Friday, February 09, 2007

'Vagina' Is Back! "Vagina' Is Back! Yaaaaay!

An update to yesterday's story:

The director of the play demanded that the title be changed back, saying that they only had the rights to the play if its contents - including the title - were not censored.

As a result, two days after the hoohaa brouhaha began, the vagina was returned to its rightful place on the billboard.

The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler's award-winning international hit play, is an attempt to celebrate the vagina as an object of empowerment, rather than of shame. There's some way to go with that one, clearly.


and an updated version over at DailyKos relays this e-mail from the theater:

Hi,

I think we are being misunderstood. "Hoohaa" was meant to be tongue in cheek. Having a 9 year old daughter and coming from a medical background I was furious that a woman would actually complain about having to explain to her niece what a vagina was after the child read it herself. My daughter knows the anatomically correct term but calls uses hoohaa. Yes, we know what free speech is and we are glad to be putting Vagina back up today. I am female and I support VAGINA!!!

Thanks,
Kim (assistant manager)


Good to know snark is still alive and well in The Sunshine State, or as Homer Simpson likes to call it, America's Wang.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Hoohaaaaa!

No vaginas please, we're Floridian:

A theatre in Florida has had to change the title of a charity production of The Vagina Monologues on its marquee, after a woman complained that it was offensive.

The new name? They've decided on 'The Hoohaa Monologues'.

Atlantic Theatres in Atlantic Beach, Florida, received a complaint from a woman who'd seen the advertised title as she drove past with her niece. She said that it had made her niece ask her what a vagina was.

The theatre's Bryce Pfanenstiel commented: 'I'm on the phone and asked “What did you tell her?” She's like, “I'm offended I had to answer the question.”'

So the theatre, anxious to avoid controversy, decided that the childish slang word 'hoohaa' was the most appropriate thing to replace 'vagina'.

Some have welcomed the change to 'The Hoohaa Monologues', while others have expressed some confusion. 'It sounds like a country band,' one passer by commented to local TV station WJXT."

Okay, Florida Hellions. Bob? Jim? Kristy? Any comments on this?

All I can say is, if I ever do form that country band, I'm definitely calling it The Hoohaa Monologues.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Quote of the Day

David Terrenoire in a comment on today's Good Girls Kill For Money Club:

You know you’re a writer when you’ve convinced your spouse that lying on the couch staring at the ceiling is work.

I totally want this on a T-shirt.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Huzzah!

Bob Morris' third Zack Chasteen novel, Bermuda Schwartz, is now available. If the first two are any indication, this one's gonna be a keeper.

Buy it. Buy it now.

Uhh....What?

Nebraska Has a Navy?

Well, they have over 100,000 Admirals, at least...

Admirals in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska are individuals who have contributed in some way to the state, promote the Good Life in Nebraska, and warrant recognition as determined by the Governor.

Let's hope they don't get into a Dreadnought-style arms race with South Dakota.

Monday, February 05, 2007

So When Does He Go Into Rehab?

"Chewbacca" arrested for head-butting in Hollywood:

A Chewbacca impersonator was arrested after being accused of head-butting a Hollywood tour guide who warned the furry brown Wookiee about harassing two Japanese tourists, police said on Saturday.

"Nobody tells this Wookiee what to do," "Chewie" from the "Star Wars" movies said before slamming his head into the guide's forehead, the Los Angeles Times newspaper reported.

The 6-foot, 5-inch-(1.96-metre-) tall 44-year-old man was charged on Friday with misdemeanor battery and later released on $20,000 bail, the Los Angeles Police Department said.

Street performers at the world-famous cinema collect tips from tourists by posing for photos, but some are known to turn hostile if they don't get money.

It could have been worse. He could have tried to pull the guy's arms out of their sockets. Wookies have been known to do that.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Fox's Obamarama

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Apparently some people feel I'm being too hard on the poor folks at Fox News. And it's true, I have written some unkind things about the "we report, you decide" folks.

But recently, I've begun to think that maybe there's an opportunity for me in Fox's style of reportage.

First, a little background.

Recently, the Fox News folks were all a-twitter over reports that Barack Obama, U.S. senator from Illinois and recently declared presidential contender, had, as a child in Indonesia, attended a 'madrassa' -- a radical Muslim school where children are indoctrinated with fundamentalist ideology.

The story was originally broken by a right-wing magazine called "Insight," which happens to be owned by the same organization as the right-wing Washington Times. That organization, in case you didn't know, is the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, aka the "Moonies." You know the Moonies. Mass weddings. A funny little Korean man who says he's the Messiah. Those guys.

The report in Insight didn't name a single source -- just shadowy, anonymous figures alleged to be from the campaign of rival presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Well, it seems that unsubstantiated gossip in a tabloid owned by a bizarre religious cult is all it takes to create a headline story on the "fair and balanced" network. Fox anchor John Gibson breathlessly declaimed that the Hillary Clinton campaign had, and I quote, "outed Obama's madrassa past."

Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy thundered, "Why didn't anybody ever mention that that man right there was raised -- spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father -- as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa?"

There are a few problems with this story, however.

One, Obama wasn't raised by his father, he was raised by his stepfather, a Christian who worked for a U.S. oil company. Obama's birth father wasn't a Muslim, either. He was, in fact, an atheist.

Madrassas, in the sense of the radical Islamic academies sponsored by the Taliban, began in the late 1970s along the Pakistan-Afghan border during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, whereas Obama went to school in Indonesia in 1967. At that time, Indonesia's radical Muslim movement had been brutally suppressed by the Sukarno government, so it's highly unlikely that any radical Muslim institute of any kind would have been tolerated.

Any of these facts would have been easily ascertained by anyone at Fox News who'd bothered to take 10 minutes to look them up. These facts also might have been ascertained by any news organization that had taken the radical step of actually sending someone to look at the school. Anyone like, say, CNN.

CNN reporter John Vause, who'd investigated actual madrassas in Pakistan and Afghanistan, went to Obama's alma mater, the Basuki school in Jakarta. What he found was a public school with Muslim, Christian, and Buddhist students, not at all unusual in Indonesia's multicultural society.

"We don't focus on religion," the deputy headmaster of the school, told Vause. "In our daily lives, we try to respect religion, but we don't give preferential treatment."

Wow. Actually checking facts. Actually interviewing someone who had a connection to the place. This could be the biggest innovation in journalism since the invention of the pencil.

When confronted with these inconvenient truths, Fox began to backpedal. The story, they now insisted, was not about Obama's supposed radical roots, but about Hillary Clinton trying a smear campaign. This must have come as a surprise to Fox viewers, like the one who called in asking questions like: "Is this guy going to believe that terrorists are our enemies?"

Well, there's also a problem with the "it's all Hillary's fault" explanation: There's not a shred of evidence to back it up, other than the unidentified sources alleged in the aforementioned Moonie magazine. Apparently, though, that's good enough for Fox News. To these people, "fair and balanced" translates into "we'll believe anything, as long as it slanders a Democrat. And the more Democrats you can slander in a single story, the better."

And thus, I saw an opportunity. A shot at my own 15 minutes of fame, if you will.

You see, I have discovered my very own blockbuster expose. I have heard from anonymous sources closely connected with the John Edwards campaign that Hillary Clinton is actually an android created in 1972 in a secret Communist Chinese laboratory and programmed to ascend to the presidency by the use of high tech mind-control rays developed from technology salvaged by the U.S. from a crashed alien spacecraft and sold to the North Vietnamese in 1972 by John Kerry.

There. The seed is planted. Now all I have to do is wait for Fox to pick it up, and I'll be famous as the guy that broke the story.

New York, here I come.

Hey, can you prove it didn't happen?