by Shotgun

We asked 10 Suicide Girls if they could curl their tongue, and filmed their reaction. While Annasthesia can do multiple tricks with her tongue, Tovi has given up trying. It’s okay though, she has plenty of other talents, like baking. Watch them, along with Phecda, Kentessa, Oakley, Smayx, Vellin, Yesnesnia, Madison, and the lovely Tita as they stick their tongues out and show off their skills.

by Lee Camp

You’ve heard it before from rappers – C.R.E.A.M. – Cash Rules Everything Around Me. Does it? Or is money just a simple measuring stick that we’ve allowed to run away with itself? Are people dying because of our simplistic inability to wrap our heads around these funny green pieces of paper? Or is it possible…Sorry! Gotta run! They’re announcing the Lottery numbers!

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by SG’s Team Agony feat. Aadie

Let us answer life’s questions – because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.

Q. I’ve been married for two years and my wife told me she wants to separate. It’s been three months and everything I do or see reminds me of her. I want to move away but I’m on probation and can’t. I’ve tried dating other women but every time I go on a date all I can focus on is how it’s not the same as with my wife. She’s already moved on and I see no hope of us getting back together. What should I do?

A: You need to focus on you. You have devoted two years to ‘us’ and she left. For that I have empathy for you, but now it’s seriously all about you.

Going on the odd date here and there is healthy but don’t over do it. I think you need to find yourself again in the aftermath of a relationship that very much defined you. It’s sad when people separate but sometimes that’s just the way it is.

Now it’s time to reintroduce yourself to yourself, get new hobbies, go to new bars, join a new gym, get a new hair style even. Find new friends, and also reconnect with old ones who perhaps fell by the wayside as you put more energy into the relationship.

For the moment, instead of looking to replace one relationship with another, build up your social circle and social life, so you have plenty of support and distractions. This will also help you when you are ready to find love again, to perhaps find it in a more organic and less overwhelming way through friends and friends of friends.

It’s going to be difficult, but you’re worth more then you know. Take a deep breath and hold your head up high. Your new life is beginning. You can only move forwards from here.

Aadie
xoxo

Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls’ team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

by M. J. Johnson

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

– excerpt from Walden: Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau

I went into the park because I wished to read my book. What could be better than spending a warm afternoon with my back to a tree, a good book in hand, a cup of coffee next to me, cool grass and dirt under my butt? Well, apparently, I’m the only one who was thinking that way.

I recently moved to Iowa City; it’s a funky little college town, sort of a mini-Portland. On one side of town is this HUGE city park (cleverly called “City Park”), which is roughly the same size as the village where I grew up. There are pavilions and playgrounds, ball-diamonds and soccer pitches, and even a little train kids can ride. And the place was PACKED! Every pavilion had a family reunion, and the playgrounds were humming with giggles and screams. The walking trails were full of serious runners and leisurely walkers. There were even people using canoes to annoy the ducks.

But only I was on the grass. There weren’t any signs telling people to stay off the grass; in fact, there were benches and grills scattered all around under the trees. There just weren’t any people off the paths.

Hundreds of people, gathered in this tamed forest, and only I walked on the grass. Only I sat under a tree. Only I dared to leave the concrete or wood-chips.

Carl Jung talks about the Collective Unconscious, a sort of racial memory (where the “race” in question is “human”), which forms our psyche and explains why people in different cultures have similar stories and fears. Based on fairy tales and stories, forests are a place of human fear. Hansel and Gretel? Little Red Riding Hood? Any knightly quest, all have scary things hidden in the wild places. Our ancestors learned to fear the woods because all those trees give predators a good place to hide.

Has this translated into a fear of leaving the concrete path? Are we all so afraid of the wild that we don’t want to even walk on the grass? When I was teaching, I had to laugh at students who went far, far out of their way to get from class to class, simply because that’s where the sidewalk went.

Do we quaver at the feel of uneven ground under our feet? Does the thought of getting our shoes dirty terrify us? Are grass-stains scary? Do we think a mountain lion is lurking in the trees over our heads? Do we still fear the witch in the woods?

Or is it something else? This park did not have “keep off the grass” signs, but many do. People spend millions of dollars every year to create lawns to see but not walk upon. Shoe companies create specific shoes for running on roads, dirt paths, or sidewalks, but the human foot is designed to run on grass, to step where no one else has stepped.

When Thoreau went into the woods, he wanted to wake up knowing that he was surrounded by nothing but nature. He reveled in squirrels who invaded his home, and spent hours just studying a war between black and red ants (scholars like to debate whether he really saw the ant war or not). He spent chapters describing the quiet.

When was the last time things around you were really quiet? I open my windows at night and listen to people in the parking lot, cars on the road, fire engines, shouts, motorcycles, and some annoying brat with a whistle. We buy white-noise machines to play static so we can sleep. We have televisions and radios and ipods playing at all times, and claim its because we “live for music.”

Humans have never been all that comfortable in the wild; we’re fragile when compared to lions and tigers and bears (oh my!), so we build caves (houses) and cut down the trees, then complain that all the wild places are disappearing.

We’re supposed to be a part of nature, not separated from it. So, there is no reason to walk on the sidewalk.

Except for the bears.

M. J. Johnson is the professional name of Coyotemike. He has written a moderately bad e-book called The Bastards Club and is working on getting more serious work published.

Related Posts
My Size Cannot Define Me

An excerpt from Greg Palast’s new book, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps, including a comic book by Ted Rall and an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In 1996, Republicans were investigating President Clinton, that is, sniffing at his zipper and a wet cigar.

But I follow the money, not the semen. My target was an electric company, Entergy, one of Hillary Clinton’s law clients whom I’d been tracking since 1985.* The Entergy money trail took me from Little Rock, Arkansas, to China, and right into the Oval Office. This was a hell of a lot more serious than an intern under the desk.

When Bill Clinton became president, Hillary’s Little Rock client suddenly became a transglobal power-industry behemoth. Entergy bought the Indian Point nuclear plants in New York and the entire electricity system of London, England. Its big score was to team up with the Riady family of Indonesia, ethnic Chinese billionaires with big plans to run the power systems of China.

But the Riadys and Entergy needed Clinton and his Commerce Secretary Ron Brown to grease up the Chinese for them, beginning with Brown taking Entergy bosses on a deal-making trip to China.

Secretary Brown was not pleased. According to his long-time business partner and love interest, Nolanda Hill. Brown fumed, “I’m not Hillary’s motherfucking tour guide!”

The problem for the secretary was not the deed but the price. Brown, previously chairman of the Democratic Party, had enthusiastically endorsed a Hillary cash-for-access scheme: $10,000 for coffee with the president, $100,000 for a night in the Lincoln bedroom. But he resented the discount rate Hillary put on US executives joining Brown’s own lucrative trade missions. The commerce secretary pouted, “I’m worth more than $50,000 a pop!”

But Brown had nothing to fear regarding his price: the Clinton campaign chest got a lot more than fifty thousand for the “pop.”

Now follow this:

On June 22, 1994, the billionaire James Riady met with Webster Hubbell, former associate attorney general and Hillary Clinton’s former law partner.

On June 23, Riady met with Hubbell for breakfast, then went to the White House, then returned to meet again with Hubbell, then made two more treks to the White House.

On June 26, videotape shows the beginning of a meeting in the Oval Office between President Clinton and Riady before the tape goes blank.

On June 27, Riady retains Hubbell as a consultant to Entergy.

How much advising Hubbell could do from prison, it was not clear.

At the time of his meetings with Riady, when he got his check, Hubbell was under indictment for fraudulently inflating his legal bills, a felony. He pled guilty.

Now, I’ve conducted investigations of lawyer over-billing. How can one law partner fake detailed time logs without the complicity of another lawyer in the firm? Hillary’s logs were worth close inspection by authorities.

Funny thing about Hillary’s billing records: when requested for disclosure in an unrelated matter, they dis-appeared. First, her law firm’s computers went kablooey. Then the paper printouts vanished. But during the 1992 presidential campaign, just before the logs disappeared, her partner Web Hubbell secretly combed them over, line by line.

Hubbell knew his own logs were phony, and he understood the consequences of exposure: prison. Ultimately, the bloated hours on those records caused him to lose his law license, his Justice Department post, and his freedom—twenty-one months in the slammer.

What did Hubbell see and know about Hillary’s own billing logs? Hubbell won’t say, except for a cryptic remark, after seeing her bills, that “every lawyer” fabricates records. Does “every” include Hillary? Hubbell wouldn’t say.

If he ratted out Hillary, he might have bargained himself an easy plea bargain. But Hubbell was a champ: silent. Why would Hubbell choose to do time on the chain gang over testifying about Hillary? Could it be the $100,000 from the Riadys? (Altogether, Hubbell collected half a million dollars in the weeks up to his entering the slammer.)

Hillary’s billing records finally reappeared, two years later, just outside her office, right after Hubbell’s refusal to testify against her.

Maybe the Clintons knew nothing about the Riady money flowing to prison-bound Hubbell. Knowledge of the payments would suggest they were buying Hubbell’s silence. That would be a criminal offense. An impeachable offense.

In notes I’ve obtained of the FBI’s conversation with the president (who was under oath), Clinton first said he couldn’t remember if Riady mentioned the $100,000 payment. Then, Clinton slyly opened the door to the truth, telling the agents, “I wouldn’t be surprised if James told me.”

Neither would I.

In all, James, his father, and Riady reps met with Clinton some ninety-eight times.

Four years after the Hubbell-Riady-Clinton meetings and payments, on December 31, 1998, Republican Senator Thompson’s Governmental Affairs Committee shut down. They hadn’t called the key witnesses against Clinton, and had issued no subpoenas for the key documents. Why? Why did the Republicans suddenly halt their inquiry into Clinton’s fundraising just as they were closing in on the damning evidence?

It was the same day Chairman Thompson shut down the investigation of the Koch Brothers.

I could put two and two together. But just to make sure, I called the committee to confirm that two plus two made four. Sure enough, my insider, requesting anonymity, confirmed it was a secret straight-up deal between Republican and Democratic senators.

“A truce: You don’t do Triad and we don’t do Clinton [on Riady cash].”

PS: How did some unknown governor from the Podunk state rise like a rocket from Little Rock to the White House, zoom out of nowhere to become, in 1992, the nominee of the Democratic Party? But Bill Clinton didn’t exactly come from nowhere: he came from the Democratic Leadership Council. DLC Chairman Bill Clinton presided over this new caucus of conservative Democrats, and his nomination as the Democrat’s presidential candidate ended half a century of control of the party by the tough-regulation philosophy of Franklin Roosevelt. Rather than FDR, the DLC’s antigovernment rhetoric, its complaining about bureaucrats, rules, and regulations, echoed the philosophy of the Koch-funded Cato Institute.

And that’s not surprising: the DLC was funded by $100,000 from the Koch Brothers.

Did the DLC investment pay off for the Kochs?

Once in the White House, Bill Clinton issued an Executive Order to force agencies to halt or roll back regulations based on costs to industry. Public health, welfare, and safety would no longer rule. The chief of Clinton’s National Partnership for Reinventing Government, Vice President Al Gore, directed the anti-regulatory attack with gusto, announcing he was “ending the era of big government.” Gore created “regulatory partnerships,” giving official review powers to executives of regulated industries. The Clinton-Gore administration radically slowed the movement to cap greenhouse gas emissions by heavily promoting a system of indulgences, “pollution credits,” that allowed polluters to simply purchase the right to pollute. C. Boyden Gray, then head of Citizens for a Sound Economy, the lobby group founded by the Kochs, devised this “cap-and-trade” system.

In later years, the Kochs’ Citizens for a Sound Economy became FreedomWorks, the precursor of the Tea Party. The Kochs’ chairman of FreedomWorks, that same Boyden Gray, is today leading the Tea Party crusade against “cap and trade,” the pollution credit system created by . . . Boyden Gray. If you think that’s a contradiction, you’re not paying attention. The strategy of well-timed, stepwise manipulation of national policy debate evidenced here is nothing if not brilliant. The Kochs play an elaborate game of chess and we can’t even see the board.

And did I say that the Kochs funded the rise of both presidential nominees, Clinton and his opponent, Bob Dole? Sure did. Billionaire Rule Number two: Don’t bet on a horse when you can buy the whole damn racetrack.

But there was still the little matter of criminality. Riady money from Indonesia, Koch money through “Children’s Future,” fake-o foundations and political hit squads posing as think tanks, all this funny juice running through political arteries was, of course, illegal.

Illegal, that is, until 2010, until Citizens United and SpeechNow. For $200 and a post office box provided by a sketchy lawyer, the Riadys, the Zetas Gang Inc., British Petroleum, Qaeda Corp, Charles Manson LLC, and Vladimir Putin Partners can all incorporate and dump cash into US campaigns till their dark hearts are content. And so too the Christian Coalition and the Chinese politburo, giving a whole new meaning to the term “Manchurian Candidate.”

One other thing: Just who are these “Citizens” that were “United” for Citizens United? How could this teeny group hire a supreme lawyer like Ted Olson to argue before the Supreme Court? Olson, former US solicitor general, doesn’t work for peanuts. How could Olson keep body and soul together during this time-consuming litigation? Apparently he was given leave from his duties as legal counsel at . . . Koch Industries.

Read the rest in Billionaires & Ballot Bandits. For more info visit: BallotBandits.org

* I was originally asked to investigate the company in 1981 by the attorney general of Arkansas, Bill Clinton. But I was a big-shot New York investigator with no interest in working for some small-time politician from Dawg Patch. Too bad: I could have put him on the straight path.

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by Blogbot

A column which highlights Suicide Girls and their fave groups.

This week Lacey Suicide tells us why she love SG’s People with Disabilities group.

Members: 187 / Comments: 1,594

WHY DO YOU LOVE IT?: This is probably the most inclusive group on the most inclusive website on the internet. Any and all types of differences are embraced here. It’s a safe place to gather information, share resources, and advocate – or just giggle at the absurdity of “Japanese sex dolls developed for people with physical disabilities.”

DISCUSSION TIP: Always use people-first language: think “person who uses a wheelchair” versus “wheelchair-bound” or “children who have Autism” versus “Autistic kids.” It might not seem like a big difference, but to many people it is. “You addressed my disability too politely!” said no one, ever.

MOST HEATED DISCUSSION THREAD: There are so many heated discussions! Who deserves to get an accessible parking permit – and who really even wants one? Is it still okay to say “special”? Just kidding, though. In reality, nothing in this group ever gets too heated. Everyone is respectful, and we mostly hold hands in a circle and sing Kumbaya. Or use sign language. And if you don’t want to sit in the circle, that’s okay too.

BEST RANDOM QUOTE: Favorite: “Back in high school, I got narcoleptic in driver’s ed…” (there’s more to this hilarious story). Runner up: “Hwo has Dyslexia?”

WHO’S WELCOME TO JOIN?: Everyone is welcome, whether you have a disability, know someone with a disability, or just want to share in the love of a very accepting group of friends. It’s set up as a private group to preserve the privacy of members, so if you’d like to join please send a request via SG message to the group owner. If you want to join the group because you have some type of disability fetish though, you might have better luck on Craigslist.

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by Laurelin

He looked just like he did on TV. Face, smooth and smiling, muscles pressing up against his huge T-shirt and his hat pulled down just enough so that I could still see his eyes. I had started to get up to refill my wine glass, but when I saw him I sunk back down, the air rushing from my lungs as though someone had just squeezed the life out of me. I could feel a flush traveling up my body and suddenly my face was burning, and I turned away so he wouldn’t see me.

I rarely meet celebrities. Like every other girl in the world I have dreamt what it would have been like to meet Leonardo DiCaprio, staying calm and collected so that he would shake my hand and look me in the eye. You imagine that if they could just meet you, you would be best friends, they might even fall in love with you, and everything would be right in the world. But that’s just in dreams. You will never meet Brad Pitt or Ben Affleck, and they will most certainly not fall in love with you. You are just you after all, a regular girl, who dates regular guys. You are common, and they are special.

He took his time walking around the room, signing autographs and taking pictures with everyone from old ladies to screaming teens to little kids. Still, I sat. I wonder what I’ll say when it’s my turn, would he remember me from a brief Twitter message I sent that he replied to? Will he think I’m crazy if I bring it up? He moves closer and as he approached I could finally stand and I shook my head, clearing the clouds. He is just a man after all.

I reached out my hand to find his and from somewhere in me comes a voice, and I said, “Hi, I’m Laurelin.” He smiled and inside I melted, but outside I must have seemed okay because he started asking me questions, then we laughed and he said that he did remember me from a year ago on Twitter. I made a snarky remark about his clothing and he thought I was funny. I sat back down in my seat and I watched him continue to sign autographs. I clutched the stem of my wine glass and I looked at our photo and I smiled. I’m taller than him.

When I looked up he was sitting next to me.

“Do you have a ticket for tonight?” he asked.

“Yes,” I stammered, fumbling around for it. He must want to sign it; he signed everyone else’s. I found it and he took it, smoothly scribbling something on the back and pressing it into my palm. I looked down and I see a phone number. My blood ran cold and hot at the same time, and I thought, “Say something clever…”

“Can I drunk dial you later?” I asked, smirking.

“Absolutely,” he said, and I die. The girls around me had their jaws on the floor, and as he left he smiled at me and waved. We started texting almost immediately, stopping only because the arena was growing dark and it was time for him to come out.

I think of how all summer I have had no one, nothing but an empty bed and a cat, and now, with the coming fall, the promise of something new. All of a sudden, out of the blue, the promise of something totally just… fun. I slid my phone into my pocket and headed to my seat to watch him. The place is packed, everyone screaming his name, and my phone buzzed one last time.

“Nice to meet you,” he said. “I would love to see you again.”

I felt sick. I went home that night alone, and I crawled in bed with someone else.

“How was tonight?” my real life non-celebrity boy asks. I buried my face in his neck and hugged as tight as I could.

“It was fine,” I said, “really fun.”

We fell asleep, and I knew I was right where I belonged.

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