Hummingwolf at Home

From Slacktivist: "Only a crazy person would take what we say seriously."

Every few years, tragically, some poor confused bastard fails to realize that it's all a big game, a pretense, a lie. He takes them seriously and he takes their words seriously and he behaves as someone who believes what they say. So Paul Hill murders a doctor in Florida. Eric Rudolph bombs the Atlanta Olympics. Scott Roeder guns down a doctor in church.

And each time this happens all of the people who have, for years, been suggesting that such violent resistance is obligatory recoil in horror at the sight of someone treating their words as anything other than the disingenuous lies they were always meant to be.

You know, I was thinking when I woke up this morning that with all the news coverage about Saturday's shooting, Julian Assange must be feeling terribly left out. So when the first thing I heard after turning on the news radio station was that Julian Assange had compared himself to Gabrielle Giffords, I greeted the news with a certain lack of surprise. Then again, given what Sarah Palin and other rightwing superstars have said about the Wikileaks crew, the statement may have a point. It's a point hidden underneath a gigantic, bloated ego, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, now apparently also known as Singles Awareness Day! You know what that means, don't you? It's time for The Cap'n's Unfortunate Valentine's Cards!

If you've never visited that link before, do go. It's sure to make you feel better.

If you still want to send someone a Valentine after that, my advice is likely too late this year, but next year you may want to send this love note or possibly this card for the holiday.

And from today's livesciencefeed: Love letters in ancient Rome were all about pain. Well, really, what else would they be about?


And this languagehat link is going here because Borges = Love: The ANTI-BORGES.

First: If you are a LiveJournal user and you don't follow news, you probably should. Anyway, the most important bit is that LiveJournal now has new settings & flagging tools for "adult content," which you can read more about here. Note that by default, your search settings are "Use Moderate Filtering"--filter out explicit adult content. My guess is that many of you, when you do use the search feature, don't want to filter any results out at all, so it's a good idea to go to your viewing options (settings) page and change that.

Right then. In news unrelated to LJ, but related to the late great TV show Firefly: "I, Malcolm" by Nathan Fillion. Oh, Captain! (Link via musesfool.)

Unrelated (or at least not directly related) to any Joss Whedon show, nancylebov links to The Fantasy of Being Thin. The essay begins with this quote:

Obese patients are often encouraged to believe that weight loss is an appropriate way to combat depression, save a failing marriage, or increase the chance of career success. The irrationality of hopes pinned on weight loss is so striking that dieting might almost be likened to superstitious behavior…. Passing from childhood into adolescence, leaving home, marrying, starting a new job, having a baby, experiencing marital difficulties, adjusting to children leaving home, and growing old — all these life situations may become unexamined reasons to diet. In other instances, concerns over weight mask even more serious problems.”

-Wooley and Garner, from “Obesity treatment: the high cost of false hope,” published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, vol. 91, no. 10, 1991.

Many of you will recognize that the essay applies to more than just dieting. "Because, you see, the Fantasy of Being Thin is not just about becoming small enough to be perceived as more acceptable. It is about becoming an entirely different person – one with far more courage, confidence, and luck than the fat you has." Replace "being thin" and "fat" with, oh, "having a college degree" and "being a college dropout" or whatever other combination of words applies in your life.

Via squidpiggy: Stephen King "considers the story of Anna Nicole Smith, the little girl who became a princess"--as well as the stories of other famous young women: A Modern Fairy Tale. Makes me want to go listen to my Carpenters albums and eat something fattening for Lent.

Reality related to that fairy tale, via mister_wolf, who was looking for good, realistic references to help him with his artwork: A gallery of normal women's breasts. Not safe for work unless your work requires you to look at women's breasts, but a site with lots of non-sexualized pictures of people who don't live in fairy tales.

"Anything that lies between is traditionally a place of potent enchantment: a bridge between two banks of a river; the silver light betwixt night and day; the moment between dreaming and waking; the motion of shape-shifting transformation; and all those interstitial realms where cultures, myths, landscapes, languages, art forms, and genres meet."

I had dreams last night where I was visiting the borders between states, between lives, between worlds. I wish I did that more often. It's always fun.