Showing posts with label scars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scars. Show all posts

August 30, 2022

Oh, my! I've got 14 tonight! Let me know which TikTok videos won you over this time.

1. The mouse is going to eat your food, so why not embrace reality and construct a cheeseboard for the little darling.

2. Painting the one who says "I am too ugly to be painted."

3. So you say girls don't have hobbies?

4. The awesome high dive.

5. "Michigan is the Texas of the Midwest," etc.

6. How to deflect passive aggression.

7. The Jesus miracle nobody talks about.

8. The little girl has serious problems with the family dog and the family decor.

9. Sticker review suddenly becomes a phone-camera review.

10. The scar experiment.

11. Stand in awe of your ability to retain fat.

12. When you're in the mood to eat a wicker chair, what should you eat?

13. How exactly did kale become a thing?

14. Instant Karma Karen.

October 14, 2015

Transferable tattoo company bullied into withdrawing part of its collection of designs that celebrate the body's imperfections.

An art student named Lucie Davis worked with Topshop to put out a collection that she said was supposed to "encourage a greater appreciation and personal ownership of ourselves through highlighting imperfections and celebrating difference." The gold-colored tattoos included moles, freckles, and scars.

Somebody named Lucas Shelemy started an on-line petition calling the scars "offensive" and "disgusting." Shelemy says:
"The tagline of the product, of celebrating your 'imperfections' seems distasteful in the case of scars but more worrying still is how the majority of the designs resemble self-harm scars. Topshop should not be normalising self-harm or presenting it as a fashion trend. Not only is the glamorisation of self-injury dangerous for the mainly teenage demographic but harmful for others who have struggled with self-harm and see what for them, is a painful reminder being presented as acceptable – as long as its temporary and elegant."
Somebody wrote at the Topshop website: "I can't believe Topshop are glorifying self-harm scars, whilst not advertised as self-harm scars the scars are placed on the arm in a row which is the stereotypical idea of self-harm, absolutely disgusted."

That was enough. The product was treated as if Davis had intended to celebrate deliberately cutting yourself, a self-hating (or at least self-destructive) impulse, when the idea was to feel happy about the body's imperfections. Talk about destruction: What have the haters created?

My heart goes out to young Lucie Davis. As a person of discontinuous color (freckles), I appreciate her work.

April 18, 2015

"They weren’t thinking about me, just about my mother. They just ripped me out and tossed me aside," said Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra was a gigantic baby, the year was 1915, the setting was the family's kitchen, and the midwife had to call for the doctor, who arrived, with forceps, to save the mother. 
The doctor cut the cord and laid the boy - huge and blue, bleeding from his wounds, and apparently dead - by the kitchen sink, then quickly shifted his efforts to ­saving the nearly unconscious mother’s life.

The women all leant in, shouting advice in ­Italian. At the back of the scrum, one of them looked at the seemingly lifeless baby, picked up it up and, just in case, ran ice cold water from the sink over it and slapped its back. It snuffled and began to howl....

In a nightclub with a lover named Peggy Connelly, he flinched when, in the dark, she caressed his left cheek and her fingertips touched his ear. Though she had barely noticed the deformity, he told her how sensitive he was about it....
Connelly recalled: ‘There was no ­outburst of emotion, just a ­lingering bitterness about what he felt had been a stupid neglect of his infant self to concentrate on his mother, otherwise his torn ear might have been tended to in time.’
As for the mother, Dolly Sinatra:
After Frank was born, there were no more babies, possibly because the birth rendered Dolly unable to have any, but more likely because she ­simply decided — and she was one of life’s deciders — she didn’t want to go through that again.
But she compensated for her trauma in the strangest of ways. She chose to become a midwife and an abortionist, for which ­illegal activity she got the ­nickname ­Hatpin Dolly and a ­criminal record.
The link goes to an excerpt from the book "Frank: The Making Of A Legend" by James Kaplan. I ran across that this morning because last night we were watching the new HBO documentary "Sinatra: All or Nothing at All," which isn't based on Kaplan's book, but goes through the same story of the birth and contains that brief, startling fact: Sinatra's mother was an abortionist.

We were watching the Sinatra documentary because we'd gotten tired of that other, much more noticed HBO documentary "Going Clear," which is based on the Lawrence Wright book "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief." I'm sure the book is much more worth your time. The movie is just too dumb for my taste. In the part I put up with, there were too many boring people on camera stating that they were indeed taken in. But why? Some of the clips of L. Ron Hubbard were interesting. He was brilliant/crazy/devious. He's a good character. The rest of the cast... well, one wonders what they would have done with their lives if they hadn't entered the "prison of belief" in Scientology.

I was surprised to see that both documentaries were made by the same guy, Alex Gibney. If he could have been allowed to stay with the interesting character in "Going Clear," I might have liked it as much as "Sinatra: All or Nothing at All." But left to delve into the mystery of ordinary people getting and staying inside of religious belief, he had little insight. At least not in the part I put up with.

Maybe I'll finish it at some point... or, more likely, switch to Wright's book or just Wright's New Yorker article, "The Apostate, Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology." I could get interested in Scientology's complicated legal problems, but I don't want to hear long accounts of dumb people getting trapped in "the Prison of Belief." Why are other people's beliefs a "prison"? If some beliefs are prisons, what beliefs are not prisons? Now, if the point is, the organization threatens and bullies anyone who tries to leave, then it's not belief that is the prison.

ADDED: Lawrence Wright goes on the podcast "Here's the Thing with Alec Baldwin" which I was in the middle of listening to when I tried to watch HBO's "Going Clear." This morning, having given up on "Going Clear," I went back to the podcast and was surprised to get to hear Alec Baldwin complain that what the movie was missing was just about exactly what I'd thought. Go to 23:32. Baldwin had seen the movie, and he said: "There wasn't any sense, to me, of: What are the people who are in Scientology, who remain in Scientology, who are dedicated to this, what do they perceive they're getting out of it?... What does it do for them? Why are they there?" Baldwin suggests "maybe it's in the book," and Wright is able to give some answers — but these are answers that make me want to ask whether the motivations are different from what brings people into other religions.

By the way, at the "Here's the Thing" site, the title of Wright's book is misstated as "Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Unbelief." That's a good (if unwitting) response to my statement (above) it's not belief that is the prison.

April 4, 2013

A quick wrap-up of today's incipient "mask" theme.

Sometimes the blog acquires a theme, like today, when the first post of the day was about masks that the Hopis don't like to call "masks" — you call them masks, we call them friends — and the second was a metaphorical use of the word "mask," to refer to Ben Carson's current persona. But I would be bullshitting if I said that the third and fourth posts were on theme. Oh, I could do that bullshitting. But I'm not going to waste your time. As the title of this, the fifth post, says, quick wrap-up. So here's the news about masks:

1. "Vogue models 'ate tissues' to mask hunger: Revelations follow similar claims by fashion industry insiders."

2. "Hamas militants’ menacing mask of defiance: Hooded gangs patrol Gaza as Israel fires first attack in months breaking fragile truce."

3. "A man wearing an 'old man' mask robbed a Cleveland Chase Bank Wednesday morning, the FBI said." (Hints for bank robbers: Use sunglasses to keep the rubber mask in place and to provide additional masking.)

4. "Do North Korea’s threats mask power struggle behind the scenes?" ("Those who study the Hermit Kingdom have very serious doubts that any attack on the U.S. or allies South Korea and Japan is even being seriously considered. 'It could be there’s a whole other game going on,' said Stephen Long, a North Korea expert at the University of Richmond.")

5. The General Zod mask from "Man of Steel" has been identified as the Halloween costume item for 2013, but the images that were at this link — purportedly terrifying — have been "removed at the request of the studio." Here's a 2010-era General Zod action figure, decidedly unscary.

6. "Police are looking for a man who went into a Turkey Hill [store] in Palmyra early Sunday morning wearing nothing but a ski mask." ("The man is described as a white male, approximately 50 years old, standing 6 feet tall with a 'heavyset' build. He had no visible scars, marks, tattoos or body piercings, police said." An amusing twist on the old phrase "no visible scars." Usually it refers to scars other than on the face. Here, the face is where the scars could be.)

7. The gas mask Justin Bieber wore around town in London last month was just "a joke." (And he "know[s] who [he is]" and is "not gonna let negativity towards [him] bring [him] down.")

So put down the tissues and eat some real food. Don't let the negativity bring you down, baby. Take off the gloomy mask of tragedy. It's not your style.

November 27, 2010

"That Fat Lip Might Give Obama Some Street Cred."

An NPR headline for a Scott Simon piece:
I wonder if having a larger scar wouldn't actually fortify President Obama's profile, as he contends with Kim Jong Il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Vladimir Putin. Imagine a president with a gnarly, vivid scar telling the rulers of China, "Nice country ya' got here. I'd hate to see something happen to it if you didn't stop foolin' around with the value of your currency. Know what I mean?"
Uh... I think the reason he got 12 stitches was because they were very tiny stitches so there won't be a visible scar. But here's NPR trying to rise above its wimpy reputation.

November 20, 2008

Underwear supermodel Karolina Kurkova has no belly button.

I read it at BBC.com, where I went to look for some serious news to enlighten you. You may think I post the lowest drivel, but I actively bypassed this story last night. I started a draft, titled "They called him the 'Screamer.' He was very noisy," but then, I though, no, I'm not going there.

Yet, here is a much nicer place, the blank mid-torso of a skinny pretty woman who's done nothing more evil than prancing about in a bra and underpants. It's an interesting mystery. It's not like we know Kurkova left her navel on some battlefield in Europe (or Albert Hall).
Some have no belly button as a result of the surgery needed to correct abdominal problems at birth, often either an umbilical hernia, or a condition known as gastroschisis - born with the stomach and intestines poking through a hole in the abdominal wall.
I know all about that, having watched the "Hottest Chick, Ugliest Scar" episode of the Howard Stern Show. (It's "Megan" at the link, which has photos of women in bikinis.)

Bonus religious question: Did Adam and Eve have navels?