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March 7, 2012
The parallel primary

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Interesting “apology”.

A couple months ago, the Advocate chain of altweeklies in New Haven, Hartford and Fairfield County (unfortunately owned by the extremely troubled Tribune company) dropped TMW from their three papers. A lot of you wrote in, and they had a change of heart — which apparently lasted until a few weeks ago, when TMW was once again dropped from the chain. If you’re a local who reads one of those papers, your feedback is again needed and encouraged. (I should have updated my contract with them at that point, but it just didn’t occur to me that they’d backtrack on their word within three months. Who does that?)

Click to achieve fulfillment

February 29, 2012
A controversy erupts

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This is the thing about Rush Limbaugh — he literally cannot be shamed. The alleged sex tourist, the confirmed former junkie, a man who’s been through three divorces and rehab — you’d think he would have developed some basic compassion for other people after all the lessons life has thrown at him. But when your multimillion dollar paycheck requires you to be an unrepentant asshole, then an asshole you apparently remain.

LIMBAUGH: What does it say about the college coed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex? What does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.

She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.

(Apparently Rush Limbaugh is under the impression that the amount of birth control a woman needs to take is proportionate to the amount of sex she has.)

The next day Limbaugh doubled down:

LIMBAUGH: So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex. We want something for it. We want you post the videos online so we can all watch.

I suppose it would be too much to hope that the wives of men like this are familiar with Lysistrata.

…adding: Limbaugh and his fellow travellers are always one step ahead of liberals who naively persist in believing that at some point, rationality has to win the day. Are we really debating birth control, in 2012? Really?

Yes, yes we are. And there will be even stupider debates, about — god, I don’t even know, breathing air or drinking water — as long as we continue to believe that these are actual “debates” about actual “differences of opinion” rather than just the verbal equivalent of monkey shit flying through the air.

… fast moving story today, as it turns out. Limbaugh has lost a number of longtime advertisers; you can a petition urging others to do the right thing, here.

This one sure went viral. Clearly, I need to write more cartoons about orgasms.

Amazing story in Mother Jones about the human toll of the warehouse fulfillment industry. Those packages that show up on your doorstep a day or two after you one-click-order them? Turns out they’re not being processed by happy magical elves.

One suggestion for minimizing work-related pain and strain is to get a stepladder to retrieve any items on shelves above your head rather than getting up on your toes and overreaching. But grabbing one of the stepladders stashed few and far between among the rows of merchandise takes time. Another is to alternate the hand you use to hold and wield your cumbersome scanner. “You’ll feel carpal tunnel start to set in,” one of the supervisors told me, “so you’ll want to change hands.” But that, too, he admitted, costs time, since you have to hit the bar code at just the right angle for it to scan, and your dominant hand is way more likely to nail it the first time. Time is not a thing I have to spare. I’m still only at 57 percent of my goal. It’s been 10 years since I was a mover and packer for a moving company, and only slightly less since I worked ridiculously long hours as a waitress and housecleaner. My back and knees were younger then, but I’m only 31 and feel pretty confident that if I were doing those jobs again I’d still wake up with soreness like a person who’d worked out too much, not the soreness of a person whose body was staging a revolt. I can break into goal-meeting suicide pace for short bouts, sure, but I can’t keep it up for 10.5 hours.

Online shopping is clearly not going away, but this is an issue that needs a lot more attention. I’d much rather pay a little more, and/or wait an extra week or two for my crap, than have people working in conditions like this.

Over at DK comics: a new controversy erupts! (Hint: female orgasms are involved.)

Click to engorge

February 22, 2012
Sex Talk!

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Click to embiggen

February 15, 2012
More bad news for (parallel) Romney

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