3 weird sisters

It’s long, but stick with it. It gets worse and worse, I promise.

Thanks, Perry. At least the tune doesn’t stick with me like that Worst Music Video EVER.

Even his name is vaguely Dickensian

So the results are in from the primary voting for America’s Most Racist Party™ in America’s Most Racist State™, and not surprisingly, the candidate making the most openly racist appeals won.

I got into quite the online discussion last night with someone insisting that we should fear Gingrich more than Romney.  I disagree; while Romney really isn’t liked by most everyone, he’s not loathed the way Gingrich is in most places.  I noted that I wouldn’t be surprised if turnout was up yesterday in South Carolina, given what was offered on the menu – appeals to states’ rights (Paul), appeals to stick-up-the-ass faux religiosity (Santorum), and not-even-veiled appeals to racial bigotry (Gingrich).  You’d expect such a smorgasbord to really draw them out of the woodwork in the most reactionary state in the country, and it turns out this is exactly what happened – turnout was around 602,000, compared with 445,000 in 2008.  But let’s look where those “extra” votes went – Romney improved his 2008 showing by about 100,000 votes, which still put him far back into second place.  Gingrich bested him by about 70,000.  Both scored more votes than winner John McCain did in 2008. 

So what does it all mean?  Well, I don’t think it’s all that complicated, really.  I think what it means is that in the most reactionary state in the country, a lot of voters are motivated not by who they think is most likely to win a head-to-head matchup with the president, but by who they think is most likely to call him “ni**er” to his face, and Newt won that contest walking away.  I’m sure the magic underwear didn’t help Romney any with the snake-handling crowd, either.

Should we be worried about this?  Not particularly, I think.  Turnouts in both Iowa and New Hampshire were about even with the apathetic turnout in 2008, probably because the concentration of crazy in those states simply isn’t nearly as high as in South Carolina.  Sure, Newt may race-bait his way to further victories in primaries in the states of the old Confederacy, but that shit doesn’t play elsewhere.  Add to it the man’s history of shooting himself in the foot at the worst possible moment, and this is definitely the guy we’d prefer to go up against in the general election.  Because while Romney isn’t really liked, he’s not overtly offensive to many in the mushy middle.  Gingrich, on the other hand, seems to think it’s his life mission to be as offensive as possible to as many as possible.  And can you imagine evangelicals turning out in droves to support this guy in the general election?  I mean, we know from experience that they will be instructed from the pulpit to “fall in line” once the nominee is chosen, no matter how unpalatable to the brethren that choice may be.  But I can imagine quite a few of those folks just deciding to quietly sit at home on election day rather than going to the effort to show up and pull the lever for a serial adulterer whose fidelity to any particular church has been no better than his fidelity to his multiple spouses. 

So, while it’s true that the crazy isn’t confined to the south, what’s needed to harness it varies a great deal around the country.  God-botherers in the Midwest aren’t going to be motivated by code phrases like “food stamp president” in the way southern wingnuts will be, and Newt doesn’t have the religious fundamentalist chops to appeal to those folks the way he appeals to the bufords in South Carolina.

Go Newt!  Whether you win the nomination or not, your continuing presence in the race can only help in delivering victory to Obama in November.

If we can get an advance copy of this into Glenn Reynolds’ hands, he may just put it on an endless loop and NEVER BLOG AGAIN:

Actually, this is a documentary short about a guy who’s making a stop-action robot porno.  The full-length feature film won’t be available for some years to come, if ever.  But as one reviewer noted, “A robot horse getting buttf*cked?  That’s relevant to ALL MY INTERESTS!” 

There’s plenty of teh funneh in just the little clip above, too – particularly when he pauses for a moment after picking up one of his creations, then just bluntly states its purpose.

Most of you have probably already seen the terrifying photo of Newt with his current trophy wife, Callista, that has been showing up all over the internets.  Tbogg in particular has a thing for this picture, and there have been a lot of theories advanced as to what it most resembles.  I had noted the other day that I was reminded of a bird of prey, then went further and said that if you clapped a felt hat on her head and put her in a pair of lederhosen, you’d have the new poster child for re-launching the “give a hoot, don’t pollute” campaign. 

But last night it hit me; this is what that picture of Callista really brings to mind:

Full credit goes to the mad photoshop skillz of Mr. Jeffraham Prestonian; I had the idea and found the images and even got them sized correctly, but lacked the ability/tools to do freeform cut and pasting.  Kudos to JP for stepping up and doing this thing which really had to be done.

…without a little Gunther.

The depiction of the pint-sized psychopath in Team America may have been the only redeeming thing about him.  “Fuck you, Hans Brix!”

Wherever Kim Jong Il is now, I’m sure he’s looking up at us.

The whole “War on Christmas” thing has always amused me for a lot of reasons, the primary one being that Christmas is so ubiquitous in this culture that you probably couldn’t kill it even if you rammed a pine tree with an angel on top through its undead heart, and anyone with even two brain cells to rub together must be able to see that with their own two eyes.  Hell, it’s so obvious that even a blind person could see it.

I think that’s what most of these posts this month have demonstrated.  We co-op Christmas and its symbols and lore for literally everything, creating mash-ups with the popular culture of the moment and in some cases, creating new lore and traditions that become part of the whole ball of wax going forward.

A good example of how the holiday gets co-opted for everything might be 1988′s A Very Brady Christmas.  I watched this probably a few years after it first aired, though strictly for my own sardonic purposes.  When I told friends about it at the time, the response was, “why didn’t you call – we could have talked you through it.”  In my defense, at the time I got only 4 channels with the rabbit ears on my 13″ TV, so it’s not like I had a lot to choose from, and I’ll further note that when it premiered in 1988, it was the highest rated movie shown on TV that entire year.  Which just goes to show that the rot from within has been going on for a very long time now.

I said I had my sardonic reasons, and to be honest, primary among them was I was checking Robert Reed for visible signs of illness, or as a friend put it, “looking for lesions.”  Hey, I’ve never pretended to be a good person, but I am a better one now than I was when I was younger.  I’ll further admit that around this same time I had this idea stuck in my head of wanting to see Robert Reed doing a commercial and saying “I’m not a heterosexual, but I play one on TV…” like all those “I’m not a doctor…” commercials of the time.  The humor there for me was not “hee hee, Robert Reed is gay” but rather playing off the stupidity of the whole “I’m not a doctor but I play one on TV” thing.  It’s like saying, “I’m not an actual authority on this but I pretend to be on TV, so take my word for it.”  Which could explain much of our current pundit class, when you think about it.  Like I said, the rot has been going on for quite some time.

So my reasons for watching could be summed up under the heading of sick fascination, which pretty well covers the ground.  It wasn’t just Robert Reed – I wanted to see what lame-ass adult lives they had concocted for the kids.  I don’t remember it all, but I do remember these bits:  Greg has grown up to be a porn-stached Ob-Gyn, who’s banging a nurse in his office (of course, this is depicted as a very chaste relationship onscreen - it was a made-for-TV movie – but we know what was really going on.)  Peter or Bobby is now a race-car driver.  And so on and so forth.  The “dramatic tension” occurs when there is a structural failure at the jobsite for a skyscraper Mike Brady has designed (not at all surprising when you consider the only thing he had ever designed up to that point were insipid tract homes like the one they all lived in) and they all think Mike has been trapped or killed in the collapse.  In a true made-for-TV Christmas miracle, Mike escapes unscathed, and there is much rejoicing:

Like I said, this is just an example.  Other examples of holiday puerility as egregious or even moreso abound.

So it’s little wonder that the malcontents, the smartasses, and the curmudgeons feel the need to retaliate and take the holiday back from the Bradys and the Smurfs and Lifetime and everyone else with degrading depictions of Santa, observances of Festivus and Cthulhumas, and other not-socially-sanctioned traditions which lie outside the mainstream and probably always will.

That doesn’t stop them from developing their own holiday lore and traditions.  Cthulhumas has reached its tentacles out in several directions, encompassing not only the Christian but the more secular and commercial aspects of Christmas as well.  Below we see a depiction of the birth of the Hello Cthulhu Christ Child:

 …and here is the more secular, commercialized version of Hello Cthulhu:

That depiction of Cthulhu Claus is downright warm ‘n cuddly compared to this next one:

He sees you when you're sleeping

…and of course, what would the holiday be without caroling?

That’s just one of many.  Other classics include:  Do You Fear What I Fear?, Great Old Ones Are Coming To Town, Have Yourselves A Scary Little Solstice, Away In A Madhouse, I Saw Mommy Kissing Yog-Sothoth, and several more. 

With this creative conflation of popular culture with both the religious and secular aspects of the holiday, how long could it be before the Shithouse Troll as Santa tradition takes root?

(h/t to B^4 for tipping me off to the Cthulhu carols.)

Sorry, but I’m going video on you. Desperately trying to get Klog’s attention.

I don’t know why, but toe-sucking has touched my life peripherally in a 20-year cycle, starting when I was around 10.

Beth will remember the first incidence.  At the time, the whole idea of “toe sucking” had never even occured to me; I was introduced to the concept by my sister, who is 4 years younger than we are.  Here’s what happened:  one night, back in the days when we still lived across the street from one another, Beth was spending the night at my house.  We were in bed, and my mom was in the bathroom doing her nightly ablutions, while my sister, who was notorious for refusing to go to bed at a reasonable hour, was hectoring her from her room.  It went something like this:  “Momma….momma…momma…momma…”  “Kate, go to sleep!”  “Momma…momma…momma…momma…” (sounds of teeth brushing) “momma…momma…momma…momma…momma…….YOU SUCK!!!!” (sounds of bare feet slapping wood floors as mom strode quickly from bathroom to Kate’s room…sounds of hand slapping flesh…shrieking…) “YOU SUCK YOUR TOES!!!  I MEANT YOU SUCK YOUR TOES!!!”  (sounds of me & Beth trying to control laughter so it won’t be heard).

Anyway, that was my introduction to the whole concept of “toe-sucking.”  It wasn’t until some 15 or 20 years later that I learned that it could also be a sexual fetish, and again, I didn’t ask to know this; it was foist upon me.  By this time, I was living in Little Rock and the town was abuzz with tales of the Conway Toe-Sucker, an unfortunate young man with an uncontrollable passion for feet.  He struck at Baptist Hospital at the time a friend of mine was in for surgery; she and her roommate almost burst their stitches laughing at their jokes about how he was going to jump out and get them while they did their doctor-ordered hallway walks.  Some months later, I met the actual Baptist Hospital toe-suck victim quite by accident, when she joined a group of my friends for dinner at a restaurant.  By this time, the Toe Sucker had been convicted and this woman had testified at his trial.

I, of course, was full of questions.  I asked her how it had come about that this guy was actually able to, you know, get her toes in his mouth.  At this, her husband said in a shocked tone, “he had your TOES in his MOUTH?” in the same tone of voice you expect to hear someone say ”you SLEPT with him?”  Meanwhile, I’m thinking, dude, you’re MARRIED to her, shouldn’t you KNOW about this already? 

Anyway, she said that what had happened was that she was in her office when a nice-looking guy had come in and started talking to her; he sat down and then started complimenting her shoes, saying that he used to be a shoe salesman (this was in Al Bundy’s heyday, so…I’m not sure why she didn’t find this ridiculous), and asking if he could take a closer look at them.  He put one of her feet in his lap, took off the shoe and…started sucking her toes.  When she reacted with alarm, he jumped up and ran out of the office.

After hearing her story, I said, “ok, I understand that it’s kind of icky to have some stranger’s mouth on your foot but…that seems relatively harmless, so why the deal with the trial and sentencing?”  She said that he had approached a woman at the Little Rock airport and told her he wanted to cut her feet off and take them home with him.  So the court thing had, it turned out, been completely necessary.  She went on then about how she just couldn’t understand why this guy was doing this; she said he was good-looking and had a beautiful wife and a couple of kids so it just didn’t make sense that he was running around trying to suck all these women’s toes.  I waited a beat, then said, “maybe he just needed to get some STRANGE TOE.”  Which, of course, brought down the table.

A couple of years later, I learned that another friend of a friend had been approached by the Toe Sucker; in this case, he struck when she was at a convenience store getting back into her car.  He came up and started complimenting her shoes and was crouched by the side of her open car door as she was sitting in the car, and had just gotten around to fondling her feet when she said, “what in the hell are you doing?”  This scared him off.  Valerie had a much better sense of humor about the whole thing; according to her, it was her own fault for “enticing” him, since as she noted she was wearing open-toed shoes and had just polished her toenails.

That was the last I ever heard of the Toe Sucker until…today.  The story has even made the Reuters network - I cannot tell you how PROUD I am, once again, to live here.  This is almost as good as the time the WWF announced they would not return to Little Rock because of the fans’ lack of manners and respect.  HOW REDNECK does your town have to be for the WWF to refuse to come there?  Anyway, I’m pretty sure the current toe-sucking suspect has to be the same guy because…what are the odds?

The other reason I love all things Conway Toe-Sucker related is that it always reminds me of the Baltimore Foot-Stomper from Polyester:

Truth is indeed sometimes stranger than fiction.