Just when you thought this song couldn't get any funnier . . .

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What else can those girls do with their hot plates?

Radioactive Bikini

Is that, perchance, a woman wearing a nuclear mushroom cloud as a bikini? Why yes, yes it is. I'll admit it, I just watched the uber scary "The Hills Have Eyes", and apart from my dissection of the stereotypical horror movie roles, you know, innapropriate sexual tension setting the stage for puritanical violent payback, female characters with nary a thoughtful line to their beautifully mussed heads, I thought, IS THIS POSSIBLE? How damaging is nuclear testing, anyway? Well, it turns out there was a test site in Nevada that seems to somewhat mirror the one in the movie, but it is by no means deserted; a "non-profit" group with benefactors such as Lockhead Martin runs the "museum". Even more disturbing, Bush wanted to test a new type of bomb at this very same facility a few short years ago, but luckily congress managed to screw up the cajones to turn him down. Anyhow, the lovely lady pictured above is a showgirl who earned the title "Miss A-Bomb" during the tourist attraction days of the testing site, back when Vegas rat pack wannabes could visit hotels with "mushroom cloud views." And as for the actual effects of the fallout? Thousands and thousands of cancer cases were paid out with settlements ranging up to $500,000 a pop. Boo!

Magic Kitchen!

I thought Valium was the 50s housewife's "mothers' little helper", not LSD?

Now you see her . . .

Funny, I don't remember them retouching Dan Rather or Walter Cronkite like that . . .

Size Matters

I am not afraid to be fat. I DO NOT FEAR MY BUTT!! Okay, fine, maybe I do, a little. I mean, I have this lovely stack of "look-at-us-we're-skinnier-than-you'll-ever-be, and-have-more-expensive-clothes-than-you'll-ever own" magazines that I've been pawing through, and I do feel very reminded that my middle is more middle america than Vogue. But I can't say that I mind, and I'm certainly not alone. We've all seen the pictures of Pam Anderson (shown here) or Tyra Banks or even Oprah without their make-up on, and everyone knows that the glossy pages of a magazine are an airbrushed fantasy. And so I wonder, since most of us are aware that the images that we confront are an impossible standard, why do we beat ourselves up so much in the pusuit of these "ideals"?
Not that I'm advocating a cheeseburger in every hand and a complete lack of attention to appearance, but I wonder where moderation went when it left? Is it hiding out with those weapons of mass destruction somewhere? On the aforementioned "Top Model", there was a plus size model represented. They showed the height and weight of the girls at the beginning of the show, and guess what? This "plus size" model was within a very healthy range on the BMI- I looked it up! Is that what we've come to? Would Marilyn Monroe have been encouraged to have gastric bypass if she were around today? What kind of crazy world is this?
As women in this country, are we ever going to be satified with who we actually are, and not who we can starve and botox ourselves into becoming? And, this blog, does it make me look fat?

Fast Food Fetish

Is watching America's Next Top Model while eating chips, dip, brownies and the ironic diet coke some sort of subversive self torture? Am I laughing in the face of the conventionally underweight body image, or am I watching one form of body injury while performing another? Are we actually holding ourselves to the impossibe media beauty standard while ensuring that we fall incredibly short? Am I laughing at this show or brainwashing myself?

I think that celebrating the human form is a beautiful form of expression, it's just that so much of the messages feel less like celebration and more like the "doublethink" that Orwell describes in 1984. Like that Carl's Junior ad camaign with the toothpick model manging on a burger as big as her airbrushed face while getting off on riding a mechanical bull or washing a car- that likely sold a lot more product than would a model of a healthy weight eating their baked potatoes and salads would. But do our puritan roots follow us as a culture so closely that beauty must be enexorably linked with torture? Are we a society of closet S & M fetishists? "Look like you've starved yourself, while actually starving yourself of nutrients with fast, cheap, and apparently sexy fast food loaded in sodium and fat". Leave it to the uppity female vegetarian to mouth off about all this . . . can you hear me around this bite of brownie?