Seven months on

Music, posts interesting only to me, video
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So I was idly browsing Youtube videos, as you do, when I found the video above, which I’d first seen at the Mighty Mighty Godking last year. It was one of the last youtube videos I’d shared with Sandra; correction, one of the last that didn’t annoy her, as I always liked to wind her up (and she me).

Last Thursday it has been seven months already that she died; sharing videos with her is one of the more trivial things I miss. She more than me had a knack of finding funny/interesting/weird videos on Youtube, as well as more interesting shit in general. Of course, the last fiv-six years, with her being home fulltime; not particularly sick, but not always in the best of health either, she often had more time than me to surf and blog. Every now and again I dive in the proggold archives to find something and are reminded of just how good she could write — like here e.g.. It’s no wonder that that particular blog is in a bit of a coma at the moment…

You know who worried about women wearing makeup?

Feminism, wingnuts
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some douchecopter telling women not to wear makeup

Amanda Marcotte talks about the latest trend of sincere, pouty men telling women not to wear so much makeup:

Apparently, this is just the most famous of a trend of young men writing signs extolling the joys of “natural” beauty and taking photos of themselves with these signs, complete with wounded expressions conveying the pain they feel because the women of the world get dressed in the morning without thinking first of the preferences of these guys’ specific cocks. It’s just the latest manifestation of a multi-decade long trend of men, who are invariably self-satisfied to an alarming degree, holding forth on why they hate make-up and think women should choose a “natural” beauty path instead. This sort of thing tends to be polarizing amongst women. The weak-minded amongst us buy it hook, liner, and sinker, swooning over these guys for their supposedly feminist-ish ways. The rest of us fly into a sputtering rage, because we know that this is just some more bullshit oppression dressed up as liberation.

You know who elses worried about women wearing too much makeup and abusing their natural beauty? The nazis every authoritarian regime in the world ever. No matter what the reasons for the objections where (makeup is offensive to god, Jewish decadence, a bourgeouis indulgence, unnatural, immodest, undsoweiter), it’s always about controlling women, just as much as the makeup and makeover industries are. If you’re worried about women being “forced” to wear high heels, it’s no improvement to make flat shoes mandatory.

One very special Mormon snowflake

LGBT, wingnuts
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Some Mormom dude explains how he managed to overcome his handicap and managed to live a loving, fulfilling life with his wife and children despite being gay:

I guess the premise of this post is to share that not only am I homosexual, but I’m also a devout and believing Mormon. And that I’m very happily married to a woman, and have been for ten years now.

The happy, cheerful delivery masks an evil, pernicious message: that it is possible for somebody who is gay or lesbian to confirm to a heterosexual lifestyle and that it is desirable that they do so. It’s still arguing that a sick religious ideal is more important than your sexual identity.

Ray Bradbury

science fiction
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I’ve thought more about Ray Bradbury this past week than I’ve done for years. Bradbury was a writer I read quite a lot from when I was a child first discovering science fiction, through short story collections like R Is for Rocket. Judging from the various online obituary and remembrance threads I’ve seen, I’m not the only one for whom he was important in kickstarting their sf interest.

Which is fitting, as Bradbury is of course the writer who first put childhood into science fiction. He made small town, white picket fenced America seem as exciting and glamourous as outer space, while making all the paraphernalia of science fiction (rockets and Mars and aliens) a familiar part of everyday sububurban life. Like Roald Dahl he was great at telling adult stories for children, matter of fact if slightly patronising at times.

What set him apart from other science fiction writers was the strong nostalgia that drenched his work; not that others don’t indulge in nostalgia sometimes, but with Bradbury it was a full time pre-occupation. At heart, Bradbury was a reactionary writer and nostalgia was how he channeled it. Remember a few years ago when a rare interview revealed him as a cranky, bitter Fox News watching old man? That couldn’t have been a surprise to anybody who took a close look at his fiction. In almost every story there’s this hankering for a barely remembered, never existed golden past, when America was innocent and every summer a golden one, before progress ruined everything. He never believed in science and progress as other sf writers did; it almost always ended up in tears in his work (the automated house still going after the nuclear holocaust) or at the cost of our humanity, as in that story where the first astronauts on Mars burn the last few existing novels in the world.

Luckily, while his personal polical opinions might have been nasty, this reactionary, nostalgic streak in his fiction just helped created some of the best American fabulation ever written.