- Keira Knightley is insisting that her breasts will not be airbrushed in publicity photos for The Duchess.
- Girls are as good at math as boys.
- NCTE released a guide to Selective Service for trans people (pdf).
- The Chinese Olympics Committee will be doing genetic testing on athletes to determine their sex.
Dishdrawer Boor
Has everyone seen the ad for the Fisher & Paykel Dishdrawer? A woman is putting dishes away, from the dishwasher into the cupboard drawers. As she bends over the dishwasher, and then the drawer, again and again, her husband, sitting nearby on a comfy chair, is saying “Dish” and then “Drawer” which becomes “Dishdrawer” & voila, he’s invented this genius new thing.
& All I can think watching it is, He should get off his genius ass & help her.
But on a more serious note, I wonder sometimes if the reason women aren’t known to have invented as many things is precisely because they’re usually busy doing stuff while the guy is sitting there watch them.
For my sister, who has put away more than her fair share of dishes in her life, a very very happy birthday.
NY Is Not America
I just love that the rest of America is all of a sudden paying attention to New Yorker magazine covers. Hysterical.
More Death Shows: Cold Case
I watch a lot of death shows, as I call them – the forensics, the procedurals, the investiigation shows. I’m a big fan of Cold Case, especially: the premise is that they have to take on a cold case – a case where the leads died, mostly – and solve it. So there’s a kind of historical quality to it, and some of the early shows I saw involved a woman who got an abortion when it was still illegal, and another about a gay bashing. Every episode I’ve seen involving LGBT folks is sympathetic, like the one my mom saw about an FTM, and “Best Friends,” which I saw recently, about an inter-racial lesbian relationship in 1932; Tessa Thompson played the African American half of the couple, and wore some natty suits.
But I find this show’s real appeal is the cultural history & the music: because it’s historical, they play a lot of good shit when they’re recreating a scene in the 1950s, or 60s, or 1978, or 2004. Lo & behold, someone has compiled all of the music from all the different episodes. Like Episode 21, “Torn,” which has music by Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton, or Episode 6, “Static” with Gene Vincent and Little Richard.
Musicheads, do check it out. They show hours & hours of it late at night on TNT.
Burn Notice
The new season starts now! & Yes, I’m a fan of the show. You can’t really beat an IRA trained ex-girlfriend and an ex-spy. At least not if that ex-spy is Michael West.
Sheer entertainment, but I think it takes the spy thing to a whole new level. & Yes, I know I’ve been watching way too much TV lately. There’s a reason I didn’t want cable.
Next Stop
Anyone else catch any of the July 4th Twilight Zone marathon? Great stuff. I just saw Of Late I Think of Cliffordville which is particularly cruel, and stars Albert Salmi, who also played Smerdjakov in The Brothers Karamazov in 1958.
I also caught the only Jack Klugman TZ I’d never seen – Death Ship. & I love Jack Klugman, yes, because of The Odd Couple, but mostly because of Quincy, which, imho, gave birth to all of the forensic shows on TV now (most of which I watch). But I have to go to sleep, despite the next one up being Printer’s Devil with Burgess Meredith. (It’s a good one.) I used to tape these when the marathons were on WPIX here in New York, but now they’re all on DVD, which makes it a bit easier. (& It took me borrowing the DVD collection to finally see the Buster Keaton TZ, which they never, ever show during these marathons.)
I really do love this series, and love Rod Serling – not just for The Twilight Zone, but because he fought and fought and fought the censorship that came with advertisers’ sponsorship of television, and during an era when they almost didn’t win. As he put it:
“It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.â€
Now there was a fine tilt at an inexorable windmill, but at least he got a few stunning seasons of work done, which we’ll have forever.
Target: Women
Comedian Sarah Haskins has these short video clips about marketing that targets women, and her completely matter of fact, dry style is hysterically funny.
The new one’s on Botox. “I’m a form of punctuation that signifies an aside.”
There’s one on women voters: “Stick yourself in the middle of enough women, & you practically are one.”
Another on wedding shows: “They put the WE in wedding, and the End in feminism.”
And my favorite is about yogurt:Â “I’m gonna shit my pants.”
Just go watch.
Psych!
I try to watch a new show, this time Psych, because the trailers always seem funny, and what do you know? A man is being haunted by someone who keeps redecorating and leaving long red hair everywhere.
It turns out he has multiple personality disorder and one of his personalities is a woman trapped in a man’s body. She’s been going to a shrink to find out about SRS.
The third personality is homicidal and doesn’t want his genitals changes. So first he kills one shrink for helping the trans female identity, and is about to kill another, when the two guys of Psych figure it out. The name of the show was “Who Ya Gonna Call?”
I can’t escape trans. I can’t. I want to watch a stupid show & it’s still about gender expression. Though I do appreciate that the homocidal personality and the transgender personality weren’t the same. Is that progress? Maybe.
Interview: Helen & Betty
Nancy Nangeroni & Gordene MacKenzie, who used to bring you GenderTalk, are now bringing you GenderVision. We were up in their neck of the woods last fall and did an interview with them for GenderVision, which they’ve now got up at their website, www.gendervision.org.
A lot of our conversation is about partner advocacy within the trans community, the role of partners, and transitioning from within a committed relationship. It’s a lengthy interview, about an hour, and amazingly enough Betty talks quite a bit about her own partner advocacy, and why she speaks so little about her own experience.
exCIted.
New Law & Order : Criminal Intent tonight at 9PM. Oh, how long it’s been!