Mel & Oksana: Both Narcissistic Twits

2010
07.18

My reaction to Mel Gibson’s abusive tirade (that his opportunistic, manipulative girlfriend recorded in an intentionally passive-aggressive form of blackmail) was a visceral shock of ugly memories and cast a new light on Oksana Grigorieva as somewhat less sympathetic than her press would have us believe. No, I’m not blaming the victim, here. I’m merely pointing out what few mainstream sources are willing to admit: Oksana Grigorieva knew exactly what she was doing the entire time she was involved with Gibson and expected, if not designed, this outcome.

When I listened to the tape, I was struck by the familiarity of Gibson’s invective: his rage and machine-gun insults were so similar to those I heard from partners of my tragic romantic past. I was ashamed for him and myself – him for being such a jerk and me for ever putting up with someone like that. What was it about me that accepted such unwarranted abuse? Thousands of dollars and dozens of hours on the therapy couch helped sort out some of my questions, but what was a girl like Oksana Grigorieva doing with a jerk like Gibson? That Gibson was a bigot, a mysogynist, and a mean and violent drunk was no secret long before Grigorieva seduced him. Perhaps it was all a very careful plot hatched by a very patient opportunist. Grigorieva probably got more than she bargained for (and the consequences have yet to play out, since she does have a child with this man), but she ultimately achieved her aim: to destroy Gibson’s reputation and career in eight minutes of paint-peeling malignant narcissim.

Gibson will never change, and he won’t really suffer the way you and I would suffer after this sort of mortifying revelation. He’s still a billionaire, he’ll always find some willing woman to step into the inverted narcissist role; and this, like all Hollywood scandals, will fade from front-page interest soon enough. Gibson’s fall from grace has supplied some delicious shadenfreude to his detractors (see Frank Rich’s recent column), and hasn’t done the conservative religious “traditionalists” any good. Nonetheless, the larger point will be lost on the masses: what does his behavior demonstrate about our culture, and how is it still even remotely acceptable for a woman to tolerate physical, mental and emotional abuse for months or years and emerge characterized as a patient, sensible saint? Grigorieva was a willing participant, and I’m certain that if Gibson had videotaped some of her tantrums and unscripted dialog, we’d see a different side to the story. Frankly, they deserve each other.

Joran van der Sloot – Serial Killer?

2010
06.04

Our old pal, Joran van der Sloot is back in the news, accused of (gasp, shock, throat-clutch) murdering a 21-year old woman in Peru, Stephany Flores.

Van der Sloot, a compulsive gambler (among other addictions) was allegedly in Peru playing poker when he was seen entering his hotel room with Flores, either by surveillance or witnesses. Flores was found five days later in the room, rolled up in a blanket, dead from blunt force trauma and stab wounds. Accounts in the news vary on her condition. It certainly is odd nobody missed her for five days (and you know the apologists will seize on this as reasonable doubt), and the hotel cleaning staff didn’t smell something. There’s a lot amiss in this story, but I’m sure the scurry for reporters and voyeurs to cover such a hot topic precluded fact-checking. I’m going to take most of the early reports with a grain of salt.

According to other sources, Flores was an overt gay woman, so why would she even go to the room with a snake like van der Sloot? Why was it normal for her to be out at 3:45 AM in a casino, as her father casually noted? There is much more to this story, but we’ll have to wait for the shark frenzy to clear.

Old misfit fans know we thoroughly covered the Natalee Holloway case until it became too spectacularly incompetent, corrupt and infuriating for even hardened true crime veterans such as ourselves to perservere. The case attracted a wide array of distasteful (if not repellant) posters, bloggers and armchair experts. It was the nadir of amateur hour for anonymous crime buffs and sudden celebrities. I expect this time to be worse, since in five years we have a few million more idiots and nutcases scouring the web.

The usual suspects are opining on the new case: the nearly illiterate Scared Monkeys, the right wingnut Dan Reihl, the bloodless Greta Van Susteren, and even pink-lipped Perez Hilton who didn’t even have a website when Holloway went missing. Mark Geragos has been blessedly silent, but Joe Tacopino, van der Sloot’s American attorney who defended him when the Holloways sued for wrongful death a few years ago, has been making the cable TV rounds. Tacopino is the typical sleezy defense lawyer – not content with merely insisting that his client is innocent until proven guilty, he has to create a myth around his client’s victimization by the “media” and trot out the fake indignation.

The moral of the story is that we were right all along. I could dig up our old opinion pieces on the Holloway case where we predicted there were young women either raped or murdered before Natalee and that Joran would do it again until he was caught. It appears he chose the wrong victim this time; he got cocky, his dad has passed away, his mother can’t help him. It’s five years too late, but it may be finally all over for Joran.

Josh Powell, DB*, Follows Narcisisst’s Playbook of Grief

2010
05.23

Josh Powell, like all true to type, simply cannot let well enough alone. After ditching the house and town where he and his wife lived for years, he managed to fly under the radar for months. No press camped out on his dad’s doorstep. Nobody followed him around. Nobody attached a GPS to his vehicle. Nobody in law enforcement refers to him as a suspect. The various organized and disorganized searches for Susan have produced nothing of note. Everything indicated that Powell was probably going to get away with it.

But then came Mother’s Day and he just could not resist.

On his creepy blog dedicated to Susan, http://susanpowell.org, Josh posted a mawkish cyber greeting card to the woman he [likely] murdered, ostensibly from the children who are perhaps being led to believe that Mommy is coming home some day.

This is textbook Narcissist behavior. Frankly, even if he is never indicted or tried for murder, Josh Powell needs a seriouis ass kicking.

*douche bag

Celebrating The “Pill”

2010
05.08

This week we celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest inventions to emancipate women: oral contraceptives. While automatic washing machines and dishwashers were terrific inventions, the pill beats technological timesavers hands down.

My mother was a practicing Catholic at the time of the pill’s introduction and never partook of its advantages, however risky at the time – the early versions of the pill were much stronger than necessary and were blamed for some health problems in later years. She subsequently gave birth to four more children. Eventually, she figured out some way of stifling her fertility, but not until after her eighth child. Would high levels of synthetic hormones be more dangerous than raising eight kids? I submit not. I also suspect I would have suffered a similar fate were it not for the incredibly reliable Demulen 35 available to me 20 years later.

My own history with contraceptives is a story of both success and failure of astronomical odds-defying. Nevertheless, without the pill, I’d be living in a shoe.

I first went on the pill in the early 80s, after two pregnancies in two years. My second pregnancy was the result of a failed barrier method; my first the result of a quotidian error called “drunk sex”. I remember the pill was expensive back then, about $20 a pack, but I was able to get a discount based on a sliding scale at the clinic in Columbus that catered to college students. Being on the pill required an annual health exam, which was fine with me and well worth it.

I changed brands and levels of estradiol three times in the course of seventeen years. I briefly went off the pill when I turned 35 because I was still a smoker, and switched to the Seinfeld-made-famous “Sponge,” which has since been taken off the market. I can see why. It failed me, and probably millions of others. Unplanned Baby #3 was born fifteen years after Unplanned Baby #2. Back to the pill I ran!

In my late 30s, my then health care professional recommended I switch from Demulen 1/35 to Loestrin 1/20, reducing the estradiol to 20 mcg. She said it would help with peri-menopausal symptoms as well, although I had none at the time. Statistically, women over 35 are less fertile than their younger counterparts, and this level of estradiol is (usually) effective. Ha ha ha! my ovaries laughed at that wimpy level, and I got pregnant within two weeks of actually “testing” its efficacy. And no, I didn’t forget to take it on schedule. I actually felt horribly guilty and shocked, because I had several friends who were desperately trying to get pregnant: taking their temperature every day, standing on their heads, eating food that would allegedly boost their fertility, yet rolling craps. Me? My uterus should be in the Smithsonian.

Needless to say, after that little surprise, I decided that more radical measures were required. Even the pill had let me down. I could no more rely on any manmade chemical contraceptives, or subject myself to implants, injections, patches, rings, and IUDs than I could expect my outrageous fertility to suddenly diminish. Considering my track record, I feared I’d be one of the 1% of women who still get pregnant after sterilization. (Happily, no.) I vividly recall the doctor who was about to perform the surgery the day after I delivered Unplanned Baby #4 asking me if I was “absolutely sure” I wanted him to proceed. I looked up at him and laughed, “Doc! I have two kids in college and a newborn! Please! I beg you! Shut this down!”

“Evening” – a dance film by Bill Moulton

2010
05.03

My friend, Bill has his beautiful dance video on Vimeo:

Evening from William Moulton on Vimeo.

Enjoy!

Paying For Healthcare with Chickens

2010
04.24

I don’t know what era Nevada senate candidate Sue Lowden’s grandparents lived in, but I know my grandparents didn’t pay for their health care through the barter system, much less with poultry products. They used cash, check or Medicare. Paul Krugman weighs in on the absurdity of the notion of paying for doctors’ visits with chickens, but even he fails to point out that Lowden’s grandparents would not have been living in an agrarian outback where bartering for services was feasible, unless they lived circa 1890s Kansas.

Even folks in rural counties of Ohio have sophisticated hospitals these days, but if specialized care is required, patients commute to the urban hospitals where chickens are definitely not a payment option. You can bleed to death interviewing with the receptionist with all the questions asked of you about your coverage. Then, you’re lucky if your insurance will cover your treatment, and you often don’t find out until after the fact. I remember once going to an emergency room with severe abdominal pain and having to wait over three hours to be seen because I didn’t have an elevated temperature, therefore I wasn’t suffering from appendicitis. Instead, it turns out I required emergency surgery anyway, since I was suffering from an incarcerated intestine due to a small hernia. I had less than 24 hours to live, but no fever.

Even a barnyard full of chickens wouldn’t pay for that surgery, considering my then misrepresented policy did not cover the procedure. I wound up with over $13,000 in medical bills that today would be double. Maybe I could trade the procedure for a thoroughbred racehorse? After that disaster, I became a licensed insurance agent so I could learn how to avoid another trap.

Redecorating

2010
04.23

Readers of my previous blog may recall when I used to change the design every few months. Recently, I became a little nostalgic about the old blog and decided to rearrange the furniture in here to cheer me up. I don’t have the time anymore to dedicate to blogging as I did in the years 2002-2006, but I will try to post something once a week that is interesting and fun.

Teabonics Dictionary

2010
04.03

As an homage to our Dibble’s Dictionary, allow me to define some common Teabonics words:

Alliens – during a game of Kick the Can, when all the players rush the can at the same time
Amensty – broken blood vessel in the eye caused by a revival meeting
Amnety – a crazy, but very friendly neighbor
Baught – nausea caused by too much draught beer
Boarder – Mexican tenant
Borror – When Joe Bob needs another donut, he asks to “borror” a dollar
Clunkker – a pickup truck plastered with Confederate flag stickers
Competnce – when incompetnce just won’t do
Constution – characterizes a criminal who hardly ever gets sick
Currancy – a dessert made with Jell-O, Cool-Whip and currants
Daugter – a female child born in August
Descent – lowering one’s reason for dissent
Dependance – An aging Tom Cruise reprising his role from “Risky Business”, this time dancing around the living room in his Depends™.
Deviding – combination of “devoid” and “divide” – seceding for no reason
Enoungh – a large-bellied Dr. Seuss character
Excetions – exceptional secretions
Extremey – characterizing Tea Partiers’ point of view
Facism – something easily mistook for actual totalitarianism
Feedom – Dick Armey’s war chest
Gemany – fictitious country located between Hobbiton and Gondor; denizens known as “Gemans”
Hugh – large, adult duck
Impeah – common condition resulting from severe dehydration and lack of portable lavatories in Nevada
Lanaguage – anti-aging cream made from lanolin and guano
Lier – a Tea party activist in ambush mode
Lobbyest – when, during a tennis match, your opponent scores most of his points with lobs
Mavrick – an unconventional Rick roll
Mortage – deed held by a now defunct bank
Offical – flip-flopping politician
Plummer – fruit picker with severely baggy pants
Polititions – a petition to oust an “official”
Rascist – a rascally bigot
Rediculous – when an interior designer suggests painting your bedroom brick red
Redistribtion – painting only the molding red
Repeel – what Mom does to the potatoes after Dad
Sactity – being fired from your job for having small breasts
Scholiast – a philosopher with socialist tendencies
Socilism – closing one’s eyes to the truth
Stimulas – an abundance of stimulating information; see also: pornography
Theif – subject of a logical premise: theif, thenwhat?
Waisting – When your George Washington costume doesn’t fit
Wroking – if the trailer’s doing this, don’t come knocking

How Tea Partiers Resemble The Dibbles

2010
04.03

Readers of my former blog and followers of the Peterson trial will remember, not always fondly, the group of people who advocated for Peterson’s innocence and organized web sites and discussions forums that simply begged to be parodied and ridiculed. We called the “Scott is Innocent” group “The Dibbles.” “Dibbles” was shorthand for “Opus Diable,” a spoof organization we invented in which the members were doing the work of the devil, as opposed to “Opus Dei”, of course.

Among other constant insults to our intelligence, the Dibbles flung spurious and unsupported allegations at the victim’s family, libeled Amber Frey and Ron Grantski, and accused virtually everyone involved in the prosecution of misconduct and criminal conspiracy, which was bad enough. It was their blatant and consistent stupidity we mocked. It was as if they were following a different murder trial on some parallel universe.

The Tea Party activists resemble the Dibbles in many regards, not least of which are their narrow grasp of facts, their prejudicial viewpoints informed by hate-radio (Limbaugh, Beck, Levin, et. al.), and their dismal use of the English language. Are Tea Partiers as dumb as the Dibbles? Let’s look at some startling similarities:

  • Tea Partiers and Dibbles make atrocious spelling and grammatical errors demonstrating either incompetence, ignorance or amazing indolence. The Dibbles were so prolific and hilarious in thier misuse of language, we developed a “Dibbles Dictionary” featuring the most grevious of their typos, misspellings and word choices. Perhaps someone should do one for the Tea Partiers.
  • Tea Partiers are mean-spirited like the Dibbles, and attack anyone who disagrees with them, including threatening to divulge personal information, posting addresses of dissenters’ homes, and interfering with the daily business activities of their “enemies”.
  • Tea Partiers and Dibbles both enjoy defacing and defaming anyone they dislike, using jejune photoshopping and insults. They demonstrate the emotional maturity of a seventh grader.
  • Both Dibbles and TPers are hypocrites and practice double standards.

Are there former Dibbles among the TPers? Very likely. However, I think that the similarities between these groups are less about politics and more about the personality types that suffer from insecurity, prejudice, rage, and envy. The TPers, like the Dibbles, are sore losers who refuse to accept reality. I suspect the TPers will suffer the same fate as the Dibbles: self-immolation.

Shunnin’ o’ the Green

2010
03.17

St. Patrick’s Day in Cleveland, especially if you live on the west side, is always a major annual event. There’s a big parade downtown with the usual ubitquitous ugly floats, fat men in kilts, bagpipers, tone-deaf marching bands and loud spectators drunk by noon without access to a decent public bathroom in sight.

On St. Patrick’s day “Irish” is a synecdoche for everyone in town. Local bars that reek of steaming corned beef and cabbage are crammed with revelers guzzling foamy (sometimes green) beer and swaying to canned Irish music from noon to midnight. It’s a couple of rungs above a peasant festival for amateur drinkers and pseudo-Irish. The real drunks (many Irish) know better than to venture out. Some use the “holiday” as an excuse to take the day off and start drinking and spilling mid-morning from flimsy plastic cups, and by mid-day start planting sloppy kisses and singing, “green alligators and long necked geese” as if it’s a sacred hymn.

In my family, our maternal Irish ancestry was considered a dirty little secret, a source of shame and ridicule, and more often denied than celebrated. Although my mother would occasionally sit down at the piano and play a few maudlin Irish standards in sentimental moments, our father essentially disowned her heritage, despite the fact that her family were wealthy mixed patrician stock with no immigrants from the emerald isle in several generations. We were raised to claim only our German roots, with a little French thrown in for flavor, except on St. Patrick’s Day when some of us would disclose the unmistakably Irish surname of our grandfather in order to feel a kinship with the merrymakers. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that in a household where virtually no racial slurs were ever uttered, my father’s only passing bigotry was toward the Irish.

I have long since purged myself of any shame in my Irish lineage and instead embrace what I believe are some of the interesting aspects of the ancient Celtic culture, especially the music. To me, the quart or two of Irish blood contributes a mellow sweetness to the otherwise rigid Teutonic and Alsatian snobbery, which was instilled in us with arrogance and aristocratic authority. Delicate and haunting Irish melodies resonate for me as profoundly as a Beethoven symphony, and a Celtic harp will stop me cold. One of my favorite books as a student was James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I must have read four times, along with every word written by William Butler Yeats. Thus, somewhere in a hidden chamber of my heart courses the bitter brine of chaos, passion and rebellion. Erin go braugh, indeed.