Dogged Pessimism

Before I leave the B-Word office to spend the weekend working in the air-conditioned, shades-drawn splendor of my own home, I wanted to hip you folks to two very cool projects that are looking for your input and support.

The first comes courtesy of Stacy Bias, a Portlander who many of you may have heard of because she's pretty much a one-woman dynamo of both fat activism and general creativity. Have you heard of Fat Girl Speaks? That'd be Stacy. Visited the TechnoDyke.com community? Stacy, again. Indulged in the sweet-smelling lippy goodness of Pussy Pucker Pots? All Stacy.

Anyhoo, her new undertaking is an oral, written, and visual history project called The Fat Experience Project. Here's what she's got to say about it:

During the mid-'80s, my political education came almost entirely from Bloom County, to which my brother introduced me and to which I immediately became attached. Really, what's not to love about a preadolescent Bob Woodward type, his feminist elementary-school teacher, and a neurotic penguin with an unhealthy Caspar Weinberger obsession?

I haven't posted about either WAM or the rest of my trip east because, frankly, I haven't had time — I got back to Portland with a teetering pile of pre-production work about to fall off my already stacked-sky-high plate, and I'm still slogging through it. But I have been reading what others out there have had to say about their conference experiences, and it's a combination of unsurprising, enlightening, and depressing.

Among the postconference musings I read today were those of Blackamazon, one of which has started something of a...situation with Seal Press. Namely, the musing — which came at the end of a long and sort-of-unrelated-to-said-musing post — was "Fuck Seal Press," and the situation was that the ladies at Seal jumped in to defend themselves, with less than satisfactory results. And when I say "less than satisfactory," I mean for everyone.

I was amped for the premiere of the new Fox sitcom The Return of Jezebel James. First off, as someone whose relationship to TV normally mimics that of a wino and a big bottle of Night Train, the writer’s strike and its aftermath has been hard for me. Second, series creator Amy Sherman-Palladino was the brains (and something like 80% of the dialogue) behind Gilmore Girls, and I loved Gilmore Girls. And finally, if 2007 was the year of the unexpected-pregnancy film, 2008 is shaping up to be the year of the Odd Couple-esque gestational-surrogacy comedy—along with Jezebel James, there’s the upcoming Tina Fey-Amy Poehler film Baby Mama—and I was curious to see how a half-hour sitcom was going to tackle the tricky subject of assisted reproduction.

Meet Sprint, an adorable (check out those eyebrows!) six-month-old pit bull mix who's looking for love — more specifically, looking for a permanent home in the San Francisco Bay Area. He turned up on Lisa's doorstep recently, and she and her friend Janet are hoping to find him a new family. Could it be your family? Read on for fun facts about this sweet little dude.

I'm going to start this post by admitting that, most mornings, I wake up and immediately turn on the Today show. Partly it's a kind of alarm supplement, to ensure that I don't fall back asleep. Partly it's because I like to know if anything was attacked or blown up or wiped out or otherwise disaster-fied in the previous 8 to 10 hours. And finally, I find Matt Lauer and Al Roker oddly soothing in the A.M.

The New York Times continues to kill with its abundance of dog coverage. The weekend brought a look at the four new breeds making their debut at the mighty Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show; today, there's a piece in the Sports section on the various dynasties of Westminster-winning dogs. (Warning: If you don't want to hear anything about chilled canine semen, stay away.)

Lots of dog news this weekend. First and most notable is the New York Times story and photo essay on the dogs rescued from Michael Vick's dogfighting operation last year, many of whom are now residing at the Best Friends Sanctuary in Utah. (The dogs at that sanctuary are the main focus of the piece, but it should also be noted that 10 of the dogs are in the care of awesome Bay Area nonprofit BAD RAP.)

I was both depressed and intrigued when I read about the bizarre double suicide of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake last summer. Bitch interviewed Duncan way, way back in Bitch no. 7, when she and Blake had just completed ZeroZero, the third in a series of truly awesome CD-roms for girls following Chop Suey and Smarty.

Every year, I'm one of the many critics invited to select their top 10 albums and singles for the Village Voice's venerable (if interesting largely only to other music critics) Pazz & Jop poll. I stopped writing about music for a (fractional) living seven years ago, and most music criticism gives me hives now, but I still love music itself, and the nice thing about Pazz & Jop is that you don't actually have to wax adjectival about your picks, you're just like: White Stripes. I liked it. Boom.