I can't tell you the misery that any human-cat interaction is in my house if that interaction includes nail clipping, kennel populating, or flea bathing. It is hell. The kitties got fleas after 2 of them went to the vet and sat near some new kittens awaiting treatment. At first, I tried putting flea collars on them but that was a horror and they never stopped trying to get them off somehow. My alternate solution was to get a spray for them, but not thinking, at other times, I didn't realize that using a spray bottle filled with water would be so effective as a tool to discipline them. If I brought out a spray bottle - any spray bottle - they all hid or hissed or both. After this, I realized that I would need to be sneaky. I got a shampoo for them, and took them each away to have the tub work happen behind closed doors. When they were done, I would put them in my room so the others couldn't see them.
In preparation for the excitement, I (tried) trimming their nails last night. That went poorly, and after all the hissing and fighting, I didn't even get to Delancey (I should have been wearing jeans instead of pajamas as Zyzzy was able to claw and cut me clean through, which naturally meant I bled through them and had to perform emergency first aid.) Farty and Zyzzy's baths were total disasters, requiring me to all but hold them firmly by the neck while I did the washing. Even this barely worked...they fought harder than an Arkansas Large-Mouth bass who gets a good look at the bubba trying to catch and fry him (Zyzzy is small, but I am telling you he is strong as hell.)
When I finally got Delancey in the bathroom, he knew what was up and clawed his way up my front and, as I leaned over to get hold of him, he got over to my back with his claws in deep. I feel bad but I had to throw him off me to keep him from shredding my back to ribbons. I heard him hit the floor or wall pretty hard. This didn't take any of the fight out of him, but it did take the fight out of me. I gave up on the bath, threw a towel over his head, and got the spray. The spray sucks because it is nasty stuff for them to lick off - which they inevitably do - and it is hard to wash off one's hands. It took more than a little strength to hold, spray, and fluff him, but I did.
I am getting to the point where I think I am just gonna drop them off at the groomers and let them deal with it. I am getting to the point where I dread doing the routine maintainance on them. I am covered in cuts right now, they hurt like hell, and the cats are giving me the stink eye for the effort. Ugh!
Maybe I am not cut out for kids after all.
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I do not know yet how to get video off of my TiVo and onto the internet, but as soon as I do, I will share with the world a watershed event. In what I believe is a local cable ad, targeted at Oakland, Popeye's Chicken now has an ad which starts with the words "Pimp Your Meal At Popeye's" and shows the words "Shrimp" "Chicken" and such getting out of a limo onto a red carpet.
Let me just admit upfront that I am one of those people who goes around doing the "Ironic Use Of Popular Hip Hop Lingo In An Uptight White Voice". I do it more than almost anyone I know. I do it because I am the whitest person I know, and the process of digesting the lingo that comes out of hip hop culture is particularly difficult for me. As one who considers himself a student of Applied Rhetoric, I am endlessly fascinated by any lingo, created by any subculture. The lingo that comes from the inner-city (naturally) is not something I get first hand...I get it third or fourth hand, and when I do, I rarely would say it is a natural fit with the way I use language. My inability to successfully digest these things as intended the minute I hear them is something that proves to me the hopelessness of my whiteness. No matter how hard I try, I revert to my training in being a cracker.
As always happens, these things eventually make sense to me, and their eventual co-opting by mass culture usually doesn't strike (there are exceptions) me as terribly shocking or strange. To see a peckerwood sitcom in which words like "homey" and "dis" and such are used (always looking for a laugh track to pick up on it) has worn itself down pretty well. It's "played". It is double when major corporations do it in their advertising. They usually are the last to know, and it shows in how they use it.
This Popeye's ad is both behind the curve and off the curve. The new innoculated uses of the word "Pimp" that MTV uses, or rap stars use for their energy drinks, are one thing. I, for one, find pimps disgusting. I still cling to that old notion of pimping as being the kind of enterprise fit only for truly low-life slimeballs (like the Patton character says in the movie Patton, "Only a pimp from a cheap New Orleans whorehouse would carry a pearl-handled revolver..." - such a great movie!) I am a square on 99% of things on the planet. I don't think prostitution is cool. I think it preys on women who have few other choices, and I think it is based on a system of violence and coersion. Even the legal types of prostitution retain much of the degradations of its illegal counterparts. I like sex. I live very close to Nevada, and could get to a whorehouse with a relatively small amount of effort and outlay. I don't do this because it isn't so hard to get laid in this world if you really want to, and I don't do it because I suspect that if one did a survey among the ladies at the whorehouse, you would find incredibly high instances of childhood sexual abuse among them, and I would guess most of them were born behind the 8-ball. Any pleasure gained in getting the poison out of the warehouse would be offset by the shame I would surely feel if I were to get a cheap holiday on other people's misery. Like I said...I am square as they come.
Other than ODB's "Got Yer Money", I am not sure that I have too many CDs or files of songs that extoll the virtues of pimping (now that I think about it, I also have Ice Cube's It Was A Good Day, but that ain't too heavy on the pimping aspect.) Of all the people idolized and reprezented by the thug set (mobsters, pushers, pimps, etc.), the Pimp Love has always been the one I just couldn't go for. Perhaps it is the puritanism that has never been extirpated from my makeup that causes "pimping" to be my "I don't go there" element in hip hop culture, I am not sure. I only know that I just never saw a way to make it cool. No amount of time, no new context for its useage, no number of instances of it making into the wider culture ever really changed what I associate the word with.
If fucking Popeye's Chicken is going to make this a normal part of their marketing (will one be able to Pimp-Size their meal? Can I get that lemonade in a chalice? Where is my change bitch?), then something needs to be done about it. Someone raised in a ghetto can reasonably say "where I grew up, we idolized all the hustlers, the pimps, the pushers...they were the ones with the fine cars, fly threads, foxy ladies, and diamond encrusted canes, and that's what we all wanted." Popeye's Chicken, on the other hand, cannot.
I totally get the origin of using pimps as role models. It makes sense. I don't see all that much evil in simply restating the way things are in the places where we allow ghettos to exist. I do see an evil in a major corporation joining in and taking the misery of ghetto people and co-opting that misery to shill their (nasty) mashed potatoes. Even if I grant that black people tend to make the vending of fried chicken viable where they exist in high concentrations, that does nothing to confer street cred on the corporations who get in there to sell it to them. Colonel Sanders whole "Go Colonel" thing was bad enough, no matter how tepidly offensive it is (an old school white man who wants to be called a Colonel from Kentucky doing hip hop dance? It is cruel in its absurdity, but at least it highlights the complete absurdity of trying to find a way to sell a holy shrine of vicious crackerdom to African Americans.)
What can be done to make this sting Popeye's in some way? They have always been associated with New Orleans, so I suppose they need to find some way out of it at this point, much in the way that the Confederate Racist overtones of the Coloniel needed to be concealed after the passing of so much time. Is this how they plan on doing it? If so, I hate to be such a prude, but they gotta get the boot of common sense stuck up their ass. If they are only running that ad in places where they can be sure they are targeting blacks, then the ad needs to get out on the internet and the mass of society needs to see it. I am sure most will not give a shit, but hopefully someone who sees it will know how to properly shame the miserable shills at Popeye's. I would volunteer, but I lack the ideas and/or ability.
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I received an email from a right-wing reader who wondered if I would be posting the piece from USA Today of today (Drudge had it as a headline today...yes, the same today as the UK Bombing Plot arrests and warnings.) I think this was an attempt to show that I am biased - which I am and never pretended otherwise (why do right-wingers still cling to their hackneyed ideas about the fairness & purity of journalism, especially with respect to blogs like this, which are read by 10 people or less - all of whom I know?) Hereby I post, bring attention to, and ask you to read this piece which shows (what I think most already knew) that Al Gore is, in many ways, a total phony, a little prince, and hypocrite. While Al Gore is the first Dem I ever voted for for President, I didn't do it out of any particular love for him. No, even then, I knew it was "Anybody But Bush". I was right then. I think even less of John Kerry than I do of Al Gore, but I was also right to vote for him over George Bush. Also, to be clear, I liked George W Bush's father, at least to the degree that I thought he was decent man. George W Bush is not a decent man. He is an incompetent coward. This is plain as day - and always was to anyone not blinded by their hatred of what they think drrty lib-ruhls are. Those of you who put him and his party in power love to give the lectures about personal responsibility, yet you and those you vote for seem to have a very hard time exercising any. How it is you can ask others to fight in your place in Iraq I don't know. I suppose that is between you and the troops fighting the war you want them involved in (it is also between you and the tens of thousands of innocents killed in that war which you think is "better there than here", but I don't imagine you will ever see any of them either before or after they are blown up.) In any event, Al Gore is a hypocrite. Mission Accomplished.
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As it turns out, my sister isn't coming this weekend. This means I am free this weekend. Yippee! I have already given away too much nice-weather time to visiting family (no offense guys.) I need to get out in the wild for real. I need to see some virgin territory. Right now I am trying - on short notice - to put a visit together to The Bridge To Nowhere. I would hate to give away any more than that on the off chance I actually make it and get stellar shots and a stellar story. In any event, I am going to be like a loosed beast this weekend; my first to do as I please in a few weeks and my last to do as I please with for the next few weeks that follow. I have a few chums on the calendar for a visit, and with my old friends, I would always take a guest, but I am seriously cutting off access to casa Rudayday for others. It is rude to be rude, but I have no choice. I need my weekends and vacation days too much to be so promiscuous with them.
Anyway, I am trying to get a music review thingie done. After that, I will only have Murikkka and travel stuff for ya until I get my nuts regrown and figure out to do with this damned weblog. I am just not happy with it even though I enjoy writing everyday and having this outlet. I need to do more with it, I just don't know what that means quite yet. All in due time I guess.
Posted by rudayday at August 09, 2006 09:14 PM