Work Your Brain — 10/31/06

Travel In America

• Homeland Absurdity – Jill @ Brilliant at Breakfast reports that the difference between life and death is a ziploc bag apparently…
  

  There you have it: Tiny containers of hand sanitizer in zip-lock bags are harmless and approved. Those not in zip-lock bags are dangerous contraband. Meanwhile, the TSA still cannot justify its methods of confiscation: If certain liquids and gels are taken from a passenger, the assumption has to be that those materials are potentially hazardous. If so, why are they tossed unceremoniously into the trash? At every checkpoint you’ll see a bin or barrel brimming with illegal containers. They are not quarantined or handed over to the bomb squad; they are thrown away. In effect, the agency readily admits that it knows these things are harmless. But it’s going to steal them anyway, and either you like it or you don’t fly.

What the Fuck Are They Thinking?

• UK retailer to little girls:”Let’s have a lap dance over here, luv!” — Twisty @ I Blame The Patriarchy has a commentary on Tesco’s plans to market a striptease toy to five-year-olds for Christmas this year. Kid you not. How sick is that. I thought thongs for four-year-olds was bad enough, but you’ll be able to buy a toy sexy chrome pole, a CD with sexy music, and ”Peekaboo Dance Dollars” to stuff in a toy “sexy dance garter” to “Unleash the sex kitten inside” (quoth the Tesco website).
  

  Naturally there is great ‘public outcry’ against the stripper toy, to the extent that Tesco was forced to repurpose the item as a sex-ay “health and fitness” aid. Think of the calories those burly little 5-year-olds will burn wrapping their pudgy young be-gartered knees around that health-giving chrome phallus!

  Once again — and I wish this would stop happening, because it always gives people the tiresome idea that I think sex ought to be abolished or something — I find myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with prudey conservative family groups: yep, this toy is offensive almost beyond description. However, it is at this juncture that our ideologies mercifully diverge. I do not, as one ‘family campaigner’ suggested, believe that the toy will “destroy children’s lives.” (The only toy with that sort of power is Etch-A-Sketch; a more frustrating, soul-sucking, ungratifying, time-wasting blot upon Western civilization has never been conceived). No, I’m afraid children’s lives were deep in the crapper long before the pencil-dick pervs at the Sexy Toddler Toy Company came up with their sexbot training kit. This asinine pole-dancing game is merely the logical extension of the ideology generated by our global thermonuclear megatheocraticorporatocracy — you know, the patriarchy — which has been destroying children’s lives, and everybody else’s lives, too, for centuries now. Which it does through God and war and the nuclear family and high heels and consumerism and illiteracy and, of course, the violent misogyny that makes all of the above possible.

  I will go a step further and postulate that if, in our violent patriarchal class structure, sex were anything other than an exercise in humiliation, degradation, and dissociation so taxing that only adult persons are thought to possess the emotional chops to keep from committing suicide over it, nobody would give a rat’s ass if little girls were crawling up every vertical object in the British Isles.

Some Fun

• WalMart + husband = DISASTER — Omni @ Every Topic In The Universe will have you rolling on the floor laughing at the antics of her husband, who apparently is some sort of black hole for receipts, and this tale of the cursed pants from WalMart.
  

  Because he’d eaten the receipt (well, what do YOU think he did with it?), my husband agreed that he should be the one to do the way out of the way drive the next day to do the return; as always, he milked it until the last possible moment (he gets some sort of thrill from leaping through the door of a store 2 seconds before it closes), but he went… and came back with the pants. It turns out that at least that particular WalMart closes its customer service desk before the store closes; ignoring that my eyes were bugging out of my head with stress, he airily announced that he’d go again the next day, so there was nothing to worry about.

  The following night, he napped after dinner; when I woke him up to tell him to get going, he belatedly informed me that customer service leaves TWO HOURS before the stores closes, meaning that it was already too late to go. When I inquired, in a voice that could shatter granite, why he hadn’t apprised me of that particular detail BEFORE he went to sleep, he sheepishly replied that he’d “meant to” set his alarm to handle the issue, but had failed to do so… but that he’d go the NEXT night, so no worries.

  The next night, he DID go, and at a proper time; he returned with the pants AGAIN. He’d been told that he needed the store tag or the receipt to do any sort of return, but that if he got a new pair he could then use the receipt to return them and the tag to return the original pair. When I asked him where the new pants were, he replied that he didn’t want to take that step, a step that was inarguably necessary, without asking me 1st, so he hadn’t gotten them; when queried as to why he didn’t call me from one of the pay phones right outside the store, he said, “Uh… I don’t know.” He assured me that he’d do it the NEXT night, so I should stop fretting.

Voting Irregularities? Really?

• Doesn’t anyone in this country know how to write voting machine software?– Jill @ Brilliant at Breakfast reports that apparently in Virginia, voters won’t be able to read the entire name of their candidates on the polling boxes. The error occurred due to a change in font on the summary page. In fact, Democratic candidate Webb will appear with his first name and nickname only — or “James H. ‘Jim’ “. All of the party affiliations have been cut off. Talk about foobar. Don’t they have a Q&A Department at that software company?
• E-voting Problems Already in Florida — Richard Cranium @ The All Spin Zone reports that early voters are already having problems with electronic voting machines showing something different from what they selected on the review screen…oddly the selection difference is always in favor of the Republican vote.
• 2006 election-rigging update for Tuesday, October 31 — Jill @ Brilliant at Breakfast is reporting that voters in Jefferson County, Texas are also having the same problem. She adds that so far, the reports have all involved votes flipping to Republican candidates in South Florida, Missouri, Virginia, Arkansas, and Texas.

Government Censorship

• People everywhere just got to be free — SteveAudio @ CorrenteWire writes about the next targets of government censorship. First they went after reporters, next they’ll be coming after the bloggers. Actually they already are in countries like Iran, China, Tunisia, and Vietnam. Amnesty International has launched a human rights campaign asking webmasters around the world to stand up for their fellow imprisoned bloggers.

tags: WAL-Mart, Ziploc, TSA, Tesco, airport security, U.K. striptease, Voting Irregularities, Texas, Florida, Virginia, James Webb, Democrats, Republicans, Missouri, Arkansas, censorship, bloggers, Iran, Tunisia, China, Vietnam, Amnesty International, human rights

3 comments

1. on November 1, 2006 at 3:09 pm

   Danielle said:

   On WTF Tesco’s sex toy:

   I posted on this story as well. I found it really disturbing at first read, then after a little more reading & pondering, decided it seemed more of Tesco needing a few more appropriate categories…maybe an adult games section?

   It also depends on which section of the toys & games category it was listed in…their site isn’t categorized by ages, just types, brand, and price. If it was in ‘kids’ bedrooms’ or ‘dolls & playsets’ it seems worse to me than ‘games’.

   I don’t agree with these things being marketed to children, but I don’t see a problem with it being sold to adults…

2. on November 1, 2006 at 4:27 pm

   n. mallory said:

   You know, I remember when products like that could only be bought in certain stores where you had to be 18 or older to get in…or Spencers that had an 18 or older section.

   I guess the question is would you want your children to be able to purchase such a thing in WAL-Mart where they’d be able to find it mixed in with the Disney Monopoly and the Go Fish cards or would you rather it be somewhere only adults had access to it?

   I just keep picturing Jon Bennet Ramsey with one of those poles and wondering if that’s the next big pagent idea.

3. on December 2, 2007 at 1:34 pm

   Work Your Brain — 10/31/06 — Holidays Organizer said:

   […] stuff in a toy sexy dance garter to Unleash the sex kitten inside (quoth the Tesco webs source: Work Your Brain 10/31/06, The Naked […]

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