I MARRIED A TEENAGE MONKEY

Annette Funicello ... has the beat.



She also has The Beach Boys for a backing band. You can do that when yr Annette Funicello.

By order of the court,

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TEENAGE LOBOTOMY

Speaking of Annette Funicello, she invented the bikini film genre, you know.



Which is cool, because otherwise, we could never say that no one’s ever made a film featuring Frankie Avalon fighting himself, a surfing gorilla and Don Rickles saying, “Let’s do the Watusi!”

To say nothing of the guest performance by Little Stevie Wonder. Backed by the world's first skinhead band, no less.

The word “Kooky!” was invented for movies like this.

That warm California sun,

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EASTER EVERYWHERE (#4 OF 4): THE MOMENT YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR

Well, of course, as the headline suggests, this series was always an excuse to eventually post a 13th Floor Elevators song at the end.

And here it is.

Nothing to do with Easter, of course. But then the same could be said for Playmate pinball machines and Jessica Rabbit in bondage (if not Cthulhu).

Anyway, to keep some level of bunny consistency, I’ll add this cute yet disturbing picture which, now that I think of it, goes rather well with influential Texas psychedelica.


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Okay, and that’s all I’ve got for Easter. Next year I’ll try to work in some obscure Mitch Easter jokes.

Bouncing off the ceiling,

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GAY THUNDERSTORMS WILL RAIN GAYS ALL OVER YR CHILDREN AND THEN YOU’LL BE SORRY YOU TOOK OUR FREEDOM

Now that gays can get married to other gays in FOUR WHOLE STATES, the backlash of Big Gay Fear has begun, as you knew it would.

The National Organization for Marriage has prepared a national TV campaign full of Impending Gay Marriage Doom – complete with heavy weather metaphors – that really has to be seen to be believed.

It’s so jaw-droppingly WRONG that I can’t even bring myself to embed it. But you can watch it on YouTube here – and I recommend that you do so.

Otherwise, you won’t get the humor of this great mashup version mixing the ad with a Weather Girls video.

Which is really the only reason I’m mentioning the ad at all. Production design and sheer chutzpah aside (notice that bit about rainbows at the end?), the ad is the usual faux-earnest shit-stirring Fear Card that doesn’t say anything that hasn’t already been said (and debunked) about the ZOMG Homosexual Agenda® a hundred million times.

Human Rights Campaign has a good fact-check of the ad’s “claims” that’s worth examining in case you find yrself cornered by a NOM member in the break room or something. But as I’ve said before, when you trade in Big Fear, logic and facts beside the point.

So you might as well mock them with Weather Girls footage.

Enjoy it while you can, as NOM has spent the weekend patrolling YouTube and demanding takedowns of unauthorized footage of the auditions – as well as any clip they don’t own that shows them (like Maddow’s short segment on it), although people have been making copies and re-uploading them once they get taken down.

Alternately, you can take a page from Ana Marie Cox and mock their acronym, which on the Interwub is more likely to be mistaken for something else.

Nomnomnom,

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EDITED TO ADD [a few minutes later]: You can also mock NOM's other acronym, 2M4M, which also means something else in Internetland.

Meanwhile, according to Violet Blue, it seems Amazon.com has decided to stop including "adult" titles in its sales ranking, which seems to mean no more LGBT books – for yr protection, apparently. WTF, Amazon?

So ... maybe we should take NOM a little more seriously after all?

AMAZON.COM IS NO PLACE FOR ADULTS

I know I mentioned this at the end of the previous post, but this deserves some extra attention, since the initial story has expanded well beyond the Violet Blue post where I first saw it.

THE STORY SO FAR: Some time over the last few days, Amazon.com apparently began delisting “adult” books from their sales rankings, which ensures they don't pop up in search results and best-seller lists. Consequently, it’s knocking an awful lot of LGBT titles off its search results and best-seller lists.

Here’s what else it also affects so far according to the LA Times:

Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 by Michel Foucault
Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison (2005 Plume edition)
Little Birds: Erotica by Anais Nin
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominque Bauby (1997 Knopf edition)
Maurice by E.M. Forster (2005 W.W. Norton edition)
Becoming a Man by Paul Monette, which won the 1992 National Book Award.

Brokeback Mountain was also reportedly off the rankings, though it now seems to be back on.

At the moment, it's not really clear just what's going on. When author Mark R. Probst noticed that hundreds of LGBT titles had been deranked, he wrote Amazon to explain themselves and they said: "In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature."

Several thousand angry Twitters later, Amazon is now saying it's a glitch.

Uh huh.

So which is it? Policy or glitch? Case precedent leans towards "policy", if only because Amazon.com ran into a similar, less-publicized problem two months ago when it deranked a number of memoirs by gay strippers and porn stars while leaving similar books by Cody Diablo and Jenna Jameson on the ranking list. And for all we know, the "glitch" could simply be that the policy is accidentally deranking hetero titles.

It's possible there's a rational explanation for all this, if only because the people at Amazon strike me as reasonably bright sparks more often than not. It's hard to imagine they would make a business decision this stupid. What bookseller in his/her right mind would make it HARDER for long-tail customers to find something they want to pay for, much less do so in a way that looks as though it's engaging in censorship, which would not only anger a decent chunk of their customer base, but also the authors and publishers whose books they sell?

Either way, until Amazon can get its story straight, as of now I am boycotting all further purchases on Amazon.com. If it's a glitch, fix it. If it's a policy (even if the "policy" is from some crazed middle manager acting unilaterally), rescind it. The fact that I can still buy deranked books on Amazon is irrelevant. So is the question of whether the alleged policy targets LGBT titles over hetero titles. I do not want Amazon or anyone else filtering my search results for my own protection. I do not need protecting from Teh Fuckingz.

And I'd better not hear that this is all because some morality pressure group complained that their kid bought a Dan Savage book or something.

MEGA FAIL,

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