My French Microsoft Outlook has this menu item:

It turns out that in French police has two meanings:

• Cops
• Font

I had been wondering why Outlook was offering to call the cops on my email. I thought I had the Microsoft Outlook Feminist Blogger Edition.

The tale of Dominique Strauss-Kahn gets worse and worse. In mid-October the story broke that a dozen people, including hotel management, police officials, business executives and underworld figures, were placed under investigation for running a prostitution ring out of the Carlton Hotel in Lille. According to the testimony of at least one woman, France’s leading sex addict was a customer, both in Paris and Washington, right up to his final stay at the Sofitel. One police official has been taken into custody and questioned about a trip to Washington in which prostituted women were trafficked to the US for DSK.

The distinctive feature of this episode–besides the wide scope and the involvement of police–is that it has come to light afterthe Socialist primary. The chilling realization has crept over his erstwhile supporters that had he not been knocked out of the race by his arrest in New York there is an excellent chance he would have won the nomination and then brought this shit storm down upon himself and the entire party. They plead ignorance and are livid with him for endangering their careers and the election. Even his staunchest allies have dropped him like a ton of bricks and are saying on the record that they never want to hear of the guy again.

Nafissatou Diallo single-handedly saved the French Socialist party. That same party would not be saved by its own officials, who willfully overlooked what it knew of its leading prospect’s increasingly vile behaviour out of fear and misogyny. Le Monde report that Socialists are saying, “We should raise a statue to Nafissatou Diallo.”

Michel Petrucciani:

• He: “Great jazz!”
• She: “Fucking sociopath.”

Ides of March:

• He:  “I learned you can lose an election and make a million dollars year consulting on K street.”
• She: ” I learned you can rape a woman and drive her to suicide and you can just get another one and no man will ever be held to account.”

Michel Petrucciani, afflicted with a rare bone disease, was one of jazz’ leading pianists until his death at 36. The documentary film of his life portrays clearly how he used and tossed a series of women. Avoid.

The Ides of March is political junky George Clooney’s self-indulgent TV-caliber fllm about dirty deeds in a presidential campaign. Virulently misogynistic. Avoid.

Happily, “Chicken with Plums” (Poulet au prunes), the new Marjan Satrapi movie, is coming out. And if “Where do we go now?” (Et maintenant, on va où? ) is playing anywhere near you then move heaven and earth to see it. It’s moving, hilarious and has the most satisfying scene of a woman straightening men’s shit out ever consigned to film.

Feministe reports on some douchebag creating a Hot Chicks of OWS web site. Said douchebag, Steven Greenstreet, describes himself as “documentary filmmaker, video producer, 7D owner, comic book reader, sci fi nerd, atheistic troublemaker, and social media mercenary,” all of which taken together I have long since learned (through decades of exposure to hipsterdom) to read as “self-important socially-maladapted misogynistic ass.”

I swear, Andrea Dworkin is rotating at 7200 rpm in her grave.

to leave the State in the toilets in which you found them upon entering.

Am I the only person on Facebook who finds this appallingly sexist?

Why doesn’t it say “Or ask your mother how it’s done, you ignorant lazy-ass slacker”? Would the ‘likes’ dry up if it did?

What’s so damned funny about treating anyone (least of all your own mother) like a servant, anyhow?

New office supplies at Elizabitch Worldwide Industries global headquarters and European bureaux:

My ex, whose intellect impresses me less all the time, posted today, “All I can say is thank you Steve. You made the world a better place and will be missed.”

Better? Really?

Well, he gave boys great toys and what’s not better about that?

Glad you asked. Where do I start?

Let’s go back to 1976. I grew up surrounded by electronics. My father had an electronic music recording studio in the house. I was fascinated by it.

I entered high school at 13 and signed up for an electronics class at high school. Big mistake.

Whenever I entered the room, jumping, grabbing boys yelled ‘HEY GIRL HEY GIRL GIRL GIRL GIRL GIRL GIRL WITH THE PINK COMB GIRL GIRL GIRL.’ The teacher did nothing. I got no help from anyone. After six weeks, I dropped the class.

And that is the point where my life story and that of every male geek I have ever met, loved or worked with irrevocably part ways.

I took programming and math classes at a university when I was 15 and 16. But I never quite believed in myself and no one around me ever did either. No one saw the potential. I was a girl, at the age where the pressures to develop into a suitably fuckable cunt become crushing. I did not escape its effects. I abandoned tech.

I did come back to geekery after ten years of typing letters for a living, at the behest of my mother, amazingly enough, who had put together a satisfying consultancy writing database applications. I often assisted her performing surgery on computers, fixing up corrupted datafiles in the hex editor, and writing DOS batch file programs. It was her who urged me into IT and I am glad she did.

But over the years since I, as an adult returning student, graduated in the mid-90s, the tech world has remained a white-boys-only club. In every shop I’ve ever worked in there was a core clique of white males who ran everything. They got the good jobs, the promotions, the good work and everyone else in the IT department, the Chick, the Black Guy, that Guy Whose Name We Can’t Pronounce, The Lower Status Non-Warcraft Playing Males, got the crumbs. People with no more intelligence or talent than I rise in IT through the compelling power of the trouser snake.

So back to Steve Jobs. Jobs built a technological and business empire on the firmest of foundations, the narratives that structure our world. He was able to harness the archetypes of white-boys-with-toys, the male wizard bending the physical and social world to his will, the lone visionary. None of Job’s unique catalyzing talents would have made the least difference if he hadn’t had a dick and were he not, to white peoples’ way of seeing, drained of ethnicity. (I saw a friend today who knew him personally. She told me, “Did you know he was Syrian? He was adopted.” No, I did not. Jobs, like Ralph Nader, was socially bleached.)

They say Steve Jobs had a ‘reality distortion field.’ But he did not distort mine. There is a glass ceiling in my field, one that all of my male friends and colleagues floated through, supported by The Narrative and their lower-earning, non-techie, totally unthreatening wives. On the job I was the Perl ‘queen,’ the PHP ‘queen,’ the regular-expression ‘queen,’ the go-to person to solve thorny problems, but I was marginalized and made 10% to 20% less than the men (and those are just the cases I know about.) The past 25 years have been presided over by the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds and Mark Zuckerberg, men who are held up as the geniuses and the leaders. I feel the effect of that every single day.

Jobs, by all accounts, was an amazing human being and definitely will be missed by friends, family and colleagues. But let’s not exaggerate. He did not make the world better or even much different. He (however inadvertently) reinforced the narratives and the archetypes that hold me and millions of others back. It’s still a sexist, racist, homophobic, imperialist oppressive shithole of a world…and all we got was this lousy iPhone.

Fed up with school job cuts dictated from above, the village government of Tournan-en-Brie decided to strike back by voiding the lease of the local office of the National Education service (charged with implementing the job cuts) and tossing them out into the street. Now it’s calling for other municipalities who are landlords to the ministry cutting their teaching staff to do the same. (Charlie Hebdo, No 1006, 28 Sept 2011.)