My lawn need aerating. I wonder what she's charging.

Totally blog worthy!!!!

wonder if jose lima's wife ever did this (?)

either way, you've inspired me to throw away all of my hooker shoes ....

hooray!!!!!

Ohhhhh CHECK IT OUT!! more Muffin Top! I'm having deja- post...........

Um, remember back to your high school physics class... It's not the spikes themselves but the weight distribution. All of the weight on one tiny spike is what does the damage. This is what makes ice skating possible. Go look it up.

Sad to see the piling on angry mentality in here. Real ballsy Tony, calling a stranger a "ho". But I'm glad to see Malignant find a home for her sad flickr hate. And you, Nerd, are the one that needs a physics lesson. If you think that chick standing there puts more damage than a 6'5" 230 lb. outfielder running full speed on the turf, you are an idiot. It's called f=m*a; go look it up.

Hey, look everyone! "Judy" is now the moral compass, not to mention the next Nobel prize winner in physics, for LAist!

Put a sock in it. If you don't like what you're reading here, go to the Popular Mechanics website or something.

Additionally, the heels can sink in 3"-4" while the cleats are only about half an inch long. So while the formula applies, the depth of penetration is totally different thus the statement about the "230 pound outfielder" in cleats is a moot argument.

It's those bags under her boobs that frighten me.

Not talking about the body habitus, Matt. Talking about the shoes. She's not even fat.

why is it ironic that Mal calls em like she sees em on a site that covers LA (where both of the items you mention take place)?

Also, are you calling UCLA students who run in their underwear sluts, matt? Cuz we never did.

Don't you get it, Tony? All opinions expressed on LAist must be uniform and consistent. All articles must support one another. All writers must agree with each other. If they do not, it is "ironic."

Matt,

You sure sound a lot like Daniel. Are you SURE your name is Matt?

In case you missed it, the field is for playing baseball on. Not for walking around on in society shoes. The groundskeeper would probably like to punt her entitled butt across the plate a few times. I know I would if she ruined MY new turf.

That's a pretty disingenuous defense, Mal. If you didn't mean to imply that she was a slut, you would have called them "high heels" instead of "hooker shoes." And "don't get me started on the navel ring" seems like a pretty obvious reference to her belly.

You claim that you simply photograph what you see. True, I guess. But what you *choose* to see, what you frame, focus on, and shoot is always very revealing. Besides fashion "mistakes," your pictures are inordinately obsessed with fat and flabby bodies.

And, in an oddly puritanical manner, you also comment on the fashions that you deem to be too sexually expressive. It's an odd aesthetic which grants you the permission to surreptitiously zoom in on a fat girl's ass crack, snap a photo and upload for your peanut gallery to chuckle over, while also inveighing against the loose moral character of young women in short skirts.

And whatever your captions or photos don't say is left to be filled in by your legion of fans. The comments in the peanut gallery are a window into the nasty body dysmorphia of our image-obsessed city. Sad to see that some people haven't outgrown the playground.

Anyways, I'm sure I need to "get a sense of humor." That's what jerks always say when people don't laugh at their "jokes."

> That's what jerks always say when people don't laugh at their "jokes".

And that's what jerks say when they are humor impaired, they call the people whose wit they don't understand "jerks".

It's all a matter of perspective.

Mal sez:

"I have almost 12,000 photos on my Flickr stream. The majority of them are not of fat, flab, or asses. Those are just the ones that seem to upset you. I'm not sure what is upsetting you so much; one woman's silly photos seem to bother you quite a bit."

Exactly. I'm not bothered by the vast majority of the photos in your Flickr stream. I'm only bothered by the ones you're justifiably infamous for. Come on, Mal. You know the ones-- the photos where you train your camera on the perceived physical faults of unsuspecting Angelenos. You know, ones like this doozy that you titled "If all that were allowed to disperse into the appropriate areas, it would look okay..."

http://www.therealmalingering.com/2007/04/12/allow-me-to-rant-for-a-minute-here/

The woman in the photo was kinda "bothered" by her sudden celebrity too. What a shocker! You make fun of people and sometimes they get upset.

Hell, you even make it easy to find the really "funny" pictures of fat people. Here's a whole set tagged with the keyword "obese."

http://www.flickr.com/photos/malingering/tags/obese/

And I love the little boxes we can superimpose onto your images, putting our uhhh...commentary.. directly onto the lucky person's body.

You claim that the "point" of your photos is to offer us a window into the LA obsession with "perfect" bodies. But your images, captions and cheering section are the gold standard of this very fixation. You're not a social critic. (Unless calling women skanks and teasing fat people can be counted as social criticism.)

As it happens, Bettye Travis just died. I encourage you to read her obit. You might find the story about how she became an activist enlightening. You see, some creeps at Disneyland were taking photos of her body, treating her like a carnival freak. Sound familiar? Well Travis decided to turn her own camera on the voyeurs, sending them away ashamed. And it began a lifelong career fighting against the kind of meanspiritedness that you've made your trademark.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-travis4jun04,1,1882396.story?coll=la-news-obituaries&ctrack=2&cset=true

Lots of people are doing a pretty good job of defending Mal here (herself included) but let me just point out one more thing.

She doesn't make a habit of making fun of people's bodies - as you seem to suggest. But rather how they choose to *dress* those bodies. My mother has struggled with obesity for many years now, but you'll never find her in one of Mal's photostreams because she knows what does and does not flatter her body type and dresses herself accordingly. It's the clothes. You may not have a choice about your body type, but you do have a choice about what you wear. Anyone who has watched Stacy and Clinton turn a misguided fashion victim into a stunner on "What Not To Wear" knows the power clothing has on your image.

The people who end up in Mal's pictures dress for attention - you can't say that they don't. Showing a lot of skin or making prominent clothing choices (whether obese or anorexic or anywhere in between) is asking people to look at you. Which we all do. Don't blame the lens for something the object has total control over.

"This experiment wasn't nearly as successful as I'd hoped. I will have to work on the troll bait. Or maybe Friday night is a bad trolling night.

The only person I successfully pissed off was someone who wrote to me in private, so that didn't even work."

That was Mal's comment on the first picture you referenced. Clearly she knows that she brings out a lot of angry criticism... she was doing that one on purpose just to raise people's ire. You'll notice that she eliminated the face from the woman in that picture as well...

Caroline:

That Mal deliberately set out to provoke anger, and that she rendered her subject faceless in the process are not arguments in her favor.

William:

I don't have any problem with calling people "fat." But your particular brand of social engineering is already pretty well-established and it ain't working. There's no evidence that fat people are likely to become thin due to social "stigmatization" and "making them feel like shit." So why don't you just leave them the hell alone?

I won't leave them the hell alone because their being fat affects my life. How, you ask?

1. When I'm in an airplane and I have to sit next to someone who should have indeed payed for the whole row and I don't have anywhere to rest my elbow on the whole way to Paris (or London, or Vegas) because, although the fat person's elbow isn't on it, they can't pull it far enough away for me to slip in there.

2. When I'm on a bus or metro train and there is one seat open and it's next to a fat person and although they're not taking up the whole seat, they're taking up just enough that if I were to sit on the edge next to him/her, it'd feel like a trip to prison rather than a relaxing ride on the public transport.

3. When I'm living here and I have to deal with the exhaust fumes and enviornmental damage that is caused by a fat person's need for an enormous Suburban or Expedition or Excursion to not only fit them but fit their whole family who is probably also fat because you know damn well they can't fit in a Civic.

4. Finally, having to see and hear them complain about how hard it is to lose weight while they're gorging on some cheeseburgers, Fritos, and Diet Cokes - it just pisses me off.

A few things.

First you said:
>The comments in the peanut gallery are a window into the nasty body dysmorphia of our image-obsessed city.

Then you said:
>Mal's column on LAist doesn't "comment" on this dysmorphic social condition. It doesn't seek to illuminate or change our biases.

So am I illuminating and exposing biases or not?

Then you linked to my blog and said:

The woman in the photo was kinda "bothered" by her sudden celebrity too. What a shocker! You make fun of people and sometimes they get upset.

You have that all wrong. Sudden celebrity? She was talking about photos of herself that she posted on her own photostream. Maybe you should read the rest of the post.

So, according to mattarmstrong's brand of social engineering we shouldn't take photos of certain categories of people, or talk about them unless we share his opinions, and sarcasm isn't a valid sense of humor. If anything, Malingering should be flattered for someone to think she has such a huge influence on society.