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too sweet to die

The girls I mean are not refined

By On February 8, 2011 · In Adipocere


So this is crazy. How often does my name get to be on Esquire.com’s home page? Answer: Not often. And somehow I got to write about romance, which is pretty much the thing I am least qualified to write about (other than cap and trade and taxidermy). An excerpt:

So who are the victors on Valentine’s Day? The purveyors of Red Lobster, shitty chocolate, oversize teddy bears holding normal-size teddy bears holding tiny little teddy bears, middlebrow jewelry, and Tawny Kitaaen-inspired lingerie. (Which, incidentally, makes most of us feel like cats wearing costumes. Or surgical cones. I’m sure not every woman has run around in a backwards, drug-addled circle in an attempt to escape a frightening undergarment, but it’s not unheard of.) If women had no input on what constitutes an appropriate Valentine’s Day present, the output would resemble a Spencer’s Gifts collection co-curated by Anton Le Vay and David Lee Roth.

Somehow, what was penned as a bitter jeremiad was massaged into advice. God help anyone who follows it!

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Recapturing the “popular imagination”: victims, not hookers

By On February 8, 2011 · In Danse Macabre

Warning: GRAR ahead.

Last month, Slate published an article titled The Decline of the Serial Killer. “Statistics on serial murder are hard to come by—the FBI doesn’t keep numbers, according to a spokeswoman—but the data we do have suggests serial murders peaked in the 1980s and have been declining ever since,” the author states.

Is this really so? I’m not a criminologist. But neither is the guy who wrote this. And of the two “experts” he quotes*, one of them authored a shitty, shitty book that offers little more than pop-psych analysis and “insight” from people like James Dobson and Dr. Joyce Brothers. We don’t have a lot of perspective on what motivates serial killers, which is why the criminal profilers you see on TV are basically snake oil salesmen. Anyhow, I’m not here to discredit these bozos, I’m just saying: Just because the US crime rate dropped overall and you have a shoebox full of clippings that confirms what you already believe doesn’t necessarily prove that there are fewer active serial killers.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say that yes, there are fewer active serial killers now. But here’s where the article gets into some happy horseshit.

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Over at the runoff: The Ironic Combover

By On February 3, 2011 · In As I Am Now

I should just stop riding the bus:

The other day on the B62 bus (a line that wends its way through nearly all the hipster enclaves of Brooklyn) I saw a hipster guy with a giant ironic mustache and this elaborate Hitler-bangs-side-part hairdo, plastered low to his forehead with a prodigious amount of pomade. From the front it was, momentarily, bus-fascinating.

And then! He turned his head, revealing a large and partly concealed bald spot. The monument to vainglory and fixative resins. The Potemkin Coiffure.

In case you’re having a hard time telling them apart, THIS blog is where I hate people who deserve it. THAT blog is where I hate people who (probably) don’t deserve it.

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On Shawna Forde and why you have no clue who she is

By On January 27, 2011 · In Adipocere

Ed note: I posted this over at my tumblr but I’ve been following this case for over a year now and I’m getting angrier and angrier that the media isn’t doing its friggin’ job.

I’m really surprised* that so few people are familiar with Shawna Forde, the leader of Arizona’s Minutemen American Defense vigilante group who murdered Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia, in their house.

So here is some long-winded, rambling background on Shawna Forde, murderous right-wing sociopath.

Shawna Forde had by all accounts a lousy childhood, raised in foster homes in Everett, WA, and, as a teenager, became a prostitute and thief.** Somewhere along the way, she married and divorced four times, had a child who died from SIDS, raised some fucked-up children, ran for Everett city council, possibly murdered someone in 1997, reinvented herself as a charismatic (if not uniformly accepted) leader of various Minutemen organizations, was disowned by said organizations, lied about being shot and raped by Mexican drug dealers, moved to Arizona to start her own movement…the story is convoluted and practically endless.

The FBI was told of Forde’s plans to raid Flores’ house and rob him of money, drugs, and guns (they believed he was a drug dealer — which, incidentally, has not been proven***). The FBI chose to do nothing. Then, on May 30, 2009, Forde and two of her henchmen, Albert Gaxiola and Jason Bush, murdered a man, wounded a woman, and shot a 9-year-old girl point blank in the face.

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