1. That re-communicated bishop I wrote about has been charged to disavow his denial of the Holocaust. (See the story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7869995.stm). Interestingly, he is not being called on to disavow any of his sexist shit. He doesn’t believe women should wear pants. I’d like to sick the ghosts of Katharine Hepburn and George Bernard Shaw on him. It’s also fascinating that the Pope apparently didn’t know he’d been saying all those anti-Semitic things. Isn’t the Pope infallible? Oh, wait, if he were, this guy wouldn’t need to be re-communicated.
2. Obama has signed into legislation a bill that will grant insurance to a bunch of children. I am all for this, and for the eventual plan to have everyone covered. However, I find it odd that we always take care of the children first. I know that it’s easier to make people care about abstract children than abstract adults, but adults are more likely to get seriously ill as their bodies fall apart. And if the adult in a child’s life is ill, that child suffers big time. Won’t somebody please think of the adults?
3. I heard Heart’s “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You” in the car today. I have three problems with this song. You know the story, right? A woman picks up a hitchhiker and fucks him for a night and then she runs into him years later. She has had his child, and says she only slept with him because her partner was incapable of providing said child. Fine. But she says, “We made love–love like strangers.” Um, they were strangers. It wasn’t “like” they were strangers. Second, she said “I am the flower, you are the seed, we walked in the garden, we planted a tree.” Has this woman not taken any biology classes? Middle school bio will tell you this isn’t how you plant a tree. Third (and this is not a writing problem), I remember when this song came out and all these guys would dedicate this song to their girlfriends. Presumably because they had only listened to the title of the song. Or else there were a bunch of sperm-lacking men who were comfortable enough about it to make songs suggesting they be cuckholded.
4. If you haven’t seen them, there are two souces of internet fun you need to see. www.escapistmagazine.com has two weekly series. Zero Punctuation is a review of video games by a brilliant, funny Brit who lives in Aussie Land. I don’t even play video games, but I love this series, mostly because of the analogies (he makes fun of his own analogies this week). Unskippable is a new series that does the MST3K thing to video game opening stories. Again, you don’t have to be a nerd, you just have to have a sense of humor. Most videos are only five minutes. Enjoy!
The Zero Punctuation guy's basic relationship to most games
“Little Queen”-era Heart: rock.
Horses wandering in the mist Heart (“All I Wanna Do,” “Alone,” “Dreams in the Mist”): ffffft.
Have y’all read that article in Bitch about Sarah Palin’s misappropriation of “Barracuda”?
Melissa–Barracuda is my jam. This is unacceptable.
Karma–Let me say a few things in Anne Wilson’s (Heart’s singer/lyricist) defense, re: “All I Wanna Do is Make Love to you”
1. Anne had one love in her life, Heart’s first manager Mike Fischer. From 1971-8, he was her magic man. She was so crazy on him, she moved to Canada. His brother Roger was in the band and dated Nancy, also in the band, and then they all broke up. Roger sent a guitar straight on for Nancy’s head during a show. They are the Pacific Northwest’s own Fleetwood Mac.
Anne wrote “All I Wanna Do” 12 years after that. She has been alone and the nights have gone by so very slow ever since. She may very well have forgotten how to plant a tree.
2. Classic Heart is about mixing sense and nonsense. Even though I hate the song in question, it is participating in a long tradition of Heart, enlivening a seedy story with meaningless metaphors. It brings together the best lyrical elements of classic heart.
From “Magic Man”
seedy story–
Come on home girl, he said with a smile
you don’t have to love me
Let’s get high awhile
But try to understand
I’m a magic man
From “Crazy on You”
batshit botanical nonsense–
I was a willow last night in a dream
I bent down over a clear-running stream
You sang the me the song that I heard up above
and you kept me alive with your sweet flowin-love
Ergo:
This song is all Nancy Wilson’s fault. She writes the music. Hard rocking Heart can pull off bad lyric, and Nancy’s gone namby pamby ever since she hooked up with Cameron “Vanilla Sky” Crowe.
I don’t think women should wear pants either, at least not in warm climates. Nor should men, intersexuals of all sorts, children, or circus animals. We should all be free to romp around naked. He’s a religious fellow; he must know that if god had meant us to be naked, we’d have been born that way.
This Pope is nuts. I liked the old one better.
Also, I always found it funny when people used “Every Breath You Take” as their wedding song. Marriage = Stalking? I guess sometimes . . .