. My sister threw up in a parking lot after receiving the J&J. So I needed a trusted buddy.   The line at the Walmart pharmacy was quite long. Everyone is sick in Western Washington, many with COVID-19. They acquired these sicknesses over the holidays, especially from New Year’s Eve partying. They tend to get belligerent if questioned about their choices. They insist they were “cooped up.” I don’t see how the opposite of “being cooped up” is having a wild party at a large venue sans a mask, but you can’t reason with emotional, privileged head-cases. One thing I do know
Post a Comment
Read more

Mixalot, KING5, and the Problem with “Augmented Reality”

I’m racist, or at least according to KING5 News. Never mind that KING5 is generally racist, and certainly not the liberal news outlet it pretends to be. Never mind that a large number of the women on this channel, particularly the diversity hires, were pulled from the Beauty Queen trade and certainly don’t represent most women. Never mind that KING5 always prostrates itself to corporate interests, or that they spent decades sucking up to a billionaire who partied on Epstein Island.   The real problem here is a pissed-off person from the Bremerton/Silverdale area.   Imagine I show you a picture. It’s of a naked lady. Imagine she’s black. It’s not a terribly derogatory picture. It’s actually kind of flattering. Is it sexist? Nope. It’s just a picture. Now imagine I put this picture on a video, and I zoom in and out to show just the woman’s nipples. I cut out and enlarge these nipples and zoom them around the screen. I have a man floating around in the middle of these nipples shouting, “I
Post a Comment
Read more

Letter to Climate Pledge Arena Regarding Dave Chappelle’s New Year’s Eve “Special”

  17 December 2021 Climate Pledge Arena Management: This letter is in response to your last minute decision to “ring in the new year” with Dave Chappelle, the Hollywood celebrity. Your special guest is a self-described “TERF” (trans exclusionary radical feminist) who has made plans to eventually move to the anti-LGBTQ country of  Ghana  as he finds the freedoms and diversity of the US unpalatable. As a long-time resident of the Pacific Northwest, I have three specific objections to your decision to host this person. I find your behavior so distasteful that it has negatively impacted my feelings toward your arena. Suffice it to say, I won’t be attending any events there in the future. One of my favorite concert experiences at this arena was a late 1990s They Might Be Giants Bumpershoot concert I attended with my sister. Back then, the band made clear that everyone was welcome at their concert, no matter what the particulars. I see those days are, sadly, long gone. This leads me to my fi
Post a Comment
Read more

I Am the Santa of Office Supplies

  Of all the things associated with Christmas, I hate wrapping presents most. It’s hard to explain. It’s not that I dislike giving people presents, but that I have severe anxiety attacks whenever I wrap anything, especially a Christmas present. It was a gift from my Dad. My late father had an undiagnosed personality disorder. One year, just after we moved to Washington State, he asked that I stay behind to wrap some Christmas presents while my mother and sisters went somewhere. I was bamboozled by the request.   Since we had moved to Washington State, I’d been subjected to Dad’s vicious public physical attacks. Dad told me it was time to get me back for my out-of-control behavior and to “break me down” so I could be “fixed.” He said he had carefully read the “rules” (meaning the RCWs) and that in this wonderful “paradise,” as he called it, a parent could beat a child as badly as they wanted, so long as it was “with and open hand” and “left no significant marks.” Physical discipline was
Post a Comment
Read more

Pandemic Thanksgiving

 The latest thing to flip out over is “cancel culture,” a subject most of us got over in 2017. At least, that’s when I personally got over it. In the latter years of the Obama administration, things really did get out of hand online. I spent a long period of time hating all online examples of social justice because I got mobbed by a nasty bunch online. I acquired a troll who turned out to be a wealthy teenage girl. She was trying to “gain clout” with a group of sex workers, and felt she could do so by telling people I tried to “rape” her. I’ve never seen this person. I just called her a mean name for a sex worker because that’s what I assumed she was. The community was historical costuming, by the way. The Internet is a weird place. Anyhow, these people told everyone I “raped a minor” and doxed me. It was easy to dox me because I wasn’t hiding. They mobbed my work in a pile-on. They tried to involve the police. They made patently untrue, easily disproved claims. They did admit it “got
Post a Comment
Read more

Story Time: I Was in a Cult-Like Atheist Group, Part 2

  I PAID MONEY TO HEAR THAT THE EARTH IS ROUND I may have had to sign up on Meetup. We had to pay admission. I think I paid at the door. Karen sent out messages and emails. She wanted me to leave a positive review of the last meeting on the Meetup page. She kept calling everyone “Heathens.” You would receive a message that started with “Hey You Heathens!” as a greeting. Did she know there was a religious group calling themselves “Heathens,” and that some of these people were in White Power groups? Again, choose a different word. I am not a Heathen; I do not worship Odin. I am not into White Power. Not that all of the Heathens are, but just want to avoid the meme of that, as you people would put it. I invited my mother to the earthquake thing, but she had the perfect excuse. It was the day before Mother’s Day, and I’d arranged for her and Dad to stay at Manressa Castle in Port Townsend. Had I forgotten it? This is the only stucco castle in Washington State, after all, and perhaps in the
Post a Comment
Read more