Photo of columnist Margaret Wente via The Globe and Mail.

We try to keep the rants to a minimum here. Coilhouse is a love letter, after all;  we’d rather be supportive of what’s beautiful and nourishing. But Ross just linked to something that has left me (almost) stunned speechless. As an active female blogger with a pulse, it’s impossible for me to ignore the topic of Margaret Wente and her latest pile of myopic, belittling, divisive, unsubstantiated garbage.

Some quick background info: Wente’s a popular, award-winning Canadian columnist who writes for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto. Reviewing some of her previous pieces at the Globe’s website, I’m flummoxed by all of the accolades, if not her success. The only reason I can see for continuing to employ this poor, unfortunate soul is that her output must regularly trawl in tons of infuriated traffic, a-la Coulter or Limbaugh. Get a load of these excerpts from her latest journalistic triumph, entitled Why Are Bloggers Male?:

Guys seek thrills and speed. They go for the adrenalin rush. They get pumped by going higher, faster, farther than anyone else. They want lots of action and instant gratification. That’s also why guys like blogging – instant opinions, and lots of them.

Men clearly have an urge to blog that women lack. Like extreme snowmobiling, the blogosphere is dominated by men. Not many women are interested enough in spitting out an opinion on current events every 20 minutes.

Are these things cultural? Not entirely, perhaps not even mostly. For most of my adult life, I was almost struck dumb in the presence of strangers. I managed to complete five years of university without raising my hand, and the idea of a dinner party used to make me faint. Several of my female friends tell similar stories. No matter how brilliant they were, they lacked the confidence to express themselves in public.

Fortunately, something happens to women in midlife that disinhibits them. It is the same thing (in reverse) that turns bold, extroverted little girls into painfully self-conscious adolescents: a drastic change in hormones. These days, I no longer care when someone calls me an idiot, and my husband often has to drag me home from dinner parties.

But blogging? No way. That’s guy stuff. And they are welcome to it.

JEEZUM CROW. Where to start? Why even bother? I almost regret giving this drivel the extra boost in publicity, but it’s just too out-of-touch, sexist, and insulting to ignore. I’m actually more skeeved out by The Globe and Mail’s crass capitalization on the furor than I am by Wente herself, if that’s even possible. When news sources stoop this low for increased traffic/sales, they need to be called out on it.

Think it’s pointless to protest? Could be. After all, we’re talking about arguing on the internet. Then again, if there’s even an outside chance that the “professionals” at The Globe and Mail might chastise Wente, or issue a retraction, after receiving an onslaught of disgusted comments from their readership, maybe it’s worth it taking a few minutes to weigh in.

Or, alternately: “Boys are dumb, and girls aren’t talking!”

Heh. Honestly, I feel pretty naive even typing that out. But I just can’t let it go, because there are still plenty of folks who expect their media sources to conduct a bare minimum of research and fact-checking before printing something. (Yes, even some blowhard Glennbeckistani-level op-ed piece.) Someone as spectacularly ignorant as Wente, standing on a platform that high, needs to be knocked down. With more solid facts. With meaningful statistics. With pure, undiluted, well-heeled contempt. And so does the platform itself, with dollars and cents, with pulled advertisements, and with bloggitysphere-wide denouncement by male and female writers alike.

Do a bit more friggin’ research next time, Wente. Then, if you’re up to it, present your opinions in a halfway decent and intelligent fashion, not like Betty Draper on three valiums and a bottle of wine. The scolding goes double for your editors. Seriously, Globe and Mail, talk about multiplying zeroes.

In the past two months, seven clips have appeared on YouTube under a mysterious account titled iamamiwhoami. Two days ago, the first full-length music video appeared – and many are claiming that, based on a few clues in the video, the identity of the author (widely rumored to be Goldfrapp, Trent Reznor, Lykke Li, Lady Gaga, The Knife and, seriously, Christina Aguilera) has finally been uncovered. But first, a bit of background by Leila Brillson to underscore the sheer amount of gematrical/Fortean weirdness packed into this haunting viral endeavor:

In December, a 55-second clip of a hyper-saturated, eerie (Scandinavian?) forest appeared on YouTube. No information was given, just the title “Prelude 699130082.451322-5.4.21.3.1.20.9.15.14.1.12.” The set of numbers following the dash, when matched to their alphabetical correspondents, spell “Educational.”

A few weeks later, a second video emerged, with a dirt-covered blonde girl seductively licking trees to a slow, driving electronic beat – the message this time, “Its Me.” Each video ended with the outline of an animal: a goat and an owl, respectively. The next video, accompanied by a funkier and more cheerful song, featured the painted girl again, up-close, with freakishly large eyes… this time, it spelled “Mandragora.”

The next video (“Officinarum”) increased the count to five (the featured animals, at that point, comprised of a goat, owl, whale, bee and llama). Then, on Friday, [James Montgomery, a music editor] received a package from a messenger service. “It was a thin, brown envelope with my name and floor typed on the front, and no return address.” Inside was a strand of hair from the blonde wig, some bits of wood, and what Montgomery calls a codex.

The project is not without a sense of humor. Each of the videos has a hyperlink in its description to another random but zoologically relevant YouTube clip -  Spit On by a Lllama, Screaming Monkeys, Bumble Bee on a Sunflower, to name a few. The new music video, which you can see below, links to this terrifying monstrosity.

So, yes! Now that the new music video has been posted, people have been started putting together the pieces. The most compelling evidence is here – while it does take a bit of magic out of the whole thing, it’s an impressive piece of internet sleuthing.

Yep, she’s a weird one. Please, please let it be her, and not some overproduced pop star. I mean, look at what she did to Nitzer Ebb. Jonna, if this is you, you have arrived!

To those of you who live in Estonia or are of Estonian descent: please pardon my ignorance. Not only do I know next to nothing about your fine country but I can only fill this void with ridiculous and completely false information such as that your population is 54,640 and your main exports are rocks and sex slaves. This is terrible and I will do my best to amend this grievous lack of knowledge. For example, Wikipedia informs me that you are a Finnic people, which means that you enjoy an unfathomably difficult language. Good luck with that.

Also helpful is this wonderful parody for Estonia tv3, what I assume is one of at least three television channels in Estonia. It incorporates all the hallmarks of modern life in Estonia, like one room school houses, horse-drawn carriages, pigs heads, and toy stick horses. Of course it could all be a big ruse and, in fact, Estonia could be a nearly energy independent country with the most robust economy of the three Baltic states. Only the Estonians know for sure.

via The Daily What

Right around Issue 03, our lovely copy chief Joanne Starer sent all the editors of Coilhouse a condensed document of guidelines based on the Chicago Style Manual. It tells us to spell out whole numbers one through one hundred (unless they are percents), italicize titles of books, newspapers & magazines, omit spaces around our em/en dashes, and many other such useful things. That was all fine and good, until today: the day that FakeAPStylebook on Twitter shook the world of journalism to its very foundations. The feed has amassed over 8,000 new followers in just two days, and it’s no wonder why: all issues of grammar, capitalization & punctuation have finally been revealed. This incredible new resource finally provides clarity to crucial concepts that the heretofore-accepted AP Style Guide completely overlooked. For example:

• Use the quintuple vowel to transcribe the utterances of small children, “Daaaaaddy, I waaaant a Pooooony!”
• Since the 1986 edition, the plural of McDonald’s is officially McDonaldses.
• “Batman” may be used informally (“let’s go, Batman!”) and “The Batman” formally (“Mr. President, this is the Batman”).
• The word “boner” is not capitalized, regardless of size.
• Use a possessive proper noun in front of a movie remake title to convey crushing disappointment. (e.g. Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes)
• In the news industry, an ’80s celebrity sex scandal is known as a “trifecta.”
• Do not change weight of gorilla in phrase, “800-lb gorilla in the room.” Correct weight is 800 lbs. DO NOT CHANGE GORILLA’S WEIGHT!
• “Your” and “you’re” may be used interchangeably if you are an idiot.
• Avoid using the letter ‘G’ as it is unlucky.
• The numbers one through ten should be spelled out while numbers greater than ten are products of the Illuminati and should be avoided.

Via Xeni.

Asgarda. Mountain-dwelling, scythe-wielding Amazonian cult? Paramilitary defenders of Our Dark Lady of the Orange Revolution? Exactly 37 new Asgarda fan clubs will pop up in Japan by the time I finish writing this post, and we still won’t be any closer to knowing who they really are.

Recently, a photo essay on Asgarda by Guillaume Herbaut in Planet Magazine captured imaginations all over the blogosphere. Coverage has ranged from cautious (Xeni: “sounds too awesome to be true in this cold, cruel world”) to shamelessly sensationalistic (English Russia: “A French explorer has found a group of amazons hiding in the woods”).  Like most, I want there to be a legendary tribe of ass-kicking warrior princesses living in the mountains of Ukraine. I’m just surprised at how little fact-checking has gone into this tale, across the board. It’s worse than usual. For example, in their original article, Planet Mag writes, “in the Ukraine, a country where females are victims of sexual trafficking and gender oppression, a new tribe of empowered women is emerging.” Over at The Frisky, this statement quickly transforms to: “the women have seceded from society because sexual trafficking is rampant in Eastern European countries.” My old journalism professor would’ve pulled out fingernails for that one. On the other hand, there’s been a steady chorus of people calling “fake,” saying that this is a PR stunt for some movie, or that they’re just a bunch of Pennsylvanian LARPers who’ve taken it one step too far. This post is for them, too. Don’t be afraid to believe! Below, my humble attempts to separate the facts from the fiction about this all-female purported warrior tribe.

The photos are real. Herbaut is a gifted photographer who has captured enduring images from Chernobyl, Ciudad Juarez (harrowing & NSFW), the city of Auschwitz as it is today, and Hiroshima. He’s done fashion potraits of “trendy Mollahs” from Iran for Elle, and documented the victims of family vendettas is Albania. His objectivity as a photojournalist when it comes to Asgarda may be up for debate, but the man knows how to tell a story. Sixteen captioned images of Asgarda can be found on his page, under the title “Return of the Amazons.” More photos by Herbaut of Asgarda appear in the series Ukraine’s Cossacks.

Today has not been a good day. Not. At. All. Usually, you would join your other co-workers around the photocopier, placing bets on which intern can make the most copies of their face without blinking, but you’re in no mood for such frivolities. Today you can only stare at your desk in despair. How much longer can you go on working this soul-sucking job; planted in front of your computer inside the thin, blank walls of your cubicle? What does it even matter? How can you, a single, lowly person, possibly prevail in the face of the worldwide Jewish banking conspiracy? What’s to be done?

The answer, of course, is nothing. Take it from me, an insider who types these words on a golden keyboard while sitting atop a pile of money, sipping from a tall glass of still-warm Christian baby’s blood. Don’t get too down on yourself though. After all it’s Friday. That’s a good thing, right? Sure it is. So why don’t you just ignore the screams of Jessica as her retinas are seared with ultraviolet light and watch some documentaries about a few of the people who may or may not control the world.

That’s right, this week we offer you Secret Rulers of the World, Jon Ronson’s series detailing the puppet masters who work behind the scenes and the lovable loons who strive to expose them. The highlight for me has to be Episode 2, which focuses on David Icke, a man so crazy, it turns out that when he talks about the world being run by “a race of 12 foot, blood-drinking, shape-shifting lizards” he is not making a coded reference to Jews but actually means a race of 12 foot, blood drinking, shape-shifting lizard men. You don’t run into that kind of batshit insanity everyday; especially unaccompanied by an orderly. So enjoy all five episodes; hours of New World entertainment.

Now if you’ll excuse me, my baby’s blood is getting cold.

I don’t post vintage photos here very often (mostly because there are so many wonderful blogs devoted to them), but this one found over at Siege’s blog was too good to pass. You simply have to click here to see it in large format – there are so many incredible details! This looks like a still from a new movie – two talented actors, dressed expertly by a costume designer, captured by an in-demand photographer.  But no; it’s a vintage ambrotype from the Civil War era.

Just look at them. If this image doesn’t inspire you to start spinning tales, I don’t know what will. What did he do for a living? Did he ever fall off a horse? Did he like doing magic card tricks? Was he allergic to bees? How did he meet his lady, so stylish with her ruffled bonnet and black leather gloves? Was their marriage passionate? Did she have a good singing voice? Did she hate going to church?

Tell me a story about them.

Update! This post is officially getting the Coilhouse tag “Misinformation,” because Siege has uncovered some new facts. “A TinEye search result led to Google led to a post on A Database that lists this as ‘Veteran of Waterloo with his Wife’ c1850s:

“Bruce Bernard saw this unusual photograph for sale at Christie’s in the 1970s. It appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine where he was picture editor and in his book Photodiscovery, he later tracked it down for the collection. The medal on the man indicates him as a veteran of Waterloo.”

See also: Reliability of Wikipedia

Although it turns out this couple was from Europe, I still like Paul Komoda’s more American-sounding names from the comments: “Athanasius Scrimshaw and his good lady, Jerboa.”

For more on Coilhouse’s love affair with old photographs, check out The Tarnished Beauties of Blackwell, Oklahoma, probably one of my top 5 favorite Mer posts of all time.

It’s been a long, long day. When you haven’t been in meetings you’ve been at your desk alt-tabbing between solitaire and Excel, rearranging your budget so that you’ll be able to afford those sweet zebra-print seat covers you saw on Jalopnik the other day. Well, just stop it. You’ll never be able to afford them and Jalopnik was being ironic anyway. Also, anyone can win at solitaire if they pull one card at a time. Yeesh, have some self-respect. Close Excel and prepare for Friday filmage.

Today: Jesus Camp, a documentary about the now defunct “Kids On Fire School of Ministry”, a Pentecostal summer camp in North Dakota. It follows three children who attended the camp in 2005 where they are taught how to become part of God’s army. A lighthearted tale of willful ignorance and homeschooling, this is the film to show your atheist friends if you wish to see them become apoplectic and jittery with spittle-flecked rage. Or to pass the time while avoiding the siren call of compulsive spending.

Seriously, zebra-print isn’t going to make that ’89 Camry any cooler.

Shots from the most evil airport on earth, as reported by Vigilant Citizen

At first, I hesitated blogging about The Vigilant Citizen, a site that exposes the Masonic/Illuminati symbolism present in everyday things ranging from pop stars to national monuments. The site had to be a joke, I told myself, poking fun at occult nuts the same way that Christwire pokes fun at religious zealots. I’m not so sure, though. It feels like too much research to be fake, and yet it feels too silly to be real (case in point: Lady Gaga, The Illuminati Puppet). Whether or not the site is faux, it’s attracted some true believers! As one commenter writes in response to the the Gaga post:

This is truly amazing im shocked. I believe god told me to check this site. I feel like a total fool I wad becoming a fan of hers. Im totally conviced that this is what she’s trying to convey.

So dive right in, and have an occultastic good time! My favorite article is a toss-up between Top 5 Worst 9/11 Memorials and Vigilant’s analysis of the Denver National Airport (part of his Sinister Sites series, which examines the architectural occultism of buildings from all over the world). In a style that reminds me somewhat of Weird New Jersey, the latter article gives us a spooky tour of the most evil airport in America, introducing us to the apocalyptic horse with glowing red eyes that guards the entrance, the airport’s nightmarish murals, the arcane symbols embedded in the floor, the gargoyle statues, and of course the Nazi swastika-shaped runway. All part of the impending New World Order! Enjoy.

[via Aaron Muszalski]

I dedicate this dripping blood bar to the memory GeoCities, which was shut down by Yahoo last week:

GeoCities – or GeoShitties, as we all oh-so-cleverly called it – began in 1994 as a community of themed “virtual cities.” There’s a list of all the GeoCities neighborhood names that ever existed on this page, which also offers an illuminating explanation of how the whole process worked:

When GeoCities first started offering free web pages to the public, they decided to create themed neighborhoods. Each neighborhood was then divided into blocks (each block was numbered between 1000 up to 9999). A user would then adopt a block and thus create their own pages within that block. Thus, a user would then have their own web pages located at a URL in this format: http://www.geocities.com/neighborhood/XXXX (“XXXX” would be a four digit number). The whole management of each Neighborhood was run by volunteers – known as ‘Community Leaders’ (CL’s), which is what made the GeoCities experience so special.

This whole process was known as “homesteading”, and each user had their own  “homestead”. Community Leaders helped out each “homesteader”, and created a friendly atmosphere which contributed to the rapid explosion of personal web pages on the internet.

And though it’s probably been years since any of us have even looked at a GeoCities page (and that’s probably a good thing), to some of us, those pages, with “BourbonStreet” and “SoHo” in their URLs, represented a special time: the period in which audiovisual sharing first really took off on the web. Geocities, along with Angelfire and Tripod, were among the first wave of free personal self-expression sites for the masses. It was the first time that people who weren’t born-and-bred web geeks began to establish an earnest online presence, clumsily piecing together basic HTML (“hello! border = 0!” was the big insult to fling at someone whose page lacked a certain finesse). Sure, it contaminated the web with a lot of bad poetry, but it also brought us a plethora of wonder: band fan sites, zine reviews, scanned photos of interesting strangers from across the world.

GeoCities will completely cease to exist by the end of the year, and all its sites will be wiped from the face of the web forever. Feast your eyes on few of the relics that will be soon be gone [edit: But there's hope! æon writes in the comments, "jason scott of bbs documentary fame and a team of volunteers are archiving the whole thing." Click here to learn of their valiant efforts.]:

• Kristy’s Riot Grrrl Review
• Panpleasant Profederacy of Eris Proleteriat
• How to Dance Gothic (this and other sites like it are basically where Voltaire scraped all the jokes/lore for his “how to be goth” Hot Topic bestsellers from)

So… anyone here remember a beloved Geocities site that they’d like to share? Anyone here guilty of actually having ever made their own Geocities page? Let us take a moment to commiserate and recall our first memories of the web, our favorite haunts, the ways we discovered one another. Efnet. Dalnet. Undernet. Midgaard. Webrings. Guestbooks. X of the Y sites. ASCII-embellished sigs. BBSes. Alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die.

What was your first circle of friends on the web? Do you still keep in touch with them? Where did you get your first taste of this great series of tubes?