Parasite or Paragon?

It’s a dry day, I’m not feeling too bad, St.Salaria has visited and we need Frontline and flea spray if I’m to avoid being eaten alive so I’m going to take advantage of these freak conditions and get some things done while I’ve got the necessary oomph and also take some pictures of houseboats if possible. That’s the trouble with this warm wet weather, perfect incubating conditions for all manner of bugs and parasites.

Speaking of which in the meantime here’s a blast from the past about another sainted personage, this time Our Lady of the Progressive Blogosphere, Arianna Stassinopolous-Huffpo.

I’m republishing it because a commenter at TBogg reminded me that it’s not only Republicans who use politics to social-climb, and not just cats that have parasites. Ironically enough it’s by Christopher Hitchens, who should know a thing or two about both.

Enter the gifted Greek
Evening Standard (London), Jul 27, 2000 by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

IF you are standing in a circle of political types, in Washington or New York or Los Angeles, and the name “Arianna” is mentioned, everybody knows at once who is meant. This saves a lot of time, because there’s no need to pronounce either of the other names under which she’s already been celebrated: Arianna Stassinopoulos, Arianna Huffington or Arianna Stassinopoulos-Huffington. (During the brief reign of the third, it was no extra trouble to throw in a Puffington as a suffix and have done with it.) She’s Huffington now.

I was at a smallish dinner at her understated but beautiful house in the Brentwood area of LA a few nights ago. Nothing special; Norman Mailer and his wife Norris Church (in honour of whose first novel the bash was given), putative Presidential candidate Warren Beatty, several columnists and the man who might be the first Hispanic mayor of Los Angeles. The next day, both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ran quite extensive accounts of the soire, emphasising the fact that there will be “Shadow Conventions” at both the Republican and Democratic gatherings this summer, and that “Arianna” has organised them, and that she’s already booked more interesting speakers than the two parties have.

How did we get here? Readers of my age will remember Arianna Stassinopoulos
from the late Sixties: arriving from nowhere like one of the daughters of Zeus, she was one of the first women to be elected president of the Cambridge Union, and followed this up by writing an against-the-grain counter-feminist hit entitled The Female Woman. She was a star of the chat-shows and the social circuit, kept company with Bernard Levin and produced biographies of Maria Callas and Pablo Picasso. Interested in “New Age” spirituality, she held evenings for an outfit calling itself “Insight” and was mocked a bit in consequence, by me among others.

The magnet of America always exerts itself on such people, and by the mid-Eighties Arianna was to be seen around New York and Washington a good deal.

She’d become more decidedly political by then and married a junior figure in the Reagan administration named Michael Huffington. A nice but slightly ineffectual chap, young Huffington had access to pots of money through his father’s Texas oil business, and Arianna was very much at his side when he ran successfully for Congress on a conservative ticket. He used his time in Congress mainly to run for the Senate in California, against the incumbent Democrat, Diane Feinstein. By this time, Arianna was a positive blur of energy. She held upscale political dinner parties in DC, at which there were prepared topics for discussion (and according to rumour, a tape-recorder of hers running under the table). She was often closeted with Newt Gingrich, the supposed conservative revolutionary who had captured Congress from the Democrats for the first time in decades.

WHILE back in the Golden State, she was standing in for her husband at public debates, writing his speeches and directing his campaign. From nowhere, he came to level pegging in the polls with Feinstein and is said to have spent almost $30 million of his own money. The joke was – and it was told seriously – that Arianna would ride him all the way to the White House.

Two things unhorsed this plan. The Huffingtons were found, in the last days of the campaign, to be employing an unregistered immigrant as a domestic servant. And Michael, well, it looked as if Michael wanted to lose. He probably did want to lose, at that. It turned out that he’d been an unhappy secret gay man all his life. Arianna divorced him amicably, retaining custody of the two lovely daughters and receiving a pretty decent settlement. Then she moved sharply to the Left.

I was not ready for this. Nobody was. Suddenly the avenging figure of Huffington was everywhere, on her own radio spot in LA and in a nationally syndicated column, denouncing conservative America’s cruelty to the poor. She started a think-tank, the Committee for Effective Compassion, which seems to have given Governor George W Bush the idea for his campaign slogan of “Compassionate Conservatism”. She wrote a book called How to Overthrow the Government, in which she denounced the corrupting role of big money in politics. To her home came all the aspiring liberals and radicals. She personally floated the short-lived but much-publicised idea of running Warren Beatty as Hollywood’s liberal answer to greed and glitz.

SHE has persuaded Senator John McCain, the most popular politician in the country and the man most Republicans wanted in the Vice- Presidential spot, to open her “Shadow Convention” in Philadelphia this weekend. When the Democrats gather in LA on 13 August, they are to be shadowed by a “rapid reaction team” to include (as I gathered when I reeled from her dinner table) Gore Vidal (Al Gore’s cousin), Warren Beatty and perhaps your humble servant.

At last, the Press will have something to write about.

Copyright 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.

Old as I am and with a history of several decades worth of reading Private Eye, It’s a matter of continued surprise to me that a woman who ascended to career socialite-ism by flitting about London’s salons on the arm of reactionary Times columnist Bernard Levin, who peddled spurious psychological group therapy (and even became a minister in its ‘church’) to the London literati and who then wrote several, allegedly partly- plagiarised books, one attacking feminism, should be so feted by the sensible American liberals.

But then I suppose they have to: if an Arianna can be in the big tent too, surely so they can they, be they movie star, trust fund baby or hedge-fund manager. Her rise to progressive prominence shows them they need have no qualms about being obscenely rich, just as long they say the right things and butter up the right people at the right time.

Here she is in 1994 arguing for the proposition that the woman’s movement as a disaster:

The main news in these agreeably contentious two hours is the emergence from the campaign closet of Mrs. Huffington, a sometime head of Cambridge Union, the debating society at Cambridge University, as a well-prepared, fast-thinking advocate, even of as murky a cause as “the spiritual dimension of life.”

She is responsible for the evening’s hottest moment, incited by her denial of credit to the women’s movement for the 19th Amendment. When Judge Burstein suggests that Mrs. Huffington is not up on American history because she did not go to school in the United States, this Greek-born, British-educated, naturalized American citizen retorts that the judge can get away with that sort of put-down of immigrants only because she is a liberal.

[My emphasis]

Bestest friends with Newtie?. Progressive, my ass.

Mrs S-H is a flip-flopper par excellence who’s always managed to take advantage of the political zeitgeist to advance her own career. I’d trust her political convictions as far as I could throw her private jet, because as soon as the Right look to be in ascendant again she’ll be bigging them uip as the best thing since sliced bread. If she is to be sainted perhaps it should be as St Arianna of the Opportune Moment.

In that respect you could say she is an epitome of the Democratic party – self-made, but not; liberal, but not, principled, but not, a parasite on the body politic.

Is That A Wand In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Pleased To See Me?

For all those Harry Potter fans too ashamed to be seen reading the latest release on the bus or metro:

Do you love Harry Potter, but think you’re too old and too awesome to be seen reading the books?

We have the solution, my friend. Print these out and you can safely read your Potter in front of all those ex Navy SEALS at the local strip club.

Here’s my own personal favourite (Click for larger image):

Right, because of course being a Harry Potter fan’s much less sadder than pretending you have a huge penis….

Girls Just Wanna Have… Fairies?

It may be unfair to judge a book before it’s published and before I’ve even read it, but I did hear the author on the radio this morning and on hearing what she had to say my feminist radar immediately went “Spung!! Twee stereotype alert!”

And I speak as someone raised on Arthur Mee’s Childrens’ Encyclopaedia and Enid Blyton. But I also read Swallows and Amazons and Ursula LeGuin and knew when I was being talked down to by condescending adults.

The book in question is called ‘The Glorious Book For Girls’ and purports to be a riposte to that best-seller to middle-aged men, ‘The Dangerous Book for Boys’. There’s certainly room in the market for a book that teaches girls survival skills – it’s just not this one.

I must say my hackles went up right away just at the title: The girls’ book is called ‘Glorious’. But why not ‘Dangerous’? Don’t girls want to tie knots, ckimb trees, collect coins and stamps, start campfires, make their own microscopes and cause small explosions too? I know I did and I still do.

Here’s the publishers’ blurb:

Homemade scones, pom-poms, daisy chains. . . The Great Big Glorious Book for Girls will take women back to a time when we made cup cakes with our grandmothers, when girls weren’t obsessed with all things pink, when they didn’t wear ‘hot to trot’ t-shirts aged eight and when a bit of sticky-backed plastic and a tissue box could be the answer to your dreams.

Perfect for mothers, grandmothers, aunts and godmothers (as well as daughters, granddaughters, nieces and goddaughters, of course), this is a book for all women who secretly, or not so secretly, loved playing French elastics, dream of making elderflower cordial and need reminding of how to play cat’s cradle.

Sounds quite tempting, doesn’t it? I certainly enjoyed doing those things when young.

So despite my misgivings about the title I was quite interested. But as the discussion progressed between the author and the feminist lawyer who’d been invited to give the opposing view – because as any fule kno, any BBC radio news discussion must be reduced to two opposing views- the book’s actual content became clearer and my heart sank.

Glitter and ponies. How to talk to boys and pluck your eyebrows; how to bake a cake, sew a hem and what? How to sulk?.

Surely it couldn’t be so regressive, could it? The author couldn’t be trying to turn girls into little po-faced, fairy-loving Violet Elizabeth Botts or embryo Fanny Craddock memsahibs, all flowery pinnies and high maintenance hairdos – could she?

Oh, yes she could.

The Telegraph (what a surprise that the Tory papers should love this book) gives a little more insight into the book’s topics:

10 Things Every Girl Should Know

1. How To Deal With Boys
2. How To Have A Best Friend
3. How To Cope When Your Best Friend Gets A New Best Friend
4. What To Do When Introduced To Older People
5. How Not To Be Fazed By Other People’s Strange Habits
6. How To Keep A Secret
7. How To Tell If An Egg Is Fresh
8. How To Sulk
9. How To Have A Crush
10. How to Set Your Inner Alarm Clock

To which I might add, 11. How to tell when someone with no conception of girls’ lives today other what she gleaned from Enid Blyton school stories is talking down to you. Or 12. How to tell when you’re being flim-flammed by your own side.

I could go on, but you get the drift.

This is the corresponding publisher’s blurb for The Dangerous Book For Boys:

The Dangerous Book for Boys gives you facts and figures at your fingertips – swot up on the solar system, learn about famous battles and read inspiring stories of incredible courage and bravery. Teach your old dog new tricks. Make a pinhole camera. Understand the laws of cricket. There’s a whole world out there: with this book, anyone can get out and explore it.

That’s the book I’d’ve wanted to read, not some twee advice about fairy cakes or ballet shoes. If someone had bought me a book like the Glorious Book when I as a girl, I would’ve thanked the giver and immediately ‘lost’ it (the book and my temper) the moment I came across this :

Build your own fairy house

Fairies usually live in hedges and little bushes, so you should look out for them and help make their houses more comfortable. Choose the tree or bush you think is most likely to be a fairy’s house and carpet it with moss and flower petals.

Acorn cups make good bowls for water and basins for the fairies to wash their faces and clothes. Small fluffy feathers are very soft for pillows; if you live in the country, find some lamb’s wool – fairies love to sleep on it.

Empty snail shells make good sculptures for fairy banqueting rooms. Find pieces of wood to make a grand dining table and benches for the fairies to sit on.

You can leave tiny things to eat. Fairies like small garden peas, berries and rose petals.

Mark out a garden path with tiny coloured pebbles and make a fairy garden with flowers and twigs. If you dig a little hole and place a small bowl or cupcake tin in it, this could be a garden pond.

Fairies don’t like to be seen, so usually come out at dusk, just before bedtime so they can find your gifts and eat their supper while you are sleeping. In the morning, when you go back to the fairy house, you might have a little clearing up to do to get it spick and span.

So when climate change starts to hit, our female young will be perfectly prepared to build shelters, find food and care for themselves fairies.

I think that speaks for itself as to what the authors think it’s useful for girls to know. Not how to deal with bullying by SMS, or keep yourself safe on the bus, or what to do if your friend’s Dad gets a liitle too friendly or your house gets flooded. Nope, the answer is glitter, pompoms and fairy cakes. Oy.

Feminism may not be quite dead, but some of us women are doing our best to kill it.

Linky Linky

I’m still not feeling very well still so here’s a bunch of interesting stuff to be going on with till I feel up to ranting at the world in my usual misanthropic way.

Just when you though the lolcats were over…. LOLBEES!

I can has royle jelli?

Food politics: is your butter-flavoured popcorn killing workers?

Hah. Wolfowitz guilty of ethics breach says World Bank panel

BOOM! Big bada-boom!

Brightest supernova evar: The brightest stellar explosion ever recorded may be a long-sought new type of supernova, according to observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based optical telescopes. This discovery indicates that violent explosions of extremely massive stars were relatively common in the early universe, and that a similar explosion may be ready to go off in our own Galaxy.

And while we’re on the subject of space; octogenarian astronomer and wingnut Sir Patrick Moore proves age is no bar to mysognynistic assholery, in the Telegraph:

On the subject of female newsreaders, he said: “These jokey women are not for me. Oh, for the good old days. “There was one day (in 2005) when BBC News went on strike. Then we had the headlines read by a man, talking the Queen’s English, reading the news impeccably. “I would like to see two independent wavelengths – one controlled by women, and one for us, controlled by men. I think it may eventually happen.”

He should stick to reporting on comets and cosmology, he knows bugger-all about anything else.

Aw, poor iddle wingnuts, they got up a nice shiny drum-beatin’, war-lovin’ online petition, with like, Instapundit and all, and those pesky liberals immediately came along and pissed on their bonfire. Until the lone alert winger on duty noticed and yanked the page of fictitious petition-supporting blogs much hilarity ensued,. Petty but fun. I wish there really were a blog called Grabthar’s Krauthammer.

Sky-fairy spotting: Jesus on a four-gig Samsung Flash memory chip. Looks more like HELLO, I”M BRIAN BLESSED! to me.

Shorter Times columnist Minette Marin – “Oh no, the Morlocks are coming!” In Blair’s ruinous legacy of beta children a posh Tory totty holds forth on those dreadful state school children. Why, the chav might rub off on Theo or Poppy, and that would never do! Cameron may be photogenic and’ve done well at the local elections but the Tories haven’t changed a bit, every one’s a Hyacinth Bucket.

Robbery is the mother of invention:Johannesburg robbers superglue naked man to exercise bike

Mitt Romney’s Guide To Europe: sounds about right to me, at least where provinicial NL’s concerned:

Page 76:
The Netherlands, Deventer –
The purple pipeweed is good and the ladies are babalicious at Garth’s Party On Cafe.

Bibliodyssey is like candy for the booklover – you can’t stop till you’ve eaten the whole bag. Here’s one of the illustrative plates of squid from the book The Voyages of the Corvette L’Astrolabe

Bibliodyssey, The Corvette L'Astrolabe

Don’t start looking unless you’re willing to give up the rest of the day. Fantastic.

Bigots 1, CBS 0.

Actually, That Sounds Quite Interesting

Shopping trolley evolution in the wild

The winner of this year’s oddest book title of the year has been announced:

“The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification” by Julian Montague secured 1,866 out of a total of more than 5,500 votes from a six-strong short-list.

In second place was “Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan” with 1,365 votes; third was “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence” with 685 votes.

In a statement announcing the winner, The Bookseller said: “‘Stray Shopping Carts’ joins a noble pantheon of Diagram winners, perhaps closest in spirit to those rural guides ‘How To Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art’ (1989) and ‘Weeds in a Changing World’ (1999)”.

[..]

Last year’s winner was “People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves To Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About it.”

The competition has been running since 1978, when the winner was “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice.”

The nominations are made by publishers, booksellers and librarians from around the world.

My own personal pet spotting project is the Carlton canvas ziptop shopping bag, in all it’s splendidly prosaic colour and variety. Carlton don’t even make them any more but they’re seemingly indestructible and have a pan-European spread.

I also keep a weather eye on the evolving colurs and patterns of those gigantic woven cheap bags that are used to schlep around laundry, to store bedding or to move the whole family from Macedonia to Madrid via Euroline bus – but I’m not yet quite so obsessed as to be looking at manufacturer’s online catalogues.

So I can see why supermarket trolley spotting could be addictive. They’re all different in some small way, with different locking systems and wheel size and livery and little doodads for hanging your bag on… one of those things that are all around us but that we don’t normally notice that much.

Um. I feel a new hobby coming on.

[Shopping trolley dragonfly and more shopping trolley art from Makezine]