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MacGuffin,

It has come to my attention that my previous posts have not reached you. I will correct this post haste. In the meantime, I’ve found a most ingenious way of adding credibility to any crackpot theory.

Thank the kind people at Mother Jones for their simple, step by step instructions.

Yours,

Puffin

PS. This would make fabulous wall art for your upstairs bathroom.

Dear Puffin

A new meme has come to my attention. Edit: Ok, actually I’m trying to start a meme. Upload this picture to facebook and tag the corresponding people. I’m finding this hugely entertaining.

So far I’m a pot smoking little devil, a rebellious woman, a lewd woman, a non homemaker, and a Jesus mocker. I had no idea I’d been so busy. Unfortunately I’m not a party animal, a so called christian or an ankle biter. (Aren’t ankle biters children, by the way? Perhaps this fellow has gotten pillow biters and ankle biters confused.)

Love
MacGuffin

Dear Puffin
Go check out We Say Gay, a site set up by Tennessee students to oppose SB0049.

“Tennessee is trying to pass bill SB0049. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill would prohibit speaking about homosexuality at middle schools and elementary schools, while talking about heterosexuality would be fine (‘(2) Notwithstanding any other law to the contrary, no public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality.’) Kids at my nephew’s high school are protesting it. The bill goes to vote tomorrow.”

Via BoingBoing:

Head over to We Say Gay to support these students- both the ones targeted by the bill and the ones who are so valiantly fighting against it on behalf of their fellow students. This is wonderful and it’s so great to see young kids with their priorities in order.

We say gay for the students who won’t be able to. This site is dedicated to fight against the Tennessee state bill SB0049 (Don’t say gay bill), which would make it a misdemeanor to talk about homosexuality in grades bellow 9th. That is an obvious insult to our first amendment rights to free speech as well as it is a major blow to those young people who are shunned by their own parents for being gay and soon will not be able to talk to their schoo … Read More

Via We say gay

Please sign the petition, subscribe to the blog, plug it any way you can. This is wonderful and gives me some hope that maybe the world isn’t totally screwed. If kids like this still exist then maybe there’s hope for us after all.

These kids earn a whole pile of gold stars.

Love

MacGuffin

Dear Puffin

Did you know that the only reason women menstruate is so that they can avoid having sex with their partners and have an excuse to eat lots of chocolate? Neither did I. Thank god the clever folks at HonestAds have clarified this for me. (Note: it is possible that this is meant to be a send up of this kind of advertising. But frankly it didn’t come off that way. So there is some token balance, and now I shall return to my rant.) See, I was under the clearly incorrect impression that my period was merely a slightly annoying bodily function that we are all hopefully grown up enough to deal with.

But no! I was wrong….Imagine how shocked I was to discover that my uterine wall has a secret agenda! It turns out menstruation is a giant plot to deny men sex! Because, you know, it’s all about the menfolks. My uterus’s need to shed it’s lining once a month is all part of a cunning plan to keep men out of my hoo-hah. I did not realize this! It all makes sense now. My period is clearly one of my oppressive tools of sex-denying torture. It’s the wimminz number one excuse to withhold sex, which is, as we all know, one of the primary goals of all women everywhere.

I’m so glad HonestAds has legitimized this. I mean, usually I’m helpless to withstand the carnal advances of my lover, and I simply have to clutch the counterpane and think of England. It will be such a relief to be able to shirk my wifely duties once a month with a clear conscience! Cause, you know, women can only say no to sex once a month. In fact, women can only assert themselves and control their own bodies when they have the red shield of menstruation to hide behind and make the decision for them. And then, you know, it’s not really me saying no, it’s just that no man would want to have sex with a woman on the rag. Someone should really notify every man I have ever dated, since apparently none of them got that memo. (On the other hand, I did once have a tampon-crucifix nailed to my bedroom door to keep my little brothers out. Tampons are to some men as garlic is to vampires. All you have to do is wave it at them and they run screaming from the room.)

From now on I shall spend the last 5 days of every month reclined on a chaise lounge, eating bonbons and grapes peeled for me by my totally pussywhipped boytoy. It’s my entitlement, dammit!  Yeah, I love getting my period, it means I can eat all the chocolate I want while I blueball my boyfriend. It’s my favorite time of the month! During that 5 day window I’m entitled to act like a bitch and I can just blame it all on the menses! Because that’s what my period is, when you come right down to it. It’s all just an excuse to be mean to men, and indulge myself with chocolate. Cause everything about the female body is really just about men.

Also, true fact, the only possible result of not being able to have sex is male sexual frustration. Shout out to hetero-normative thinking, and a total denial of the female sex drive!

I am disgusted Puffin. Thoroughly disgusted. What is the plural for ignoramus? It’s very important that I know this, because the people who came up with this are ignoramuses. Ignorami? Ignoramæ? Help me out here.

Love

MacGuffin

You might also like other posts categorized under feminism:

Point by Point Shred of Mike Pence, Winner of the Asshole of the Month Award

Uterus is no longer an acceptable word to use in mixed company

NAACP chapter president says gays have “hijacked” the civil rights movement

Point by Point shred of victim blaming language in the New York Times coverage of the Cleveland, Texas gang rape case

Dear Puffin

So the State Dept. is considering a new protocol for people applying for passports and, well, I’m stunned and part of me remains convinced that this is an elaborate hoax. You can see the new Biographical Questionnaire here in PDF format, but I am also attaching screenshots because this is frankly so bizarre that it might just evaporate in a puff of insanity at any moment. Or, which is less likely, the State Dept might come to their senses and try to hide this under the governmental carpet, which is capacious, but getting quite crowded.

My personal favorite questions include the following, from the section for people whose birth was not recorded within a year or who were not born in a US medical facility. (I don’t know how many people that might be, but I assume quite a few, especially older folks. And, you know, anyone who deviated even slightly from the stereotype birth plan. Like a home birth, or, hmmm, going into labor unexpectedly? Does that count?) Anyway, these are the questions you might be asked to fill out, if you want a passport:

Did your mother receive pre-natal or post-natal medical care?: Ok….

Name of Doctor: Well that might be difficult to track down but I’m pretty sure I could. My mother, on the other hand, probably has no idea who her mother’s obstetrician was. It was, like, 55 years ago.

Dates of appointments: SERIOUSLY? How anal retentive would you have to be to keep records of the dates of your prenatal appointments? Or conversely, how traumatic would they have to have been for them to be so memorable? And also, guys, I wasn’t there. I was freaking in utero for my mother’s prenatal care. Hence the term prenatal. Was I keeping a diary of her prenatal appointments while I was still in the womb? No, I’m sorry, I was not. Silly of me, I know.

Please describe the circumstances of your birth including the names (as well as address and phone number, if available) of persons present or in attendance at your birth: …………………..

……I…what?……….

…….but………I don’t………

…….pfft…..hehehe……ahahahahaha…..

LOL

Um, how shall I put this, I don’t really have a clear memory of my own birth. And I was not collecting names and contact info from the other people present. I was busy. BEING BORN. I also didn’t pass out party favors or commemorative gift baskets, and I didn’t make a scrapbook page. Martha Stewart has literally been disappointed with me since birth. I mean you’d think I spent all 9 months just developing organs and stuff. That was 9 months wasted. I could have crocheted doilies for the entire nursing staff of whatever hospital I wasn’t born in.

Anyway Puffin, the page snaps are behind the cut. Click to embiggen or go here to see the whole thing in a PDF.

On a more serious note, this strikes me as a twisted version of the birther obsession with the intimacies of the delivery room. Could Obama actually fill this form out? No of course not, no normal person ever could. There is also, of course, potential for abuse here, even for people who were born in hospitals in the normal way. When they are asking for every address you have ever lived in and every employer you haveever had, the chances of being able to complete the form in the best of cases is low. And that effectively gives some beaurocrat in DC the ability to deny you a passport for other reasons and use the guaranteed 3 errors on this form as an excuse. This just seems rife with potential for abuse.

What a weird start to the week Puffin!

Love
MacGuffin (who has no idea who may or may not have been present at her birth)

Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Puffin,

I have never watched The Jersey Shore. I have no desire to watch The Jersey Shore. I could care less about The Jersey Shore. I do, however, have a profound desire to Oscar Wilde-ify everything I come across in life, which may explain why my vocabulary inexplicably expands the moment I get even the slightest bit inebriated. You remember the penguin joke incident of 2006, I’m sure. Hence my utter delight at finding these videos from Playbill: transcripts from The Jersey Shore preformed in the style of Oscar Wilde, by the cast of the current Broadway production of The Importance of Being Earnest.

The lads of Broadway’s The Importance of Being Earnest — namely Santino Fontana and David Furr — have created a video series exclusively for Playbill, asking the question: What if Oscar Wilde’s famed comedy-of-manners characters talked trash instead of epigrams?

Fontana (as Algernon Moncrieff) and Furr (as John Worthing) swiped real lines from the reality series “Jersey Shore” — MTV’s thick slice of Italian-American stereotype mixed with twentysomething testosterone, booze and pasta — and dressed up in their Victorian best to deliver the lines.

“Jersey Shore Gone Wilde,” a five-part video series, launched April 18 on Playbill.com. It was shot in the lobby of the American Airlines Theatre, where the acclaimed and extended Brian Bedford-directed revival of the classic plays. A new chapter launches daily through April 22.

From the Playbill write-up, here.

Update: Ahahaha, I found a working link for the fifth part!

Enjoy Puffin

Love

MacGuffin, who is nearly sick with laughter. Never has the phrase ROFLMAO been used so literally.

You might also like:

Bacon Roses

Minimalist movie posters: Tron, Narnia, Ghostbusters 

The 20 Best Beer Commercials of ALL TIME!

Asshole of the Month- Mike Pence

An Actual Working Mermaid Swimsuit

The Big Lebowski Monopoly Board Game

CandyPenisLand- The Penis Theme Park from AIDS Awareness

Dalek Propaganda Posters and Doctor Who Miscellany

You can't just come in here with a banana and act like everything's peachy!

Dear Puffin

I have made a wonderful discovery! Shaun Usher, the man behind Letters of Note and Letterheady, has a new tumblr called Scaffoldage. He describes it as a “niche photo blog” about “skeletal archiporn” and frankly it’s amazing. I’ve poked around for a while and these are my faves:

No idea where this is from

The USS Macon

Sagrada Familia- BarcelonaGuilford CathedralThe Forbidden City- Beijing

Sagrada Familia- Barcelona

Something to do with snowboarding?

YKK construction site, 1992?

Unknown- from London in the 80's

There are tons and tons more. Such beautiful images from such mundane materials Puffin. I’m inspired, I really am.

Love

MacGuffin

Dear Puffin

Despite rumors to the contrary, I am still alive! My brain, however, has not not yet recovered, so rather than launching into my new rant about reproductive rights or my collective bargaining health care conspiracy theory (I will fill you in later Puffin but spoiler alert: I’m pissed at everyone except Antony Weiner) I will instead drop an awesome-bomb on you in the form of assorted Doctor Who stuff. Am I excited about the new season, which starts on Saturday? You bet! Will I be able to watch it? Of course not.

This is an AMAZING Dalek propaganda poster, by the fantastic Francesco Francavilla.

This is another one which was actually produced by the BBC themselves. Of course, it was a tie in to my least favorite episode ever. Honestly, Victory of the Daleks was awful. But the poster is good, and can be downloaded in hi res here. You can also get it as a tee shirt from, sigh, Hot Topic, which I refuse to link to. 
Victory through extermination!

Here is a Skaaro Institute of Extermination mug that I obviously need to own.

These are some minimalist Doctor Who posters from Etsyer Geekasms.

  

  

  

  

This one has a bit of a German/Weimar Republic feel to it. From deviantartist LycanLauren.

These are a series of Doctor Who travel posters, or the closest thing I can find to them. Follow the link to find a few more. With all the crazy worlds the Doctor visits you’d think there would be tons of awesome posters, like Steve Thomas’ wonderful Star Wars advertising posters and Middle Earth travel posters. But this seems to be pretty much it.

  

This is from the vault, and I may or may not already own the first one, but they’re still my favorite things ever so I will continue to blog them every couple of months until I grow up a bit and stop feeling the urge to show off. From Bill Mudron. Purchase info is here.

  

This is a fantastic French Tom Baker era poster. Unfortunately it’s a terrrrrrible quality pic. From flikr.

Next we have a mild riff off the Social Network’s extremely repurpose-able poster. From tumblr.

And this is just to settle an argument I’ve been having with certain truly stupid male relatives. Karen Gilliam is HOT, ok? End of story. Pics or it didn’t happen? Fine. From a photoshoot for Marie Claire. (I know at least 3 people who are going to need to change their trousers after looking at this.) Her legs alone warp the space time continuum.

This is a Tardis infographic. Click to embiggen and make it, you know, legible and stuff.

Next there is this great design from the wonderful Krystin, who also made the image that we sort of stole for our blog header. Hope that’s ok Krystin…..

And to finish off I present you with possibly the most impressive thing I have ever seen. A Tardis cake that is a) incredibly pretty and accurate and b) is bigger on the inside!!!!! How is that possible???? Well, as far as I understand it, the cake-engineer (I don’t even know who this person is, but I want them to be my friend forever) did something clever with mirrors to make the inside seem bigger than the outside. Puffin I cannot even cope with awesomeness of this magnitude. 

  

That is a CAKE! WhatisthisIdonteven…..Look at the detail!  

  

I am flabbergasted Puffin. Flabbergasted. I hope the season premier is awesome enough to live up to all this crazy coolness. Watch it for me.

Love

MacGuffin

Other geek stuff roundups:

My obsession with Tron Legacy, including TRON CAKE,

More minimalist Doctor Who posters,

Thor roundup, because May 5 is way too far away,

Poster art roundup 1 (Ghostbusters, Naria, Tron etc)

Poster art roundup 2, movie posters as icons and some Formula One stuff

Poster art roundup 3, Back to the Future and more

Poster art roundup 4,

Vintage Star Wars posters by Steve Thomas

Check out the poster art tag or the category in the drop down menu to the left. Also, please submit stuff! I love nerd-phenalia, so drop stuff in comments, send it to tumblr, whatever. I’m always looking for more.

Dear Puffin

This is why I am pro-choice. I will have more thoughts on this later, but for now please watch this, make your friends watch this, share it with anyone you can. It’s important.

This is an important reminder that the pro-choice position on reproductive rights is about CHOICE. It’s not pro-abortion. No one likes abortion. No one enjoys abortion. The point is that these issues are far too complicated to be dealt with by black and white laws, which is why the decision MUST be in the hands of the parent. And abortion is not always about the mother. The pro-life side (as if anyone is anti-life) loves to talk about the baby. Fine. Who gets to make decisions for their babies? The parent. End of discussion. This almost transcends the abortion debate. This is the case of a mother being banned by law from making the right medical decisions on behalf of her child. This is how much damage can be caused by trying to control women’s bodies. This. Right here.

Yours, with a heavy heart.

MacGuffin

Dear Puffin

For my next birthday, instead of the traditional hothouse orchids you usually send, I would like a dozen bacon roses please.

Bacon. Roses.

There is an instructable here.

Bacon roses Puffin. End of story.

Love

MacGuffin

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You can reach MacGuffin or Puffin at MacGuffinandPuffin AT gmail DOT com

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