On Calvin and Hobbes and me

Okay, so all of the "grownup Calvin and Hobbes" cartoons depress me. The sad ones, where Calvin outgrows Hobbes and/or grows into a degenerate and/or turns into a boring, conventional, grown-up banker-looking kind of guy? Devastating. The sweet ones, where Calvin outgrows Hobbes, but Hobbes eventually finds happiness and fulfillment as the imaginary best friend of Calvin's precocious handful of a kid? Depressing--Hobbes is for Calvin, and Calvin is for Hobbes, and I don't care if Calvin and Susie reproduced or not. The bittersweet ones, where Calvin and Hobbes grow old together? I don't want to see Calvin and Hobbes old. Calvin and Hobbes do not grow old. Calvin managed to stay an eight-year-old for a full decade of publication, and there's no reason to assume he spontaneously started aging just because the cartoon went out of print.

Besides, the fact that Bill Watterson isn't making any new Calvin and Hobbes cartoons doesn't mean that Calvin has disappeared. I can crack open my dusty copy of Scientific Progress Goes "Boink," and Calvin remains eight years old (and Hobbes remains whatever age he was). A hyperintelligent, philosophizing eight-year-old, sure, but a second-grader nonetheless.

There have been debates over which of Calvin's two realities was really real--his interactions with his parents and Susie and Moe and the crew, symbolized by stuffed-Hobbes vacantly staring into the middle distance, or his adventures with real-live-tiger-Hobbes. It's a dumb debate. They're both real. Hobbes's antics frequently leave Calvin bruised and dirty and/or tied up, to be discovered by his mystified parents. Obviously, his world is the real world. That Calvin's parents don't recognize Hobbes for the living, talking tiger that he is is really more unfortunate than anything else.

Which means we have no reason to believe that the rest of the strip wasn't real, too. Calvin's Spaceman Spiff adventures could generally be chalked up to his imagination and his favorite comic books, but his transmogrifier? Do we know it wasn't real? Do we know that he never traveled back in time? Do we know that Calvin didn't have a flying carpet? It's not his fault his dad was too busy working to notice a flying kid (and tiger) outside his window, and obviously the condition of the rug afterward would indicate something beyond normal foot traffic.

AJ Aronstein published an essay--not the reason for this post, but possibly the impetus--talking about the comics in terms of nostalgia: the way we observe and appreciate things differently through the lens of age and life experience; whether we love it now because of its inherent, enduring awesomeness or because it recalls a simpler time when we were more innocent and uninhibited. It's a good question. And it's easy to say, "Well, my experience is different, and I'm special, and I can see how your thesis might apply to everyone else, but I'm the exception." So easy, in fact, that I think I'm going to say it right now.

Kicking back to my childhood, I can remember being so desperately jealous of Calvin. His life was awesome. In a time when I was feeling particularly lonely, he was never lonely--he had a constant and enthusiastic companion. In a time where the somewhat nontraditional workings of my mind made me feel isolated, his took him to other planets and duplicated him and made him an owl. My "playing pretend" was seldom--if ever--as vivid and engrossing. (A note to Allie: Do not think this makes our Calvinball games any less precious to me.) As great as my childhood was--and it really was--I wanted to borrow Calvin's so badly.

As great as my life is now--and it really is--I still want to borrow Calvin's. I still, on occasion, feel lonely; I still sometimes feel isolated; I still wish my friends were more open to playing pretend. I need a childhood like Calvin's to borrow, and that really only works if he stays eight.

Some of you may be tempted to attribute all of this to my tragic and ongoing tendency for anthropomorphization of my own stuffed animals. (Hold on, did someone just say ongoing? Ridiculous.) Of course I can neither confirm nor deny that I still have the favored stuffed dog of my early childhood tucked away in my closet, nor can I confirm or deny that I apologize to it if I'm ever forced to crowd it at all to accommodate more shoes. If Calvin can grow up, if he and Hobbes can be separated or be exposed to the harsh reality of adulthood--and I don't really know which would be worse--that would mean that maybe I can't be eight years old anymore. And that would be devastating and depressing.

On more anniversaries

Or, Happy fugging birthday.

Okay, so Practically Harmless isn't the only blog to celebrate its seventh birthday this year. July 1 marked the seventh blogiversary of exceptional (and personal favorite) blog Go Fug Yourself, which combines two of my passions--fashion and snark--for a wholly entertaining and time-sucking blogging experience.

GFY, I celebrate your awesomeness and wish you all the success in the world. To the rest of blogdom: HOW COME I AIN'T MAKING ANY MONEY OFF OF THIS, BLOGDOM, HUH? THIS AIN'T WORTH A LITTLE SCRATCH? JUST BECAUSE I HAVEN'T TAKEN THE TIME TO TRY TO SELL ADS? OR BECAUSE MY POSTING RECORD HAS BEEN SPOTTY OVER THE PAST FEW MONTHS? Not feeling the love, blogosphere. And now my first-grader of a blog is crying. Nice job.

On girlhood

Okay, so I'm a girl. This may come as a shock to those of you who are convinced that I'm actually a 63-year-old man from Little Rock trying to fulfill his need for adulation and sexual affirmation via an assumed identity. (But seriously, folks, if I were a dude trying to adopt a sexy female alter ego, do you think i'd go for 30-year-old underpaid marketing writer writer with a steady boyfriend and an addiction to Dr. Who? It's kind of niche.)

Ask me, though, and I'll self-identify as a girl. Sometimes a lady, under certain circumstances. I was called a dame once and found it most entertaining. But generally, it's "girl"--and almost never "woman."

I don't know what it is about "woman" that doesn't sit right with me. It's not that I'm not a female of the species who presents as such. It's not even that I don't consider myself an adult, although my standards for real adulthood tend to differ from those of people who usually don't wear feather earrings to the office. And it's not that I cling to girly-girlness--I do love a brand-new hairdo, but I despise pink, ruffles, "princess," "diva," French provincial, and non-ironic marabou. So maybe I'm not exactly a girl. But I feel I'm not yet a woman.

Karen Duffy would take issue with that--"girl" is a pet peeve of hers. She writes,

I cringe when I hear the women from "The Real Housewives" accuse their cast mates of acting like "mean girls." Sure, the dames on reality television are cruel, narcissistic and self-absorbed (and I love every minute of it), but girls? For these women, girlhood was more than 30 years ago.

A not-unreasonable observation. There's definitely a disconnect between "girl" and "housewife," and it's odd to think of someone as a "girl" when she herself has given birth to several of them. But the real concern seems to be not that they're identifying as girls but that they're acting like them. I can't say I've actually seen any of the "Real Housewives" shows myself (and I'm okay with that), but they, like pretty much all other reality TV these days, seem to be heavy on the gossiping, plotting, snubbing, sniping, and backstabbing that we all should have gotten over in high school.

On the hidden enemy lurking within 49.3 percent of the U.S. population

Okay, so The Boy and I got into a lengthy discussion recently over a blog post by Dilbert cartoonist and all-around dickweed Scott Adams asserting that recent "tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive" by some "powerful men" is really just them giving in to their manly urges, urges that are "shameful and criminal" in a world that values only the natural instincts of women.

The Scott Adams part of this post

In Scott's words,

The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?

By all means, correct me if I'm drawing weird connections here, but I'm digging through my limited and dusty knowledge of propositional calculus to make sense of whatever the hell he's saying. If someone could please, in comments or via e-mail, characterize it some other way than "raping and cheating are only bad because society caters to women," I'll give you a nickel. The whole lion-and-zebra thing really reads like "Some dummy put rapey men and rapeable women in the same habitat! Man, whatcha gonna do, right?"

On being this many (redux)

NB: As I was preparing this post, I was all, "Man, it's been so damn long since that last post, and that whole no-power thing really blew, and I'm so glad to be finally getting back to posting." I put my laptop aside to go run some errands, and… CAME HOME TO NO MOTHERFUCKING POWER. AGAIN. I wish I were shitting you. So now we've officially spent more time this week without power than with it, and we've had to throw out food, and do you know what it smells like in a house that doesn't have air conditioning but does have a storm-phobic rat terrier? YES, IT SMELLS LIKE THAT. So I'm glad to be returning to posting, not just because I miss my reader(s) but also because it means I have lights and AC and access to a coffeemaker or blow drier or circular saw or whatever else I want that runs on electricity. So… moving on.

Okay, so I actually have a decent excuse for not posting for most of the week--our power was out for the better part of three days following a 15-minute thunderstorm. And it sucks, because I actually had stuff to post, or at least that I would have gotten ready to post had I not been forced into the Luddite hell of pen and paper by candlelight.

One thing that I missed out on? My own seventh blogiversary. (The seventh is supposed to be wool or copper, or possibly big metal chickens, so make your gift purchases accordingly.) Seriously, I've been doing this for seven years. If this blog were a kid, it would be in first grade. So really, it could be writing itself, albeit laboriously on that special paper with dotted lines.

Looking back over the past seven years, I see more than 900 posts--three and a half bazillion words--of stuff that's important to me, some of it societally significant, some of it even world-changing, and some of it so trivial that it's probably not even interesting to my reader(s). There's one thing about me when I get passionate, though: Sometimes, my word choice becomes… less than optimal. My dear aunt says swearing is unattractive, my grandmother said it's a sign of a weak mind, and my mother cringes when she hears verbal naughtiness (despite having a potty mouth of her own, on occasion, due to my own horrible influence), and they're all right. However, as they say, behind the mouth of a sailor lies the heart of a poet,* and I generally let such words fly in moments of passion and fervor. One can guess that they appear in important places. Thus my seven-year review follows them like something you follow to see where it's going.

Seven Years of Practically Harmless, in Words My Mother Disapproves Of

On Mashup Monday: Happy blogiversary to me edition

Okay, so it's late--my blog actually turned seven last Tuesday. But I do have a reasonable excuse for holding off the celebration. Until now. And that celebration begins... now.

In honor of me, I give me the gift of five great tastes that taste great together.

The Beatles/Joan Jett/Cypress Hill/House of Pain/Rage Against the Machine - Mash Together


Thanks for sticking with me. Regular posting to recommence in three... two... one...

On outing and hypocrisy*

*In which we expose our own hypocrisy by outing others

Okay, so it's so common it's not even a funny cliche anymore: a legislator who uses his virulently anti-gay leanings to mask his own homosexual proclivities. Most recently, it's New York State Senator Carl Kruger, who railed against gay marriage during the day and entertained a male lover by night (and who has since changed his vote on gay marriage). Previous offenders have included Larry "Wide Stance" Craig, Ted "Sexual Immorality" Haggard, and Mark "Pageboy" Foley.

Now, in the wake of Kruger's outing, Salon ponders whether "outing" someone is okay as long as it's a conservative, closeted politician--"… reporting on a politician's sexual orientation serves the public interest," says column author Alex Pareene. I couldn't agree less.

I'm unequivocally opposed to outing anyone--even schmuck bastard bigoted closeted politicians. Sexual orientation is something personal and private, not something you do but something you are, and the exposure or concealment of said orientation is no one else's business. We talk about homosexuality as being natural and nothing to be afraid or ashamed of, but we're frequently comfortable using it as a weapon against political opponents--when we say we're trying to "expose their hypocrisy," usually what we mean is we're trying to punish them, using the secret shame that any other day we'd insist shouldn't be secretive or shameful.

Note to us: Either homosexuality is shameful or it isn't. If it isn't, we shouldn't be using it as a weapon. We'd never justify the outing of a gay teenager or adult to settle a score, so it doesn't make sense to arbitrarily justify it for a closeted congressman--even an anti-gay hypocrite--who's obviously keeping his sexual orientation secret for a reason.

On Baby-Sitters Club Super Mystery #last: Chapter 5

Okay, so first, a note: The characters, places, and situations created for the Baby-Sitters Club series are the property of Ann M. Martin and Scholastic. (If they were mine, you know Janine would have gone all A Beautiful Mind by now.) Everything that isn't real life and isn't Ann M.'s is mine, and if you violate my copyright, I will cut you. On with the show.

In our last episode, Mallory had herself a little sleepover.


Chapter 5.
Dawn.

“Does everyone have sunscreen?” I couldn’t believe what a mother I’d turned into. I’d always prided myself on being so laid back, even when I was a baby-sitter. But now that I had two of my own, I had to hold myself back from hovering.

Calantha rolled her eyes. “Yes, Mom,” she said.

“Yes, Mom,” Teal echoed, doing a decent four-year-old attempt at Calantha’s all-pro eye-roll. I had to keep an eye on that one.

“You put it on them yourself, Mom,” Brent said, eyes all sparkly in that way that kept me from hitting him, and he kissed me on the cheek. He pulled into Sharon’s—Sharon’s and Richard’s—driveway. “And I have an extra bottle of it. We’ll all be fine.”

I grabbed his face and kissed him on the lips. “I know. You take good care of my girls.”

On Baby-Sitters Club Super Mystery #last: Chapter NOTHIN'

Okay, so we regret to inform our reader that this week's installment of our ongoing unauthorized epic Baby-Sitters Club sequel quasicollaboration will be... not here, due to a trip that kept me literally in the wilderness for five days. By way of apology: two baby chinchillas in wine glasses.



Regular totallynotfanfictioningIswear will resume next Thursday night.

On personal safety: Are you rape-proof enough?

Holy mother of God!

Okay, so I had to borrow the title of this post from jfwlucy on a recent post at The Frisky, because it's both pertinent and sounds like an OK Cupid quiz that would come with little check boxes. But the subject matter is a little more serious: It's the author's assertion that being drunk is a feminist issue. (Via Feministe.)

Why does Kate Torgovnik believe that being drunk is a feminist issue? It's because sometimes, drunk women get raped. Women + rape must make it about feminism, so drunk = feminist issue it is. She's not blaming the victim, BUT (ding!) if women drank less, they wouldn't get raped so much. She even has statistics--sobering statistics (ding!)--to prove it.

O sweet Raccoon God, we're talking about this again. As if it had never come up before, we're presented with the realization that rapists prey on vulnerable women and drunk women are more vulnerable. Shocking and new and certainly worthy of the same rehashing and analysis it's been getting for decades now! Certainly something that hasn't been discussed on this very blog once or twice or thrice or whatever comes after thrice.

And there's certainly argument for drinking responsibly--it's good for the soul, it's good for the skin, and it's always better to be more in-control than less in-control. Of course, Torgovnik points out, in an ideal world, rape wouldn't exist, BUT (ding! Yahtzee!) we don't live in an ideal world. This is true. The question is how far we should be expected to go to offset that un-idealness. In an ideal world, priests wouldn't fondle little kids, but this isn't an ideal world--yet parents still take their kids to church. In an ideal world, terrorists wouldn't hijack planes, but this isn't an ideal world--yet people still fly. In an ideal world, rapists wouldn't attack runners in the park, but this isn't an ideal world--so what are we expected to do, get a treadmill and live in fear?

I'm not going to go into the whole argument a thrice-plus-one-plus-another-one time, because my view is simple: Life is a calculated risk, and everyone--man or woman--makes choices that someone else will disagree with. There is no choice that anyone--man or woman--can make that excuses the actions of the one who victimizes them. We love to harp on a rape victim's dress/sexual history/blood alcohol content/choice of parking spaces because it gives us a false sense of security that rape can be avoided by following a few simple rules. And "I'm not blaming the victim, but" is the clarion call of the person who's actually blaming the victim.

But how about that quiz, huh? How rape-proof are you? Ten quick questions, and you'll know for sure!

On Baby-Sitters Club Super Mystery #last: Chapter 4

Okay, so first, a note: The characters, places, and situations created for the Baby-Sitters Club series are the property of Ann M. Martin and Scholastic. (If they were mine, you know Karen Brewer would be an "actress" waiting tables in New York by now.) Everything that isn't real life and isn't Ann M.'s is mine, and if you violate my copyright, I will cut you. On with the show.

In our last episode, Jessi woke up really... tired.


Chapter 4.
Mallory.

Ohhh crap.

Every part of my body was sore, starting with a pounding ache at the top of my head. I’d never been much of a partier. Okay, I’d never been a partier at all. Hamilton College wasn’t really known for its ragers, and I’d always ducked out of the writing salons when the absinthe came out. So this feeling of blurriness, bleariness, and all-over crappiness was unfamiliar and unpleasant. I blamed Stacey. At that point, I wasn’t entirely sure why I blamed Stacey, but I was pretty sure she was at fault.

Stretching an entire body full of aching muscles, I rolled over to bury my face in the pillow and block out the sunlight cutting between the curtains. I couldn’t do that. I was stopped by something very large and very warm.

My eyes snapped open, and I barely noticed the pain shooting to the back of my brain because there was a man in my bed. Looking around the room, I was comforted to see that we were in a hotel room and thus it wasn’t actually my bed, but there was still a man in it. He was bare from the waist up—at the very least—revealing a rather nice set of back and shoulder muscles, but I couldn’t muster the courage to peek under the sheets and see if any other muscles were exposed. I peeked at myself, though. I was definitely completely exposed.

On Baby-Sitters Club Super Mystery #last: Chapter 3

Okay, so first, a note: The characters, places, and situations created for the Baby-Sitters Club series are the property of Ann M. Martin and Scholastic. (If they were mine, you know Cokie Mason would have her own show on Fox News by now.) Everything that isn't real life and isn't Ann M.'s is mine, and if you violate my copyright, I will cut you. On with the show.

In our last episode, the girls reunited over Mexican food and a lot of tequila.


Chapter 3.
Jessi.

Ohhh shit.

Opening my eyes was physically painful. I think my mascara glued my eyelids shut. And then I got them open, and I had to close them again, because there was just a little bit of light coming in between the curtains and it felt like it was melting my corneas. So I had to do that about three times. And then, when I finally got my eyes open, I could see that I wasn’t in my hotel room. It was a hotel room, but not mine. And nothing I could remember from the night before was telling me whose room it was.

When the bathroom door opened, I seriously gave thought to jumping off the couch and running out of the room. But it was Claudia, which answered the question of whose room I was in and also answered why I felt like I’d been run over by a truck.

I’ll tell you: I’m used to pain. I’ve sprained almost every joint in my body. I don’t have any of my original toenails. I once dislocated a rib—I didn’t even know that ribs got dislocated. Have you ever taken a full-body ice bath? I have. But nothing—nothing—compared to the misery of waking up with a hangover after partying with Claudia Kishi.

On the Fourth Amendment (we hardly knew ye)

Okay, so the police get to come into your home whenever they want, for whatever reason. If you got up to go to the bathroom or make a sandwich and missed that, I'll repeat it: The police get to come into your home whenever they want, for whatever reason. This new and exciting twist to our Fourth Amendment comes as a gift from our very own U.S. Supreme Court, who decided in an 8-to-1 ruling that the suspicion that evidence is being destroyed inside is sufficient cause for the police to enter without a search warrant.

Before I continue: At no point during the discussion of this development will I accept or even debate the argument "If you're not doing anything illegal, you don't have to worry." I do have to worry, and I get to worry. My constitutional protection from unreasonable search and seizure doesn't come with the condition that I not be doing anything naughty inside--it's absolute, and the only acceptable exception involves the serious consideration of a judge followed by a search warrant. I may be doing something legal but private inside--crafting a politically controversial manifesto, writing deeply disturbing fiction with terrorist fantasies and deviant sexual themes, dressing up in a rubber suit and touching myself in front of Mythbusters. If cops knock on my door and yell "Police, police, police," hear scuffling inside, and charge in to find me sumo wrestling naked in my living room with a grown man dressed like a baby, that's not okay. Adult baby sumo isn't illegal, but it's a rather private activity and not something that anyone gets to see if I don't want them to.*

(NB: Top search terms for this blog are fixing to get bizarre.)

On Mashup Monday: True romance edition

Okay, so I'm a romantic at heart. All you need is love. Love is all you need. I don't believe that there's any particular "one" for everyone, but my feeling is that out of 6,775,235,700 people (and counting) on the planet, pure statistics say there's probably at least one person out there who'll be prove entertaining, fulfilling, and tolerable. Which raises the obvious question: Why have Debbie Harry and John Mayer never recorded a duet together?

Norwegian Recycling/Take That/Usher/John Mayer/a bunch of folks - Recycled Romance


Those crazy kids. You know, The Boy and I are together because of a pair of skilled and knowledgeable matchmakers. Maybe some people just need a good nudge. (And John, maybe a little less frank and racially-tinged discussion of your nethers with national nudie mags--good advice for us all, really.)

On Baby-Sitters Club Super Mystery #last: Chapter 2

Okay, so first, a note: The characters, places, and situations created for the Baby-Sitters Club series are the property of Ann M. Martin and Scholastic. (If they were mine, you know someone would have told Mr. and Mrs. Pike where babies come from by now.) Everything that isn't real life and isn't Ann M.'s is mine, and if you violate my copyright, I will cut you. On with the show.

In our last episode, Mary Anne and Dawn had a rather awkward reunion.


Chapter 2.
Mary Anne.

Los Sombreros hadn’t changed even a little bit. It was comforting. We even managed to track down our old table—still all the way in the back, to the right—and do our best to cram ourselves around it. It seemed to work better when we were teenagers, either because we were smaller then or because we had no problem piling into each other’s laps. I think our record might have been eleven, including boyfriends and one visiting cousin, which involved a lot of squeezing and stacking.

Of course, it had all started with just the four of us—Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and me—brought together by what Kristy still insists on calling her Big Idea (capital B, capital I): a club of baby-sitters. A baby-sitters club, if you will. From an entrepreneurial standpoint, it was brilliant: Call one phone number and quadruple your chances of finding an available baby-sitter, if you weren’t squeamish about leaving your kids under the supervision of a thirteen-year-old. Over time—and in response to increasing demand—we expanded: Dawn came in when she moved to town, and Mallory and Jessi joined as junior members for parents who didn’t mind leaving their kids under the supervision of eleven-year-olds. More came and went over time, but this group, these seven girls, was the real thing.

At the head of our table sat, not unexpectedly, Kristy Thomas, who was staring down the length of the table as if assessing the chip-basket-to-diner ratio and finding it lacking. She had been the president of the club, if for no other reason than her own insistence, and I can’t say she didn’t carry the role well. No one I’ve met has had a better sense of organization, a stronger drive, or a louder voice. Or her own bullhorn. The third of four children and the only girl, Kristy was left to more or less fend for herself after her father bailed and her mother had to go back to work, and I think it left her with a bit of a chip on her shoulder, even after her mother remarried and Kristy suddenly acquired a larger and more complexly blended family.

On Baby-Sitters Club Super Mystery #last: Chapter 1

Okay, so first, a note: The characters, places, and situations created for the Baby-Sitters Club series are the property of Ann M. Martin and Scholastic. (If they were mine, you know Logan Bruno would have two illegitimate kids by now.) Everything that isn't real life and isn't Ann M.'s is mine, and if you violate my copyright, I will cut you. On with the show.

In our last episode... nothing really happened, because it was the prologue.


Chapter 1.
Mary Anne.

I’d dusted the living room three times, which was three-times ridiculous: I hated dusting, Dawn wouldn’t care, and we never used that room anyway. But I had to do something. I was excited—not unusual for me—about seeing Dawn for the first time in over a year. And I was nervous—definitely not unusual for me—about seeing Dawn for the first time since Dad and Sharon separated.

The front door opened, and I spun around.

My stepmother Sharon flew in like a tornado of shopping bags and dry cleaner’s plastic. Her huge purse, bags, and dry cleaning went on the dining room table, but she carefully hung her garment bag on the top of the doorframe. That was going to have to come down before Dad got home.

“Hey, Sharon,” I said.

She jumped a little. “Um, hey, Mary Anne.” Awkward silence. “Dawn not here yet?”

“Nope. There was some weather over the Midwest, so her flight has probably been delayed.”

My best friend and stepsister Dawn—my onetime best friend and current stepsister—was supposed to be in from California any minute now. It was strange to think that we’d been friends for more than half my life, and now I was worried about us liking each other.

On the new, improved dogs of war

Okay, so cry “Havoc,” and what is let slip will fuck your shit directly up. Meet the Navy SEAL dogs, every bit as badass as their human counterparts and twice as anerable. These fuzzy sonsabitches can sniff out bombs and baddies, parachute from high altitudes, take out targets with their armor-piercing titanium teeth (a bit much, I admit), and warm the ever-living fuck out of your feet on a cold night.

Yes, part of me is of the opinion that a dog’s job should, if at all possible, involve no more stress or danger than rug burn from all the rolling around and tummy rubs—then again, I feel that way about people, too. But as highly trained military teammates go, you can’t do a lot better than an armored, night-vision German Shepherd. And the image of a SEAL pup strapped to a dude’s chest as he rappels into Osama bin Laden’s compound and sniffs the bastard out makes me both awed and tickled, particularly when it’s followed by the image of that same dog wallering around in the yard and then getting a cookie.

The United States War Dogs Association is working to get war medals for these cuddly commandos, which is cool since they take just as much risk as two-legged soldiers and the humans don’t have to attack bad guys using just their teeth. And you can even send the dogs care packages, since warrior dogs like Kongs, too. (No, really, apparently they do.) Now you’ll have to excuse me, because I feel it’s time to cuddle the hell out of Dave, who would make an excellent war dog except that he’s never shown any kind of aggression at all, he has a tendency to lick strangers, he’s solely food-motivated, he hates water, and his huge Tina Turner tail would immediately give away his location. Otherwise, though, he’s an animal.

On a world west of the Chattahoochee

Okay, so I hate to dwell—what am I talking about? I love to dwell—but that Gawker post got my back up, and I found myself doing something I wouldn’t have thought I’d be doing five years ago: defending Alabama.

When my brother started doing some freelancing for a newspaper in Phenix City and eventually moved to Birmingham to work for UAB, he got the crap teased out of him, because Alabama was this kind of backward, redneck, cousin-kissing cultural black hole that thanked God for Mississippi for protecting them from the bottom of every list except obesity. Then I moved here in 2006. And it’s actually kind of awesome.

Now I get just as frustrated as Doug did when I get the hick jokes from people who have never actually been here. My personal policy is that whenever I hear someone making a generalization about a region, I think back to whether I’ve ever seen that same generalization in a movie. If I have, I take the sentiment with a grain of salt. (Example: Sweet Home Alabama is not a wholly accurate depiction of Alabama. Does it get some things right? Oh, hell yes. But it’s a comedy, not a travelogue. Also: not filmed in Alabama.) Another example: Defending your derision of people trying to help disaster victims with healthy food by insinuating that these hick rubes are too dumb to appreciate it or know what to do with it anyway.

So to the Gawkerites who believe what they see in Talladega Nights: Tuscaloosa is a college town with a top-50 public university. Birmingham is the financial center of the state with one of the top-ranked research and clinical health systems in the country. Huntsville is home to the space program. And all of those little flattened communities between? The ones you’d probably never heard of before but seem to know so much about now? Though rural, they really did have indoor plumbing, internal combustion engines, Super Wal-Mart, books, TV, and schools that go past sixth grade. So if you want an excuse to push off some Soviet-era dreck in an unmarked can on desperate people, you’re going to need something better than “let on their own, people in rural Alabama wouldn’t know what to do with a can of salmon.”

Alabama is not a stupid state. Conservative, frequently. Often stubborn. Sometimes prone to listening to dumb things and ignoring smart ones. But this dogmatic, intellectually incurious, ignorant hicksville that people—non-Southern people, non-Alabamians who need something to look down on—are creating for themselves is bullshit, and screw you for making me point that out.

NB: Feel like being part of the solution? Show Uncle Dad, Larry Wayne, and all the other slack-jawed yokels you care by donating food and other crucial material goods.

On nonperishable food snobs

Okay, so if I know one thing about the hundreds upon hundreds of victims left without any form of shelter or source of food by the mile-wide tornado that scored a 200-mile path across the Southeast, it’s that they deserve the absolute shittiest shit you can give them in donated food. Three-year-old Chef Boyardee? Bam. Whatever’s in that can with the label off? Go for it. Beans? More beans? Who doesn’t love more beans?!

And how do I know it’s wrong to offer healthy food to people standing next to the rubble of their own lives? Because the awesome folks at Gawker let me know.

Sure, you’ve lost everything and your entire town has been obliterated by one of the most devastating series of tornadoes in history. Doesn’t mean you can’t still eat smart, local and organic!

Magic City Post, a lifestyles website from Birmingham, offers “25 ideas for non-perishable items that will provide high-quality proteins, good carbs and health fats.” It’s just something to consider when you’re loading up that box of canned food to bring to the shelter.

Gawker’s Seth Abramovitch, who I’m sure came all the way down to ‘Bama to take those disaster pictures himself, because he’s obviously just busting out with concern, offers a mockable short list of items in his post. A few others that he seemed to miss:

1. Canned or pouched tuna
2. Canned salmon
3. Canned chicken
4. Canned black beans
5. Canned chickpeas or lentils
...
8. Smart Balance or natural peanut butter
...
13. Shelf-stable milk
14. Oatmeal and grits
...
17. Herbs, spices and spice blends
18. Canola, olive, flax seed (linseed) or peanut oil
19. Lundberg’s Rice Chips and Chip’ins Popcorn Chips
20. Minute white rice
21. Raisins and other dried fruit
22. Olive oil, mayonnaise and other condiments
23. Wheat crackers

Look at those stupid, pretentious foodies, trying to give people... healthy proteins. And milk. And dried fruit. And rice. And oil and seasonings and condiments to make their nourishment a little less bland. Those... bastards?

On Mashup Monday: Hope edition

Okay, so news gets worse, not better. There's a point where miraculous discoveries are made and every crumbled house is a potential gift. Then there's a point where that's not realistic and every house contains either nothing or worse. It sounds fatalistic and depressing, I know, particularly coming from someone who didn't have as much as a broken window from the weather, but the death toll topped 300 today and it's just a lot.

K'naan/Matisyahu/Akon/Michael Jackson/The Fugees - Songs of Hope


God bless the families and friends who've lost loved ones, the ones still working for loved ones, and the volunteers trying to help make it better.