"I'm mad as gel, and I can't bake it anymore!"

Archive » 2010 » February

Blaming the Victim

By Cyberquill • 02/24/2010 • 41 Comments

An attractive young woman suits up in a tight mini skirt and a skimpy peekaboo blouse, paints her face like Irma la Douce, dons a flashy diamond necklace, sticks a wad of 100-dollar bills into each of her exposed garters, puts on a pair of four-inch stilettos, gets plastered out of her mind, and proceeds to take a midnight stroll on the South Side of Chicago, all by herself.

She ends up raped, strangled, and robbed.

Now, if—upon condemning this act of violence—you ever so gently offered for consideration the thesis that the young lady’s choices in the run-up to her demise may not have been among the most conducive to her personal welfare, chances are you’d be taken to the woodshed by every women’s and victim’s rights group under the sun for “blaming the victim” in a disgraceful bid to make excuses for her attacker(s), as if you were implying that on account of the victim’s conduct the crime committed was less severe than had she been stone sober, wrapped in a burlap blanket with a potato sack over her head, and assaulted en route to the grocery store in broad daylight with fifteen body guards and a pack of … (Read More »»)

Living with DDD

By Cyberquill • 02/12/2010 • 27 Comments

Some folks were born one sex but would like to be the other. More precisely, they feel they are the opposite sex, but owing to some sort of cosmic misunderstanding or genetic snafu, their soul/spirit/essence or whatever came to inhabit the wrong body. Now their hormones find themselves in a perpetual state of war with their external anatomy, thus resulting in a painfully conflicted existence. Something like that. So if a man perceives himself to be trapped in a female body or vice-versa, and the psychological distress over such mismatch impairs his/her daily functioning, that person is diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder.

Apparently, GID has been officially classified as a medical condition such that, in some cases, sex change operations may even be tax-deductible as medical rather than cosmetic procedures. Translation: you and I foot the bill. At least part of it. And that’s fine. Nothing wrong with helping the sick.

My aim is not to dispute or even to debate the merits of such classification. I do, however, contend that if GID indeed amounts to a genuine medical condition, then my DDD is a genuine medical condition as well.

I honestly don’t know if I’m joking or not, as I find it increasingly difficult to tell what is and what isn’t a joke when it comes to the ever growing lexicon of … (Read More »»)

On Writing Kingly, Snakes, and Wheels

By Cyberquill • 02/07/2010 • 18 Comments

In his splendidly (oops…) entertaining and highly (ouch!) edifying writing primer On Writing–A Memoir of the Craft, horrormeister Stephen King counsels against the use of adverbs:

Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They’re the ones that usually end in -ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. With the passive voice, the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously; it is a the voice of little boys wearing shoepolish moustaches and little girls clumping around in Mommy’s high heels. With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.

The above 80-word paragraph features five adverbs, i.e., 6.25% of it is pure adverbiage—quite remarkable for a paragraph explicitly composed to discourage rather than to promote their employment—including a whopping three instances of the word usually. (On the previous page, Mr. King had stated that he was “not in love” with the sentence My romance with Shayna began with our first kiss because it contained the word with twice in four words.)

Mr. King continues … (Read More »»)