Category Archives: The Slattern Speaks
Who put Stevie in charge?
Courtesy Last FM
Those of you who had progressed beyond teething rings and Cookie Monster by the tail end of the Seventies will probably recall the musical and sartorial splendor of Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks. In hindsight both are somewhat cringe-inducing, though to this day I maintain a soft spot for Tusk — it’s the brass section, I guess.
Honestly, guilty pleasure though the record most certainly is, it really gets the solo dance party started, at least after a few Saturday night Sazeracs anyway. Don’t believe me? Toss a couple back and have a look at Mick Fleetwood getting his groove on courtesy of the USC marching band. See if you don’t feel the urge to shake a tailfeather.
Anyways, if it’s all too far back in the murky past for you to recall, let me remind you that along about 1979, platform shoes, flowing raiments, floppy hats, tatty lace and Rapunzelesque locks were already a bit out of date, except on Steven Tyler and the occasional tranny, but our gal Stevie held on to them all well into the next decade, for better or worse.
Steve and the boys, dressed as girls, courtesy sweet-emotionn.tumblr.com.
Now owing to some “personal issues,” Stevie had largely disappeared from the musical/celebrity scene by about the mid to late Eighties, effectively ending her solo career, which I think we can all agree was really for the best. So imagine my surprise yesterday when I was out and about, shopping for suitable attire for an upcoming social event that’s not really formal, but just a little bit dressy — you know the kind of thing, and all I could find were Stevie’s cast off Welsh witch twirly skirts, princess-on-acid maxi dresses (no foundation garment possible with these) and impossible platform shoes.
A typical offering. Via bismilahirahmanirrahim.blogspot.com.
Apparently after all these years girlfriend has assumed control of the fashion industry! Rehab must have included some mixed martial arts training, because she has somehow managed to kick Anna Wintour’s bony backside to the curb, replacing the tasteful Jackie O sheath with the crochet mumu or mini as every gal’s must have wardrobe staple in the process.
Unfortunately, Stevie redux (the sequel) doesn’t look quite as fetching on the middle-aged frame as it did on the teenage one; however, lace minis and swirling maxis were literally all I could find that were fashion forward without being a little black dress, and so I came home empty-handed and more than a tad frustrated.
Granny suit and sensible shoes courtesy Duchess Whatsername and jezebel.com.
I ask you, why is it women over 40 (who are not Demi Moore) must choose between dressing like the Olsen twins or Duchess Whatsername Mrs. Prince Charles? Is there no middle ground?
And why can’t I find a pair of dress shoes that weigh less than fifty pounds? Owing to my lack of stature, I have had to get used to walking in a very high heel, and more often than not I do just fine. But these newfangled platforms are like cement mixers. Have you ever tried dragging a pair of them around? Sure they build up your calves after a couple of days, but really, I have time to separate my workout from my leisure activities, and I prefer to do so whenever possible. Who wants to feel the burn while walking from the table to the ladies room, I ask you?
The final injury is the hats. If the ladies at Bloomingdale’s are to be believed, we should all be topping off our hippie costumes with big floppy hats, a la Rachel Zoe, whom I now believe to be in cahoots with Stevie. Or maybe she IS Stevie. Have you ever seen them together? Think about it and get back to me.
Oh yeah, I could wear that. Via Trendmill.com.
Visual literacy, or how to tell if that guy in the next office is going to drive you out of your mind before he ever opens his mouth
Unless your photocopier is broken or you run a tanning salon, you probably won’t encounter this guy, but just in case you do…
You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but it doesn’t take much more than a glance to get a good idea what the story’s all about. And so it is with new acquaintances, both social and professional. I find that being able to get a quick handle on new people is an extremely useful skill, as it helps you avoid the undesirable, the annoying and the certifiable before they can stake a claim on your time, your attention or your guest room.
Does my tendency to take others at face value make me a bad person? Nah, shallow maybe, but not bad. What it does make me is a happier person – one who rarely has to duck a neighbor, hide behind a newspaper in the employee cafeteria, or make good on a threat to file a restraining order, though of course that misunderstanding with Anthony Bourdain did involve an order of protection…sadly, not on my behalf, but we’re well past all that now. At least I am. I’m not so sure about Tony.
Anyways, for those of you who are not familiar with the more common hallmarks of the crazy and/or obnoxious and what they communicate, here’s a little primer on how to pick out some of the most easily recognized signifiers that say, “back away now while you still can.” An ounce of prevention, as they say, is worth a pound of Tums.
via wikimedia.org
Blond Dreads
“I hate my parents almost as much as I resent my trust fund. Sooner or later I’ll hate you, too.”
*
via Wikimedia.org
Birkenstocks
“High heels reduce women to sex objects. I refuse to be objectified.”
*
via wikimedia.org
French Manicure
“How’m I suppostah know wheah ya’ check is?
I’ll ax Mistah Nussbaum when he gets back, ahright?”
*
Courtesy youjustmademylist.com
Scraggly, Bald Ponytail
“I still got it, baby. You want some?”
*
Courtesy zimbio.com
Adult GRRanimals
“My wife dresses me (so I behave like an adolescent).”
*
Courtesy mashable.com
Hideous, Inappropriate Footwear
“I dress myself (and I just made ten trillion dollars off an idea I stole).”
Tech Support Follow-Up: “It’s worse”
Now that I’ve upgraded the operating system on my laptop, I find that my printer no longer works. Neither Apple nor HP can offer any suggestions, beyond “buy a new printer.” See, my printer is too old (five years — practically stone age) to have a print driver in the sexy new Lion operating system. I wonder what’s next. Maybe my new RAM will father some lambs or I’ll have a complete plug-in failure. Worse, I may finally be forced to crack that nasty bottle of blackberry brandy Aunt Muriel sent us as a wedding gift in 1990.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Help me Technical Support. You’re my only hope.
Computers were SO much simpler in the 80s. Courtesy IGN.com.
I’ll admit it. Technology has gotten away from me. Every innovation, each update, every new feature sends me into an angst fueled emotional crisis; vodka bottles are drained, the medicine cabinet must be locked, and Dr Feelgood Feldman rises to the top of my speed dial list, or whatever we’re calling that now — iFriendFone, iTalkieFavorites, iSpeedyDial, I don’t fucking know.
Facebook mystifies me. Can you or can’t you send a private message to one of your friends? If you can, why not just email? Isn’t the point of Facebook to make your every breath, utterance and rest stop into a public holiday? And why does my page now look like it was laid out by an ADHD-addled first-year graphic design student with a psychotic disorder and an astigmatism? I can’t find ANYTHING on my own page. So I never look at it. Ever.
I can just about cope with Twitter, though I have no idea what the point is. Tumblr, I am told, is a new social media must, as is Pinterest. I tried to set up a Pinterest account but they put me on a waiting list. Apparently it’s very exclusive — some kind of virtual country club or ivy league college. Later, they sent me a congratulatory email when they magnanimously bestowed an account upon me. Am I supposed to feel thrilled at being included? Again, I don’t fucking know. And I don’t much care. After fifteen hours of trying to find some kind of technical support I gave up. The social media world will have to spin without me.
Remember the little stylus? I LOVED that.
Hardware poses even greater challenges. While others eagerly seek the newest, shiniest, most cutting edge gizmos on the market, I sit pining for my Palm Pilot and the long dead Vindigo application. I know there are other ways to find a piano bar near 70th and Park, or a shoe repair shop within limping distance of Gand Central, or a bathroom in the Financial District, but they’re all different applications. I just want my one source, and the late Vindigo was it.
I recently got an iPhone because I wanted one simple thing: to be able to see the same calendar and address book on my phone and my laptop. That’s it. Instead, the simple act of syncing my phone to my laptop unleashed a tsunami of technical difficulties requiring no fewer than six calls to APPLECARE, a $50 operating system upgrade for my computer and a $150 RAM upgrade. I got the phone a month ago and I still haven’t figured out how to keep it from duplicating every appointment in my calendar and switching the listings from last-name-first to first-name-first. Nor can I color code the events in my calendar without a slide rule, an HTML brain implant and a TIME MACHINE.
What it really comes down to is this: technology exhausts me. So much so, in fact, that I can barely cope with my own little blog. For example, what is an RSS feed and how do I use it? If I add it to my site, what will the implications be? If I click it on someone else’s post will it inundate me with unwanted comments, put cookies in my laptop (sure there are plenty of crumbs in there, but a whole cookie strikes me as a bit too much), or worse, send loads of unwanted Spam my way? I hate Spam. How come other bloggers have RSS feeds and I don’t?
Here’s what WordPress has to say on the subject of RSS.
Subscribing to a feed is very easy and only requires a feed reader. Most browsers can already read feeds, as can many email clients. In addition, you can download special desktop clients for this purpose, and other websites even provide feed reading services, as well.
By the rest of us, do they mean everyone who didn’t get into Pinterest? Beats me.
Feed reader? Clients? When did I get clients? I don’t want clients — that’s why I stopped working in business. Are desktop clients different from regular ones? Will they be expecting cookies? I have absolutely no idea what any of this this means, so I looked it up in my Dummies book. Here’s what they have to say:
“RSS is a format that allows readers to subscribe to your blog and read it in an application — an RSS reader such as Google Reader…The best way to keep track of your RSS subscribers is to replace the RSS feed created by your blogging platform with a feed from Google’s free FeedBurner service…etc.”
Feedburner service? Sounds like dinner with my inlaws. I’ll spare you the five step process for affecting this change. It’s full of redirects, logins to accounts I don’t have and hyperlinks. For example: “Use the new Feedburner address in the hyperlink for your Subscribe button or link, not the original one created by your software.” Is it me? Can you follow this?
All of this is entirely too much like a flashback of sophomore Geometry, which I slogged through for what seemed like decades and barely managed to pass. It was all well and good when we were looking at shapes and vectors and points and angles, but then one day we turned to theorems and proofs, and we might as well have been talking about feedburner plug-ins.
Courtesy deviantart.com
Interestingly, the following year I scored highest in my class on some kind of standardized math exam. At the time, owing to some very high grade under the counter substances, I couldn’t even recall taking it. The teacher gave me a filthy, accusatory look, like I’d been hiding algorithms in my bra, and promptly started calling on me in class, which made it a lot harder to skip doing my homework.
So I’m wondering, if by some remote chance I master RSS, SEO, XML, DNS and the myriad other ingredients in the electronic soup of the world wide interweb, does that mean I’ll have to start showing up for class and turning assignments in on time? If it does, I’m out.
With props for inspiration to the tallest and the baddest, our own Cristy Carrington.
Kitchen Slattern 
When we’re in charge, things are going to change around here
Jun 19
Posted by WSW
Some thoughts on Viagra, Oreos and war as a dance fight
That’s right, I’m talking to YOU.
An acquaintance once shared a piercing insight with me, namely that a woman would never have invented Viagra or its evil twin Cialis. Rather than addressing erectile dysfunction, she pointed out, a modern day Madame Curie would almost certainly have taken on the larger, more pressing problem of masculine inability to pick up dirty undershorts, socks and T-shirts from the floor and transfer them to the hamper. Among the fairer sex, it is well known that the repetitive act of relocating well worn, often soiled undergarments is a surefire libido killer in women. As a result, Viagra becomes about as useful as sneakers on a fish, and the only thing the suddenly tumescent spouse is likely to be able to use that thing for is a place to hang his damp bath towel.
Hang up that towel! via blokeshealth.com
For obvious reasons, I often recall this conversation while sorting the laundry, and recently as I was working my way through about six weeks’ worth of washing, I had ample opportunity to consider the question of how our world would be different if women had done the bulk of the inventing over the years.
Now, before my male readers jump ship and go searching for more testerone-friendly surroundings, let me just say that I have no plans to turn this into a husband bashing extravaganza, unless of course I decide to whip up another batch of Bloody Marys before I get to the end of this post. In that case, all bets are off, grammar rules become suggestions and I can’t guarantee we won’t also end up discussing Emeril, Fairway or the New York Yankees in terms that are at best pejorative, or at worst obscene. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I hate guys. Via my hero.com.
I like guys. I really do. In fact, I have always tended to avoid anything with a feminist label, starting with Virginia Woolf and continuing through the ass-frying ill humor of Gloria Steinem and right on up to the droning, whining sanctimony of the Women’s Studies majors of today. Though I remember clearly the era of bra burning and Women’s Lib, with the exception of Bella Abzug’s hats, I have always found it all too boring and annoying to even contemplate. Call me an ingrate; I’ve been called far worse and occasionally will even answer to the name.
Anyhoo, where was I? Oh yes, Madame Curie, Viagra, undershorts. So I have concluded that daily life would be subtly, yet measurably different had women been doing the inventing over the years. For example:
Light bulbs
First of all, any wattage higher than 60 would never have been invented, and if it had, the bulbs would be in use in operating rooms and holding cells exclusively. The notion of domestic overhead fixtures would have been dismissed outright as the product of diseased minds. Why? Because stark 150 watt bulbs are absolutely disastrous for all but the youngest female face. I haven’t screwed in anything higher than 60 watts in my house for years, and we may be on the cusp of a general downgrade to 40 watts in the not too distant future. If my eyebags get any more ruched, it may come to a candles-only policy in the evening. Eventually Mr. Slattern will have to learn to read Braille or start wearing a petzl around the house.
If only Mr. Gravity had been stopped before the scalpel was applied. Via plasticsurgerybest.blogspot.com.
Gravity
Now I realize Isaac Newton only discovered the principle of gravity, but I think we can agree his time might have been better spent trying to reverse it. One look at my jawline is proof enough. If only he’d brought his work home, I think Mrs. Newton might have been able to offer some gentle suggestions and guidance as to the direction his work might take for the betterment of mankind. If so, asses might be riding a bit higher in midlife and millions of tragic face, brow and breast lifts could well have been avoided.
Oreos = Health Food
If women ran the food industry, they would have long since developed a harmless and effective way to remove the carbs and calories from sugary treats, so that spending Saturday night with a pound of thin mints or a cherry cheesecake would be the same as a week at a
fat farmspa. Also, there would be no “cool ranch” anything, and beef jerky would be sold in the pet food aisle.And what exactly am I supposed to wear with these?
via foottalk
Bowling
It would never have existed – at all – and we’d all have been spared the sight of hideous bowling shirts and the horror of rented shoes. If by some quirk the game had been invented by a woman, the shoes at least would come only in black (slingbacks with a kitten heel I think), teams would wear matching caftans and champagne would be sold at a modest mark-up in the bar.
The Theory of War
Forget Sun Tzu. Left to us, war, territorial disputes and power struggles would be resolved by either 1) dance fighting, 2) fashion supremacy, or 3) a series of cutting remarks. Failing that, we’d dress the combatants in formal attire and lock them in a small overheated den with their mothers in law for a few days while The Wheel of Fortune played on a continuous loop. That, my friends, is deterrence that works.
Dance fight! Courtesy britannica.com
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Posted in Commentary, The Slattern Speaks
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Tags: Bloody Mary, Cocktails, Humor, Light bulbs, Oreos, Petzel, viagra