sunday best-of blogging

best song to program a valentine-themed stuffed animal to play when squeezed: "absolutely cuckoo" by the magnetic fields. this gift is best for a significant other who is newly significant, but whom you're also pretty confident about. of course, i do allow for the possibility that the sentiment of this song is only irresistibly enticing to me, given my overly mushy reaction to shoe-gazing nerds, but i think it's a small possibility. if there is a way to fit the stuffed animal with some kind of pocketed garment, the pockets of which could then be filled with cereal, all the better. but again, i mean, maybe just for me.

best birthday*: happy 197th to chuck darwin, that crazy rabble-rousing boy with a dream, whose work has somehow turned the united states into a scene out of dr. seuss's the butter battle book, and abraham lincoln, whose battle was far from buttery and is, in sometimes subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle ways, every bit as ongoing, curiously enough in mostly the same regions. there are plenty of public celebrations being held in honor of darwin, and most of us americans get to sleep late for a day in honor of lincoln (and some other guy, whatever the hell his name was), but i think it might be good if each of us had a private moment of reflection today on the efforts of these two fellows and their dedication to the idea of emancipation, both physical and intellectual. it's tempting to wonder if they would have gone to such lengths if they had known how stubborn the world would turn out to be about accepting their proposed changes, even this far down the road; i'm pretty sure, though, that neither of them would have done anything differently, and that's why i love them. maybe you could blow out some candles and make some earnest wishes in their honor.

most ridiculous grounds for suspension: right here in massachusetts, where i had believed the overall crazy level was slightly lower than the national average, a six-year-old boy was suspended from first grade for three days after supposedly touching a female classmate's skin beneath her waistband. according to the boy, the girl pushed him or something, and he reached out to get her back as she was walking away and grabbed a bit of her shirt. as the article states, grounds for sexual harassment are typically that the harasser got, or desired to get, some sort of sexual satisfaction out of his or her behavior; the boy's mother has been struggling to explain the situation to her son, because he doesn't know what any of the terminology means—he isn't capable of sexual satisfaction. i'm sorry, i understand that people want nothing so much as to protect their children, but i think this is the single most nonsensical thing i've ever heard**. he didn't pinch her ass, he didn't ask her if she wanted to play with his "pink crayon," he just grabbed her, the way all little kids are constantly doing. the odds of the girl being adversely affected by it in any lasting way are slim to none. in my opinion, you're doing more damage to a child by taking this sort of action, because it creates the idea that most contact is negative. i don't have a kid, so it's harder for me to pass judgment about where lines really ought to be drawn, but i'm pretty sure that this case is nuts.

most barbaric arcade game: eight corners market in scarborough, maine, has installed a modified version of the classic claw tank, where the prizes are lobsters instead of toys. for two dollars a player can watch the lobsters "flap their tails, flail their claws and squirm this way and that" before being hauled up to the surface to meet their scalding fates. i will never understand the concept of torture as amusement. i guess some people have an easier time dissociating a living thing from its own sentience. i don't care whether or not you believe lobsters experience any form of pain, the fact that they attempt to escape from the claw more or less proves that they do experience some form of fear for their lives, and so inducing and then prolonging that experience for fun is pretty cruel. people are going to eat animals, that's just how it goes, but do we have to do things like this to them first? really? come on.

best duh: "in hindsight, [i] should have been suspicious of a veterinarian who only made house calls and treated animals at an undisclosed location." kudos to raymond reid, the owner of an incredibly lucky boston terrier named burt. burt survived an unspecified operation performed by steven vassall, a college student with impressive delusions of grandeur who was posing as a veterinarian and cutting up pets under who knows what conditions, maybe in his kitchen or the back of his van. that's a pretty rotten way to turn a buck. the news coverage is giving most of the attention to fred, the kitten who went undercover in the sting that ultimately led to vassall's arrest, but i think the animals who most deserve medals are the ones this creep has already treated. especially burt, who is probably experiencing extra hardships.





* i have to give an honorable mention to my imo, whose birthday was february 8. he's got some great new artwork up; here's my favorite:

** when i searched for an article on this story to link to, some headlines popped up about a six-year-old who was suspended for sharing lemon drops, but i couldn't bring myself to read that story. apparently sharing is only caring when it's done under the watchful eye of a responsible authority figure; the rest of the time, it's dirty and must be punished.