"Seriously, stop fetishising and commodifying my ghastly body. I worked long and hard to get this far out of shape..."

"... and I don�t need you telling me that�s fine and that I�m actually the new big thing (literally) in male body types...."

�Dadbod�. It�s a horrible little dismissal, suggesting cosy respectability and the inevitable slide into middle age. Me, I�ve always thought of my rejection of physical fitness as rather rock�n�roll, an almost political act of dietary rebellion....

Does jibe/jive jibe/jive with your sense of spelling?

In the first post of today, there's a quote about a white supremacist troll who "listed examples that appeared to jive with the sample of angry responses."

In the comments, Tom B said, "JIBE not JIVE you f*%#ing @&*%! aaaaaaaaaaah," and The Godfather said "Thanks, Tom B: You screamed so I don't have to," and holdfast said: "That's ok, I speak Jive"... which is that flies above all controversy.

But for the last word...
Click for more �

"Who Is This Objectively Badass Attorney Running The Freddie Gray Investigation?"

Headline at a Huffpo article that's teased on the Huffpro front page with "BALTIMORE BADASS":



If the question is the abuse of government power in the form of the police, the answer is not mindless cheerleading for another form of government power, a prosecutor.

Objectively Badass...

Yeah, let's be objective. Let's be level-headed and demand that all government power � police, prosecutors, the lot � operate within the bounds of the law.

My criticism is of the headline and the front-page teaser. The article doesn't contain the word "badass" or present Marilyn Mosby as anything that warrants the use of the word "badass." She herself is saying appropriate things like "I uphold the law" and "At the end of the day I�m here to do my job. It�s about applying justice fairly and equally to those with and without a badge. Did I treat this case any different in the pursuit of justice? No, I didn�t."

I wonder what pushed Huffpo to use that word "badass." I doubt if the word would have been chosen if Mosby were a white male.

"There was the story about a man bringing a gun to an Easter church service � which went off when it got caught on his pants."

"Then we had a guy accidentally shooting his mother-in-law through the wall of her trailer when his target was actually an armadillo ('That bullet couldn�t have taken a more American journey if it had punctured a Kraft single, ricocheted off a Nascar trophy and got lodged in a painting of Elvis and Jesus holding hands at a rodeo,' observed Williams). But neither of these news stories could even come close to the report that succeeded in taking home the 2015 'Mercun Award crown..."

From a WSJ report on "The Daily Show"'s  awards based on the "popular social-media meme #Murica." The WSJ's link on the hashtag goes not to Twitter but to the Urban Dictionary, which defines the term in an openly bigoted manner: "The way un-educated Americans (generally rednecks, hicks, republicans, or very patriotic people) say America" and "The term 'murica' is the way how many people with extremely thick, American accents, pronounce 'America'. The term is used to denote extreme, extreme nationalism and patriotism, but not necessarily facism. It is generally seen as a derogatory yet humorous way to describe most Americans: fat, lazy, gunwielding, war loving, horse riding, saloon fighting, beer drinking, sex wanting or etc."

"Mayor Rahm Emanuel said Wednesday he had an 'honest, frank conversation' with Spike Lee to let the movie director know..."

"... that he doesn�t like, 'Chiraq,' the working title of Lee's coming movie on black-on-black violence based in Chicago�s crime-ridden Englewood community."

Emanuel didn�t say whether he asked Lee to change the name.... But the mayor made it clear that he had used the Hollywood pipeline provided by his brother, super-agent Ari Emanuel, to make his feelings known directly to Spike Lee. The face-to-face meeting took place in the mayor�s office prior to Wednesday�s City Council meeting....

In an apparent attempt to soften the blow of the title, "Chiraq," Lee... noted that gun violence is �not limited� to Chicago. It�s happening in Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York, where he�s from. He even talked about the derogatory name used to describe a part of Brooklyn where he�s from. He talked about how similarly insulting names applied to Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Well, apparently "Chiraq" is a great title. It's getting such high level attention. You can't buy that kind of PR. Obviously, it's also negative PR for the city, but Rahm is trying to squeeze good PR out of the bad (on the theory that Chicago isn't really that bad and even if it is, other cities are also bad... or worse).



ADDED: From a year ago: "How Chicago Became 'Chiraq'":

President Obama may have gotten our troops out of Iraq, but the gunfire in his hometown of Chicago is still earning it a searing nickname coined by young people who live there.

Chiraq.

Misunderstood word of the day: Yardy.

I was reading a Guardian article titled "Can Oregon's tiny houses be part of the solution to homelessness?"

The 30 dwellings at Opportunity Village[, in Eugene, are] made of prefab donated materials, cost �around $3,300 a unit.� The savings come from the fact that they are basically detached bedrooms, with no utilities or running water....

[And] Dignity Village, two hours� drive north, on the outskirts of Portland... began in 2001 as a �tent city�, and a protest against the city�s harassment of homeless people... From 2003, the tents were replaced with tiny homes. Since then, the village has successfully offered housing on the communalist model that Opportunity Village is patterned on.

A commenter named RoughSleeper:

They look like sheds on allotments. In which case, can we have chickens and grow our own food? Will there be some kind of community policing to stop a yardy culture growing?

Chickens and growing your own food? I assumed "yardies" were something like "foodies" and filed away the new slang to use the next time Meade fantasizes about putting a chicken tractor and greenhouse in our backyard.

But that's not what RoughSleeper was talking about. Urban Dictionary says � I'll quote the more polite definition � "Yardy is another word for a Jamaican, specifically one from a difficult socio-economic area. The term stems from the slang name given to occupants of government yards in Trenchtown, a neighborhood in West Kingston, Jamaica. Trenchtown was originally built as a housing project following devastation caused by Hurricane Charlie. Each development was built around a central courtyard with communal cooking facilities. Due to the poverty endemic in the neighborhood, crime and gang violence became rife, leading the occupants of Trenchtown to be in part stigmatized by the term 'Yardie.'"

Bo Ryan was the pinball wizard of Pennsylvania.

He was better than anyone at freezing the flippers, he says. But what's happening in that second video? Nigel Hayes says: "We care more about suckoffs than smash battles. We�re a super smash brothers team. FIFA�s taken a back seat to that, all we care about is suckoffs." Okay, I had to research that. I don't even know what FIFA is, let alone suckoffs. So I think FIFA is a soccer videogame. And I'm going to trust Reddit on "suckoffs":

Is he talking about blowjobs or am I outta the loop on something?

I imagine they are all bad at Smash, so matches are "suckoffs" because they are seeing who sucks the most? That's all I got.

ADDED: You know, there's a lot of pressure on the Badgers to be adorably weird.