those of you who (out of kindness, pity or a mixture of the two) rss feed this blog, know that it’s been quiet on kateklonick.com.

a little too quiet perhaps. eerie, even.

to my credit, it’s been for a good reason. i have taken a job as a blogger/reporter for talking points memo, specifically tpmmuckraker.  it is a fantastic organization, with fantastic people and feeling incredibly lucky to be there, i have gladly handed over my early mornings, days, evenings, holidays and weekends to the noble cause of this modern fourth estate.  so if you can’t get enough of me here, tpm is a great place to start.

in other news, my little brother is back from australia, mott got a new tank, my best friends got married, turns out nyquil gives you crazy dreams, dan savage’s mama died, and pixar finally outdid itself.

Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine was on Capitol Hill this morning to testify to the House Subcommittee on International Relations, Human Rights and Oversight, about his report on the FBI’s role in detainee interrogations, released two weeks ago.

[. . .]  (more…)

Street Vendor selling umbrellas: Get ‘em now. Get ‘em now.  They’re only going to get more expensive the harder it rains.

but sometimes, you get so wrapped up in an identity or a cause, that you stop thinking critically.  though, i was probably only able to come to the aforementioned conclusion because i hadn’t rotted my brain on Sonic the Hedgehog.

so let’s start from the beginning:

feministing.com, a blog which i mostly agree with, but sometimes disagree with, posted an angry, and seemingly logical post about the terrible misogyny of GTA IV.

“ok,” i thought, “killing prositutes is bad. therefore, GTA IV is bad. therefore i am anti-GTA IV. ta da! i win! give me a beer!” 

but then i started to hear dissenting opinions from people i trust.

“do you really think that more violence in videogames creates more violence in real life?” X asked me over and over.

“sure!” i said. “some poor lonely socially-maladjusted dude is sitting in his bean-bag chair playing GTA IV, he kills a prostitute and then he thinks it’s okay to do that in real life.”

 X rolled his eyes.  i sputtered out something about misogyny.

i wasn’t very convincing.

and in the days following, other very reputable sources started making compelling arguments for GTA IV.  last weekend, NPR’s On the Media did a great segment interviewing a harvard scientist who had just completed a study of 1,200 middle schoolers and concluded there was no relationship between video game violence and real-life violence.  there goes my argument.

and then my favorite sites started giving the game incredible reviews.  slate, waxed poetic about how GTA IV is a “living, breathing place” and salon called it a “dark urban masterpiece.”

i mean, basically, now i kinda want to play it. i’m still not going to shoot me any prostitutes, but i am going to make the new argument that videogames are art. and i’m also going to give more credit to that guy in his beanbag chair, for being able to tell the difference between reality and fiction.

this is not as bad as some woot purchases i know about (my brother once bought a faux-suede duvet in a drunken episode of wooting at 3 a.m.), but i’m pretty sure voluntarily owning these headphones makes me just a few world of warcraft victories away from proposing marriage to an avatar on second life.

when i got home today, the box was waiting outside my door.  i opened it hurriedly, anxious to see my new hipster pair of headphones.

now, when i said this was an impulse buy, i really mean it.  all i knew was that these were a pair of headphones, and i needed headphones, and they looked cool and they were $19.99 + shipping.  it seemed reasonable.  so i bought them, without worrying too much about the specs.

so i opened the box, and there they were.  they were, um, HUGE:

“designed for comfort and extended wear!” the box said.

“optimal noise isolation!” the box said.

“instantaneous audio response!”

“3.1 M cable length!”

ok, clearly these are made for someone with more facial hair, body fat, and thumb blisters than i.

but in tribute to my geeky new headphones i decided to take some pictures.  so i played my favorite game on photobooth– stating an event and then making a “spontaneous” face in reaction to it.

appropriately, these suckers make me look a bit like princess leia, so i decided to make my photo sesh “star wars” themed:

“you are the last hope for the rebellion”:

“your dad is darth vader”:

“you’ve been screwing your brother”:

ok, that’s all i’ve got for this week. i’m going to go wash dishes and listen to a podcast on my new headphones on my ipod, which will safely be sitting 3.1 M away on the kitchen table.

but this is no casual tuning into showtime or listening to WBRU on the way to pick up groceries, these have turned into borderline part time jobs.

almost every night, i come home, sit down on the couch, with a beer and my dinner and proceed to watch upwards of 4-5 hours of lesbian drama.  it’s gotten so bad that when one of the show’s main characters (dana) died, i tweeted about it on my twitter account [exact text: ”oh my godddddddddd nooooooooooooooooo dana is dead!“] causing my boyfriend to frantically call me asking if my real-life friend dana had died.

i have a real-life friend name dana? oh yeah! i do! i ran a clarification.

almost every morning, my computer gently wakes me up to the soothing sounds of the morning edition on  WNYC National Public Radio. i listen to it as i get dressed, and over the weeks have gotten attached, nay, dependent on hearing soterios johnson (the morning edition lead reporter) as i start my day. who was this man with the spry, trusting voice? where did his mix of youthful tones and wizened baritone develop? what kind of name is soterios johnson?

now, i have a principle of NEVER google image searching radio announcers, ever since i fell in love with garrison keillor on prairie home companion.

“don’t do it,” my friends said.  “absolutely do not google garrison keillor. we’re warning you.”

“but he’s married!” i said. “someone loves him! how bad could he really be?”

really. really. really bad.

mi amore, garrison keillor turned out to be a thin haired, pug nosed, little troll/BOCE of a man.  after that, every time i listened to his tales from lake wobegon, all i could imagine was the words drooling out of his slack jawed mouth.

but i broke my rule for soterios.

and it didn’t turn out all that bad. he’s old[er than me], but not awful looking!

but while my crush on soterios blossoms, my deep uncompromising hatred of L word character jennifer schechter threatens to cloud over the blue sky of my heart and create an inhospitable environment for new love to grow.

sure, she looks harmless enough. but really jenny is an evil evil vagina wig who kills puppies (for real!) and writes bitter nasty hetero-hating novels about her lez friends and is a terrible terrible self absorbed self pitying drama queen who should die die die die.

hmmmm.

i just wrote a hate-blog post about a fictional character, maybe i should take the newspaper off the walls and get out more.

___

confidential to all the commenters on my fiona shaw post: i don’t think fiona shaw is ugly. i just think she’s uglier than saffron burrows. please stop telling me what an awful, shallow person i am.

oh, and ignore the above post about garrison keillor.

now this franco-phobic truck driver was so impassioned  about the country (i assume) of france, that s/he felt it necessary to emblazon their bumper with a death threat, just in case the country of france was ever sitting behind them in traffic on the brooklyn/queens expressway.

 bumper stickers as a form of expression always seemed like a self-important declaration– as if we even cared  that your kid was an honor student or that you brake for fetuses.

but making  your own bumper sticker really takes it to a whole new level, because whatever it is you want to say is so unhinged they don’t even print it on bumper stickers. 

my friend max has a funny joke about this that he does in his stand-up routine, where he describes being behind someone who has covered the entire rear of the car with bumper stickers that when read left to right clearly document her decent into insanity.  they start out with “jesus saves” and slowly progress to “god hates fags,” and then finally a hand- made sign hung in the rear window that says, “homosexuals need not apply” scrawled in angry red letters.

then max always says, “oh good lady, i’m glad you put that there.  otherwise i was going to roll up my resume and stuff it in your tailpipe.”

 max is funnier than me.

brooklyn is spitting at me. or rather, the sky is spitting at me, because brooklyn holds no grudges. walking through the mist, my skirt lilts upwards towards my breasts, the friction of my thighs defying gravity. i can feel the slit in the back exposing the cellulite on my hamstrings. i smile at the man who passes.

___________

i never remember unlocking doors. often, i find myself in my apartment, in my coat and scarf and burdensome sack of a bag, and forget how i got there, so vapid are the memories of key and lock.

today is one of those days.

i pause, in my kitchen, suit undone, arms akimbo and ask:

why must his eyes be so dark? so lashy?

except then it wasn’t so nice.

“Get over yourself. No one cares what you think. Get back I. [sic] The kitchen bitch and get me a beer” 

so while i pondered whether this was 1) my brother; 2) cosmo or 3) actual viable hate commenting, it occurred to me that this was actually very easy to find out.  wordpress, miracles of miracles, logs the ip of all commentors. “az” as he had logged himself, was from ontario, canada (they have bigots in canada!?) and his ip was traced to a company called research in motion. az had also been kind enough to leave me an email address in his posting. so i quickly drafted a reply:

“Thank for your comment on my website, and thank you to IP addresses that allowed me to track your place of work, name and send a letter of complaint to you company about the sexist comments you‘re writing during work hours.”

not 15 minutes later but i’d received this reply:

“Just joking”

followed by this, 3 minutes later:

“hello,
i don’t know who this is but you sound very upset. so i checked my emails and found that a STUPID ROOMMATE of mine had sent a web site a very sexist and moronic e mail. i apologies for his insensitive comments. from now on i will lock my laptop from community use. “

now, i doubt very highly that this is true, but it makes me mildly happy that i earned an apology from someone, and that maybe, just maybe az got a shitload of crap from his roommate.

as an aside, i was kinda baffled by the intro to the comment, “Get over yourself. No one cares what you think.”  i was under the impression that this kind of useless deflating of personal blogs went out in the mid-nineties along with kris kross and neon stirrup stretch pants.

Review: Autumn Skateboard Shop

According to the staff at Autumn Skateboard Shop, the store gets its name from a Neutral Milk Hotel song. And even if they’re a little fuzzy on exactly which song (or album, or lyric), they’re not nearly as soft on details when it comes to skateboarding [. . .] (more…)