Freaky fragment friday

April 4, 2008 by Wendy

I continue to hear gnashing of teeth over this whole Sweet Valley Size business, but a week later I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s nothing more than a bullshit Size 4 sack of stupid provocation, a crazy flack stunt to rid the Wakefield twins of their misty nostalgic associations and try to get them on the same bitchtastic bandwagon as the Gossip Girl and Clique books. And we all took the bait by blogging about it, hooray! Now let’s never buy these books again, and keep our fat fingers crossed that the reissues don’t sell, and subsequently the books get pulped to make recycled paper wrappers for delicious, delicious hamburgers enjoyed by future generations of pre-teen girls who will hopefully not run off and purge them in order to fit into a Size- Whatever-Is-Perfect- at-the- Moment. Agreed? Okay, then!

I’m doing one of those photo-a-day things at Flickr, wherein I try to take one half-decent photo a day, or at the very least POST one half-decent photo taken on another day when half-decent photo opportunities were more plentiful than they are on the particular day of posting. Yeah, hope that’s clear. Anyway, I’m trying to stay honest.

Oh, if you were wondering why you couldn’t get to Candyboots the last couple of days, I accidentally let the domain registration lapse. Oops, sorry. It’s back up! Sorry! Renewed all the way up to the End Times now, I swear.

The new BUST is on newsstands now, and if you buy it you can read my Pop Tart column on Britney Spears as well as a short interview I did with Ira Glass. I cannot quite bring myself to erase the recording of the original interview phone call, in which I laugh very loudly and horsily over every other thing Mr. Glass says. The gulf between the droll NPR radio career persona I often imagine for myself and the sad, sputtering reality is vast indeed, but oh well. As for the Britney piece, I wrote it when she was a bit more spinny-eyed than she is now, back when her future lifespan was looking as scanty as those shirt-dress-thingies she’d wear to the liquor store, and I figured I’d better write the column and gather her crazy roses while ye may, you know? But in a way I’m kind of glad that my article is a tad less relevant than it used to be. Perhaps you understand, too.

Fever specials and daily dreams

February 15, 2008 by Wendy

Chills, aches and fever mean flu, right? Or malaria? I have one of those. Last night we alarmed the nice folks at the Ukranian Village bingo game by leaving right before the final big cover-all game for the grand prize. Two very concerned people stopped us to ask us if we were sure we wanted to leave, and only one of them wanted to know if she could have our cards. It was sweet! But I was getting really achy and woozy and beginning to feel like I was grimly daubing my very life force away, so we left. I was in bed by 9:30 having a feverish, uncomfortable dream which I feverishly reasoned was so uncomfortable because the only place in my head where this particular dream was playing was at this weird brokedown second-run dream theater and in my dream of having the dream I berated myself for not dreaming a 27 Dresses or Definitely Maybe kind of dream instead. Something like that.

Now I am at home napping and coughing and just now I somehow managed to get my feeble fever brain to figure out how to embed the code to play this phone interview I did with Kim on Elastic Waist’s Daily Special show. Check it out!

Anyway, it was fun. I like how they really dug the valentine from yesterday!

Um, and I might go back to bed now. Please think lucid thoughts for me this weekend, because right now I feel like the monkey is eggplantish, and that is never funkadelic.

And by "fat girls" he means "pretty much everyone"

February 7, 2008 by Wendy

I’m trying to feel just a little tiny speck of pity for this guy, who appears to have no friends, or at least no friends who support his efforts to run an anonymous and patently derivative humor website containing misspelled fake news stories, satire, and cooter jokesâ€”or, at the very, very least, no friends with whom he feels comfortable enough to disclose that he’s the dude who posted the Lane Bryant Body Bag story just a few hours after five women were killed in an attempted robbery here in Chicago on Saturday.

Somehow the joke didn’t go over so well. I know, right!? Because the execution-style killing of five bystanders in an incident with no answers or closure whatsoever is so totally comedy gold, yet hardly anyone has shown up to give him the props that he deserves for going there, man, because everyone is so sick of these obese women who have the freaking nerve to go out and buy clothes while they’re still fat, and can you believe they actually have stores for them, encouraging them to stay all fatty jubbo and shit, and all with such complete disregard for ~~his boner~~ the obesity epidemic that of course he had to say what he said, lest the fat chicks of the world think they can get a death-holiday day off or something.

But no, nobody gives this guy credit! Instead of high-fives, practically all he’s getting are angry comments from fat chicks! Well, except for two guys who hate fat chicks, including some dude named Alex who keeps valiantly coming back to post like some self-appointed keeper of the flame, or refiller of the douchebag, or whatever. As for the fat chicks who are posting comments there, they don’t say they’re fat chicks, but they just don’t seem to appreciate the way the victims of a violent unsolved crime were immediately ridiculed in a feebly written Onion-copycat mock press release, and everyone knows that only fat chicks have a sense of human decency and also high standards for satire, right?

I know that all kinds of people read my site, but if any of you go over to this guy’s site to tell him how unfunny he is (and whether you do or not is up to you), it seems you automatically become a fat chick. Seriously, as soon as you click “Submit Comment,” a tub of ice cream will magically appear in your hand, and then you’ll be promptly told to put it down. This guy blames the nation’s health problems on us fat chicks for writing “obesity–coddling” blogs and eating all the pies, but clearly all our militant binging and coddling is no match for the way this guy’s site can make fresh new fatties in just minutes, just like donuts! It’s so amazing that if I, too, were into writing stale, imitative news parodies in lieu of having any kind of individual comic voice whatsoever, I would totally crap out one right now with the headline Area Man’s Website Increases Female Obesity Statistics to Include 98% of the General Population, and then I’d quote him saying some inane shit that I just made up, and hyuk hyuk hyuk har har! But I digress.

Anyway, as for all you newly-minted fat chicks, hello and welcome to the fold! (By which I mean, of course, the fatty, fleshy folds that guys like dude-with-the-website love to describe in fetishistic detail, for reasons we could have a field day with if we actually cared.) Please feel free to enjoy the privileges of honorary membership, which includes 1.) getting to eat all the pies and 2.) possessing the kind of adaptive skills that help you to be way the hell funnier than any braying jackhole whose jokes are all based on his own desperate need to keep things just the way he thinks they ought to be and, especially, keep everyone in their place. Which is spectacularly shitty just on principle, but even worse when it’s not funny.

And by “not funny” I don’t mean in bad taste. I mean actually not funny. I mean it completely failed. It’s one thing to read something smart and sharp and precise enough that in spite of all your defenses and preconceived ideas and notions of correctness it gets through; it slays you. It’s another thing entirely to come across some bullshit that is so stunningly mangled and skidmarked and sloppy that it’s like getting hacked in the neck with a spork, and then of course it’s a perfectly reasonable response to want to punch and kick and scratch and bite back. This is just to explain why I bothered to write this. Sometimes it’s just what peopleâ€”excuse me, “fat chicks”â€”have to do.

Update 10:45 p.m: He took down his “Fat Girls Don’t Think I’m Funny” entry but you can read this screen shot of it here to see how dopey it was. The last comment I saw posted there read, “Honey, nobody thinks you’re funny.”

Update, Februrary 18th: He’s gone extra chickenshit now and doesn’t even approve comments anymore. I’ve decided to just link to screencaps of his site instead. I gaveth traffic, but sorry, you friendless angry little clown fart, now I taketh away.

Update, Feburary 25th: Today, like two and a half weeks later, he got all lonely and tried to bombard the comments of this entry with more of his shit-sputtering failure rage! I just checked my spam filter, where his last message says, “awwwâ€¦you erased my comment. Bet you wish is (sic) was just as easy to remove all your fatz from your ass.” Oh, but “Alex,” blocking your tiny and inadequate insult cock is way, way more fun than removing the fatz from my ass! Check out how I totally just gained 50 pounds because I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE! I drink it up!

08:17 AM, from txt

January 31, 2008 by Wendy

This morning on the drive to work we were stopped at the light at Kedzie and Peterson. Just as the light was turning green there was this kid, like this high school kid, in front of the carâ€”he was still crossing, moving slowly through the crosswalk. He wasn’t scared of being hit. He had his hood up, and he looked morosely pleased with himself as he shuffled by and made the cars wait.

I told Chris, “That kid is so like, ‘Dude, I just cheated death.'”

“You know that’s going to be his Twitter today,” Chris said.

Various pleas to the universe

January 9, 2008 by Wendy

First: Bring back the dark chocolate Bounty Bars. I know that officially Bounty Bars haven’t been sold in the U.S. in years and years, but you can find the milk chocolate ones at any one of the four or five Greek and/or Mexican produce stores I shop at, and for a few exquisite months this summer and fall, they all carried the dark chocolate ones, too. The dark Bountys are sort of like Mounds, but Bounty : Mounds :: Belvedere : Absolut. Or Barbra : Celine. Or, if this were 1984, Guess Jeans : Palmettos. (And guess which kind I owned.) But anyway, dark chocolate Bountys are awesome, and have no almond traces to poison my boyfriend the way Mounds bars do. And so we’d snag one every couple of weeks until I guess the stock was depleted, and they gradually disappeared from one Bouzouki-muzak-blaring produce-mart checkout aisle after another. Now there’s only the dubious Balkan candy, and those sawdusty honey-and-sesame-seed thingies, and, of course, the totally unremarkable milk chocolate Bountys (in the blue wrappers) to remind us of what we’re missing. O red-wrappered Bounty goodness, when will you return? And if anyone has seen them lately at other Eurotrashy grocery locations around Chicago, please let us know.

Also, we wish the universe could bring back the little bitty grocery store around the corner from our place. We don’t know how long it was open; we thought it had opened shortly after we moved to the neighborhood because we went by and saw a “Grand Opening” banner inside, and we thought, hey, let’s give this guy our business, because he just opened and it’s the nice thing to do. And then after a year we realized that the banner was still up, and then we wondered if perhaps the owner kept it up all the time because he read in Ghetto Grocer Monthly that it was good for business if people thought you’d just opened; but by then it didn’t matter to us, because we liked that it was close, and that it was a half-decent produce store where you could get eggplants and ginger and lemongrass and coconut milk. And the guy was nice, too. And then on New Year’s eve afternoon we went over there to get limes and it was closed, with all the signs down and the windows ominously covered, and it appears to be very profoundly gone, and we are sad, and we hope Mr. Owner guy is okay.

Final plea: That How To Look Good Naked keeps on being an impressive show. I’d heard good things about it, but sometimes I can be really steadfastly cold and tiny-hearted when it comes to unabashedly cheerleaderish love-your-body sentiment, and I figured the show would be just a lot of chirpy encouragement to Love Our Curves with help from Carson Kressley, the Magical Gay. And while I guess it was a lot like that, I wasn’t at all prepared for how sniffly and verklempt I got during the first ten minutes, possibly because Carson and the girl on the show were both so very open about the distinctly fatty nature of her initial unhappiness and not just making vague mumblings about being “too curvy” or “plus-sized.” But while I was won over, I still nurse an icy little shard of skepticism in wondering how long it can keep going, how many bits of Jedi self-estreem wizardry can Carson really haveâ€”he won’t always get to work the miracle of the better-fitting bra, will he? Or the “really great skin” thing? But maybe an even better question is: so what if it is just the same little tricks over and over? So what if they only interviewed the nice strangers on the street, the ones who looked at her picture and said she was pretty? So what, maybe my stingy bitter soul will be saved after all? We shall see!