And another thing

I've gotten quite a few emails & a couple of comments about the post below ("My privileged white ass"), and I've talked to a few people about it in person. I'd like to add a couple of things:

It occured to me later that one of the biggest reasons the whole scene irked me so much was that I've been actually hassled and/or felt threatened in public places before and only one time in recent memory has a bartender or proprieter ever thrown the offending asshole out (thanks, Andy!). In this case, however, I was having a pleasant conversation with a decent human being, and he got singled out for -- well, for what, exactly? He was not substantially more scruffy or grungy than the sweet young boy playing guitar. He wasn't acting nutty or hostile or violent. He wasn't scrounging for spare change.

He was black. He was apparently broke.

I feel like I have to say right out that here I am not an idiot when it comes to my own safety, and I will not hesitate to be rude to people who squick me out for any reason whatsoever. Any person with good intentions and half a brain will not be insulted if I err on the side of being, or even seeming, rude (and if they do, fuck 'em, they need to get a clue somewhere).

For all I know this guy had a reputation in that particular neighborhood for being annoying or trying to scam money, or whatever, but the fact is I've spent plenty of time shooting the breeze with homeless crazy folks on the street or on the bus or in the buildings where I work -- here and in other cities where I've lived. I've spent time helping out at homeless shelters and answering crisis hotlines and stocking food shelves and serving food in soup kitchens. I always make a point of speaking to, or at least acknowledging, the "regular" homeless crowd in any neighborhood I'm in because 1) they are fellow human beings and we're neighbors in a sense; 2) they are often pleasant company and frequently highly entertaining; and 3) they are present at all hours and have saved my ass many many times simply because they know who I am and don't want to stand by and watch some asshole steal my purse. Or worse.

Plus, I very often have a dog with me when I'm out and about, and she's a pretty good judge of character.

I frequently go to certain bars by myself and I am rarely hassled and almost never fear for my safety. Sure, there are some really "nice" places that you couldn't pay me to go to on my own because they are chock full of assholes, but I don't go to those places by myself. The place I was talking about was not someplace I go regularly, and it is certainly not a place I will go to again. Even though it is right across the street from places I've gone to alone and will certainly continue to patronize.

And for those of you who think I was being brave and noble (as opposed to stupid and naive), please understand that what I'm trying to say is that there is quite a lot of ground between the brave/noble -- I am certainly not that -- and the stupid/naive (see above). You too can learn the difference.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll have more to say about this, but in the meantime, thanks for your comments and emails, etc.

Searching for meaning. And ass.

I was looking at my site stats earlier today. That's certainly amusing and instructive. Most folks seem to arrive here at alphabitch.org on purpose via their own bookmarks or links from other sites/comments, but a few show up here via links from search engines. For the last 100 visits (as of this morning), the top five search strings were "DIY haircuts," "Dynastes tityus," "ants on countertops," "ass," and "Tab Energy." In order of popularity, in case you care.

Ass? Who the hell opens a search window and types only the word "ass?" I guess I did use the word in the title of a recent post, so of course that's what popped up. I don't really know what they were looking for of course, but I suspect that it's something they won't find here.

Among the Tab Energy-related searches, my favorite was "tab drink (pink)." I hope they didn't take it too personally when I described it as "way too fucking pink." Although they would have seen on their search result that the headline of my post was Tab Energy Drink is an abomination, so caveat lector, as they say.

Of the Dynastes tityus searchers, most appeared to be trying to find out where to buy one to keep as a pet. Beetles as pets? It's true that they're fascinating critters, and I guess they would be pretty low-maintenance compared to certain other pets I could name my blog after. But when I do trap Coleoptera under glass to observe them (and I do that from time to time), they seem alarmed and, frankly, a little hostile -- and who could blame them? I don't think I'd want to keep one for a pet. Not because I think they're icky & weird, but it just seems mean. I wouldn't want to be responsible for incarcerating a creature that is constantly alarmed & hostile. They're sure pretty, though. Maybe you can get some kind of happy beetle habitat, or -- hell, I don't know, maybe you can train them. For all I know they make loving and attentive pets. I guess I need to follow some of the other links in those searches.

The DIY haircut folks included one searching for "cute haircuts of 2006" [gosh, you really think so?], and one looking for information on "compulsive behaviour" + haircutting. I hope they followed my links to Liz and Mrs. Kennedy. That has been one of my more popular posts for a while now.

"Ants on countertops" searches also included one search for "'tactile hallucinations' + bugs." The less said about ants the better, as far as I'm concerned. But I will say that I learned this morning that there's a reason they call sweet corn sweet: on account of it contains enough sugar that the one kernel left in the bottom of my sink when I rinsed out my plate last night was sufficient to attract ooty pazillion ants.

Oh, the horror that was my morning. No way could I make coffee or eat breakfast. I did put on a pair of gloves and wipe away that kernel of corn and every other speck of remotely food-like debris from the drain. And discovered that I am out of bleach, dammit.

There were also quite a few amusing search strings that each led one person here. Some of them led to a specific post, but the weirder ones just led to an archive page that happened to contain all of the words in the strings that weren't enclosed in quotes. My favorites, and the posts (or archive pages) they found:

• kitten carpal problems [I was the #1 result in that search. Go figure.];
• fishbone bicycle stop;
• what does a dream of being hit by another car mean?;
• white german shepherd puppy skin blotchy; and
• what is the difference between an octopus and a squid?

The 'Squid? or Octopus?' post is one of my favorite stories, and it seems like the one that is most frequently linked to in other peoples' sites.

Oh, and a couple of people have found this site lately from search strings with the word 'bisexual' in it. Unfortunately they end up at this post, which is kind of boring. This one, from quite a while ago, is a little more entertaining.

[Update: I just added the picture of my beloved alphabitch to the above post. I sort of miss her today.]

My privileged white ass

I am a lucky woman, I understand that. I'm an over-educated prep school dropout and I have a pretty good job. There is really no material thing that I want very badly that I absolutely could not ever hope to get. Sure, my desires are pretty tame and my actual needs are modest, but truly I am overwhelmed sometimes by the volume of stuff that is mine. And I can go pretty much wherever I want to go and buy whatever damn kind of beer I want. I'd have to make some changes if, say, I wanted to travel a lot, but if it were terribly important I could find a way to make it happen.

Yeah I'd go broke pretty quickly if it was cocaine I wanted or a huge quantity of consumer goods. I'm lucky not to want that shit.

But I was caught up short the other night when I went downtown and the show I wanted to see was sold out. I watched it through the window for a while but I got kind of tired of crouching down and kneeling in gravel, so I went across the street to have a beer & wait for folks to leave at intermission. I didn't go to the tiny martini bar I usually go to; there was a new place open that I hadn't been to before, so I wandered in. The bartender was pretty busy, so I didn't really talk to him at all, I just ordered a diet Corona (not my favorite, but I've been on sort of a diet beer kick lately - plus it tastes pretty good in the hot weather) and he served me immediately as I settled in to watch the jazzy little combo on stage. They were pretty good. Sort of a bongo drum/saxophone/acoustic guitar trio with interesting lyrics and a sweet young thing playing guitar & singing.

As I sat there, this homeless guy wandered in and stood near me to listen to the band. During a pause he turned to me and said "Wow, I can't believe it's only three guys -- I heard them from outside & thought it was a bigger combo." I said yeah they're pretty good, etc., and we talked a little about what other bands were playing around town and about the show across the street that I was missing, and about some other music. I figured he was some kind of musician, or at least a fellow music geek, so I offered him a chair.

Oops.

The bartender came over and asked the guy if he was a member. The liquor license laws hereabouts are kind of strange to me. Places that serve liquor and no food are generally members-only establishments. "Memberships" are generally a matter of signing a mailing list type thingy and paying a dollar or so.

And not being a homeless black guy, even if you've got a dollar.

Anyway, this guy just got up to leave. The bartender said, "Sorry man, the owner just got here & he's gonna get all freaked out if there are non-members in here on a busy night."

The guy just calmly walked out, no hassle. I got the impression he was used to this, and he could, after all, hear just fine from outside the door.

Somehow it just irked me. Maybe because I was sitting there alone and had actually spoken with the guy, but still. The bartender never asked me if I was a member. And the fact is, I'd never been there before and I'm not a member either.

So I left my beer on the bar and walked out.

Now, I'm not totally clueless. I know that this sort of thing happens all the damn time, and in fact it's not the first time I've seen it happen, although most places I go to they'd only do it if the non-member patron were hassling others or acting nutty. And I'm sort of sympathetic to business owners who don't want to have space taken up on busy nights by non-paying customers who maybe look kind of grungy and freak out the nice white folks. And I know that there is a homeless shelter right around the corner from this place and sometimes people come right in and ask customers for money & generally make pests of themselves by being drunk & disorderly and/or crazy.

I'm all for throwing people out when they're drunk & disorderly, whether they're homeless or club members or whatever.

The guy was standing just outside the door, still listening to the music. He said, "You didn't finish that whole beer already did you?" I said no but that I wasn't a member either. He said, "No way, he did not throw you out." I laughed and said that he hadn't but I didn't like his attitude. "Just doing his job," the guy said. "My name's Richard, by the way" he said, and I shook his hand & we chatted a bit. He was from Buffalo, and we talked about being in the South & I told him my name was Nora and I was from Minneapolis, and we talked about the Stanley Cup games & more about music, and finally I said "I want to go across the street. I'm a member there, and I can't get into the show for another half an hour or so. Will you join me for a beer? I'm buying."

He accepted my invitation, so we walked in. I don't usually go there on Saturday nights so I didn't know the bartender. When they started to ask Richard about his membership, I said he was with me and I was a member. The guy actually started to look me up, but half the people at the bar were friends of mine and greeted me, and he gave up.

I've so totally never seen them do that. Not to me. I am so fucking clueless.

I got us beers & we went out on the patio and immediately met some folks from Ithaca and Syracuse and we had a great time talking about weather and politics and hockey and the relative merits of NASCAR vs IndyCar racing. Or whatever the hell it's called.

I do know enough about hockey to talk about it, and we did just win the Stanley fucking Cup & all, but car racing is a little beyond me.

We did not discuss membership policies or homelessness.

But then I could see it was intermission across the street & I was finished with my beer. Richard and I left, and he thanked me. He wasn't hitting on me, and he certainly wasn't trying to scam me with some dumbass story, or asking for spare change or acting nutty or anything that scary homeless guys are known for. He wasn't my dream date, to be sure, but he was a nice enough human being and I enjoyed talking with him for half an hour.

But goddamn, what a way to live. And what a thing to have to live with.

The show I went to see, by the way, was highly excellent, even if I only got to see the last half.

[update: more on this topic here.]

Has it been a year already?

I really did mean to post more frequently about my experiment in carlessness. It's been more than a year!

See, I thought the whole thing would be way more complicated and exciting than it is. Or that at least I'd have lots of hilariously funny stories to tell about it. I still do run into a certain amount of incredulousness: "You don't have a car? How is that possible? You can't do that here." But honestly? It's neither very difficult nor very interesting. And since gas prices started getting so high, people don't even think I'm all that eccentric any more.

It's true that my friends have been generous about letting me use their cars when I need to drive somewhere for something, or giving me rides to work, or letting me tag along with them to the grocery store or whatever. It would be way more difficult without that. Thanks, yall. And it's true that I don't have kids.

But even though this town has a seriously limited public transit system and is NOT EVEN REMOTELY pedestrian- or bicycle-friendly, I've been able to walk or bike or take the bus to most of the places that I need to go. Sometimes I feel kind of conspicuous or goofy while I'm walking along (especially in work clothes or carrying a bag of groceries) some weedy strip of gravel where there's no sidewalk & cars are whizzing by & the only other people I encounter are the crazy people who are shouting bizarre prophesies or vague threats at passing motorists.

Sometimes when I'm waiting for the bus, one or another of my neighbors will recognize me and wave, but the next time I see them, they'll apologize profusely for not stopping and giving me a ride. It makes them uncomfortable, I guess, to see me standing outside waiting for the bus while they cruise by in air-conditioned comfort listening to morning moron radio. I think I win, though, because I have my iPod on, and a book to read, and I'm not generally in a big hurry to get anywhere.

And then there's this one block on my way home that has a certain amount of unauthorized commercial activity and a couple of times I've been offered money to perform what I think must be sex acts, but there is some sort of code that I don't really understand and, well, I think it's best not to listen very closely or respond at all to these offers. I don't take that route home after dark.

I don't mind taking cabs from time to time, but the fare has almost doubled in the last year (since Katrina, mostly).

I do have to plan my days pretty carefully sometimes, and there have been a few things that I've chosen not to do simply to avoid having to figure out how to get there and back -- but really, that's all to the good. It's a lot less stressful to do less stuff. And I save money not only because I'm not paying for a car & gas & all of that, I also can't just hop in the car and go to the bookstore or Plaster Leopard World any old time like I used to.

The biggest hassle has been getting home from my evening classes at the (fancy, private) University campus way on the other side of town. I can get there from the research building where I work on a shuttle bus, but I can't get back to my office after class. Cab fare back to my end of town is pretty steep, and the city buses don't run that late at night, and I don't really like to ride my bike after dark.

The campus itself has well lit sidewalks & nice enough bike paths and there are bike racks everywhere, but it's pretty cut off from the rest of the city.

I got into a very silly hassle with a series of people in the registrar's office or whatever when they tried to issue me a parking sticker -- and make me pay a parking fee! -- but I was patient and I prevailed: "Where do you want me to put the sticker?" I'd ask. "On the rear bumper of your car," they'd answer. "But I don't have a car," I'd say. "Oh," they'd say, "Then why do you need a parking sticker?" And we'd start over with how I didn't want a sticker in the first place.

Most often, though, there is someone I know in every class who is going home in my general direction, and they've been perfectly happy to drop me off on their way. That's had the additional benefit of giving us time to talk about the classes and the readings, which we all complain there's not enough of when you're taking classes that only meet once a week for three hours.

Anyway, I'm trying to set a good example, and spread the word about how easy it is not to have a car, but I don't think it'll really catch on in this town. A lot of people don't really make decisions about employment or housing based on commuting issues, and very often they can't. I know more than a few couples who live in a city halfway between their respective employers and both of them have an hour-long commute each way. That would make me just nuts.

This city is extremely sprawled out, and getting sprawlier by the hour. Large employers don't tend to be located in or near the more desirable residential areas (with a few exceptions). Or if they are, there's often no way to walk across the zillion-lane freeway overpasses safely in order to get from one to the other.

The one factor I'm most glad I don't have to consider is children and their monstrous activity schedules. There would be absolutely no way most parents who can afford to have a car would consider doing without in the face of all that schlepping around.

That would blow my head gasket.

The Transportation Chronicles

• On the bus
• Biking on Wednesdays
• It's not the heat
• Week Three
• My Colt Vista got totaled
• Week Two
• Week One
• The moon is in FUBAR
• Girly girls & car repairs
• Black duct tape made my day

Enough of cute?

"It's like he's coming out of the fog to rescue me from some bender that has gone so badly that I think it's going well. He'll nurse me back to sobriety and sanity. This time's for real."

Occasional commenter fstorch, rescuer of turtles and baby owls and suchlike, sent me this link, and, well, it's a blog full of pictures of fossas and rusty spotted genets and tapirs and the degu pictured here. No cute puppies or kitties, just lots of pygmy lorises and javelinas and lemurs. And so much more. Plus some seriously weird comments. As the proprieter over there says, it's "puppy dog eyes without all the puppy dog." The blog is called JustALittleGuy. The proprieter of the blog goes by the name Awwwww.

Gene testing & the mark of Cain

This post is really beautifully written. It's from one of the new folks in the ScienceBlogs lineup, Dr. Charles of The Examining Room of Dr. Charles.

Highly excellent illustration of an increasingly important issue. Go read it already.

Another silly quiz I found

My Bloginality is INTP! Apparently a lot of bloggers share this Myers-Briggs type. Who knew? The test that they have on this site only contains four questions, but INTP is the same result I always get whenever I've taken the full-length Myers-Briggs test. It's a fairly rare personality type, apparently, so I was kind of surprised to see that so many bloggers share this type. But according to this online source, anyway, it's easy to see why people like us might wish to blog:

"[INTPs] tend to see distinctions and inconsistencies instantaneously, and can detect contradictions no matter when or where they were made. It is difficult for an [INTP] to listen to nonsense, even in a casual conversation, without pointing out the speaker's error. And in any serious discussion or debate [INTPs] are devastating, their skill in framing arguments giving them an enormous advantage."

Well then. If the shoe fits, as they say. You know who you are. I don't enjoy debating all that much, but it is difficult for me to listen to nonsense. I mean, who likes to listen to nonsense? I guess maybe this is the problem: people do listen to it all the damn time. And more to the point, they believe in it.

I'm not sure where I found the bloginality link; this has been sitting on my desktop for a while. NTodd, maybe?

With suspicion and ID cards for all*

Found this handy public service announcement over at Pharyngula, home of the nearly famous Minnesota biology professor Dr. PZ Myers, who urges readers to verbalize polysyllabically.

For their own safety and privacy of course.

As someone who has always had a paranoid streak, and who was raised by a woman with a healthy conspiracy theory for just about everything, I've long suspected that my telephone conversations are being monitored. Probably by mistake, as I don't have much faith in the competence of folks who do this kind of work. But when I get that icky 'what if they're listening' feeling (which most often occurs when I talk to my sister, oddly enough), I usually start talking about chick stuff -- the really gross kind, like menstrual cramps, or gynecological disorders. Because it really makes me chuckle to picture some poor dweeb of a surveillance operative in a trailer somewhere trying to transcribe the whole conversation.

I like this solution just as well, though. Just start making sense, and it will confuse them.

Anyway, speaking of my favorite scientists, the good people over at ScienceBlogs(tm) have spiffed up their homepage and added a whole bunch of new blogs. The page runs updated blog post headlines as well as science news headlines, and its content is indexed by topic and by blog title, with a few links to free stories in SEED Magazine, which hosts the whole ScienceBlog project. I love the site, but I have to warn those of you who are neurologically impaired or who get carsick watching wiggly graphics & intrusive and/or animated ads, you might encounter a few disturbing things. Sometimes I have to hold a 3x5 index card over parts of the monitor to continue reading. I wish web designers wouldn't do that. Still, it's pretty good.

*I'm quoting Tokyo Tom, one of the commenters at Apostropher, which is where PZ found this nifty graphic.

Ahem.

This just in. Well, OK, the BBC posted it on Sunday.

Using magnetic resonance images of live tissue rather than images obtained via dissection of cadavers, Australian urologist Dr. Helen O'Connell has confirmed that that the clitoris is indeed much larger than anatomists have previously thought.

"The sex industry has known about this for some time," said Fiona Patten from the Eros Association, Australia's adult retail and entertainment industry body.

Gotta love the BBC.

Tab Energy drink is an abomination

Despite what I can only describe as an odious marketing campaign [warning: lame-ass music plays when you open that site], I tried the new Tab Energy Drink the other day. I mean really: "Fuel to be Fabulous(tm): A deliciously pink, lo-cal energy drink -- because it's hard work being fabulous?" That's just so fucking stupid. It was embarrassing to even pick one up at the drugstore. But hey, I have a certain nostalgic affection for Tab, and so I bit the bait. I bought one and I drank it so you don't have to.

Eeeuw.

I am so sorry I did that. There's just no way to express how horrible it was.

It's sweet and it's yucky and it's way too fucking pink. It tastes like one of those multicolored Charms pops dissolved in some kind of awful diet soda. With a liquid multivitamin or something medicinal added. I didn't notice any particular energizing effects, but I'm pretty heavily caffeinated as a rule, so that's not surprising. I guess it's about as caffeinated as a couple of cups of coffee. Whoop-de-doo.

It's true, on the other hand, that I've never had any of the other so-called energy drinks before, so I don't know what they're supposed to taste like. Maybe this one is as good as or better than all the others, but I didn't think it was very good at all.

TaB, though -- the real TaB soda, I mean -- now that's some good stuff. It's got that great old-school diet soda aftertaste, and it's not overly sweet, plus it reminds me of my grandmother. And of the student lounge of my high school, which had a soda machine that dispensed those beautifully textured 16-oz bottles of the stuff (as well as Fresca and Coke and Pepsi and Dr. Pepper -- this was long before those exclusive brand contracts that soda manufacturers demanded of schools in exchange for funding).

There's one store here in town that still carries TaB with some regularity, and whenever it's on sale for really cheap I buy as many 12-packs as I can carry. I have to walk past a lot of research geeks on my way to my office, and sometimes they make jokes about bringing TaB for the lab rats. "They love that shit," they always tell me. Hahaha.

And when I give people directions to my house, I tell them to turn onto my street and it's the third one on the left -- the one with all the TaB cans on the porch (see photo).

But back to the Tab Energy drink: I noticed it a while ago in the drugstore, and then I noticed there was some online commentary about it (e.g., here and here and here and here). Truly I had no intention of ever trying it. But I did. What can I say?

I also have to confess that I had no idea that there was this whole bizarre subculture-type thing of TaB aficionadas with, I guess you would have to call them fan websites (e.g., here and here and here).

I'm kind of embarrassed by this, somehow, but I really do like fizzy caffeinated beverages. Maybe I'll have to go back to mixing concentrated coffee and mineral water. Although I guess you can still get Jolt Cola in some places. Now that was an excellent beverage. If only they'd ever responded to my repeated requests for a sugar-free version, I would probably still drink that. I can't drink sugary sodas though on account of I'm afraid that my teeth will dissolve. And of course there's that bizarre subculture of gamers and programmers and hackers who like it.

The wheel of life rolls on

They're back. I've been sort of worried about Fafnir & Giblets. They're OK, but it looks like they've been through the end of the world. Or something:

"The world hasn't ended!" says Giblets eatin our last piece a world. "It just happens to be going through a naturally-recurring cycle of world and not-world!"
"I dunno Giblets," says me. "The scientific consensus on the world seems to be that world-endification is caused by human activity like burnin fossil fuels an deforestation an that time we blew up the world."

You can read all about it at fafblog!

Bisexual? Indecisive? Moi???

I'm certainly not androgynous:

"You scored as Either. You brain is neither specifically male nor female dominated in the way you perceive things and as bad as this sounds it can easily mean that you are capable of combining both limiting gender aspects to your advantage. Rather than being genderless you are possibly able to think freely. This does not necessarily mean that you are bisexual or androgynous or indecisive, though it might."

Either		54%
Male		50%
Female		46%
Neither		21%

Should you be MALE or FEMALE?*
created with QuizFarm.com

PS: Thanks to antiprincess at paleofeminist for the link. I'm a little, um, nonplussed at the phrase ".. and as bad as this sounds..." in that description. I like not being tethered to silly gender regulations.

Demented

This website is just fucking demented. It's your internet source for plastic action figures demonstrating ashtanga yoga. No, really.

This post features the webmistriss, Elastigirl, and all six of the GI Joe Sigma 6 operative action figures demonstrating utthita parsvakonasana and parivritta parsvakonasana:

Duke: "Kamakura, what the holy bleeding fuck are you doing?"

Kamakura: "Sir! I am attempting to do the pose, sir!"

Duke: "We are not putting on a goddamn Broadway show here, Kamakura. This is not A Chorus Line."

Kamakura: "Sir! I find I am able to lunge quite deeply but my torso lacks the articulation needed to fold over my bent knee, Sir!"

Duke: "Kamakura, the point of these two poses is to create a line of energy running from your grounded back foot all the way up through your spine and shooting out your fingertips. Like a spear, a warrior's spear, son! That's why your pretty little nancy ass is here, because you're a warrior! Or am I mistaken? Are you or are you not a warrior!"

Kamakura: "Sir! I am a warrior, sir!"

Duke: "Then, Mother of God, start acting like one. Look at Storm Shadow there in front of you, he's got a nice modification going with his elbow resting on his knee and his left arm stretching up. Try that."

Kamakura: "Sir! Om shanti, sir!"

There's so much more. Truly, it's almost enough to make me sign up for a yoga class. Especially if Bendy Marge Simpson is the guest instructor. As Elastigirl notes, "Her yogic knowledge is so deep that her daily practice consists of mixing cake batter in a Tupperware bowl while doing advanced pranayama, which really gets her chakras a-whirlin'."