The Plaid Sheep In A Family Of Black Sheep

Wherein Aunt Hippie Shaves (Most Of) Her Head and has All The Feels About It

2018-01-17T15:42:46Z

I'm a little angry, dear readers. I'm pretty sure y'all can guess the source of my ire, on account of decent people have been runnin' around with their heads on fire screamin' "What in the name of JESUS is goin' on around here" on more or less a daily basis for the last year and change, and there's not a lot of point - though there's certainly a lot of print space - detailin' exactly which dumpster fire has the strongest hold on my sanity at any given moment.

Now, my natural reaction to this depth of fertilizer is to envision myself as a giant, flamin' middle finger flung defiantly upwards, reachin' to plug whatever asshole is responsible. And since they're always tellin' us to be a light in the world, I like to express my beacon-ness through a bit* of subversive fashion.

I've written before on my on-again, off-again relationship with femininity. For about 3 years in my 20s, I shaved my head on a weekly basis, and once you lop your hair off once and realize that you haven't died of it, it's awful hard to swallow the argument that you'll wither and die like some Samson with running mascara without your Crowning Glory. I tend to swing between short, conventional haircuts that somehow all turn into Feathered Lesbian after one wash and intricate combinations of unnatural color and razored bits that ought to have been left in a previous decade and certainly never seen on a Lady of a Certain Age, which I passed about a year or two back, according to the more judgey hairstyle bloggers** out there.

All of which would be deeply concernin' if I made a habit of bein' concerned about it, I suppose. But that's not to say that perception doesn't matter, since I haven't found a way to excuse myself from western society and still do fun shit like eat and pay my bills, and there is always that nebulous Professionalism*** to reckon with. And so Aunt Hippie found herself starin' down a dilemma, Dear Readers. How to adequately convey the magnitude of brightness that middle finger has been flamin' with lately without runnin' afoul of the need to pass for a Respectable Adult 5 days a week? Drier wits than mine have observed that a compromise is a decision where everybody's only a little bit unhappy, and it hit a point where it was actively makin' it worse to look in the mirror at my quasi-respectable self.

Now, Aunt Hippie has recently undertaken a personal improvement project that I like to call "gettin' in apocalypse shape****," which may or may not have the side result of reducin' my 1-ton pickup body back down to a light duty S-10, and I caught myself offerin' up the bribe of bein' able to shave my head once my face was thinner. Insert sound of record scratchin' followed by a heavy silence here. Clearly, I had reached a point where if my inner Tank Girl didn't get to come out and play, there was gonna be tears and a little bit of light bloodshed.

Three actual decent quality wigs later (one grey with hidden pink underside, because sometimes one goes out to brunch in search of avocado toast; one reddish wavy thing that looks like the best expression of Aunt Hippie's high school coif, only without the frizz or the dandruff or the cheap Sun-In highlights; and one shortish curly bob that could plausibly be my unaltered hair or Rosie the Riveter, either of which will do) and I am flippin' a coin between Tank Girl and full Furiosa, just for old time's sake, and watchin' all that pesky respectability hit the bathroom rug.

I field tested a photo of myself in disguise on friends and got a whole mess of disbelief paired with confirmation that I can pass myself off as a minivan-drivin', pumpkin-spice-sippin', yoga-pants-wearin' PTA president, which I suppose was the aim, but know, Dear Reader, that my discomfort with same runs deeper than most therapists can go without SCUBA gear, and I intend to poke at it and see what surfaces. And in the meantime, I got me a sweet aviator hat and a pink pineapple crown.

*Truckload.

**If any of the MRAs out there writing about how girls with short hair are unfuckable, broken harpies who want to suck your male-force out of you, but not in a fun kinda way, can enumerate all the ways besides my haircut that I'm anathema to them, god bless 'em. I figure it's easily number 12 or 13 on the list.

*** I won't elaborate on the layers of fucked-upness that make it so anything short of carvin' "Fuck $Employer" into my undercut can fly, while non-white women with their natural hair who are actually tryin' for respectability don't get a pass, but I feel like it needs a mention just the same.

****Clearly Aunt Hippie puts too much stock in the kind of apocalypse where you're fightin' zombie mutants and not enough in the kind where you just kinda quietly starve to death. Go ahead and blame television for that oversight.

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a la McSweeney's: translated fashion magazine article titles

2017-10-16T20:29:29Z

Everything Is Fine, Buy More Stuff
The Line Between Dowdy and Slutty Is Actually A Moving Point
20 New Shades of Foundation That Are All Still White
How To Find The Perfect Suit For Your Body And Still Be Body Shamed Anyway
Rich, Famous Chubby White Women Talk About Oppression
Feminist Is The New Ugly
Diversity Checklist Photoshoot
Influencers: What's Your Excuse For Not Monetizing Your Entire Existence, What Are You, A Commie?
Instagram Trends We'll Declare Totally Overhyped Next Month
Perfect Make-up For Your No-Makeup Look, Because God Forbid You Stop Buying It
Body Hair: Empowering Things To Do Until A Guy Is Looking
Real Women: Different Colors, All Still Pretty Because That's What Matters
Empowering Products For Every Budget, Because Capitalism
Thrift Shopping: How To Do It Without Encountering An Poor

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On Nazis, and the punching thereof**

2017-08-29T16:58:49Z

Holland, 1945 - Neutral Milk Hotel pic.twitter.com/4Bjz4FAaQ9
— Alt-Right Getting (punchedtomusic) January 22, 2017

First off, let me make one thing perfectly clear, since Aunt Hippie has nearly lost some molars over the pages and pages of apologist explanations for not punchin' a Nazi when you see one. As far as I'm concerned, these are the only valid reasons not to:

You're grossly outnumbered, or you have reason to believe said Nazi is armed, which amounts to the same thing

You're not physically capable of throwing a halfway decent punch and/or any follow-up actions such as running away or kicking the fucker whilst he's* down

There's cops nearby who may or may not be sympathetic to douchebag white supremacists, and you don't have bail money / have a job which requires you not gettin' arrested / have other legal, financial, or skin-color based reasons why interacting with the legal system is likely to cause you harm

...nope, that's pretty much it.

* Aunt Hippie recognizes that some of these lackwits may in fact be of the uterine persuasion, or otherwise needin' a "she," but is gonna play the odds that the person in need of jaw adjustment is a white male of low to moderate income under the age of 30.

**Aunt Hippie also recognizes that she's late to the party on this one, but it's alright, I brought beer and some pasta salad- the good kind, with oil and vinegar and sugar snap peas, and anyhow I keep trippin' over links lately explaining why not, which is aggravatin' the daylights out of me.

Now, look. I don't typically advocate for violence. I let people cut in when I'm drivin. I repeat "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity" so often it ought to be a cross-stitch in my parlor. But there's two good reasons to make an exception for white supremacists.

First off, anyone bleatin' about how nice and law abiding their flavor of protest is ought to maybe live under the experience of havin' their very existence criminalized and see how much they care about abidin' by the law in that case. [And, to the woman in my local Suburban White Ladies' Handkerchief-Wringin' League who insisted that protest ought never be disruptive, and instead should just be standin' to the side meekly waitin' for people to listen and pay attention, I have a dictionary right here with your name on it.] I could go on at length about how the law is set up to perceive a collection of nice white ladies with signs as adorable, and a collection of black ladies with the same as threatening. Or how there's an ugly trend towards criminalizing free assembly. Or, well, pass on anything that's been written in the last 10 years about bias in the legal system. Bottom line is, you're going to run afoul of the law in some fashion unless you're not so much as brushin' past the status quo on a crowded subway train. And, not that two wrongs make a right under any circumstance, but do I really need to point out how often Nazis have done far worse than punchin' and not been treated to the county's finest accomodations?

It's as if the entire rule of law is designed to ensure that they have and keep the upper hand. Mercy, who ever would have suspected?

Second, there are some arguments that just don't deserve to be treated as worth arguing. Chief among them is the notion that some people, by some quirk of heritage, are more or less human than any others. There's no argument against it except to decisively declare it bullshit, and any normal exchange of debate involves some give and take, wherein you admit that they might have some valid point- which, did I mention earlier that they don't?
And second-point five, a fair number of them seem to feel like this is an intellectual exercise, similar to a debate club, where they're shielded from the real world consequences of their words because, after all, it's just playing devil's advocate, or havin' a thought exercise, or similar nonsense. In this instance Aunt Hippie quite thoroughly recommends connectin' their hateful words to reality by way of a fist.

Now. I'm sure a lot of y'all remember those schoolyard bullies, who would taunt and taunt and say the most vile, hateful things they could think up until you snap and deliver some manual orthodontia, at which point you're snatched off by a teacher who tells you you're in the wrong.

Those teachers are full of some high-grade manure.

If they were halfway doin' their job, they would have intervened well before the stage where you needed to step up and do the silencing yourself. They would have watched those bullies like hawks, not let them get you alone, or snatched them by the ear the first time they said something that was pure, distilled mean. Our culture, and our legal system, are that teacher, and they for sure aren't halfway doin' their job.

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Well, if y'all are gonna force me to reread 1984 on the news pages...

2017-04-27T17:57:53Z

http://www.salon.com/2017/04/26/trumps-newly-unveiled-anti-immigrant-hotline-bombarded-with-reports-of-space-aliens/

I'm not even gonna bother speculating on what might go wrong here, because so many brilliant science fiction authors have just covered the idea of an evil government getting its citizens to rat one another out for scraps or just for the joy of pure meanness to death already, and if there's one thing Aunt Hippie hates to be, it's redundant.

[Although I'm starting to think that, after every high schooler reads these books, we ought to do a psych eval and weed out the ones who were rooting for the bad guy, send 'em out as space explorers or somethin' like that, the key point bein' that we strap 'em to a rocket and get them as far away from decent folk as possible.]

I'm not lying when I say that ridiculous trolling such as what happened almost immediately here is Aunt Hippie's favorite thing, right after plain noodles with garlic butter, and it fills my heart with a warm feeling that might even pass for hope in our species on a good day. But at the end of the day when we've all had a good laugh, there's still someone in power who actually thought this was a fine idea.

We don't need more chaotic good little revolutionaries running around - ok, scratch that, what the hell, let's double 'em and see what happens- so much as we need ordinary, decent folk to stop and say "Y'know, instead of droppin' a dime on Eduardo* or Abdul, over there, maybe I ought to just go have a beer on the front steps with him, get to know him a little."

*Or Wong or Giovanni or Stanislasz or Patrick, if you want to both be retro and acknowledge that blamin' the last guy through the door ain't exactly cutting edge, ideologically speaking.

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Wherein Aunt Hippie throws in her $10 in regarding tomboys

2017-04-21T20:51:27Z

I'm sure most of y'all have seen the current back and forth between the NYT opinion piece and the Medium rebuttal and there's enough collective butthurt between the comments on the two to keep proctologists in business for centuries, but I'm gonna throw in anyway, because this is a Big Thing for your esteemed author.

I grew up dressed in boy hand-me-downs because the 5 boy cousins that were older than me were vaguely my shape, whereas the one girl cousin who's got a year on me was a spindly little thing (waif-like, spindly, tall and delicate being words that have never in their life so much as waved hello in passing to Aunt Hippie's physique.) I also wore out a couple of sets of Wonder Woman underoos, because, let's face it, who wouldn't if given the chance? And I was prone to taking the yellow ruffled curtains in the back bedroom and draping them around myself with the help of some spare yarn and belts and whatnot to form what I was certain was the most elegant princess dress ever. I had a pair of red patent mary janes that I squeezed my feet into for two sizes past what was reasonable and cried when I had to pass them down to my sister.

I might have been tempted into long hair if I'd had a chance to get used to it, but a babysitter decided that the only cure for my wild tangle of curls was a Dorothy Hamill cut (and clearly I've betrayed my age with that; for those unfamiliar the choice of reference dates me at "too old to have any fucks left to spare.") Enter a decade of people assuming that I was a boy, to my perpetual annoyance- but then again, I never did get annoyed enough to grow my hair out.

The first time "tomboy" was applied to me, some time in the late 70s, it was such a blessed thing to know that there were lots of me, enough that we even had a name, and maybe- if I bumped into any- some kind of secret club that we could all ride our bikes and climb a tree to get to. Because it was the late 70s, and according to my parents and the burgeoning sentiment in the world, girls could be literally anything they wanted. Of course I was a girl, because girl didn't have to mean that people would tut-tut athleticism or bravery or outspokenness or a knack for taking things apart any more.

Sally Ride. Wonder Woman. Mary Lou Retton. Sandra Day O'Connor. Geraldine Ferraro. Laura Ingalls and Caddie Woodlawn. Helen Keller. Florence Nightingale. I ate up their stories and let them nourish my soul, confident that by my quarter century mark and a new millennium, women would be astronaut-lawyer-doctor-president-moms, all of us.

[Aunt Hippie could write an entire screed on the frantic backpedaling that's been apparent since her college years, but, in the interests of not setting anything on fire with her gaze, will refrain. For now.]

Of course, some of the sheen came off with age, as it does. My 7th grade math teacher, after I had handily completed the pre-algebra exam with the best grades in my year, grudgingly admitted that I was good at math "for a girl" and that I could be a nurse! or maybe even a math teacher! I brushed him off because he also pined for the days when he could send boys home for having hair that touched their collar- clearly this was not someone who knew what was what.

Then the boys, on whom I was crushing desperately, telling me that it was so great that they could talk to me, and wasn't it so great that I could speak girl too, so I could help them out with my hot friends? When bisexuality hit like a ton of bricks when I was 16, realizing that all my girl-crushes were nothing so much as visual representations of the kind of delicate yet interesting alternapixie that I wished so desperately to be, and lamenting for the first time that I was bad at being a girl. The kid sister who effortlessly strode into popularity and conventional beauty, got kissed before me, and had to fend boys off with a stick.

Gradually, though I had never noticed nor cared, the volume of people who felt compelled to tell me how I was Doin It Rong, no matter what "it" was, got loud enough that it started to penetrate my blissful obliviousness. In response, I adopted the "fuck this shitty one horse town, I will leave and I will be smart and fit in and never see any of you again" of the sort that writes poetry and smokes clove cigarettes and wears her transgressions like a point of pride.

[Aside: We are, my teen tomboy and I, watching Daria on DVD. My high school life in cartoon form, let me show you it.]

The one that stuck most was the first time I was betrayed by my own- a college chemistry prof who was outraged that I would dare take advanced chem as a liberal arts major, because something something owed it to my gender to prove that women could do math and science, and my dilettante ass was undermining Real Women everywhere. And the less said about my experience of Mandatory Sisterhood that was somehow supposed to magically override the class barrier between me and my future Leaners-In sistren, the better.

I had children. I rolled my eyes at the Earth Mama Goddess types who reclaimed their inner power via their uterus. This time the gap between me and the women I was surrounded with was in age; most of the women in my parenting class were a few years younger than my mother, and talked about how to navigate career pauses and hiring nannies.

Then my ex (one of oh so many reasons why he has that title) told me that I was frigid and no longer attractive, oh and also he would prefer to be humiliated and beaten and tied up and have things shoved up his ass, several items of which I had expressed negative interest in- so he wanted to open our relationship. I agreed, mostly out of guilt that he was unhappy.

I grew bitter from a brief foray into trying to be conventionally attractive- I lost the baby weight, I grew my hair, I wore heels and fashionable clothing, and yet somehow, they Knew. Men everywhere passed me over in favor of women who did this every day without a second thought. So I abandoned it in favor of the look that I like to call the Pre-Emptive Fuck Off. And suddenly I was the darling of the alternative set, and it felt like I had found my place.

I started to become That Girl who brags about how she finds it easier to be friends with men. There were a few friendships that were fraught with Unresolved Sexual Tension - both one-sided and mutual- but honestly the notion that it was impossible to avoid never made much sense to me, since clearly as a Sparkly Unicorn Bisexual I had to be able to have *some* gender of friend without immediately hopping in the sack (although as everyone knows, we are both indecisive and greedy.) And truth be told, it was my female friendships that were more likely to manifest from stealth crushes.

I got into restoring and maintaining cars and delighted in having a wedge between myself and women who were naturally good at being women, while at the same time secretly despairing that it was forever out of reach for me. I also delighted in the transgression of striding into male spaces as something other than a decorative object, and vented my righteous fury every time I was mistaken for one.

But I remember an incident, one that I thought little of at the time, that was the first beam of sunlight on the horizon: having spent most of the day involved in prep for an engine swap in my boyfriend's car, the Men arrived to help finish up. The engine, no matter what we did, was not sitting so that it would align with the transmission. I looked and shoved and looked some more and decided that for whatever reason, the angle of the mounts and the subframe made it impossible. Not So, they cried, I clearly did not know enough, and they stood around each side of the engine bay to prod it with their metaphorical Penises of Innate Knowledge and I shrugged my shoulders and went upstairs to make hot cocoa. 4 hours later, they realized that the wrong engine mounts had been ordered, to absolutely no apology, and I raised one eyebrow and shrugged again and regretted nothing about choosing to go inside and get warm after laying in slush for the better part of a winter's day.

A few years later I was attending electrical apprentice training with a bevy of 19 year old boys, after deciding that a building trade would hit the sweet spot of not having to conform to office norms, being able to move physically, and yet also paying enough to cover things like "eating" and "a car that runs" while allowing some mild to moderate use of brains, which had been growing skittery from disuse. Having 11 years and an actual job history over these kids, along with a legitimately foul mouth and drama allergy, the elephant in the room was maybe like knee-high by the end of the year. They called me mom (and recoiled in TMI horror when I counted backwards to let them know that only one of them was young enough for that to be physically possible) and counted on me to stare blankly at them when their dipshititude regarding women got too out of hand, but even though I was clearly physically female, I was operating under the "not a REAL girl" regulations.

Fast forward to my late 30s, and I have finally ended up where I belong, in an engineering job surrounded by sarcastic bastards. It's still a sausage fest, and even worse, it's a conservative sausage fest compounded by New Jersey's insane attachment to gender norms.

I spent a fair amount of time wondering if, in fact, I was in the wrong box somehow. Dating women as someone who looked butch but was really a cleverly disguised evil fence-sitter was a lesson in frustration. I saw half a dozen friends transition, including one for whom I'd have gladly traded bodies- the manic pixie dreamgirl crush of my first year at college. When even people who turn out to be transmen are better at femme than you, well.

One of the first times I abandoned my sarcastic tshirt and cargo shorts/pants uniform, I wore a shaped black knit jacket, a black cami, and black cropped tuxedo pants to work. Our sales engineer, the dude who sulked for a week at not being voted the hottest, looked me up and down and said "Look at you! You look... badass." Yes, thank you for that slightly redeeming recovery from being startled that I can girl on occasion.

And then something in me just snapped. A year later, when I was 6 months into a promotion, fighting imposter syndrome like mad, struggling to make my liberal, female, non-degreed self acceptable to my coworkers, I hit the wall of Fuck It. I was here. I was doing a goddamn good job. And I was going to stop apologizing for half my existence right that very second, so help me goddess.

I wore dresses. I wore sequinned leggings. (They remain the only piece of clothing that male engineers have *ever* noticed and remarked on in my entire experience, which is a pretty decent sample size.) I spoke up. And at no point did I meekly ask permission to exist as a female in their space, because fuck that, it's my space too. Gentle reader, Aunt Hippie is not exaggerating at all to say that there were faint echoes of a heavenly chorus, replete with sunbeams and cherubim and trumpets, as this lack of apology started to really, really sink in.

I did not have to pretend to be One Of The Guys. I did not have to "tone it down," or make myself deliberately unsexy, or deliberately sexy. I did not have to stick seventeen qualifiers in front of any statement of belief I made. And if my experience was different than theirs, you bet your ass I said so without dancing around the subject of why that might be. I walked right up to that damned elephant, threw a sparkly hot pink blanket on it, and rode it around the room in triumph.

Now, a lot of this is owing to a natural decline in one's supply of fucks, and a stricter rationing of same, as one approaches one's 40s. But honestly, it has taken me this long to learn how to actually embrace and enjoy being an adult woman who can believe that girls can be themselves, just like my little 5 year old inner princess-gymnast-astronaut-doctor-President was once upon a time. And I'll be damned if anyone takes that away from me ever again.

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Thoughts, Prayers, and other Useless Things

2017-04-11T13:40:45Z

"Mayor R. Carey Davis of San Bernardino said he had received a call from the White House and that President Trump offered to help “in any way possible.” Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education who has supported Mr. Trump’s promise to ban gun-free zones around schools, wrote on Twitter asking “everyone to join me in keeping the victims and all those impacted by today’s senseless violence in your prayers.”"

In Yet Another School Shooting, an estranged husband opens fire on his wife's special ed classroom. Betsy DeVos would like to offer her thoughts and prayers. Well ain't that thoughtful of her.

Not as thoughtful as taking back her asinine remark about needin' to pack heat in case bears attack your suburban classroom, mind.

Not as thoughtful as meaningful gun reform.

Or domestic violence reform.

But, go ahead, Betsy, you do you and keep them thoughts and prayers comin', maybe God will hear you and do us all the favor of zappin' some smart in your noggin. Or some shut in your yap.

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noodly thoughts and thinky things

2016-07-21T13:02:27Z

I. I am bored with my jerb. No frenetic pace, no puzzles to solve, ample time to get my not terribly challenging tasks done, which leads to my inner procrastinatrix just taking the fuck OVER (oh hai there, blog and BBS and unrestricted web access! how YOU doin'?) and... I mean, I am getting things done that they want, and feeling a minor cheering burst of confidence that I am, in fact, eminently capable of all of them, but meh.

And then boredom leads to depression leads to my near-endless capacity for self-defeat and I still wonder why I agreed* to leave the best job ever, complete with sarcastic genius boss at whose feet I could sit and learn shit forever (this was, in fact, pretty much the career path he planned out for me - hang out, learn shit, and do more and more of it as I learned. This is pretty much my concept of heaven, y'all.)

*[Ostensibly I have chosen to preference Boy's career over mine because he makes a substantial amount more and has things like free cars and 15% match on his 401(k) and paid education and pretty much unlimited growth potential, whereas I was one notch below the top already at a company that pays decent but whose true perks are far more insubstantial, and consist of things like "sarcasm" and "not-shitty coworkers" and "don't have to look adult or professional unless strangers are coming." I'm sure I could have grown the responsibilities of the position, and been fairly compensated for same, but nobody was taking over the world from there.

Also, he's been ambitious his whole life long, whereas I'm just looking for something that gets me out of the house, pays enough that household finances don't involve any magic tricks by necessity, and engages at least 1/2 to preferably 3/4 of my brain.
This change is telling me that yes, actually, I am ambitious in the sense that I want to be taken seriously and recognized as not just good at what I do but also good at something that people consider relatively high-falutin' because let me tell you, nobody has a lick of respect for the Best Damn Asswiper that ever wiped. But not in the sense that I want to tear my way up the corporate ladder to management; I want to find a niche full of delicious puzzles and be left the fuck alone there to tinker with some decent and like-minded people...yeah, about that meant to be an engineer thing.

Also, societal expectations, default blah blah, endless guilt if he turned down his dream and went to a (still better paying than mine, goddamn it) mid-level beige type job so we could stay in a state neither of us are particularly fond of just so I could stick with a company who will let me sit at the big kids' table someday and who generally regard me as a precocious and pretty damned useful ~~child~~ not-male** not-engineer.

**{Is there a word, equivalent to the god-awful 'oreo' or 'twinkie' for someone who is outwardly female but gets told all the time that she's one of the guys? You know, the good minority.}]

II.I grow weary of only having friends accessible via electronic widget. Not that they aren't all awesome, but I am about a 13 on a 1-10 scale of extroversion and I just want to go do things with people not already living in my household. See above re: boredom > depression > endless capacity for self-defeat.

III. I am considering medicating the ADHD to try and mitigate this, but bottom line is that the voice in the back of my head keeps saying "You're perfectly able to adult when the job is right for you; why the fuck are you medicating yourself into one that's wrong?" Except I don't know that I can find the right one out here; the fast-whirling chaos seems to be strictly a northeast thing, and anyhow I don't have enough industry experience to pick and choose just yet and realistically I need to suck it up and find a way to function at my best here instead of just going through the motions which is a short trip to mediocreville.

So, in summary, meh.

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y'all.

2016-06-06T15:34:40Z

I have a job that allows for typing shit during the workday and doesn't restrict access to anything, on account of my being all managerial and on my honor. (Don't worry, Imma get all my shit done. I'm a big girl.)

So, watch this space, I guess, is my point. And in an election year, no less!

*wanders off singing hallelujia*

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We'll get to the Douchebag from Missouri in a tick, but first...

2012-08-21T02:43:26Z

Listen up, bubbelehs.

This economy thing? The no-capital-gains-tax? This is not about how you would want to be treated if you were Saint Noble Job-Creator, who (if he were you) ought to be rewarded for his Contributions to the foundations of American Holy Capitalism with those tax breaks that allow him to keep allllllllll his monies on account of the overwhelming nobility of having used some of it to make more of it.

Let's be honest here, shall we? Most of us are using our money to keep body and soul together, maybe under a roof even, and whatever disposable income remains goes to our preferred distractions from reality. Put even more plainly, we are not them, darlins, no matter how much we believe that we'll get there someday with hard work and a little bit of pixie dust.

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Well that was awful obliging of Mr. Romney

2012-08-12T22:57:53Z

Here I've been looking for something to get full-on snarky about and he goes and interrupts my weekend with his choice of vice president.

So is it pandering to the far-right that has become the loudest voice of the Republican party?

Is it a return to the age of the Robber Baron?

Is it a serious case of kingmaking by the hype machine, and a sign that Romney is already desperate?

Aunt Hippie is casting her vote for "all of the above," with a little dash of misogyny and cluelessness on the side. Not that any of it is terribly surprising, even if we were nurturing the tiniest of hopes that a great weight would be lifted off Auntie's state of residence. [Fat joke entirely intended, despite the fact that it is clearly one of his least despicable qualities, because Auntie is sleep deprived and full of the bitchy. We now return you to our regularly scheduled legitimate complaints.]

If there was a shred of doubt left in anyone's mind that the New Right's platform is "I got mine, fuck the rest of you," this should take care of it. The only mysterious thing in all of it is why this message is so appealing to folks who haven't actually got theirs yet.

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