My BFF has 4 Legs

I worked late all week, so Goldie got extra time with the grandparents (Hey, my dad calls her & me "the kids.")

Last night something scary happened. A guy showed up at their front door wanting to use the phone.

It is kind of pathetic that a man coming to the door asking to use the phone is a scary thing, huh? But it IS. I mean, who DOES that? They can't be up to any good, can they?

How many random phoneless people wander suburbia, stopping by the homes of the elderly to make a call?

I wasn't around to tell the guy I was going to call the cops - because I truly think that's what I would have done - but fortunately Goldie came to the rescue.

Mom said the dog hurled at herself at the man with the fury of a hound unleashed from hell. He was very, very lucky the screen door held.

Mom passed a cordless phone out to him, so if he indeed needed to make a call, he got to do it. But if he had any darker ambitions, they were thwarted by 65 pounds of rabid-looking mutt. Ha!

Another reason Goldie is officially The Greatest Dog in the World.

In a more relaxed moment.

Sotomayor and Latina vision

I was twittering the other day when @ayse said

I'm not sure I'll be able to make it thru the inevitable "reverse discrimination against white males" hooha during Sotomayor's confirmation.8:09 AM May 27th from web

Half an hour later, former Speaker of the House @newtgingrich tweeted

"White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.""

Good call, Ayse. On the money.

One line taken out of context from an old speech has been used by right-wingers to indict Sotomayor over and over for her "racism:"

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life.

Lawsamercy. How can she SAY that? We're all equal! If we say we aren't equal, then we are racist!!

Here's why she can say that: white privilege.

Here's what white people, me included, fail to see on a day to day basis: our very skin color affords us a feeling of ease and comfort in this society that people of color don't have.

The deck is stacked in our favor. White people set up the system, white people run the system, and white people make the system work best for other white people, especially white people of means.

White privilege means that we can trust, if we are rejected for a job, that it isn't because of our skin color. We can go shopping without people following us around the store. When we get pulled over by a cop, we have very little worry about getting beaten up or shot. If our children get put in special education, we trust that it is because they truly have special needs, not because of the color of their skin.

Sotomayor, no matter how entrenched in the system she becomes, still has the advantage of an outsider's perspective, because, no matter who she becomes, no matter what she does, she will still be largely seen and treated as a woman of color, as something outside the norm.

It's like the old saying about being as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. To be a person of color in our society is to have to be aware, at all times, where the rocking chairs are and who is occupying them, because still, even in 2009, the moment you quit paying attention is the moment your tail gets crushed.

It is this sharper vision I believe she was speaking of in her speech. She was saying that her perspective as a Latina woman, in a vast field of white male judges, brings something they can't offer because she sees things they don't. That isn't racism, that's life experience.

And in case you're going to hit me with the "but everything has changed" argument, let me first say that yes, things have changed and are still changing for the better. But here are some news stories from recent past:
Ecuadoran man killed by mob in hate crime: "The teens later told police that they were from East Patchogue and Medford and that they were looking for Hispanics to beat up."
Unarmed man shot by officer in train station
State Trooper Chokes Paramedic

Those are just a few. There are many, many others that pop up so often that it is hard to keep track of them all - and those are just the ones that are reported.

So when Sonia Sotomayor says she might have perspective that white males don't, I believe her. She has to.

Like Niagara Falls. Or the prom scene from Carrie.

Boys, hide your eyes. I'm going to talk about men-stroo-ation. Again. Sorry.

Ladies, you know that there are periods and then there are those periods that make you step back and say "Great jumping jehosephat, what on earth happened to me?"

It's like when you are standing there at the Niagara Falls, feeling like there is NO WAY all that water could come from Canada. It just doesn't seem possible. But there it is.

Last night I was having a Niagara Falls incident.

And I was out watching quite possibly the world's most tweeted Karaoke Night with about a dozen bloggers at the unfortunately named "Dimples" in beautiful downtown Burbank, California.

I went to the one solo restroom to pee.

As soon as I sat down, someone rattled the door, trying to get in, and yelled SORRY!!

When I went to flush, the handle did that thing where it just goes all the way to the bottom without the normal feeling of flushing and then about 3 ounces of water dispenses into the bowl and the toilet contents swirl and swirl and never go down.

I waited and waited. I could hear the girl outside talking to someone. And then someone else.

I flushed ---- too soon --- swirl, swirl, swirl.

Waiting. Voices from outside "Come ONNNNN!" "My GAWD!!"

I considered just waltzing out and leaving the toilet unflushed. But the Niagara Falls effect had done its worst and I wasn't eager to share that with the world.

As a matter of fact, this photo of OJ:

was on the ceiling above the toilet, and it looked a bit like he had been there. On a certain night in June 1994. Allegedly.

So I waited and waited for the toilet to fill. Again. Again.

I was probably in there more than 5 minutes, which seems like forever when you are on the inside of a toilet stall door and you know there are a line of people on the outside of the toilet stall and YOU KNOW WHAT THEY ARE THINKING. And what they are thinking isn't "Oh, she is probably politely waiting for the defective toilet to finish flushing."

I had victory on the fourth flush. Evidence destroyed.

I walked out to a line of people glaring at me with Horror and Disgust. I was, in their eyes, the woman who had dared poop in the one tiny stall of a busy club.

I thought about trying to explain myself. "Niagara Falls! Canadians! Toilets that don't work right!" but then I decided to cut my losses and skeedaddle back to the truly embarrassing part of the evening - karaoke.


Badass Dad sings (and sings well) while Undomestic Diva videos/photos/tweets or something.

A long way from pirate pants

One of the great disappointments of my life has been, of course, Mel. You know who I'm talking about. THE Mel. But I want to know - how could a man who started out so good go so bad?

When I was in college, my girlfriends and I swooned over every one of Mel's movie appearances. We escaped from homework and went to distract ourselves with thoughts of Mel...ahhhh Mel.

He was the hottest thing since Tabasco sauce! Even with the movie theater air conditioning blasting, we had to dab our youthful, unlined brows with those little foldy paper napkins from the snack bar.

And how could we not? He started out as a leather-glad road warrior with a cute Aussie accent in Mad Max:


Then he steamed up the Indonesian tropics as idealistic cub reporter Guy Hamilton in "The Year of Living Dangerously," which left us all wanting to be Sigourney Weaver:


And who could ever forget that unbuttoned shirt and the ponytail and those pirate pants Mel wore as he played ultimate Sailor Bad Boy Fletcher Christian in The Bounty? Not me!

(Edited to add: a whole Internet and not a single photo of the pirate pants? What kind of cruel world IS this??)

We heard that Mel was happily married and quite religious and didn't believe in birth control. That put me off a bit, and soon other fantasy men replaced Mel in my affections, like all of the Team 7-11 Tour de France riders:

Why am I craving a Slurpee?...but I digress.

After college, Mel started doing sillier and sillier movies and I sort of lost track of him until he built a chapel for hardcore old-school Catholics in my area and he popped back onto my radar.

That didn't bother me. You can practice whatever religion you want, but when you proclaim your religion and then show up allegedly driving drunk and making anti-Semitic slurs and calling a female police officer "Sugar Tits," well, I'm outie.

I have this theory about drunkenness. People generally become more of what they really, truly are when they get intoxicated. The person with sublimated rage starts throwing punches. The comic starts getting sillier. And the anti-Semite anti-feminist? He starts acting like Mel did.

Mugshot

Oh, and Mel? If you're gonna try to keep working in Hollywood, you might wanta get right with Judaism. Just sayin' that Msrs. Katzenburg, Spielberg and Glazer might not wanna hear your theory about how Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.

But losing faith in Mel back then was convenient, because now I don't have to get irritated because of this whole Russian pregnant girlfriend/divorce mess and I don't have to point out that, hey, don't old-school Catholics generally disapprove of divorce? Because that would be unkind of me to say, wouldn't it?

Almost as unkind as posting a photo like this:

Don't worry, man. I'm sure she loves you for your personality.

Join my ponzi scheme

Updated: I have five victims participants. One more, please? You NEED 36 random books! Think how proud you will be to donate them all to the library book sale!

My sis got me involved in this harmless ponzi scheme - a book-sharing club. I had to mail one random paperback book to someone and am supposed to get 36 books in the mail.

I kind of hope it doesn't work, given that I have books piled on every available surface already. But what the heck.

This is predicated on me finding 6 suckers friends to join in. I already have 2. Anyone else want to play?

Email me at suebobdavis aaaat g mail and I will send you the deets. Please? Please don't make me beg. It really isn't pretty.