Let's Pretend All Drug Use Is Abuse!
Actually, it's not. But we do pretend it is, by disqualifying people for jobs based on pot use -- when there are only urine tests to detect marijuana and other illegal drugs, and none for martinis.
Well, here's Matt Welch, most recently of Reason magazine, newly hired as assistant editorial page editor of the LA Times, on the humiliation of being made to pee into a cup to start his new job. Yes, Matt Welch, who, like me, reacts to pot the way most people react to being clonked over the head with a cast-iron frying pan:
THE NEWSPAPER you are reading has been lovingly compiled by hundreds of humans who urinated into plastic measuring cups for the privilege of bringing it to you.I gather this is not widely known among readers, judging by the reaction from those I've told. "Why would the L.A. Times care whether you've smoked pot?" goes the typical response. It doesn't help with the comprehension that it's not immediately evident that anyone here actually does.
Yet it's been company policy for at least 18 years that every new hire excrete on command while a rubber-gloved nurse waits outside with her ear plastered to the door. Those who test positive for illegal drugs don't get their promised job, on grounds that someone who can't stay off the stuff long enough to pass a one-time, advance-notice screening might have a problem. (And yes, it has happened in the newsroom a handful of times.) This despite the fact that we generally don't operate machinery heavier than a coffee pot, aren't likely to sell our secrets to blackmailing Russkies and are supposed to be at least theoretically representative of typical Americans.
Because guess what? The typical American — and just about every journalist I've ever asked — has already tried marijuana at least once before the age of 25, according to the government's National Survey on Drug Use and Health. What's more, despite 35 years and billions of dollars' worth of taxpayer-financed propaganda to the contrary, most of those who've inhaled didn't collapse through the "gateway" into desperate heroin addiction or "Traffic"-style sex slavery. George W. Bush turned out all right (at least on paper), as did Al Gore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bill Walton, Michael Bloomberg and millions more.
More on the urine-testing issue from Reason's Jacob Sullum:
To magnify the size of the problem facing employers, the government and the drug testing industry routinely conflate illegal drugs with alcohol. But it’s clear that employers are not expected to treat drinkers the way they treat illegal drug users. Although drinking is generally not allowed on company time, few employers do random tests to enforce that policy. In 1995, according to survey data collected by Tyler Hartwell and his colleagues, less than 14 percent of work sites randomly tested employees for alcohol. And while 22 percent tested applicants for alcohol, such tests do not indicate whether someone had a drink, say, the night before. In any case, it’s a rare employer who refuses to hire drinkers.When it comes to illegal drugs, by contrast, the rule is zero tolerance: Any use, light or heavy, on duty or off, renders an applicant or worker unfit for employment. "With alcohol, the question has always been not ‘Do you consume?’ but ‘How much?’" notes Ted Shults, chairman of the American Association of Medical Review Officers, which trains and certifies physicians who specialize in drug testing. "With the illegal drugs, it’s always, ‘Did you use it?’"
The double standard is especially striking because irresponsible drinking is by far the biggest drug problem affecting the workplace. "Alcohol is the most widely abused drug among working adults," the U.S. Department of Labor notes. It cites an estimate from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration that alcohol accounts for 86 percent of the costs imposed on businesses by drug abuse.
In part, the inconsistency reflects the belief that illegal drug users are more likely than drinkers to become addicted and to be intoxicated on the job. There is no evidence to support either assumption. The vast majority of pot smokers, like the vast majority of drinkers, are occasional or moderate users. About 12 percent of the people who use marijuana in a given year, and about 3 percent of those who have ever tried it, report smoking it on 300 or more days in the previous year. A 1994 study based on data from the National Comorbidity Survey estimated that 9 percent of marijuana users have ever met the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for "substance dependence." The comparable figure for alcohol was 15 percent.
According to the testing industry, however, any use of an illegal drug inevitably leads to abuse. "Can employees who use drugs be good workers?" Roche asks in one of its promotional documents. Its answer: "Perhaps, for awhile. Then, with extended use and abuse of drugs and alcohol, their performance begins to deteriorate. They lose their edge. They’re late for work more often or they miss work all together....Suddenly, one person’s drug problem becomes everyone’s problem." This equation of use with abuse is a staple of prohibitionist propaganda. "It is simply not true," says the Drug-Free America Foundation, "that a drug user or alcohol abuser leaves his habit at the factory gate or the office door." The message is that a weekend pot smoker should be as big a worry as an employee who comes to work drunk every day.
Employers respond to the distinctions drawn by the government. Under the Americans With Disabilities Act, for example, alcoholics cannot be penalized or fired without evidence that their drinking is hurting their job performance. With illegal drugs, however, any evidence of use is sufficient grounds for disciplinary action or dismissal.
The question is: How many lives get ruined for a bit of pot possession? How many people are in jail or have criminal records because they toke instead of suck down vodka and tonics? How come the government is allowed tell you what you can and can't put in your body, and where you can and can't go in your own head? If you aren't driving drunk, or operating a lathe, what's the problem?
In fact, I know a brilliant scientist who is something of a pothead. She works from about 8am to 8pm, and comes home and smokes a big doobie to wind down. Ooh, another life ruined by drugs -- well, if you'd call "ruin" coming up with a breathtaking scientific discovery that's saved thousands of lives...just for starters.
Of course, it's futile to expect the dumbass criminalization of pot to change, in light of the caliber of officials we elect to represent us -- the caliber that sticks a finger in the wind and feels which way the votes are blowing...which is generally on the side of can't go wrong with "Just Say No!" to intelligent drug policy.
Jack Shafer Has A Very Good Point
Among others, he writes on Slate:
I want editorials signed by people, so I know who to yell at.
On the heels of Matt Welch being hired by the LA Times' editorial page, I second that. Matt's opinions, which I've been reading in Reason for years, shouldn't be ground into anonymity all of a sudden -- nor, in fact, should any of the opinions of the people writing editorials at papers. It's weird that they are, and something nobody seems to question.
A Brief History Of Timely
The latest on being late, by New York Times' Bob Morris:
So, like Einstein's notion of time itself, being on time has become relative.Ten minutes late is the new on time. Twenty is the new 10. A cellphone call that someone is running 15 minutes late means you won't be seeing him for 30, at least. Our clocks might as well be dripping in a Salvador Dalí painting.
Jay McInerney, who is not exactly a nobody, was recently kept waiting five hours by Julian Casablancas, the lead singer of the Strokes, for a magazine interview.
The explanation? "I fell asleep," he was told by the rocker. "I'm a little bit sad."
Not as sad as all the people whom celebrities (excluding Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is famously punctual) have kept waiting recently. But then there are so many sad souls out there these days, mortified while waiting for dates at highly visible tables at highly visible restaurants.
To deal with all this, social time zones might be good to keep in mind. "At our church we have Church Time," said Jeanne Hamilton, a wedding planner in North Carolina who also runs www.EtiquetteHell.com. "But that only means starting 10 minutes late. What bothers me is when people keep me waiting a half hour and then they're so entitled that they think they shouldn't be hassled."
Mothers of clients, for instance. Not to mention a bride featured on "Bridezilla," a cable TV show, who was an hour late for her own wedding and miffed when her ceremony had to be shortened.
So what's to be done about all this? Tom Coughlin, the Giants coach, keeps players out of games if they're late for team meetings. Airlines (not known for punctuality themselves) are bumping more and more late-arriving passengers, and a Seattle newspaper reports that judges are tossing late defendants in jail.
At coming fashion shows, perhaps American designers should take a cue from the Italians. At the last Gucci show in Milan, wine was served to keep waiting guests happy. Roberto Cavalli served chocolates.
"Now, that's what I call managing a deficit," one guest said.
Or maybe it's just feeding a habit.
Let's Play Foil The Sleazebags!
I've gotten two junk faxes from the same (unnamed) company -- using my toner and my fax line to sleaze me somebody's "Bad Credit - OK" ads; one last week, one just now. That's vandalism and theft. I don't pay for a phone line and fax toner to fund somebody's advertising. (FYI, posting their message here is the antithesis of that!)
I called the number on the fax, 1-800-210-0605, to try to find the company behind the sleazing, so I can sue them for $500 per fax under the current junk faxing laws. Well, some rude guy there won't give me the company's name, he just said, repeatedly, "Give me your name and number and I'll take it off." Well, I'd already called their bogus "take-off" number last week, and it didn't help; furthermore, the last thing I want to do is identify myself to some sleazebag company. The guy's response: "you can get as angry as you want" and hung up. Repeatedly. Each time I called back for the company's name.
Well, I don't think people like this should have an easy time doing business, so I'd like to enlist your help to find out who's behind the faxing...in the most annoying, sleazy business-confounding way possible. Let's all call the company and see if we can't, well, work for the greater good. That number again:
1-800-210-0605
Post your experiences here. You might also encourage other bloggers to link to this blog item so their readers will join in. Let's show these creep-asses that consumers don't have to be victims.
PS The fax number it says it came from this time, atop the page, is 877-508-8463. Whether that's correct is anyone's guess. The last fax came from 877-417-8570.
The Difference Between Daily Papers And Alternative Weeklies
It's in the guts department, for starters. For a sense of that, here's Nancy Nall Derringer, on the daily paper prissies.
When I was a grass-green rookie, an assistant managing editor at The Columbus Dispatch excised the word "funk" from one of my stories, on the grounds that I couldn't define it well enough for him -- you can't imagine a less funky man -- and it was only one letter away from the F-bomb. He thought I was trying to pull some sort of fast one. And so readers were spared the incendiary phrase, "clothes with funk and flash."After 26 years in the business, I've become accustomed to editors less interested in readable stories than those rinsed of every possible word that might offend. One executive editor made a top-down decree against anything the dictionary listed as "vulgar," after an elderly woman called to complain about the phrase "the straight poop." He proudly announced this in a column; some days later, the word "snot" was struck from one of my own.
A syndicated writer told me she was asked to substitute "hips" for "butt" in a column on liposuction. Readers of a Florida paper a friend of mine works for could be forgiven for not knowing what, exactly, Monica Lewinsky did with Bill Clinton, because all sexual activity is referred to simply as "sex," so no phones will ring in the newsroom.
We could trade examples all day, but as we do, maybe we could spare a thought about how writers and editors accustomed to a leash this tight -- so tight they're running the public statements of a high-profile politician through the Bland-o-Tron, so that no one need be offended by the phrase "chocolate city" -- are ever going to make the transition to the wide-open, uncensored online world. Or, for that matter, to any world where Howard Stern can sell a million satellite radios and the readers newspapers most want to gain are well-acquainted with what "MILF" means.
No one's advocating newspapers start using the Big Seven. But can we maybe stop editing the paper for the 90-year-olds in the audience?
No, apparently, we can't. More on that from Scott Adams. And then there's my own experience. And PS, that was me, above, too -- in the "substituting hips for butt" example, in a joke about liposuction (I decided to use thighs instead, which was slightly less unfunny). Anyway, I did it because my editor told me daily papers, some of which run my column, consider "butt" "too vulgar" to use, and I find getting fired counterproductive. So, here's the line, and here's the substitution I included after the column:
In the meantime, vacationing with your best friend and hooking up with the cabana boy beats staying home and paying some doctor to inject your butt into your face.STYLE NOTE, CONSERVATIVE PAPERS ONLY: Last para of answer, if you must, you can replace “butt” with “thighs.” If you must!
But, back to alt weeklies. Their bottom line is dependent on classifieds to a great extent, and they're terrified that Craig Newmark's Craiglist.org will put them out of business, so what do they do? They invite him to be the keynote speaker at the west coast alternative weeklies conference, then debate and question him afterwards:
I was amused by this remark he made (which may not be word-for-word accurate, due to the time it took me to grope for a pen...but it's very close):
"You may suspect that I have no vision, I just respond to what people want...and that's accurate."
He mentioned this New York Magazine profile of him by Phillip Weiss, subtitled, How a schlumpy IBM refugee found you your apartment, your boyfriend, your new couch, your afternoon sex partner—and now finds himself killing your newspaper.
Since he's a fan of "progressive journalism," I mentioned to him after his talk that many of the alt weeklies are not as well-funded as he seems to think, and sometimes $65 a week in classifieds revenue for a couple months is the difference between staying afloat and going under. I also asked him to let the blogging world know if he finds a way around IP address anonymizers, so we can all finally figure out which little man has been posting under the name "Soupy" on Cathy Seipp's blog these past few years.
Ethanol Is The Answer?
From a Fortune Magazine piece by Adam Lashinsky and Nelson D. Schwartz:
You probably don't know it, but the answer to America's gasoline addiction could be under the hood of your car. More than five million Tauruses, Explorers, Stratuses, Suburbans, and other vehicles are already equipped with engines that can run on an energy source that costs less than gasoline, produces almost none of the emissions that cause global warming, and comes from the Midwest, not the Middle East.These lucky drivers need never pay for gasoline again--if only they could find this elusive fuel, called ethanol. Chemically, ethanol is identical to the grain alcohol you may have spiked the punch with in college. It also went into gasohol, that 1970s concoction that brings back memories of Jimmy Carter in a cardigan and outrageous subsidies from Washington. But while the chemistry is the same, the economics, technology, and politics of ethanol are profoundly different.
Instead of coming exclusively from corn or sugar cane as it has up to now, thanks to biotech breakthroughs, the fuel can be made out of everything from prairie switchgrass and wood chips to corn husks and other agricultural waste. This biomass-derived fuel is known as cellulosic ethanol. Whatever the source, burning ethanol instead of gasoline reduces carbon emissions by more than 80% while eliminating entirely the release of acid-rain-causing sulfur dioxide. Even the cautious Department of Energy predicts that ethanol could put a 30% dent in America's gasoline consumption by 2030.
We may not have to wait that long. After decades of being merely an additive to gasoline, ethanol suddenly looks to be the stuff of a fuel revolution--and a pipe dream for futurists. An unlikely alliance of venture capitalists, Wall Streeters, automakers, environmentalists, farmers, and, yes, politicians is doing more than just talk about ethanol's potential. They're putting real money into biorefineries, car engines that switch effortlessly between gasoline and biofuels, and R&D to churn out ethanol more cheaply. (By the way, the reason motorists don't know about the five-million-plus ethanol-ready cars and trucks on the road is that until now Detroit never felt the need to tell them. Automakers quietly added the flex-fuel feature to get a break from fuel-economy standards.)
What's more, powerful political lobbies in Washington that never used to concern themselves with botanical affairs are suddenly focusing on ethanol. "Energy dependence is America's economic, environmental, and security Achilles' heel," says Nathanael Greene of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a mainstream environmental group. National- security hawks agree. Says former CIA chief James Woolsey: "We've got a coalition of tree huggers, do-gooders, sodbusters, hawks, and evangelicals." (Yes, he did say "evangelicals"--some have found common ground with greens in the notion of environmental stewardship.)
The next five years could see ethanol go from a mere sliver of the fuel pie to a major energy solution in a world where the cost of relying on a finite supply of oil is way too high. As that happens, says Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has become one of the nation's most influential ethanol advocates, "I'm absolutely convinced that without putting any more land under agriculture and without changing our food production, we can introduce enough ethanol in the U.S. to replace the majority of our petroleum use in cars and light trucks."
...Not that ethanol will replace gasoline overnight. There are 170,000 service stations in the U.S.; only 587 (count 'em!) sell E85. To refine enough ethanol to replace the gas we burn (140 billion gallons a year) would require thousands of biorefineries and hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet one of capitalism's favorite visionaries is convinced that very soon filling up on weeds and cornhusks will be no more remarkable than tanking up on regular. Says Richard Branson, whose Virgin Group is starting an ethanol-inspired subsidiary called Virgin Fuels: "This is the win-win fuel of the future."
In Paris Now
No, not me (not at this exact moment, anyway). It's the name of a great new Paris group blog Emmanuelle Richard turned me onto, created by Laurie Pike, an LA journo I'd met briefly some years back. Here's a link to Pike's moving piece on her days as an au pair for several versions of the Wicked Witch Of The Better Arrondissements, via the job postings at the Centre Information et Documentation Jeunesse:
My first trip there was at the age of 19, shortly after I had moved to Paris from Cincinnati with $100 in my pocket. Coincidentally, the job I took was on the very same street, in a grand building overlooking the Seine. I looked after two children and stayed in a chambre de bonne on the 8th floor. The help was not to use the elevator.On my first day as an au pair, Madame set out some fresh vegetable—vegetables I had never seen before—next to a coquotte minute, and told me to make a puree for the kids. I was too scared to tell her that my cooking experience was limited to tossing fish sticks in a toaster oven. “People just eat hamburgers in America,” she told her husband at a rare dinner I was allowed to attend. “And when they meet each other, they say, ‘Hello, how much do you make?’” She turned to me. “Don’t they?”
I was unhappy in my six months with the family, but what an experience it was absorbing aristocratic French life in their vacation homes in Avignon, Cannes and Normandy. I wrote home about waxing the children’s shoes, feeding them a spoonful of honey before bed, having to “verify the laundry” by checking every button and zipper before hanging it up.
After six months in France, I went back to Cincinnati a different person. I knew AOC from TGV. I sang French nursery rhymes to my little brothers. (I never did learn how to work the damn coquotte.)
I moved again to Paris two years later, a bit wiser but just as poor. I returned to the Centre de Jeunesse. I turned down a job offer from a man who hinted that sleeping with him would earn me a salary bump. I considered a governess position in Africa until my brother informed me the country in question had just had a coup d’etat. I ultimately settled in with a middle-class family in the 18th. They weren’t as stingy with food as my first family; “nourri” meant three meals a day instead of one. Madame made friendly small-talk with my French boyfriend before we’d go out dancing. I was fond of this family, and I cried when I left them—despite the fact that Madame commemorated my last day by giving me 5 hours solid of housework.
A few years later, I was making enough money to afford an actual vacation in Paris. I decided to take a stroll in the Champs de Mars, and I descended at the Bir Hakeim metro station. (To this day the name reminds me of the first Madame’s frequently expressed trouille over the increasing Arab population.) Unbelievably, as I approached the entrance to the building of my first au pair family, I saw Madame coming from the other direction with her now-older children, and the new baby she claimed she would never have, in a pram. I froze. Their faces looked blurry. I heard the buzz of the door and Madame screeching, “Attention à tes doigts!”
That line, and her harpie voice, rang in my head as I continued walking, feeling wooden. I passed the Centre de Jeunesse, and I smiled, my bloodflow kicking back into normal. I was happy I didn’t have to go in this time.
She goes back to the Centre, to the au pair wall:
I burst out crying. It was like looking at myself in the past. Were they down on their luck? Were they waiting for a $20 bill from their sister in the mail, as I once did for days on end? Would any of them say yes to a salary bump, winding up like Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie?
The entire piece (and a great new Paris blog) are at the link above. And while Laurie can't work a coquotte minute, I wonder if she's mastered the mandoline. It's the greatest invention in food slicing -- and, now, it will only set you back $29.99 on Amazon, and possibly, a fingertip or two. I bought one for my editor and another for my bookkeeper for Christmas, and sent along stern warnings to only use it with thick garden gloves, lest my bonus gift to them become an unexpected trip to the emergency room.
Throwing Good Money After Bad Love
Why does anyone get married? (ie, Why does anyone harbor the delusion that a relationship will necessarily last forever, given how long we all live, just for one?) Why, especially, does anyone who's an aging bazillionaire who isn't interested in having children get married? Perhaps a wife is just another acquisition, perhaps they, like all the 17-year-old girls who write me, dream of finding "the one." Kate Zernike writes in The New York Times about super-rich men, multiply divorced, who are right up on their feet, chasing wife number three, four, or five...to the tune of many, many millions when they divorce:
FOR Ronald O. Perelman, Forbes magazine's 34th-richest man in America, marriage would seem to be getting expensive: last week, he announced that he was divorcing his fourth wife, the actress Ellen Barkin, and would pay out the $20 million promised in their prenuptial pact — having paid $8 million, $80 million and $30 million, respectively, to Wives 1, 2 and 3.While matchmakers among the ultrarich are already speculating about who will be wife No. 5, others might reasonably ask why Mr. Perelman and other serial grooms in his jet set don't take the actor George Clooney's "never again" approach: Date ferociously, but don't marry. As one prominent New York divorce lawyer said of an 85-year-old client now negotiating his fourth prenup, "Don't you think he would stop?"
"They marry people who listen to completely different music, who don't know who Joe McCarthy was," bemoaned the lawyer, who would not be quoted by name for fear of angering his clients. "They have less chance with every one that it's going to succeed."
So why do the ultrarich marry, and re-marry, and re-marry? For men who have cycled through what Harriet Newman Cohen, a New York divorce lawyer, called "very high powered, high ZIP code divorces," marriage, more than dating, fills old traditions of respectability, status and comfort. It might even be love, for a while. Plus, they can afford it.
..."This is a new phenomenon — not the mercenary quality, but the fact that people are willing to risk this kind of money, just to say they're married," Ms. (Stephanie) Coontz said. "Love has been so idealized that at the top, the rich are willing to throw good money after bad to see if they can get the magic ring." So if a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, as Samuel Johnson observed, that's only more true of Marriages 3, 4 and 5.
"They love the institution, they want to do it again," said Janis Spindel, a matchmaker in New York who said she charges $100,000 for what she calls her "power elite clients" to find a spouse. "They think three times is the charm."
Of course, marriage to a certain kind of woman — a movie star, a socialite — can also be about conquest, ambition, cachet.
"It's ego," said David Patrick Columbia, who writes NewYorkSocialDiary.com. "If you're a big deal, you've got to have ways of showing it. You've got the house, got the car, got the wife. They don't think much of marriage, they think much of possessing."
They can easily find women to agree — and typically it is the women who are, as divorce lawyers gently call it, "the non-moneyed."
Stanford G. Lotwin, a divorce lawyer in New York, said he tried to warn his serial clients about taking on serial wives.
"We tell these men, you cannot go anywhere without our card in your pocket," he said. "As soon as you have your second date, you have to call, and we'll remind you how expensive this is. He'll say, 'I repeat your name in my sleep, I promise you I'm not doing anything.' " But soon enough, Mr. Lotwin will be pulling out the box of tissues he uses to guide the man's new fiancée through the prenuptial process.
For many of the men, the prenuptial is simply part of the business deal that is marriage. "They see it like a hedge fund," said Ms. Cohen, the divorce lawyer. "Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't."
In the Advice Goddess economic analysis, dating models and having sex with hookers is much cheaper, and the "love," in the end, probably works out about the same.
Breadmaking, By Nan Talese
What did publishing icon Nan Talese know (about Frey's book), and when did she know it? Timothy Noah writes on Slate of a 2003 article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune by Deborah Caulfield Rybak, questioning Frey's credibility. One Rybak citation concerned the book's very first paragraph! Frey contended that he'd awakened in an airplane, missing teeth, broken, and bruised, with "a hole" in his cheek. Frey's friend, Keith Bray, says otherwise. Noah says:
Rybak also talked to several airline employees and was told that no flight attendant would ever allow someone onto a plane in that condition because she wouldn't want to take responsibility for evacuating him. "The only way someone would be on a plane in that condition would be on a stretcher and accompanied by a doctor," said Capt. Steve Luckey, chairman of the Air Line Pilots Association's national security committee.When Rybak flagged these credibility problems to Talese, did Talese stand steadfastly by her author? Er, not exactly:
"You have to remember when someone is writing in the first person, it is their memory as they recall it," she said in an interview. "And memory is very selective; there's no such thing as the whole story. If they took a lie-detector test it would probably be true, but if that person had a witness all the way through, maybe it didn't exactly happen that way. But that's how they see it."This is more or less what Talese would later say in response to The Smoking Gun's findings: Memoirs hew to a different standard because memories are faulty. That's true up to a point—one that falls well short of Frey's gaudier inventions. It certainly doesn't extend to changing people's names without informing readers in the text, another problem Rybak flagged to Talese. Talese acknowledged this error more directly. "It's a total slip-up that we didn't have a disclaimer page," she told the Star Trib. "I'm embarrassed."
Yeah, embarrassed all the way to the bank.
More Annoyance With PR
The popularity of text messaging is soaring, writes Yuki Noguchi in The Washington Post, and like vultures on freshly flattened skunk, PR people are rushing in to ju$tify their existence. I got this press release in my email last week:
Hi Amy,Did you know that 60 percent of those who send text messages have sent one to tell someone they love them or miss them? Further, 26 percent have even sent a "Happy Valentine's Day" text, according to the first annual NAME WITHHELD! Texting Outlook Survey from NAME WITHHELD! Communications.
If you're planning Valentine's Day coverage, I hope you might consider the press release below offering the top-ten texting & dating do's and don'ts from NAME WITHHELD! and John Gray, author of best-seller Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus.
In addition to the data in the press release, I also have data-specific to the top-20 DMAs if you are interested.
Get Some Textual Healing this Valentine's Day
Textpert Advice from T9 and Relationship Guru John Gray
Seattle, WA - January 11, 2006 - Tegic Communications, maker of popular T9 Text Input software for cell phones, has teamed up with John Gray, author of best-seller Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and AOL Love & Sex Coach, to offer the top-ten tips to help ensure a successful union of texting and dating in 2006.
It's no secret that text messaging is on the rise. In fact, even texting to share amorous thoughts is on the upswing, according to the first annual T9 Texting Outlook Survey. Sixty percent of those who sent text messages have sent one to tell someone they love them or miss them.
Meanwhile, 27 percent have sent a flirtatious or sexy text message and 26 percent have used cell phone text messaging to say "Happy Valentine's Day." Seven percent have even sent a text message to ask someone out on a date so keep that phone charged up at all times!
Given the rise in text messaging, which is now used for breaking up, making up and for asking out dates, Tegic and John Gray offer the texting tips below to help ensure successful coupling in 2006.
Texting & Dating: Top-Ten Do's & Don'ts
DO reply to a text message in a timely manner. No one wants to press "send" only to be left waiting (and waiting) for a reply.
DON'T read too much into whether he or she has (or hasn't!) signed off with X's and O's for kisses and hugs.
DO carefully consider the effect your text message is going to have on the reader. Send a note that will put a smile on her face, not leave her wondering why she gave you her number in the first place.
DON'T overuse emoticons, such as smileys, and text speak, and make sure the recipient knows what you mean. You don't want to scare off a potential date who thinks you mean "lots of love" rather than "laugh out loud" when you type LOL.
DO wait until at least the third date before you engage in "textual relations" with a new love interest. Be sure sexy or intimate texts are well-received before firing off note after note.
DON'T assume he is awake and sober just because you are. If you receive an outlandish reply at 3 in the morning or no reply at all, wait 12 hours and try again.
DO flirt and send love letters via text. But be careful about sending texts that you wouldn't want read by anyone other than the intended recipient.
DON'T read too much into failure to reply right away to your text message. However, if you've texted three times without a reply, it may be time to move on.
DO make sure you're sending a text message to the right person in your phone book. Imagine the discomfort upon learning you've sent hot and steamy love notes to your grandmother.
DON'T be a bad speller. It makes less of an impact on the intended to learn that you want to "kips" rather than "kiss" them.
"Sending a text is a great way to get to know someone better and to let them know you are thinking of them. Text messages are an informal and fun way of communicating," said Dr. Gray.
I wrote back to the PR lady:
Did John Gray really write those himself, or did he just stick his name on them? Forgive me, but I have a hard time thinking of him as somebody who even knows what a text message looks like. -Amy
Weird...I didn't get so much as a text message in reply!
The Blunder Years
I'm in San Francisco at the alternative newspaper conference...which happened just on the heels of driving to Palm Springs for the evolutionary psychology pre-conference, so forgive me if blogging's been a bit lite for a few days.
I just posted a new Advice Goddess column, "The Blunder Years," about a guy, 24, who can't figure out why he's having a hard time getting dates (note: it's hard for everyone in the universe, except, perhaps, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie). Part of the problem is his panic to find "the right girl." Here's an excerpt:
Forget finding “the right girl.” Free yourself up to find the wrong girl now, because there’s no uglier time than midlife to have a midlife crisis. You jolt awake one morning prepared to sell your grandmother for a mean ride and loose women. As luck would have it, your grandmother is deader than your hair follicles, and your wife convulses with laughter at the idea of funding your automotive ambitions. The next thing you know, you’re the aging male version of a Catholic schoolgirl, pulling into the alley behind the grocery store before work to apply spray-on hair and snap gangsta hubs on the minivan.If you’re like most people, you were Socrates as a teenager, a rare genius in a world of drooling morons. This makes it hard to recognize your 20s for what they should be, The Decade Of Extremely Bad Judgment: a lab to do dumb stuff and learn from it, taking care not to end up dead, incurably diseased, or in jail for more than two consecutive evenings. Sure, the official end of adolescence is 18, but for more and more people, it actually ends around 30. That’s their cue to start understanding exactly what idiots they’ve been, so they can try not to live and act so idiotically. Of course, some don’t hit this mark until 40. Others are still living in their parents’ garage at 55.
Let’s review freshman anthropology: Men like beautiful women, women like men with mojo. You’re a guy, 24, still in school, and girls probably picture you taking them on dates on the handlebars of your bike. What you really should be wondering about isn’t why you don’t get many dates, but why you get any dates at all. And, of course, girls too chicken to say no to your face will tell you, “Sure I’ll go out with you, just gimme a call,” then rush home to change their phone number. This is news to you? This is news to anyone?
Yes, sometimes “It’s not you, it’s me” really means “it’s you.” While it’s possible you’re coming on too strong, it’s likely you’re coming on too short. (Note to pint-sized angry letter writers: I’m just the messenger.) Studies show women prefer men who are taller than they are. Boguslaw Pawlowski, a Polish anthropologist, found that from a woman’s perspective, the ideal woman/man height ratio is about 1:1.09, which means the girls most disposed to see 5’6” you as more than their cute little friend are those around 5’0”.
Relax, crack the books, stop looking for girls, and just be on the lookout. The difference is in the desperation -- coming off like you want to show a girl a good time, not wrestle her to the ground and jam a ring on her finger. You’ve got quite a project ahead of you -- dating enough wack-jobs so you can readily identify them and either make them a lifelong hobby or get them out of your system. Then again, what part of more fun, sex, and freedom doesn’t work for you? (Much as it lacks the suspense of trying to break the speed record for going from prom to suburban disaffection.)
The entire column is at this link.
Getting Your Money's Worth From PR
I guess spell-check and attention to grammar, syntax, and meaning cost extra. On Wednesday, I got an emailed press release from Stephen at Trent & Company, with the subject line:
"Single on Valentine's Day -- Ways to Cope from -- Tips from Carrie Bradshaw and Dr. Charles Sophy."
I couldn't believe I was getting a press release with tips from a fictional character, so I opened it. From the confusing subject line, Ways to Cope from -- (ways to cope from what?), to the muddled writing, the thing was just one long (and, I would guess, expensive) mess. Remember, PR doesn't come cheap. I corrected only a few spelling errors in bold below. I didn't feel like rewriting it. And let's just say, I wasn't too hot on the ideas expressed, either. Here's the body of the release:
“Later that day I got to thinking about relationships. There are those that open you up to something new and exotic, those that are old and familiar, those that bring up lots of questions, those that bring you somewhere unexpected, those that bring you far from where you started, and those that bring you back. But the most exciting, challenging and significant relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And if you find someone to love the you you love, well, that's just fabulous. "
I think that was the "Carrie Bradshaw" portion of the press release, but, surprise, surprise, it's sloppily unattributed, so we really can't be sure!
Whether its your fictional best friend Carrie Bradshaw or well(DASH)known Beverly Hills Physiatrist, Dr, Charles Sophy, the same message rings true that the relationship you have with yourself is the most important one. According to Dr. Sophy, “An understanding of self and awareness will bring to light both your strength(s) and weaknesses. Once you've established a relationship with yourself and know yourself, you will then be ready to handle and relationship or social situation.”
Valentine's Day is a love it or hate it type holiday. When you are in a relationship that works all the flowers, candy, and jewelry in the world wont add up to the value of that relationship. When you are not in a relationship you often forget about what really matters and can make yourself sick that you're the only one in the office without roses on her desk.Dr. Charles Sophy makes the following recommendations for any single person this Valentine's day:
Be aware that you are prone to be moody and upset -- self awareness to your mood and anxiety due to feeling alone is the key to not let things get out of control.
Make plans in advance as to keep yourself busy with and occupied during these times when you know you will feel down in the dumps.
Keep yourself busy almost to the point of exhaustation that when it is bed time (ONE WORD) you will fall right asleep rather than dwell on your loneliness.
In the self(DASH)awareness process be able to remove yourself from the situation and remove yourself from these situations.
Don’t be ashamed to treat yourself like your own valentine nobody deservers it more than you...go to the spa, get your hair done, buy a a sexy new outfit. What ever makes you feel good about yourself!indulge indulge indulge.
For Children of Single Mothers:
Kids can make mom something special to show her somebody does love her..
Kids can take mom out for a hamburger or a special date with mom
Kids can do a special activity such a hike or a walk -- make sure its something mom enjoys
Buy her something special that you she can treasure.It .doesn’t have to cost a ...candy or flowers are fine.
Write her a poem...writer her song or sketch about how a great mom she is...
Dr. Charles Sophy is triple board certified in adult psychiatry, child/adolescent psychiatry and family practice. He offers an exceptional perspective on mental health rooted in an understanding of physical well-being and neuropsychiatry, as well as two decades of clinical practice that ranges from indigent populations in public-sector facilities to our nation’s business leaders and Hollywood personalities.
At his private practice in Beverly Hills, Calif.(comma) his clients include many high-profile families and their children. In addition, Dr. Sophy is the Medical Director for the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. His department, the largest of its kind in the U.S., is responsible for the health, safety and welfare of 40,000 foster children. He also is an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of California Los Angeles Neuro-Psychiatric Institute, and regularly is a speaker to groups of healthcare professionals, parents, medical students, residents and social workers.
PS It's stuff like the "poor single loser" ideas put out in this press release (and by far-too-many people and companies who aren't in the mental health biz) that make people who aren't in relationships feel bad. I suggest that all of the un-Valentined look at people who are in relationships, and see how many of them actually look happy. Maybe not being in a relationship can be something to be celebrated? At the very least, order in some food and rent Kill Bill 2, and other movies about love gone wrong.
MORE: I was so stunned by how poorly this was written, I emailed the publicist who sent it to me:
My advice to you is to spell-check your press releases before they go out. Attention to grammar and syntax is also a plus. I'm tempted to post this on my blog as an example of everything a press release shouldn't be, but I'll restrain myself.Note: Carrie Bradshaw is a fictional character.
If you represent any anthropologists or evolutionary psychologists who publish peer-reviewed studies, I'd be thrilled to see those studies.
He writes back:
thank you...i need to work on that...i get too excited!
I write back:
Um, you need to go back and get your GED.
I should have also noted that if you aren't an 11-year-old girl trying to swap Hello Kitty items, and are instead an adult trying to make your way in the business world, you might want to take that extra fraction of a second to hit the "shift" button with your pinkie, and capitalize that "i," and maybe even that "t"!
He writes back:
I am sorry your highness...I have a BA in Real Estate and Urban Land Economics....and am partially done with an MBA...spelling has never been my fortay...What a surprise. I respond:
That's forté, and they have programs for that. Your press release was the most poorly written, ill-thought-out professional document I've received in years. If you can't write, think, or spell, there are hundreds or thousands of people in the New York area who can. I suggest hiring the brilliant Michelle Collins, of the blog, You Can't Make It Up. Pay her well, she's worth it. youcantmakeitup@gmail.com is her email address, and I don't know her personally, I just think she's a fantastic writer and thinker.
I get back from the evolutionary psychology conference in Palm Springs and find this email from him:
If you ever embarrass me the way you did today....Who do you think you are? you are fucking with people's jobs and lives...how dare you do that...
I'm not quite sure what I did to embarrass him. I write back:
*I* embarrassed you? How? You send out a press release -- for public consumption -- that was written as if by an 11-year-old who'd missed a few years of school. How can you not be mortified by that? I try my best not to let punctuation errors creep into emails to friends, let alone documents sent out to journalists! And in the name of a client who was trusting you to work in his best interest! And let's not even get started on how horribly it was written and thought out.I tried to offer you help -- a suggestion of somebody (Michelle Collins, an excellent writer) who would be good to write your press releases for you. If I "ever embarrass" you...? Is that a threat?
Again, *I* didn't do a thing to embarrass you. You did that all by your lonesome. Moreover, if your client doesn't fire you for that piece of shit you sent out with his name on it, well, let's just say I don't have a high opinion of anybody who sends out such a piece of crap and then...now, let's get really, really stupid...sends what kind of reads as a threatening email to a newspaper columnist.
But, let's not leave it to me to be the arbiter. It should be a publicist's dream -- I'll post your entire release on my site for tomorrow, and let my readers be the judge.
Don't you have any pride in your work? -Amy Alkon
UPDATE: I just opened an email from the guy. The response is to my question, "Don't you have any pride in your work?"
In a message dated 1/27/06 6:24:04 AM, stephen@trentandcompany.com writes:
i do and thats why i am so upset...give me a chance please...somebody called my client and told them they were blogging about my release I thought it was you...forgive me!
I wrote back:
Well, it's good to see I'm not the only one. Your client should fire you, and so should your boss. I fight with myself over every "a, and" and "the" in my column before I send it out. Apparently, you don't even quibble with yourself about spelling. This isn't getting "excited," as you put it before. It's something entirely different. Violent laziness? Abject indifference? Feel free to come speak your piece on my blog, advicegoddess.com/goddessblog.htmlAttention to grammar, syntax, and spelling, as well as tight writing, are encouraged. -Amy Alkon
How Smart Is It To Give Out Your Social Security Number?
And do you really have to do it?
Bush Signs Bullshit Jobs Creation Act
It's called the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. What it really is is a flaming colossus of special-interest tax breaks. Kathleen Pender writes:
The new law is billed as a jobs creation act, but contains little that requires or even encourages companies to hire workers.Will it create new jobs? "Jobs for tax professionals, yes," says Scharin.
Here are a few of the details:
The bill is a treasure trove of tax goodies for companies ranging from General Electric to Plano Molding Co., a maker of tackle boxes in Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert's Illinois district.Current law imposes a 10 percent excise tax on imported fishing equipment. It seems some anglers are stowing their lines and lures in sewing kits, which are not subject to the tax.
So Plano's representatives backed a measure to cut the tax on tackle boxes (but not other fishing gear) to 3 percent.
Among other minutiae, bows such as those used for hunting are subject to an 11 percent excise tax if they have a peak draw weight of 10 pounds. The bill increases the peak draw weight to 30 pounds before a tax applies. It also repeals the tax on all fish-finding sonar devices.
In a stroke of bad timing, the bill imposes a 75-cents-per-dose tax on flu vaccines, to be paid by the recipient. The tax is equal to that imposed on other childhood vaccines and will go into a vaccine injury compensation fund.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who did not vote on the bill this week, called it the "worst example of the influence of the special interests I have ever seen."
What makes me livid is not just the cost of the tax breaks, but the fact that in the midst of war and a health care crisis, our elected officials are worried about the peak draw weight for taxable bows.
More on this from Allan Sloan in Newsweek.
Here was Ford Motor Co. announcing yesterday that it had cut 10,000 jobs last year and that it will cut up to 30,000 more. But shedding jobs at muscle-car acceleration rates didn't stop Ford from pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars courtesy of the American Jobs Creation Act.No, I'm not making this up. Right there, on page 2 of one of its news releases yesterday, Ford said that "repatriation of foreign earnings pursuant to the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 resulted in a permanent tax savings of about $250 million."
Hello? How can you simultaneously cut jobs and benefit from the American Jobs Creation Act? Welcome to the wonderful world of Washington nomenclature.
Welcome to a population of apathetic Americans who either don't go to the polls or who go to the polls but vote for party lines instead of for people, thus shoving down our throats the sleazebags who push this crap on us. Too many of the people running this country are less legislators than they are cheap grifters, conning the rest of us the Washington way to pay for their bridges to nowhere and all the rest of their local pork.
link via Sploid, photo by Gregg Sutter
More CEOs Should Be Like Him
I have a few new favorite sites, and Consumerist.com is among them. I read an email posted there, written by John Pepper, the ceo of Boloco restaurants, who leads the way in showing businesses how to respond to ticked off customers. As Consumerist wrote, "The tone of the email is so foreign. It’s almost like Mr. Pepper is speaking to… a human." Here's an excerpt:
——-Original Message——- From: John Pepper [mailto:pepper@boloco.com] Sent: Tuesday, January 24, 2006 8:31 PM To: Ben Subject: RE: Boloco.com: customer responseBen,
First of all, thanks for your note. We always appreciate hearing from customers… even if we’ve done something that doesn’t make them happy, it helps us a great deal.
We worried a lot about Roasted Veggies and what the reaction would be. The reason they disappeared in the first place is because so few people actually ordered them, and the amount of prep time and waste (because they’d sit too long and we’d have to throw them out) stopped justifying keeping them on the menu years ago… but because of the few, and outspoken, customers who lived on them, we kept them in place. You are now the 7th person that has written about this loss since we took them off three months ago (not including a handful of our employees who are also quite upset).
From a purely business standpoint, it didn’t make any sense to keep the Roasted Veggies. From a customer loyalty standpoint, however, your note (and the others like it) makes me want to get them back on the menu tomorrow! The challenge we always have is balancing the two… you would be amazed at the number of requests we get on a weekly basis from our customers - obviously, we can’t accommodate everyone, but we do listen to everyone, and consider what they say carefully.
I don’t know how this will turn out in the months to come. I know I can’t promise they will return unless we start hearing overwhelming feedback that they must. We’ve taken items off in the past and had no choice but to bring them back (ie. Buffalo chicken is best example where it felt like a riot was about to take place)… so far, this hasn’t been one of those items.
I hate to even suggest trying the tofu, if you are in fact a vegetarian. My wife is, and that’s what she gets religiously. It’s not your standard tofu, it has spice, flavor, and people love it!
...I am sorry I don’t have the answer you are looking for. To try and make up for this, and to give you a few visits on us to possibly find something else that gets you excited, send me the 16 digit code on the back of your Boloco card (you can pick one up if you don’t have one, and send it to me then) and I’ll add some Burrito Bucks on there for you to use. It’s the least we can do, and maybe you’ll find something that works. If not, we will hope that something we do in the future brings you back to our restaurants - we have sincerely appreciated your business and hope we’ll find a way to earn it back soon.
Cheers,
John
Now, a lot of people who read my "interventions" on businesses who throw their advertising costs on the consumer via junk phoning and faxing might think I'm just a cranky (rhymes with "witch"). But, what I really am is a what I call "a disappointed optimist." So, reading stuff like this letter, well...it warms the cockles of my heart, whatever cockles might be. And you can't just write when people do nasty stuff, and not say something when they do the right thing, so I wrote to this CEO:
From: AdviceAmy@aol.com [mailto:AdviceAmy@aol.com] Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 11:37 PM To: pepper@boloco.com Subject: more CEOs should be like you
That's how I run my business, and how everyone should. There's too little humanity out there, and too many recorded messages passing for customer service. Kudos to you for the way you responded to your customer. (Saw it on Consumerist.com) Best, -Amy Alkon, syndicated columnist
To my surprise, especially because it was about 9pm PST (FYI, my AOL stamp is EST, non-daylight-savings) , Mr. Pepper wrote right back:
In a message dated 1/25/06 8:44:39 PM, pepper@boloco.com writes:Amy,
That’s amazing. I just went to the website and read what you are talking about. That was a customer who wrote to us within the last 24 hours.It’s funny: I’ve been personally writing our customers for nearly 9 years now, always wondering if it really mattered. I’m glad that today it did.
Thanks for your note. It made my evening.
John
---------------------------------------------------
John Pepper | CEO and Co-Founder |
Stellar Restaurant Group | Boloco (formerly The Wrap)
www.boloco.com
My reply to his reply:
You're most welcome. I'm one of those who complains about a lack of civility in business or life, so it's only fair I speak out when somebody does something right. Ethics are the behavior you have when you think nobody's looking. It's clear you truly care about your customers, and that's becoming all-too-rare. Best wishes, -Amy
I promise to go back to my snarly old self as soon as possible.
Does My Ass Look Fat In These Pants?
A helpful new customer service site by Hillary Johnson, doesmyasslookfatinthesepants.com. And yes, this is my butt.
Hillary is a bit short on asses, believe it or not (oh, the trials and tribulations of a start-up), so send yours in!
Here's the idea, in Hillary's words:
Take a picture of your ass in the questionable pants and send it to:howsmyass@gmail.com.
Please don't tell me who you are, this is anonymous. Comments will be moderated to weed out cretins and letches. Now for the fine print: no porn, no g-strings. Full-coverage pants only, please (or trousers if you're a Brit). Photos under 400 x 300 mp might not make it.
Why?
Because a) you can't see your own ass, and b) no one you know is going to tell you the truth.
"Yahoo! Ritalin Saved My Life!"
Well, that's not really what I said when I was at the Scientology Museum, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death, with Andrew Gumbel. I didn't say "Yahoo!" (although, I now wish I did), and I actually said, "Ritalin changed my life" (ie, improved it measurably), and I didn't jump up and down. There are, however, a few correct "and"s and "the"s in there.
What a surprise that a propagandist employed by Scientology gets the facts wrong. Those facts, and then there's the stuff in the museum, suggesting the Holocaust and 9-11 were caused by psychiatry! Oh, and then, there's the belief that we're all inhabited by tiny bits of blown up aliens that forms the basis of their religion. Hello? If there's anybody who needs a shrink, it's somebody who believes that shit!
From Jeannette Walls on MSNBC yesterday (thanks, Bev!):
Psychiatry blame game
Does Tom Cruise’s religion believe that psychiatry is responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks?That’s the impression one visitor got after he visited the Los Angeles Scientology museum, "Psychiatry: An Industry of Death."
Scientology abhors psychiatry as well as psychiatric drugs, and the museum’s recent opening was attended by a slew of Hollywood Scientology celebs, including Lisa Marie Presley and Jenna Elfman.
Quoting an exhibit that claims “suicide bombers are … assassins manufactured through drugs and psycho-political methods,” Andrew Gumble writes on LACityBeat that the museum “all but asserts that psychiatry is responsible for everything evil in the world” including the terrorist attacks.
A spokeswoman for the museum dismisses Gumble’s account.
“He came in with some chick who started jumping up and down, shouting ‘Yahoo! Ritalin saved my life! So I think he’s hardly unbiased,” Marla Filidei of the Citizens Commission of Human Rights International — which bills itself as a “watchdog group sponsored by Scientology” — told The Scoop. “We invite people to come in and judge for themselves.”
UPDATE: Andrew Gumbel's email to Jeannette Walls:
Hey there,
Thanks for your item about the Scientologists' anti-psychiatry museum, as reported by yours truly. One quick thing: I hope you noticed that Marla Filidei, in her effort to trash me and my credibility, didn't actually deny that the museum claims psychiatry was responsible for 9/11. (And it's pretty hard to deny, since the museum display says so explicitly.)
All the best
Andrew Gumbel
(PS You might also want to correct the spelling of my name. Thanks.)
A note regarding his note:
(PS You might also want to correct the spelling of my name. Thanks.)
He's so...British!
The Bad Childhood Defense
You don't see Oprah Winfrey, who had a pretty rough upbringing, flying planes into buildings. Well, I just heard on NPR that "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui's lawyers are going to use how rough he had it as a kid as part of his defense. What is this -- kids tease you, so you should get a murder-millions-of-people freebie? Please.
Naomi Wolf (Apparently) Lunched On Some Bad Chicken Salad
Only, I'm the one who's throwing up.
Wolf admitted that, during a therapy session to treat writer’s block, she encountered what she described as a holographic image of Jesus.“I actually had this vision of Jesus, and I’m sure it was Jesus,” said Wolf. “But it wasn’t this crazy theological thing; it was just this figure who was the most perfected human being that there could be – full of light and full of love.”
More bizarrely, she experienced this as a teenage boy. “I was a 13-year-old boy sitting next to him and feeling feelings I’d never felt in my lifetime,” said Wolf. “[Feelings] of a boy being with an older male who he really loves and admires and loves to be in the presence of. It was probably the most profound experience of my life. I haven’t talked about it publicly.”
No, not until now.
What I find most disturbing, of course, is the prospect that Wolf might cure her writer's block.
via ifeminist
My Illegal Drug Stash
Well, it's not illegal to have the stuff; just illegal to sell it in the USA. I bring it back from France: Anthelios with Mexoryl, the best available sun protectant on the market, and Vichy under-eye stick, also with Mexoryl. Mexoryl has been "widely used in Europe and elsewhere since 1993." But, hey, the FDA is just looking out for your welfare in refusing to approve it...for years, and years, and years. Yet, just yesterday, there was a breakthrough in the FDA approval process. What did they approve? Just guess. We'll play a little game, Pick Your Potential Side Effects!
First, there's Door Number One! Behind Door Number One, we have, well...not much:
Skin inflammation and an itchy rash. Rare, but not impossible. (Incidence is 0.1-2 per cent.)
Door Number Two, on the other hand, is chock full of potential nastiness! Here goes!
Oily spotting on underwear, flatulence, urgent bowel movements, fatty or oily stools, increased number of bowel movements, abdominal pain or discomfort, and inability to hold back stool (incontinence). Between 1 in 250 and 1 in 70 patients experienced one or more of these symptoms in the first year. Generally, the side effects occurred within three months of starting therapy. In about 50% of patients, the side effects resolved within one to four weeks, but the effects in some patients lasted six months or longer. Patients...with a history of oxalate kidney stones may develop increased levels of oxalate in their urine, which may increase the risk of kidney stones.
Lemme guess...you picked Door Number One? Yay! This reflects a level of intelligence commensurate with or greater than that of the average cocktail peanut.
Accordingly, you just approved Mexoryl SX, the ingredient in my sunscreen. The FDA, on the other hand, approved an oily stool, incontinence, abdominal pain and kidney stone-producing new diet pill called Orlistat. Icky!
But, wait, there's more!
Yes, I am, perhaps, the whitest person in Los Angeles. At least I won't look like an Hermes handbag when I'm 50.
In other UVA/UVB-blocking news, I just got my driver's side window Ashkenazified (ie, tinted with clear LLumar UVShield film to block the UVA and UVB so I won't get cancer, or...horrors!...what I call "car-face" -- when the left side of a driver's face is substantially age-ier than the side facing away from the sun).
If you, too, would like to get this done, check out the LLumar site for the tinter nearest you. If, however, you live in Lost Angeles, I highly recommend A-Pro Glass Tinting, 11715 Santa Monica Blvd, West LA, 310-966-1700.
Talk to Tom. He's very nice. Tell him the wacky redhead with the Honda Insight sent you. I don't get any commissions or anything, but we did have a lovely chat about all the cancerous moles he's had hacked off!
Photo of contraband, courtesy of self. Photo of self stolen, as usual, from Gregg Sutter.
About That Flop, Brokeback Mountain
No God Zone, a blog I'll be visiting frequently, posts comments from people who have seen the alleged flop, Brokeback Mountain. The most interesting comment is at the bottom of this blog item, posted by a fundie:
‘I was dying to see it so badly and Wednesday I drove 90 minutes to the closest theatre that was playing it... and after watching it I wanted to see it even more badly than I wanted to before I saw it. I have never been so emotionally attached to a film in all of my life. ““Oh my God, I though that was just me! This film moved and affected me so much, I can't concentrate on anything!”
“It's playing about five miles from my house, so it's a constant temptation. I've seen it nine times and the tenth is just days (or hours) away. I'm so afraid I'll never see such beauty on a screen again, I just have to store up memories for the future. *sigh*”
“I've driven 60 minutes twice now to see it and I just saw in the paper today that it's now in my town!!! I feel like a kid on Christmas Morning!! Guess I know what I'll be doing this weekend!!!”
“I just saw it last night for the third time and it hit me more than the last! sigh! It's just such an amazing movie!! So much to digest!!”
“I too find this movie will not let me go. I saw it 6 days ago and think about it endlessly all day long. It kept me up for most of the first night I saw it. I'm AFRAID to go see it again because I'm afraid all this emotion isn't good for me and the baby, poor thing (she's due in early March). But oh how I WANT to. This is the first place I actually felt like I could talk about it because I don't think anyone I know would get it. I saw it with my mom and either she wasn't as deeply affected as me or she's lying. My husband definately wouldn't get it. I wish I could stop this obsession!!!”
Here, says No God, are excerpts from one posting that make it clear why the religious nutters hate the film:
‘Last weekend, I was in Dallas and - to make a long story short - I ended up "having" to see this film. It definitely was NOT my choice to do so, but to avoid a confrontation, I relented. Everybody makes this sort of compromise sooner or later, right? If the film we wanted to see hadn't been sold out, I don't think I'd ever have seen ‘Brokeback Mountain.’”“It's been four days since I saw the film, and progressively, day after day, I have been forced to admit that I am ashamed of the way I felt about homosexuals. I literally had no concept of what life is truly like for these individuals, and must continue to be. In my heart I know that good, wholesome, long-standing friends of mine - true-believing Christians - have made life horrible for these people when they go out of their way to bad mouth them behind their backs...”
“I can't explain what I'm feeling, but I haven't had this kind of doubt (about the church I go to) since I made the decision a long, long time ago to leave the family business against my father's wishes. I also didn't go into the same branch of the armed forces that he went into. Which is another story. In a way, I guess, my own personal history and my relationship with a disapproving (and uneducated) father somehow made me "get" what Heath Ledger's character goes through. Let me just say that a lot of heartache was involved. The God I believe in, that I teach my kids to trust, would never wish the kind of pain that I went through on anyone, which really I now know for real, is the same kind of pain homosexuals must go through just to live what for them is an honest life, and the choice they must make. I'd never had my eyes opened to this before, not ONE IOTA.”
via ifeminist
And You Think I'm Sick For Dressing Up My Dog?
Popgadget links to the answer to that ever-pressing question, Does your iPod wear boxers or briefs?
Check Out The Waxman-y Buildup Over At Cathy Seipp's Blog
If she gets any more comments about her pundit payola piece and the ensuing pissyfest, courtesy of journalist David Cay Johnston, I think Journalspace might explode.
Is it just me, or are more and more journalists starting to rival therapists for seeming batshit crazy -- or, at the very least, kind of deluded?
Cathy's post and the comment links are here. More on this from Matt Welch.
Turn The Other Cheek -- Then Turn Back And Shoot Them In The Head
The irrational are easily led. It seems many evangelical Christians found a way to reinterpret their beliefs so they were in lockstep with Bush's war plans. American irrationalist, uh, evangelical, Charles Marsh writes in The New York Times:
Recently, I took a few days to reread the war sermons delivered by influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war. That period, from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2003, is not one I will remember fondly. Many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president's war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine.Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, whose weekly sermons are seen by millions of television viewers, led the charge with particular fervor. "We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible," said Mr. Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers." In an article carried by the convention's Baptist Press news service, a missionary wrote that "American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."
As if working from a slate of evangelical talking points, both Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of Billy Graham, and Marvin Olasky, the editor of the conservative World magazine and a former advisor to President Bush on faith-based policy, echoed these sentiments, claiming that the American invasion of Iraq would create exciting new prospects for proselytizing Muslims. Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the hugely popular "Left Behind" series, spoke of Iraq as "a focal point of end-time events," whose special role in the earth's final days will become clear after invasion, conquest and reconstruction. For his part, Jerry Falwell boasted that "God is pro-war" in the title of an essay he wrote in 2004.
The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003. Recent polls indicate that 68 percent of white evangelicals continue to support the war. But what surprised me, looking at these sermons nearly three years later, was how little attention they paid to actual Christian moral doctrine. Some tried to square the American invasion with Christian "just war" theory, but such efforts could never quite reckon with the criterion that force must only be used as a last resort. As a result, many ministers dismissed the theory as no longer relevant.
Some preachers tried to link Saddam Hussein with wicked King Nebuchadnezzar of Biblical fame, but these arguments depended on esoteric interpretations of the Old Testament book of II Kings and could not easily be reduced to the kinds of catchy phrases that are projected onto video screens in vast evangelical churches. The single common theme among the war sermons appeared to be this: our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God's will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply.
Such sentiments are a far cry from those expressed in the Lausanne Covenant of 1974. More than 2,300 evangelical leaders from 150 countries signed that statement, the most significant milestone in the movement's history. Convened by Billy Graham and led by John Stott, the revered Anglican evangelical priest and writer, the signatories affirmed the global character of the church of Jesus Christ and the belief that "the church is the community of God's people rather than an institution, and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology."
Unfortunately, as, I believe, Bertrand Russell noted, if you'll believe without proof in the existence of God, it's a small step to believing just about anything. Think about it: Is it really such a huge leap from believing "there is a god" to believing "this is what god says"? If somebody tells you, "Amy says she's giving you $1,000," do you first try to check out whether the statement is true before charging a non-refundable ticket to Bolivia to your credit card? Why approach the outrageously silly claims of religion any differently?
Colin Farrell's Vagina Monologues
Yes, from a transcript of his sex tape, here he is making the case against vaginal rejuvenation:
C: That’s the prettiest fucking pussy I’ve ever seen in my life.
N: I hate it.
C: Aw, man, you can’t fucking say that! (incredulous) You hate it? You can’t fucking hate that, girl. She’s so beautiful, man. She’s fucking gorgeous.
N: She’s so (unintelligible)
C: What would you do? What would you snip? What would you fucking implant? Shut the fuck up.
N: Nothing.
C: It’s beautiful…she’s beautiful.
N: …no…
C: She’s a beautiful little flower.
Cognitive Behavioral Driving
To the driver of this dipshittily-monikered vehicle, here's a little pro-bono therapeutic wisdom from me: "The car is not a phone booth, assclown."
Inka-Binka-Bottla-Link
Via Reason's Hit & Run blog, a poll from 2003, on why we're in Iraq:
Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 linkWASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, says a poll out almost two years after the terrorists' strike against this country.
Sixty-nine percent in a Washington Post poll published Saturday said they believe it is likely the Iraqi leader was personally involved in the attacks carried out by al-Qaeda. A majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents believe it's likely Saddam was involved.
The belief in the connection persists even though there has been no proof of a link between the two.
President Bush and members of his administration suggested a link between the two in the months before the war in Iraq. Claims of possible links have never been proven, however.
Veteran pollsters say the persistent belief of a link between the attacks and Saddam could help explain why public support for the decision to go to war in Iraq has been so resilient despite problems establishing a peaceful country.
Santa Monica Chic
At least he wore his black panties.
Glenn Fleishman Talks Sense To Internet Latecomers
I've been on the Internet since around 1993, and, early on, it's where I was lucky enough to have met my lawyer, Melissa, who sometimes posts here, gotten a number of business deals, and made a number of good friends, including Marlon Brando, whom I would surely have never met otherwise. (I always laugh at those who blather on about how the Internet alienates people.) Early adopters like us understand what a wild, wild, wild west this "global village" actually is. Glenn Fleishman (aka Unsolicited Pundit) sets the record straight for the rest of them:
I hate to be one of those folks who points fingers at the "old media," especially since I both blog and write frequently for print, but Jim Brady at The Washington Post just doesn't get it in the same way Michael Kinsley didn't get it with the Wikitorial idea at the L.A. Times.Both Kinsley and Brady seem to think there is a finite number of people who might comment on or contribute to something at their newspaper site and that those people can be reasoned with. If they were troll-scarred veterans like those of us who used Usenet (the 80s), listservers, online forums, and blogs with comments enabled, they would recognize that the entire world is watching.
When Brady asks for civility, he's thinking about an audience similar to that which reads his print paper, not several hundred million people worldwide who might happen to trip into his forum. When Kinsley said that a few bad eggs spoiled the Wikitorial, apart from the very terrible idea that the Wikitorial represented, he also thought he was dealing with a subset of all users.
The Internet is global, folks! You can't ask for civility. You can't expect it. If you have an open forum, you'll get "goatse" (don't ask if you don't know what that is). If you have a forum that requires registration via email, people will create fake addresses at Yahoo or Gmail to post vandalism or vitriol. If you require more severe forms of proof of identity, you restrict the amount of participation.
There's no way to ensure a civil forum without moderation...
For the uninitiated, "goatse" is defined here.
Displacing Blame
Jack Abramoff's dad is indignant about the disgrace this horrid man has brought on the family. No, not Jack Abramoff himself, but George Clooney, who made a crack about the guy's name at the Golden Globes:
The movie star joked, "Who would name their kid 'Jack' with 'off' at the end? No wonder the guy's screwed up," which infuriated Abramoff's father, who was watching the awards show at home.Frank Abramoff has since fired off a letter to Clooney via newspaper the Palm Springs Desert Sun, accusing the actor of being "glib and ridiculous."
Abramoff's father says, "Your glib and ridiculous attack on my son, Jack, coupled with your obscene query as to the choice his mother and I made in naming him brought shame and dishonor on you and your profession.
"What drove you to this lapse in lucidity, I can never know, but you need to know that your words were deeply hurtful to many innocent and decent people.
"Are you the heir to the dignity and greatness of Hollywood's past, or, more likely, a portent to a depressing and horrific future?"
You know, we might ask you a similar question -- especially since it was your jack-off son who most recently turned the House and Senate into retail outlets.
Jesus Wears Combat Boots
It seems the military is ripe ground for flock-seeking bible thumpers:
The U.S. Armed Forces have always had chaplains who serve side-by-side with the troops in wartime, offering public prayers and private counseling to all comers, all faiths, believers and non-believers. But with the number of chaplains from evangelical denominations increasing dramatically in the past 10 years, the approach to pastoral care is changing -- causing new concerns within the military community. Last year, Jewish cadets and others at the Air Force Academy complained of proselytizing by evangelical officers, prompting a Pentagon investigation and the drafting of new interim guidelines regarding chaplain ministry. But many, including several members of Congress, felt the Air Force went too far and are now seeking an executive order to protect the right of chaplains to pray according to their faith. What are the limits of proselytizing in the U.S. Armed Forces, and have some chaplains stepped over the line? Deborah Potter reports on this controversy and what the military is doing to resolve this conflict. Professor Kristin Leslie with Yale Divinity School observes, "I think a lot of evangelical conservative Christians see that as the basic work that they are to do -- to bring people to Jesus -- and that's a problem in a pluralistic environment."
No Child Left Behind?
Why the hell not?
WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found.The literacy study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the first to target the skills of graduating students, finds that students fail to lock in key skills -- no matter their field of study.
The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips.
Without "proficient" skills, or those needed to perform more complex tasks, students fall behind. They cannot interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.
"It is kind of disturbing that a lot of folks are graduating with a degree and they're not going to be able to do those things," said Stephane Baldi, the study's director at the American Institutes for Research, a behavioral and social science research organization.
War On Moronism, anyone?
Gratuitous Cute Car Photo
Gratuitous Cute Dog to go with Gratuitous Cute Car.
My little sock thief.
This Week In Self-Importance
This morning at my favorite local café, a young Hollywood-adjacent type spent about 45 minutes shouting into his cell phone about various topics, including the content of his non-disclosure agreement. He was then joined by a male friend with a haircut circa 1977 Warner Junior High School, who loudly worried about people "stealing our trade secrets." Um, dude, you're lucky I had a lot of computering to do, so I turned up my iTunes volume full blast, because the other guy was shouting your trade secrets so loudly that three people moved across the café to escape them.
Is That A Son In Your Pocket?
I just posted another Advice Goddess column. You know, you need a license to cut hair. A pity you only need working ovaries to have a child. Here's a letter from a guy with a baby on the way, and an excerpt from my reply:
One night, six months ago, my best friend and I lowered our inhibitions and got in bed together. Lo and behold, in three months, I’ll be a father. I’ve been clear about not wanting a relationship with her, but I get the feeling she thinks the baby will equal magical love between us. I’m living with her until the dust settles from the baby, but tensions between us are growing daily. If I even spend time with female friends, she gets jealous and stops talking to me for days. How can I get our friendship back to normal? And how do I handle it if I meet girls I want to date?--Reality Ankle Bites
Bummer, baby’s on the way. How are you supposed to mack on girls?
As heavily as your future dating life must be weighing on your mind, when you have a moment, you might consider how you’ll handle the little things, like when your kid looks up at you and asks where he came from. Then again, maybe your partner in inhibition relaxation will be handling that one all by herself: “Mommy had a one-night stand with a man who used to be her friend. You don't know him, but the government makes him send checks to pay for your therapists and defense attorneys.” Aww, how heartwarming.
For future reference, babies do not generate dust. Babies generate bills. Moreover, while condoms are not 100 percent effective as birth control, they still beat hope hands down. Unfortunately, the abstinence education crusaders seem to have missed out on human nature education, an important element in preventing unwanted pregnancies. There they are, telling kids to abstain from sex, which is fun, when they could be telling kids to abstain from debt, which is the opposite of fun: “Let’s see, boys and girls, you could put that $500 you earned into a new stereo system for your car…or a breast pump, diaper bins, and a stroller.” Hellooo, latex!
Yeah, yeah, so the little strip turned pink, what’s the big deal? Well, here’s a big, warm thanks a lot from the rest of us, who’ll probably be getting mugged at gunpoint by your 10-year-old. What could go wrong now? What couldn’t? For starters, emotional stress on the mother during pregnancy -- for example, her continuing anxiety that Daddy’s going to dash out of the delivery room and start dating -- gives the developing baby a bath in the stress hormone cortisol. Numerous studies link this prenatal stress to serious cognitive, emotional and behavioral problems, possibly long-term, especially in boys. Marriage and family researchers Alyson Shapiro and John Gottman noted that after the baby is born, destructive conflict between the parents can cause the kid to suffer “depression, withdrawal, poor social competence, and conduct-related disorders.”
The rest is at this link.
Dumbshit Of The Universe Award
This week's honors go to the French face transplant recipient, who's using her new lips to unquit the habit. Yes, the woman has taken up smoking again, despite the increase in the risk of tissue rejection and the complications it poses in healing:
"It is a problem," Dr. Jean-Michel Dubernard, who led the team that performed the pioneering transplant in France on Nov. 27, acknowledged on Wednesday.The woman's French surgeons made their first scientific presentation on the partial face transplant at a medical conference here this week.
The news about her smoking came even as American surgeons said that they were growing more comfortable with the French doctors' decision to try the operation and that they hoped to offer such transplants to more patients.
The 38-year-old Frenchwoman received a new nose, chin and lips from a brain-dead donor after being mauled by her dog last spring. The woman has been identified only as Isabelle because of French privacy laws.
The woman suffered a tissue-rejection episode last month but is now doing well, her doctors said. However, they said she has resumed smoking, which besides being bad in general for health is especially a problem after surgery because it impairs circulation to tissues and could raise the risk of rejection.
Some doctors have questioned the woman's psychological fitness for the operation because of reports that she had taken sleeping pills in a possible suicide attempt when the dog attack occurred — an allegation Dubernard repeatedly has denied.
He said she received extensive psychiatric evaluation and counseling before the operation.
Sadly, it seems nobody checked to see if she had a brain.
P.S. And yes, honorable mention for Dumbshit Of The Universe goes to all smokers everywhere.
Let's Play "Spot The Scientologist!"
Check out the letters in this week's LA City Beat in response to Andrew Gumbel's article, "Scientology vs. Science," about our trip to the Scientology museum, Psychiatry: An Industry of Death. Typical is this remark:
I have to fault him for having his story written before he got to the museum.
Hey, loser, I have to fault you for having had your letter written before you read the story. Could it possibly be that you're a practitioner of a religion dreamed up by a hack sci-fi writer that says we're all infested with blown-up space aliens?
In the materials for OT III (Operating Thetan level 3), L. Ron Hubbard writes that, 75 million years ago, the head of the Galactic Federation, made up of 76 planets, was a being named Xenu. Faced with an overpopulation problem, he brought beings to this planet, blew them up with hydrogen bombs, and packaged them. Their spirits now infest our bodies: he says "One's body is a mass of individual thetans stuck to oneself or to the body." Scientologists at this level try to rid themselves of these thetans (spirits) by helping each one to remember the painful experiences of being blown up like that.
And they think psychiatry is nuts? Well, I guess it pays for them to think so.
My comments on our trip are here. Here's another image from within the bowels of the museum:
The publicitron for the museum initially told Andrew I couldn't use any photos I'd taken within the museum because they were "copywritten." (Sigh. She meant "copyrighted.") It sounds like this is might be a common practice of Scientology, deeming materials copyrighted so people won't go public with them. Well, this person happens to know a little something about "fair use."
Anyway, after my own little exchange with her about "fair use," she wrote back clarifying that they couldn't give me permission to use "other people's photos" in the museum. How odd that she made it seem that all photos within the museum were unusable until I pressed further! Well, mindful of Scientology's tendency to sue people who write critically of them, I'm not posting photos that include photos in them -- or even a single frame of the doom and gloom videotape that played at extremely high volume below the "You are safe so long as we are here" message.
For more critical information on Scientology, visit this link.
What Would Alito Do?
Matt Welch turns the tables in Reason:
The year is 2009. President Hillary Clinton introduces a nationalized healthcare package, which she assembled after conducting a dozen secret meetings in the White House with George Soros, Big Labor, and unknown representatives from industry groups who stand to make a bundle. Judicial Watch files a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the minutes of the meetings. Clinton refuses, citing her Executive Privilege to hold private and confidential conversations about most anything she chooses. The case goes to the Supreme Court.How would Samuel Alito vote?
President Al Gore, in a major speech on "the terrorism of child pornography," orders the Attorney General to use "all the same tools of the War on Terror" in the new crackdown against online smut-peddlers. Soon after, American citizen Jose Blow is detained on "suspicion of planning a snuff film," and is held indefinitely, without charge, and without access to a lawyer. President Gore says Blow will be detained until authorities can extract all possible "information about the kiddie-porn ring." The ACLU files a challenge.
How would Alito vote?
A good rule of thumb when weighing the wisdom of a high-voltage appointment, or fundamental shift in governance, is how that re-balancing of power will affect things when the other team's in charge. Because some other team will be in charge some day, and they will find their own unique opportunities to abuse whatever power they inherit.
...Even if you agree with the administration's conduct in the War on Terror—down to the pre-pubescent notion that any crime-fighting policy, let alone the possibly illegal surveillance of Americans, can be assessed using the up-or-down scale of whether "we're serious about fighting the war on terror"—imagine those expanded powers in the hands of, say, John Kerry. Or John McCain.
It's My Life, I'll Take It If I Want To
Or hire somebody to take it for me. Because it's mine, and I get to decide what gets done with it, same as I get to decide what gets done with my pen or my desk or my iPod. Attorney Thomas A. Bowden writes via The Ayn Rand Institute:
IRVINE, CA--"In upholding Oregon's assisted suicide law today, the Supreme Court reached the right result for the wrong reasons. The law should have been upheld on moral grounds: an individual's right to his life," said Thomas A. Bowden, senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute."Individuals have a moral right to seek assistance in committing suicide. And if a doctor is willing to assist, based on an objective assessment of his patient's mental and physical state, the law should not stand in his way.
"The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide.
"To hold otherwise is to deny the right to life at its root. If we have a duty to go on living, despite our better judgment, then our life does not belong to us, and we exist by permission, not by right.
"There is no rational basis upon which the government can properly prevent an individual from choosing to end his life. The choice is his because the life is his.
"Religious conservatives, supported by the Bush administration, want to ban assisted suicide because it defies God's will. Such conservatives crave to inject religion into the bloodstream of American law, thereby assisting in our own national suicide. People of reason must refuse their consent to the religious conservative agenda."
Oh. La. Caffeinated. La.
It's like drinking velvet. Just how it feels is different, while you're scooping it. Softer than any coffee you've ever scooped. Better than coffee you get in chi-chi restaurants in LA. (Hint, hint, Din and Nancy.)
Okay, so, we were all a bit ticked off at Nancy Rommelmann for leaving LA a few years back, but at least she and her husband Din Johnson have made it worthwhile, opening a coffee place in Portland called Ristretto Roasters. Oh, ho-hum who cares, right? Well, you would, if you were drinking their coffee, which I just bossy-girled her into selling me mail order (and which she's now selling to bossy girls and non bossy girls and boys alike). They'll have their official web site up soon, but if you want, you can order it now, via Nancy, here.
Again, this is not just ordinary coffee, and I'm not just recommending it because I love Nancy. Most stunningly, what this coffee is missing (I ordered four pounds of Sumantra Mandheling for Gregg and me) is the bitter coffee taste. I just thought that was a normal part of drinking coffee, even though I buy organic, fresh-roasted blah blah blah in LA. This stuff...it's like drinking butter. I can't recommend it enough.
Here's more from their Ristretto site:
Launched in September 2005, Ristretto Roasters is an artisanal coffee roasting company marketing super-premium, small-batch roasted coffee to restaurants; to the public via mail order, and in its flagship coffee roastery and café, at 3520 NE 42nd Ave., in the heart of Portland’s Beaumont/Alameda neighborhood.“But isn’t another coffee place in Portland like bringing coal to Newcastle?” asked an editor at the Oregonian, to which a reasonable response might be, yes, and at how many of these places does the coffee indeed taste like charcoal?
Ristretto (Italian for “restricted,” and a term used for the first sweet burst of espresso) Roasters founder and coffee roaster Din Johnson handcrafts every batch of beans, roasting them on-site in a vintage Probat roaster. Johnson sources his beans from five continents, often from the farmers themselves, and is committed to bringing out the best of the individual characteristics of each type of bean—the dark chocolate and intense blueberry of an Ethiopia Harrar; the earthy pungency of a Sumatra Mandheling; the soft chocolate tones and light apricot high notes of a Guatemala Antigua Sereno.
“It’s so much like making wine,” commented a vintner from the Willamette Valley, when he learned of the many types of beans, the balance of sweetness, fruit and body that go into Ristretto Roasters’ espresso blend.
While the American renaissance that began in the Northwest two decades ago has introduced the country to some great coffee, it’s simultaneously spawned a lot of over-roasted, over-flavored, and/or stale product. While consumers often associate black, glossy beans with richness and flavor, these beans have essentially had the flavors roasted out of them, the oils on the exterior of the bean ensuring only that it with spoil faster.
All Ristretto Roasters coffees are medium-roasted, allowing the consumer to experience the flavors of the coffee (rather than merely the roast). This can take some persuading, as customers come into the café convinced they only like the deepest, darkest roast. As all Ristretto Roasters coffees are available individually brewed by the cup, it is a pleasure to watch someone previously committed to the blunt burn of, say, a French roast, have his first taste of Java Kayumas Estate, a thick, sweet, syrupy coffee with low acidity and a unique herbal character, an experience that goes something like…
“Wow.”
And to watch the light bulb go on, when he realizes how complex coffee can be, and that there are many Ristretto Roasters coffees to experience, and that there will be others next week.
Johnson roasts coffee every day, and no roasted coffee is kept more than seven days. The café also features a traditional espresso bar, homemade baked goods, mid-century furnishings, a rotating roster of modern art, and free WiFi.
I don't recommend just anything. In fact, I mostly refuse to recommend anything. Trust me: If you order this, you will be thanking Din in your head every day as you drink it. I am right now.
More Welder's Wife Tail
Just for Crid, who asked for it. From the Ironworkers' Local 443 picnic, where I went with Gregg for his Killshot movie research. (The movie is directed by John Madden, written by Hossein Amini, from the book by Elmore Leonard, and stars Diane Lane, Mickey Rourke, Rosario Dawson, and Thomas Jane, who went with us to the picnic.)
And a little closer in on the tattoo.
more Killshot details (and exclusives!) at ElmoreLeonard.com
Why Am I Paying For Your Chain-Smoking, Under-Exercised Ass?
As a 41-year-old woman who exercises rigorously, eats her vegetables, drinks maybe three glasses of white wine a week, and rarely uses her health care, my Kaiser HMO premium is $235 a month. It would probably be lower if I were charged based on my health habits and usage -- which is how it should be, but not, unfortunately, how it is. Radley Balko writes:
Health insurance is essentially the distribution of risk. A large number of people pay into a pool, managed by the health insurance company. The company operates on the assumption that only a few of its customers will get sick enough to require more money out of the pool than what they pay in.The problem is that due to federal and state regulations, as well as tradition and custom, high-risk customers tend to pay the same or similar premiums as low-risk customers. So people who make good decisions about what they eat, how often they exercise, or what habits they take up end up subsidizing people who make less healthy decisions. It amounts to an incentive for unhealthy behavior.
This is only true of health insurance. Auto and life insurance companies regularly vary premiums with risk. If you have a poor driving record, drive a sports car, or live in a high-theft area, you're going to pay more for your car insurance than most.
There's no reason why health insurance shouldn't operate the same way. This is particularly true with state-issued health plans, where not only do you have the problem of subsidizing and fostering poor decisions, but the burden of those poor decisions then falls on taxpayers.
The question becomes, who should pay the health care costs of a state worker who chooses to smoke, then gets sick as the result of that decision: the person who chooses to smoke, or Georgia taxpayers? I have a hunch what most Georgia taxpayers would prefer.
Some may worry that we're on a "slippery slope," here -- "that health insurance companies may soon factor in traits and habits such as obesity, regularity of exercise, or alcohol consumption, too."
But why shouldn't they?
Think of it as a "live like an idiot" surcharge. I'm all for it.
Parrot Cam
Your pet could be your pet detective. A British guy's parrot revealed the girlfriend's cheating ways:
A computer programmer found out his girlfriend was having an affair when his pet parrot kept repeating her lover's name, British media reported Tuesday.The African grey parrot kept squawking "I love you, Gary" as his owner, Chris Taylor, sat with girlfriend Suzy Collins on the sofa of their shared flat in Leeds, northern England.
But when Taylor saw Collins's embarrassed reaction, he realized she had been having an affair -- meeting her lover in the flat whilst Ziggy looked on, the UK's Press Association reported.
...Taylor said he had also been forced to part with Ziggy after the bird continued to call out Gary's name and refused to stop squawking the phrases in his ex-girlfriend's voice, media reports said.
"I wasn't sorry to see the back of Suzy after what she did, but it really broke my heart to let Ziggy go," he said.
"I love him to bits and I really miss having him around, but it was torture hearing him repeat that name over and over again.
How Far Is Too Far In The War On Terror?
Matt Welch poses the question in Reason to pro-war libertarians like Thomas Sowell and Glenn Reynolds:
I figure since their approach certainly has more resonance within the White House than mine, the answers would provide a more accurate weathervane than my feverish imagination. And given the eternal foreign policy divides within the libertarian big tent, it may help clarify the differences between camps.The question is a bit open-ended, so here are 10 yes/no hypotheticals. My answer to every one is "no":
1) Should the National Security Agency or CIA have the ability to monitor domestic phone calls or e-mails without obtaining judicial approval?
2) Should the government have the ability to hold an American citizen without charge, indefinitely, without access to a lawyer, if he is believed to be part of a terrorist cell?
3) Can you imagine a situation in which the government would be justified in waterboarding an American citizen?
4) Are there American journalists who should be investigated for possible treason? Should Sedition laws be re-introduced?
5) Should the CIA be able to legally assassinate people in countries with which the U.S. is not at war?
6) Should anti-terrorism cops be given every single law-enforcement tool available in non-terrorist cases?
7) Should law enforcement be able to seize the property of a suspected (though not charged) American terrorist, and then sell it?
8) Should the U.S. military be tasked with enforcing domestic crime?
9) Should there be a national I.D. card, and should it be made available to law enforcement on demand?
10) Should a higher percentage of national security-related activities and documents be made classified, and kept from the eyes of the Congress, the courts, and the public?
My belief, crudely summarized, is not only that you do not need to imitate totalitarians to beat them, but that it doesn't actually help.
But that's just me; before the next scandal cycle of bloggery bickering begins, I'd love to know where my pro-war friends draw the line.
I'd love to know.
Who Is God's Mouthpiece?
One day, it's Pat Robertson; the next, it's New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.
Mayor Ray Nagin suggested Monday that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and other storms were a sign that "God is mad at America" and at black communities, too, for tearing themselves apart with violence and political infighting."Surely God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country," Nagin, who is black, said as he and other city leaders marked Martin Luther King Day.
"Surely he doesn't approve of us being in
Iraq under false pretenses. But surely he is upset at black America also. We're not taking care of ourselves."
Frankly, what god really needs is Sitrick crisis PR guy Alan Mayer, because if god's got anything at the moment, it's a PR crisis.
And The Lord Said, "This Is A Stickup!"
See that Newark, New Jersey palace of god above? Well, it's around the corner from some of the most blighted buildings in town. Clearly, I've been missing the boat, the one with all the moneybags on it. Well, now I'm joining "The Prosperity Gospel," from a story in The New York Times by Michael Luo:
It is time to pass the offering buckets at World Changers Church New York, and Troy and Cheryal Anderson are eager to give the Lord his due. They wave their blue offering envelope overhead, as all around them worshipers whoop and holler their praises to God.Inside the envelope is 10 percent of the weekly pay Mr. Anderson takes home as an electrician's apprentice - he earns about $30,000 a year - and a little more for the church's building fund.
The Andersons, who live in the Bronx, are struggling financially. A few weeks ago, the couple, who have two young children, had no money to buy groceries. But they believe what their pastor, the Rev. Creflo A. Dollar Jr., said on this recent Saturday night about the offering time: "It's opportunity for prosperity."
"Remember," said Mr. Dollar, a familiar figure across the country because of his "Changing Your World" television show and best-selling books, "if you sow a seed on a good ground, you can expect a harvest."
Mr. Dollar, whose Rolls-Royces, private jets, million-dollar Atlanta home and $2.5 million Manhattan apartment, furnish proof to his followers of the validity of his teachings, is a leading apostle of what is known as the "prosperity gospel."
It is a theology that is excoriated in many Christian circles but is becoming increasingly visible in this country, according to religious scholars. Now, it is beginning to establish a foothold in New York City, where capitalism has long been religion.
Mr. Dollar - his real name - is the most prominent among a host of prosperity preachers that have put down roots in the city. He is quick to insist that he warns Christians to "love God, not money" and teaches "total life prosperity," meaning prosperity not only in finances but in everything from health to family life.
"Money by itself cannot define prosperity," Mr. Dollar said in a recent phone interview. "When you say, 'prosperity,' people think money. They are not incorrect, but they are incomplete."
Asking the faithful to donate is a part of virtually all religions. Outside of Christianity, Muslims pay zakat, and Jewish synagogues have membership dues. Conservative Protestants see tithing - offering a portion, usually a tenth, of one's income back to God and the church - as a biblical mandate.
Many Catholic churches suggest that tithing be divided between the local church and a charity of their choice. Most teach that believers can trust God to take care of their needs.
As an atheist, I'm not one of them, but if you're inclined to donate $10 on the PayPal button on the left, I can't promise you salvation or anything, but I can assure you, I'll have a better life! Yes, and that's where I differ from religion. They promise you all this stuff -- you'll go to heaven, blah, blah, blah. You know anybody who's been to heaven, and maybe come back and shown you their halo? Me neither. But, with me, again, just give me your money, and you do know you'll be making a difference. Maybe I'll have a nice steak or sushi for lunch. Or maybe I'll buy some Leonor Greyl Creme Moelle de Bambou shampoo. That stuff is pricey! But, sorry, I can't resist: shampooing with it is a religious experience. On a purely follicular level, of course.
UPDATE: Wow, I just got a $10 donation. This is cool. I'll keep a tally here. Of course, it's entirely possible that the total will remain $10. Whatever I get, I'll be sure to report on what I buy with it, so, unlike with religion, you'll see exactly what you're getting for your money!
MORE: Okay, it's 11:49am PST, and I still have only $10 in the kitty. (The dog is filled with kibble and a piece of tortilla chip she found on the kitchen floor.) It seems atheism isn't anywhere near as lucrative as religion, perhaps due to the honesty factor. I'm not asking for your money for your benefit, but just for mine. Me! Me! Me! Contribute to Amyism today. Better snacks, better clothes, a better class of air carriage for The Advice Goddess. Don't think of it as doing your part for atheism, but for Me!-theism! It's no different than what these other Prosperity Gospel people are doing. I'm just frank about exactly what you're going to get out of it, which is limited to, perhaps, some small satisfaction you might get out of increasing the quality of food I eat at lunch...and, beyond that, bupkis!
Sushi-a-luyah!
OOPS! I spoke too soon, it seems. At 11:47, I got another $10 donation, bringing the grand total to $20. Ooh, what a thrill! The next person who donates $10 will get...absolutely nothing! But, I, on the other hand, will get a glass of wine with my sushi!
Cheeks And Balances
This Week In Ass News: Mooning is constitutionally protected free speech. The penis, sadly, remains muzzled.
photo from the Ironworkers Local 433 picnic in Whittier this September, where I went with Gregg for his research.
It Isn't Twinkies That Make You Fat
It's your inability to stop at just 12. Don't be swayed by the fact that fat-tax proponent Kelly Brownell got a job as a professor at Yale. There are many incongruities in the world, such as the fact that he appears to have issues stopping at just 12 himself.
Yo, Kelly, I eat a doughnut every day (actually, make that half a doughnut today -- I just gave the other half to a homeless guy), and I get thinner and thinner. Of course, before I ate this morning's half doughnut, I biked 15 miles. And no, I don't work out in some manic effort to stay twiggo, although it is nice to know that the thing dragging behind me on the sidewalk is probably only my shadow, not my ass cheeks. Beyond keeping that my bodily status quo, the fact is, if I don't move my ass often enough my head tends to fall on the desk while I'm writing.
Anyway, the "fat tax" proposal is rearing its flabby head again, thanks to New York State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz:
Popularly known as the "fat tax" or the "Twinkie tax," the concept first gained widespread attention in 1994 when Yale University psychology professor Kelly D. Brownell outlined the idea in an op-ed piece in The New York Times.Addressing what he called a "dire set of circumstances," Brownell proposed two food-tax options: A big tax, in the range of 7 percent to 10 percent, to discourage the purchase of unhealthy processed foods while subsidizing healthier choices; or a much smaller tax to fund long-term public health nutrition programs.
"The American food system is set up as if maximizing obesity were the aim," Brownell told HealthDay. "So the idea was to tax either certain classes of foods -- like soft drinks or fat foods -- or to just tax specific foods high in calories or low in nutrition. Then you use the income from such a tax to subsidize the sale of healthy foods in order to reverse what is the unfortunate reality now: that it costs more to eat a healthier diet."
The tax, said Brownell, would be a pro-active response to a food industry and consumer culture that increasingly promotes high-fat/low-nutrition products as the cheapest, tastiest, most convenient and most available dietary options.
Brownell emphasized that, if properly implemented, fat taxes could yield major benefits. For example, slapping a single penny tax onto the cost of soft drinks across the country would generate almost $1.5 billion annually -- a figure that far exceeds the budgets of current government-sponsored nutrition programs, he said.
The non-profit Washington, D.C.-based Institute of Medicine (IOM) reports that, in recent years, levies of this kind have, in fact, been imposed -- with states such as Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia and Washington creating "fat taxes" on soft drinks sold within their borders.
Other states such as California, Maine and Maryland have also experimented with hefty "fat-tax" legislation, Brownell said. However, all the levies were ultimately repealed, highlighting several practical problems with the fat-tax concept identified by both Brownell and the IOM.
One big problem is that money collected through fat taxes has typically not been earmarked for obesity-prevention programs or healthy food subsidies; instead they were often used to cover budget deficits.
Covering fat cats' fat asses, in other words.
Treating Wounded Soldiers Like Obsolete iPods
There's a new rehab center for injured U.S. soldiers -- and the government isn't funding it. From a Newsweek story by Jessica Bennett:
With record numbers of soldiers surviving injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars, veterans' organizations are questioning whether the federal government is able--or is willing--to cope with the demand for health-care benefits, rehabilitation services and ongoing treatment. And if Washington can't do it, then who should?Enter the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund. Since last July, the nonprofit group has raised more than $25 million in private funds for the construction of a training and rehabilitation center for soldiers returning from battle with catastrophic injuries and amputations. To be built on site at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, the 60,000-foot marble and granite Intrepid Center needs $10 million more before it can be completed. Once it's finished--tentatively in January, 2007--the Veterans Administration and the military will take over. The facility will be able to work with as many as 100 returning soldiers and veterans at any given time.
But should such an institution really be funded by private sources? Inevitably, organizations like Intrepid have raised questions about whether the Bush administration--committed to two wars--is too stretched to properly take care of returning veterans. "It’s surprising to us that there needs to be a facility that’s privately funded, and we hope that the Congress and the Bush administration will recognize that we need to meet these goals of the severely injured," says Peter Gayton, director of veterans affairs and rehabilitation at the American Legion. “The fact that the Intrepid Center needs to exist shows that the VA is not receiving enough funding."
The debate is being fueled by syndicated radio host Don Imus, who has donated $250,000 and has made raising money for the fund a regular feature on his morning show. On Friday he told listeners he doesn't know why "the government wouldn't just simply pay for [the center], considering the extraordinary amount of money they spend on ... this idiotic war." And later said "We have a tradition in this country, well, going back to the Civil War, in which we send off young people to fight these wars. Stuff happens to them. They lose their arms and legs. And we just discard them. You know, like they are iPods of old telephones or something."
One issue may be the number of wounded returning from America's two ongoing wars. “I don’t think anybody in the world expected the numbers of wounded coming back [from Afghanistan and Iraq],” says Bill White, the Intrepid Fund’s president. “In Vietnam, they would have died. And it’s wonderful that they’re alive, but they’ve survived catastrophic injuries that require them to get special help to rehabilitate.” According to U.S Senate research, the amputation rate has doubled from previous wars to 6 percent of those injured. Since 2000, the demand for prosthetic services has increased more than 30 percent, and is now funded at $1 billion annually by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs.
The Intrepid Fund aims to help bridge the gap between the services the VA is currently providing and what’s needed by soldiers on the ground. “Understanding that these men and women need our utmost gratitude and respect for the sacrifices they’ve made, we decided not to wait for the debate,” says White. “We decided to work with the military and say, ‘How can we help you?’”
The government (as in, we, the taxpayers), absolutely, positively should be funding whatever is needed for these soldiers. To the penny. It's the way it works in a china store: You break it, you pay for it. These people gave their arms and legs and more for their country. Don't we, at the very least, owe them the most first class rehab we can possibly give them?
Christians Against The Big Moron
Pack it in, Pat (Robertson, that is). That's what a bunch of Christians are saying in petition form:
To: Pat RobertsonDear Rev. Robertson,
We appreciate all your hard work and dedication to ministry over the years, but we are now asking that you please retire or at least stop making unfounded, insane-sounding comments and trying to pass them off as mainstream Christian thought such as:
1. Calling for the assassination of foreign heads of state (Hugo Chavez).
2. Telling people God will abandon or punish/destroy them (Dover, PA residents) because they exercised their right to vote against intelligent design supporting school board members.
3. Saying that morbidly overweight, elderly heads of state (Ariel Sharon) have strokes as the result of punishments from God for seeking peace rather than simple cardiovascular disease.Seriously Pat, you're embarrassing the rest of us Christians who are trying to demonstrate God's love and mercy to a broken world already suspicious of religion and religious people.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
Osama Bin Birkenstock
A bunch of Santa Cruz students staged a protest of military recruiting on campus and ended up (according to MSNBC) on a Pentagon database as a "credible threat." Let's check in on their protest, from a New York Times story by Sarah Kershaw:
"Racist, sexist, antigay," the demonstrators recalled shouting. "Hey, recruiters, go away!"
I'm sorry, should I be terrified now? (I mean, about something other than the fact that dred locks are surely continuing their progression through the white population up there in Santa Cruz.)
Yes, some recruiters did have their tires slashed after the protest. I'm entirely against any kind of vandalism. But, something tells me it was just a few unethical turds who did that -- none of whom were on orders from the likes of Mr. Zarqawi.
Beyond Draconian
Jacob Sullum writes in Reason about Weldon Angelos, a 24-year-old record company exec with no priors, who was sentenced to 55 years in federal prison for selling a pound and a half of pot. The problem? He was armed at the time he sold the pot to a government informent -- although he did not draw his gun. Kirk Johnson has more in The New York Times (also from a Reason mag link):
A federal appeals court has upheld a 55-year prison term imposed on a Utah man with no criminal record who was convicted in 2003 of selling several hundred dollars worth of marijuana on three occasions.The case of the man, Weldon H. Angelos, a record producer from Salt Lake City who was 22 at the time of his crime, has become a benchmark in the debate about sentencing rules and justice. The trial judge in the case complained in issuing the sentence, which was required by federal statutes, that he thought it excessive, and 29 former judges and prosecutors agreed, in a brief filed on Mr. Angelos's behalf.
But a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a decision issued here late Monday, rejected those arguments. The sentence properly reflected the will of Congress, the court said, and was not cruel or unusual punishment. Mr. Angelos was reported by a witness to have been armed with a pistol during two of the drug sales - and requiring stiffer sentences in cases where drugs and violence are linked, the court said, is legitimate social policy.
"Although the district court concluded that Angelos's sentence was disproportionate to his crimes, we disagree," the court said. "In our view, the district court failed to accord proper deference to Congress's decision to severely punish criminals who repeatedly possess firearms in connection with drug-trafficking crimes, and erroneously downplayed the seriousness of Angelos's crimes."
Mr. Angelos's lawyer, Jerome H. Mooney, said the decision would be appealed, either for reconsideration by the full Court of Appeals here in Denver or directly to the United States Supreme Court.
Mr. Angelos's sister, Lisa Angelos, said in a telephone interview from Salt Lake City that she had not yet been able to speak with her brother, who is serving his sentence at a federal prison in Lompoc, Calif.
"This was all of our hopes," Ms. Angelos said of the appeal.
As somebody named "Kip" noted over in the comments at Reason:
311 lyrics that fit perfectly here"the war on drugs may be well intentioned
but it falls f---ing flat when you stop and mention
the over crowded prisons where a rapists gets paroled
to make room for a dude who has sold
a pound of weed to me that's a crime"
Beats A Colonoscopy
On Wilshire, in upper Santa Monica, next to one of my favorite stores anywhere, Lightbulbs Unlimited.
Parents With Their Heads Up Their Ass Interviewed By New York Times
Narcissistic parents find a wacky new way to tell themselves and their children how special and gifted they are. From an article by John Leland:
At David's public school, where he is in a program for gifted and talented second graders, a teacher told Ms. Badillo that he is arrogant for a boy his age, and teachers since preschool have described him as bright but sometimes disruptive. But Ms. Badillo, a homeopath and holistic health counselor, has her own assessment. To her David's traits - his intelligence, empathy and impatience - make him an "indigo" child."He told me when he was 6 months old that he was going to have trouble in school because they wouldn't know where to fit him," she said, adding that he told her this through his energy, not in words. "Our consciousness is changing, it's expanding, and the indigos are here to show us the way," Ms. Badillo said. "We were much more connected with the creator before, and we're trying to get back to that connection."
If you have not been in an alternative bookstore lately, it is possible that you have missed the news about indigo children. They represent "perhaps the most exciting, albeit odd, change in basic human nature that has ever been observed and documented," Lee Carroll and Jan Tober write in The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived (Hay House). The book has sold 250,000 copies since 1999 and has spawned a cottage industry of books about indigo children.
Hay House said it has sold 500,000 books on indigo children. A documentary, "Indigo Evolution," is scheduled to open on about 200 screens - at churches, yoga centers, college campuses and other places - on Jan. 27 (locations at www.spiritualcinemanetwork.com).
Indigo children were first described in the 1970's by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.
The only color I see here is brown, and there's a whole load of it in need of shoveling.
"To me these children are the answers to the prayers we all have for peace," said Doreen Virtue, a former psychotherapist for adolescents who now writes books and lectures on indigo children. She calls the indigos a leap in human evolution. "They're vigilant about cleaning the earth of social ills and corruption, and increasing integrity," Ms. Virtue said. "Other generations tried, but then they became apathetic. This generation won't, unless we drug them into submission with Ritalin."
If we can't drug the parents into submission, let's at least try to muzzle them.
Dr. Barkley likened the definition of indigo children to an academic exercise called "Barnum statements," after P. T. Barnum, in which a person is given a list of generic psychological characteristics and becomes convinced that they apply especially to him or her. The traits attributed to indigo children, he said, are so general that they "could describe most of the people most of the time," which means that they don't describe anything.Parents who attribute their children's inattention or disruptive behavior to vibrational energy, he said, risk delaying proper diagnosis and treatment that might help them.
To indigos and their parents, however, such skepticism is the usual resistance to any new and revolutionary idea. America has always had a soft spot for the supernatural. A November 2005 poll by Harris Interactive found that one American in five believes he or she has been reincarnated; 40 percent believe in ghosts; 68 percent believe in angels. It is not surprising then that indigo literature, which incorporates some of these beliefs along with common anxieties about child psychology, has found a receptive audience.
I, too, was reincarnated. I was a maggot in past life named Joan Of Arc.
Ms. Jackson compared people who do not recognize indigos to Muggles, the name used by J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books to describe ordinary people who have no connection with magic. "I would say 90 percent of the world is like the Muggles," she said. "You don't talk about this stuff with them because it's going to scare them."In the TriBeCa coffee shop, David Minh Wong continued to play with his coins and talk to his mother. Ms. Badillo and her neighbor Sandra McCoy said they have family members who don't believe in the indigo idea. Ms. McCoy sat with her goddaughter, Jasmine Washington, 14. In contrast to David, Jasmine listened serenely, waiting for questions.
Yet Jasmine too is an indigo child, Ms. McCoy said: "I always knew there was something different about her. Then when I saw something about indigos on television, I knew what it was." Like many other indigos Jasmine is home-schooled.
For Jasmine, who often sensed she was different from other children, especially in the public schools, the designation of indigo is a comfort.
"The kids now are very different, so it's good that there's a name for it, and people pay attention to what's different about them," Jasmine said. Like the women at the table she said that indigos have a special purpose: "To help the world come together again. If something bad happens, I always think I can fix it. Since we have these abilities, we can help the world."
Does anybody these days not have a child who's "gifted"? I have friends in New York City with kids (not assholes like these people), and I've had great respect for the (highly literate, highly educated) dad ever since I overheard him tell his 15-year-old son, who is very bright, but was having a hard time in school, "You know, you don't have to go to college if you don't want to. College isn't for everyone."
The kid is going to go to college, it turns out. But, imagine having that pressure lifted by a dad who doesn't feel compelled to live his life out by bragging about his kids.
I Went With Andrew Gumbel To The Scientology Museum...
And all I got to blog is this one lousy photo.
Why can't I put up more of the photos, when I took quite a few inside the museum? Because the Scientologists who run the museum are a weeeee bit controlling, let's just say. You can't just walk into the museum and walk around. You have to go in groups with other people, on the half hour, and watch and listen to a series of videos on headphones. Are all those people being herded into the padded cell-style museum actual tourists? I wonder.
At the start of the video tour, the guy telling us how to use the headsets told us not to just walk around independently and look at the curio collections there. No, you ripe little bunny-minds, don't you miss any of those propaganda films, not a minute of them, or you might not hear something like the stentorian voice intoning about the Holocaust, "What could lead men to commit such horrors on their fellow human beings?!" All together now, let's fill in the blank: PSYCHIATRY!
Sure, there are horrors of psychiatry, like the lobotomies and other barbaric surgeries performed in the name of mental health. But, is it really behind 9/11 and the Holocaust, as the Scientologists behind the museum suggest?
And, why, pray tell, would psychiatry, as they intimate, want to own your brain? What's with "the mass drugging of millions"? It's all about...all together now: MONEY! Psychiatry as some great conspiracy, getting their hands on your money! (Nothing like Scientology, now,
huh?)
At one point, one of the videos went so far as to call it "psychiatry's master plan to infiltrate all sectors of society."
Oh. Please.
You go to one of Albert Ellis' Friday night workshops in New York (cost, last time I was there, $5), and tell me this frail, 90-something man wants to take over the world, not just help you stop repeating the same dumb, unproductive behavior. Hell, he couldn't even stop a takeover of his own Institute. As my friend Nando Pelusi put it, Ellis read a little too much Karl Marx in his formative years, and not enough Machiavelli.
Who really wants to take over the world, one brain and one wallet at a time? I believe the "I'm rubber/you're glue" saying from childhood applies.
Who's truly controlling? Well, after I took pictures inside the museum (my favorite was the "Psychiatry: Behind The Holocaust" exhibit, complete with photos of Adolf, the ovens, and dead concentration camp bodies), the publicitron who works there emailed Andrew that I couldn't publish any of my photos because the contents of the museum are (sic) "copywritten material"! (I knew what she meant: copyrighted.)
Again, that sort of attitude is spelled like so: C-O-N-T-R-O-L! They don't want their propaganda brought out where they can't control how it's taken -- you know, all those independent thinkers out there might find the notion that 9/11 was caused by psychiatry...a bit...laughable, shall we say? I believe it's "fair use," as long as I use the photos for commentary and criticism, but I'm mindful of the way Scientology goes after people who write critically of them, so I'm just posting the photos of me outside the museum. I will write to the publicitron and ask for permission to publish my photos of the museum. She said I'd need to do that, in the email to Andrew, in order to use any of them. Let's see if she gives me permission! What do you think will be the outcome?!
I especially loved, in our little chat session with the publicitron afterward, how she kept barraging Andrew and me with questions, as if we were on trial. One she asked me repeatedly: "Do I know the side effects of Ritalin? What are they?" Answer: Yes, you brain-snatched harpy, I do, but I'm not going to recite them for you. (The hilarity in attempting to conduct a rational discussion with somebody from a religion dreamed up by a sci-fi writer that centers around belief in space aliens apparently escaped her.)
I kept asking her a question she never answered: Why, if Ritalin helps me focus better, shouldn't I take it? What's wrong with "better living through chemistry"? Ritalin makes my life better. (In fact, I couldn't have gotten through the museum without climbing the walls if I hadn't popped 10 milligrams just before Andrew picked me up!)
The answer, I believe, is MONEY: Scientology wants yours, and if they can run psychiatry into the ground (unlikely that they can brainwash the entire American public, so I think we're safe), they can suck up your life savings into getting "clear," and preparation for the return of the space aliens and all that. Thanks, but I'll just stay home sucking up my Methylphenidate, if you don't mind!
Here's Andrew Gumbel's piece on the museum.
And here's a piece from Reason, from a few years back, on Scientology and fair use.
Big Girls Don't Fly
Margaret Jackson, head of Quantas, was held up at LAX after some dumbass TSA dude couldn't believe a woman could be top honcho of an airline. Do you feel safer, or just more inconvenienced...and embarrassed...for what passes for "security" in this country? Here's an excerpt of the story:
Mrs Jackson said yesterday her briefcase was searched after she went through a security check at Los Angeles airport.Among her documents were detailed plans of new aircraft, including cross-section diagrams showing seat layouts.
"The guy said 'Why have you got all of this?'," she told the Herald Sun.
"And I said, 'I'm the chairman of an airline. I'm the chairman of Qantas'. And this black guy, who was, like, eight foot tall, said, 'But you're a woman'."
Mrs Jackson revealed the incident yesterday in Beijing during a media conference to promote Qantas' new direct flights between Australia and Beijing. She raised it after a Chinese journalist complained that airport security at Australian airports was the most strict after the US.
Mrs Jackson, who was travelling with her husband, said her LA experience took about an hour.
After proving her identity, Mrs Jackson produced paper with her letterhead on it and wrote a note to the guard, whose name was Bill.
"And I wrote, 'Dear Bill, this is from the chairman of Qantas, who is a woman'."
Hee Hee, It Was Me!
Yes, Barry, that was me, a total stranger, calling you on your cell phone.
"Who are you? Who are you?" you asked, again and again. "I don't know you.""No, you don't, but I know lots of things about you, Barry! Yes, I know lots and lots of personal details about you...down to your name and phone number, which you shouted into your phone at Starbucks, not caring in the least whether the rest of us wanted to hear all about you or not.
Just calling to let you know, Barry, that if you'd like your private life to remain private...you might want to be a little more quiet next time! Bye!"
Well, that was satisfying!
P$ychic Senators
Bill Frist isn't the only senator to have demonstrated "uncanny investing smarts," as James Surowiecki wryly put it in the October 31 New Yorker. Look how well some of the rest of the scumbags, uh, senators, have been doing in the market:
Last year, Alan Ziobrowski, a professor at Georgia State, headed the first-ever systematic study of politicians as investors. Ziobrowski and his colleagues looked at six thousand stock transactions made by senators between 1993 and 1998. Over that time, senators beat the market, on average, by twelve per cent annually. Since a mutual-fund manager who beats the market by two or three per cent a year is considered a genius, the politicians’ ability to foresee the future seems practically divine. They did an especially good job of picking up stocks at just the right time; their buys were typically flat before they bought them, but beat the market by thirty per cent, on average, in the year after. By those standards, Frist actually looks like a bit of a piker.Are senators really that smart? The authors of the study suggest a more likely explanation: at least some senators must have been trading “based on information that is unavailable to the public”—in other words, they were engaged in some form of insider trading. It’s impossible to pin down exactly how it happened, but it’s easy to imagine senators getting occasional stock tips from corporate supplicants, and their own work in Congress often deals with confidential matters that have a direct impact on particular companies.
That the senators have done this without a hint of censure shouldn’t come as a surprise. Corporate insider trading is illegal, in theory, but prosecutions are rare. Economists have known for a long time that corporate insiders outperform the market by something like six or seven per cent a year. The only way they could pull that off is by trading on privileged information. And some people think that’s as it should be. Beginning in the nineteen-sixties, when Henry Manne published “Insider Trading and the Stock Market,” many theorists have argued that insider trading is a victimless offense, or even a positive good. After all, some investors always have better information than others, and if a well-informed trader didn’t have the incentive of trading on what he knew the stock market would dry up. Furthermore, since insider trading is, by definition, based on accurate information, it moves stock prices in the right direction. Isn’t this just market efficiency in action?
Not really. Ultimately, insider trading is an inefficient way of achieving market efficiency, because insiders earn all their profits on the lag between when they start selling and when the market figures out what’s going on. This gives them every reason to hoard information, with the result that stock prices are out of whack for longer than they otherwise would have been. Markets thrive on transparency, but insider trading thrives on opacity.
Insider trading therefore encourages executives to put their own interests before those of their shareholders. In fact, the real scandal of insider trading is not what’s illegal but what’s legal. For instance, although many companies have a rule that their employees can buy or sell company stock only during preordained periods, known as “trading windows,” they don’t need to announce in advance if they’re going to buy or sell during a window. So executives who get bad news can still dump shares relatively freely (or, if they get wind of good news, buy freely). They also have an incentive to delay disclosing news until after they’ve bought or sold all they can. Alan Jagolinzer, an accounting professor at Stanford, has shown that the stocks sold by insiders tend to drop after the sales go through, and a Financial Times study of the twenty-five biggest bankruptcies in the wake of the stock-market crash found that executives and directors in those firms collectively unloaded almost three billion dollars of stock even as their companies headed to oblivion. (The corporate insiders at H.C.A. managed, perhaps quite legally, to dump more than a hundred million dollars in H.C.A. stock in the six months before it cratered.)
Preventive Care Is Bad Business
Ian Urbina writes in The New York Times about another dumb facet of the way we run our health care in this country: how drastic health measures are covered for diabetics; just not preventive care:
With much optimism, Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan opened its new diabetes center in March 1999. Miss America, Nicole Johnson Baker, herself a diabetic, showed up for promotional pictures, wearing her insulin pump.In one photo, she posed with a man dressed as a giant foot - a comical if dark reminder of the roughly 2,000 largely avoidable diabetes-related amputations in New York City each year. Doctors, alarmed by the cost and rapid growth of the disease, were getting serious.
At four hospitals across the city, they set up centers that featured a new model of treatment. They would be boot camps for diabetics, who struggle daily to reduce the sugar levels in their blood. The centers would teach them to check those levels, count calories and exercise with discipline, while undergoing prolonged monitoring by teams of specialists.
But seven years later, even as the number of New Yorkers with Type 2 diabetes has nearly doubled, three of the four centers, including Beth Israel's, have closed.
They did not shut down because they had failed their patients. They closed because they had failed to make money. They were victims of the byzantine world of American health care, in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications.
Insurers, for example, will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000.
Patients have trouble securing a reimbursement for a $75 visit to the nutritionist who counsels them on controlling their diabetes. Insurers do not balk, however, at paying $315 for a single session of dialysis, which treats one of the disease's serious complications.
Not surprising, as the epidemic of Type 2 diabetes has grown, more than 100 dialysis centers have opened in the city.
"It's almost as though the system encourages people to get sick and then people get paid to treat them," said Dr. Matthew E. Fink, a former president of Beth Israel.
This mirrors psychiatry, which, as Martin Seligman observed at the recent Milton J. Erickson Evolution of Psychiatry Conference, has taken a disorders approach to mental health care, rather than striving to make healthy, high-functioning people better -- which just doesn't pay.
Those Who Can't Do, Preach?
Yes, another "prominent anti-gay minister" has been booked on a sex charge:
It was reported yesterday, Thursday, Jan. 5, that Rev. Lonnie Latham, a member of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention and senior pastor of the South Tulsa First Baptist Church, was arrested for offering to engage in "an act of lewdness" with a male undercover police officer.The incident occurred at the Habana Inn in Oklahoma City, which describes itself as, "the Southwest's Largest Gay Resort." Rev. Latham denied the charges to reporters as he left the Oklahoma County jail and claimed, "I was set up. I was in the area pastoring..." This isn't the first time he's been in the area, having received a traffic violation there a few years back.
Rev. Latham has been an outspoken opponent of equal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. And, of course, in recent years the Southern Baptist Convention -- the nation's largest Protestant denomination -- has become increasingly homophobic and aligned itself with the worst elements of the far right in working to stop marriage equality for gay people. Rev. Latham supported a directive urging its churches to befriend gays and lesbians and try to convince them that they can become heterosexual "if they accept Jesus Christ as their savior and reject their 'sinful, destructive lifestyle.'"
Yeah, like I can become homosexual if I just close my eyes, click my heels together three times, and think nasty thoughts about Dorothy.
But, here is Lucy, in a pensive moment, staring into the Appalachian quilt and trying to convince herself she's hungry for a nice, big spinach salad, not an entire pack of hacked-up Snausages. Well, truth be told, she does like peas and carrots -- but it seems I'll never be able to tear the little bitch away from those pressed meat sticks!
UPDATE: Latham has since resigned.
Polar Bears With Options
There's a sudden surge in hermaphroditic bears in the Arctic, writes David Usborne in the Independent. Contrary to the old Woody Allen bisexuality joke, this is not a good thing:
Wildlife researchers have found new evidence that Arctic polar bears, already gravely threatened by the melting of their habitat because of global warming, are being poisoned by chemical compounds commonly used in Europe and North America to reduce the flammability of household furnishings like sofas, clothing and carpets.A team of scientists from Canada, Alaska, Denmark and Norway is sounding the alarm about the flame retardants, known as polybrominated diphenyls, or PBDEs, saying that significant deposits have recently been found in the fatty tissues of polar bears, especially in eastern Greenland and Norway's Svalbard islands.
Studies are still being carried out on what impact the chemicals might be having on the bears, but tests on laboratory animals such as mice indicate that their effects can be considerable, attacking the sex and thyroid glands, motor skills and brain function.
There is also evidence that compounds similar to the PBDEs have contributed to a surprisingly high rate of hermaphroditism in polar bears. About one in 50 female bears on Svalbard has both male and female sex organs, a phenomenon scientists link directly to the effects of pollution.
"The Arctic is now a chemical sink," declared Colin Butfield, a campaign leader for the Worldwide Fund for Nature, which last month indicated that killer whales in the Arctic were also suffering from elevated levels of contamination with fire retardants as well as other man-made compounds. "Chemicals from products that we use in our homes every day are contaminating Arctic wildlife."
Cow Grazing, Mack Avenue
Detroit, Michigan: My former hometown, where they like to restrict design innovation to the dilapidated buildings, keeping it far, far away from the auto industry.
Gregg mentioned over lunch on Sunday how amazing it was that, in response the oil crisis in the seventies, all the American car companies built these ugly "econoboxes." It is amazing how they've maintained such a consistent track record for pathetic design and technological innovation -- dragging well-behind the Japanese in both of those areas for the past 30-plus years. Helloooo? Wake up, Ford, GM, Chrysler! If you're not already dead.
photo by Gregg Sutter
Movie Theaters And Audience Members Screaming "Fuck!" Repeatedly Just Don't Mix
Check out this story, found on Sploid, about the teen with Tourette's who had to leave the movie theater after she started "yelping" mid-screening:
Jennifer Irizarry, 13, wanted to spend the day after Christmas visiting a dream world of magic with a group of friends at her local theatre. Instead she was humiliated in front of her peers and sent away from a Merrimack, New Hampshire movie house.The problems began when Irizarry, who was diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome in 2000, started yelping during a screening of "The Chronicles of Narnia." Others in the theater complained to management and soon Jamie Pinard, the theater's general manger, asked her to join him in the lobby so they might discuss her inability to remain silent.
"What I told her was between me and her, but she wasn't forced to leave," said Jamie Pinard, the theater's general manger. But whatever was said left Irizarry feeling as though it was best for all if she left. Knowing that the stress of being singled out would only increase the likelihood of her vocal outbursts continuing, she headed home.
Sorry, but if you have Tourette's, you should stay home and watch DVDs. But, just wait, some disability organization will come out bleating that movie theaters must be forced construct some sound-proofed box -- oh, no...there's the humiliation factor...no, make it an invisible sound-proofed box in every movie theater, lest some Tourette's-suffering teen wants to see a new release.
And no, I have nothing against people with Tourette's; in fact, I feel for them. As a person with ADHD, I take medication before I go listen to some windbag talk so I won't be climbing the walls and making monkey noises. Or I stay home. There's a place for everyone, and, newsflash, it isn't everywhere, at all times...deal with it!
Public Enemy Number Yawn
James Moore's been placed on the No Fly Watch List, but nobody can tell him why:
"Well, let me get this straight then," I said. "Our government is looking for a guy who may have a mundane Anglo name, who pays tens of thousands of dollars every year in taxes, has never been arrested or even late on a credit card payment, is more uninteresting than a Tupperware party, and cries after the first two notes of the national anthem? We need to find this guy. He sounds dangerous to me.""I'm sorry, sir, I've already told you everything I can."
"Oh, wait," I said. "One last thing: this guy they are looking for? Did he write books critical of the Bush administration, too?"
I have been on the No Fly Watch List for a year. I will never be told the official reason. No one ever is. You cannot sue to get the information. Nothing I have done has moved me any closer to getting off the list. There were 35,000 Americans in that database last year. According to a European government that screens hundreds of thousands of American travelers every year, the list they have been given to work from has since grown to 80,000.
My friends tell me it is just more government incompetence. A tech buddy said there's no one in government smart enough to write a search algorithm that will find actual terrorists, so they end up with authors of books criticizing the Bush White House. I have no idea what's going on.
I suppose I should think of it as a minor sacrifice to help keep my country safe. Not being able to print out boarding passes in advance and having to get to the airport three hours early for every flight is hardly an imposition compared to what Americans are enduring in Iraq. I can force myself to get used to all that extra attention from the guy with the wand whenever I walk through the electronic arches. I'm just doing my patriotic duty.
Of course, there's always the chance that the No Fly Watch List is one of many enemies lists maintained by the Bush White House. If that's the case, I am happy to be on that list. I am in good company with people who expect more out of their president and their government.
Hell, maybe I'll start thinking of it as an honor roll.
Whether he was a victim of something sinister, or simply, bureaucractic incompetence, it's impossible to know. But, more and more people are getting caught up in the net Moore is, and having a very hard time getting out. According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center:
...The TSA administers two lists: a "no fly" list and a "selectee" list, which requires the passenger to go through additional security measures. The names are provided to air carriers through Security Directives or Emergency Amendments and are stored in their computer systems so that an individual with a name that matches the list can be flagged when getting a boarding pass. A "no fly" match requires the agent to call a law enforcement officer to detain and question the passenger. In the case of a Selectee, an "S" or special mark is printed on their boarding pass and the person receives additional screening at security. The TSA has withheld the number of names on each of the lists.The watch list was created in 1990, with a list of individuals who have been "determined to pose a direct threat to U.S. civil aviation." This list was administered by the FBI before the Federal Aviation Administration and the TSA assumed full administrative responsibility in November 2001. The Transportation Security Intelligence Service (TSIS) currently serves as the clearinghouse for the addition of names to the lists. Since the TSA took over, the watch list "has expanded almost daily as Intelligence Community agencies and the Office of Homeland Security continue to request the addition of individuals to the No-Fly and Selectee lists." (TSA Watchlists memo) The names are approved for inclusion on the basis of a secret criteria. The Watchlists memo notes that "all individuals have been added or removed ... based on the request of and information provided, almost exclusively by [redacted]."
There are two primary principles that guide the placement on the lists, but these principles have been withheld. The documents do not show whether there is a formal approval process where an independent third party entity is charged with verifying that the names are selected appropriately and that the information is accurate. Furthermore there is no reference to compliance with the Privacy Act of 1974, which imposes certain record keeping obligations on the agency.
It appears from the 2002 FOIA documents obtained by EPIC that TSA directed individuals to their local FBI offices to clear their names. More recent documents obtained in 2005 show that an ombudspersom within TSA is responsible for handling requests to be removed from the lists.
EPIC has also obtained more than a hundred complaints filed by irate passengers who felt they had been incorrectly identified for additional security or were denied boarding. The complaints describe the bureaucratic maze passengers find themselves in if they happen to be mistaken for individuals on the lists. In one case the TSA notified a passenger that airlines are responsible for administering the first generation Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System that flagged the individual as a risk for additional screening and directed the passenger to contact the airline. In an another case an airline said that the CAPPS program is run by the government, and complaints should be directed to the TSA. A local FBI office in New Jersey, at the behest of Congressman Bill Pascrell, wrote (pdf) to the TSA in August 2002 to ask it to take a woman off the list who was being flagged because of her name's similarity to a wanted Australian man. In an email dated July 2002, an FBI counter-terrorism officer acknowledged that different airlines have different procedures when the passenger's name is a similar to one on the list. The litany of problems is long, but all point to a lack of transparency and due process in the operation of the watch lists.
Policy Implications
As the TSA contemplates ever more intrusive passenger profiling schemes, the agency documents uncovered through EPIC's FOIA work raise important questions about how the TSA currently operates. The concerns surrounding the agency's administration of the watch lists preview several potential problems with the proposed roll out of passenger prescreening systems such as Secure Flight. The TSA should provide answers to the following questions:
o How many people are on the "no fly" and "selectee" lists? How many are American citizens or legal permanent residents?
o Who is responsible for oversight of the list? Who verifies that the names are selected appropriately and whether the information accurate?
o How does the operation of the watch lists comply with the Privacy Act of 1974?
o How effective have the watch lists been?
o How can individuals who have been misidentified as watch list matches clear their names?
o Why is there a need for a new passenger prescreening program if intelligence agencies are already coordinating to ensure that certain high risk individuals on government watch lists do not board planes?
o How will Secure Flight respect individuals' due process rights?
Will the demand that we show our papers -- clearly unconstitutional -- continue? Wait for the decision on Gilmore v. Gonzales to find out.
Point And Predict
I met a wedding photographer who contends that she can predict which couples are and aren't going to make it. (She's talking about couples in their early 20s getting married for the first time.)
It's her belief that, if the man is nervous and the woman is calm, the marriage is a go. If, however, the woman is nervous and the man is calm, it means something's wrong. She suggests that, "because the man traditionally bears the weight in the marriage" (as breadwinner, keeping the family together, etc.), if he isn't nervous, it means he doesn't grasp the commitment he's making.
As somebody who doesn't believe in marriage, I don't get invited to many weddings -- but for those who've gone to a bunch...do you, and does your experience, agree with her?
(Wedding dress store pictured is Suzanne Ermann, Paris -- I think, on rue de Tournon, 6ème.)
George's War On The Cheap
Oops, did your kid or somebody you love die in Iraq? If they did, maybe their death could have been prevented -- if only they'd had the proper equipment. Michael Moss writes in The New York Times of a Pentagon study linking fatalities to body armor:
A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. Such armor has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.The ceramic plates in vests now worn by the majority of troops in Iraq cover only some of the chest and back. In at least 74 of the 93 fatal wounds that were analyzed in the Pentagon study of marines from March 2003 through June 2005, bullets and shrapnel struck the marines' shoulders, sides or areas of the torso where the plates do not reach.
Thirty-one of the deadly wounds struck the chest or back so close to the plates that simply enlarging the existing shields "would have had the potential to alter the fatal outcome," according to the study, which was obtained by The New York Times.
For the first time, the study by the military's medical examiner shows the cost in lives from inadequate armor, even as the Pentagon continues to publicly defend its protection of the troops.
Officials have said they are shipping the best armor to Iraq as quickly as possible.
Better late than never, huh?!
The vulnerability of the military's body armor has been known since the start of the war, and is part of a series of problems that have surrounded the protection of American troops. Still, the Marine Corps did not begin buying additional plates to cover the sides of their troops until September, when it ordered 28,800 sets, Marine officials acknowledge.The Army, which has the largest force in Iraq, is still deciding what to purchase, according to Army procurement officials. They said the Army was deciding among various sizes of plates to give its 130,000 soldiers, adding that they hoped to issue contracts this month.
Additional forensic studies by the Armed Forces Medical Examiner's unit that were obtained by The Times indicate that about 340 American troops have died solely from torso wounds.
Military officials said they had originally decided against using the extra plates because they were concerned they added too much weight to the vests or constricted the movement of soldiers. Marine Corps officials said the findings of the Pentagon study caused field commanders to override those concerns in the interest of greater protection.
"As the information became more prevalent and aware to everybody that in fact these were casualty sites that they needed to be worried about, then people were much more willing to accept that weight on their body," said Maj. Wendell Leimbach, a body armor specialist with Marine Corps Systems Command, the corps procurement unit.
The Pentagon has been collecting the data on wounds since the beginning of the war in March 2003 in part to determine the effectiveness of body armor. The military's medical examiner, Dr. Craig T. Mallak, told a military panel in 2003 that the information "screams to be published." But it would take nearly two years.
The Marine Corps said it asked for the data in August 2004; but it needed to pay the medical examiner $107,000 to have the data analyzed. Marine officials said financing and other delays had resulted in the study's not starting until December 2004. It finally began receiving the information by June 2005. The shortfalls in bulletproof vests are just one of the armor problems the Pentagon continues to struggle with as the war in Iraq approaches the three-year mark, The Times has found in a continuing examination of the military procurement system.
More at the link above.
Funny Can't Buy You Love
Just posted another Advice Goddess column; this one, from a guy who wonders whether memorizing funny lines will get him girls. Here's an excerpt from what I wrote:
Canned pickup lines are the cheap toupee of humor. Sure, they’ll get a woman’s attention, and maybe even make her laugh -- same as she will if your head reminds her of a freeze-frame of somebody being attacked by a ferret.The guy who tosses cheesy lines around -- “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” -- is the warm-up act for the guy who talks to women like a human. A study of which openers work best by UK researchers Christopher Bale and Rory Morrison distinguishes “wit (spontaneous jokes that fit the context exactly, are genuinely funny, and require intelligence) from mere humor (the pre-planned jokes and one-liners which were ineffective and do not demonstrate intelligence).” Sexually suggestive cracks can be effective -- when you’re trying to hire a date instead of simply finding one. But, in general, even if a woman’s a cheap hoochie, she won’t appreciate being treated like one. Clever as you feel suggesting places she might re-park her thighs upon exiting the bar, it pays to consider your goal: breaking the ice, not wearing it, along with the rest of her drink.
There are books you can read that will help you be interesting to women, but they aren’t the ones with titles like “How Even A Schlub Like You Can Be Irresistible To International Supermodels Who Are Also Nymphomaniacs.” A recent entry in the Tricking Women Into Liking You genre is M.A.C.K. Tactics, by Rob Wiser and Christopher Curtis, which advocates using hostage negotiation techniques like “creating IOUs.” At a restaurant, you’re supposed to ask your date which side of the table she prefers. Whichever seat she picks, you tell her it’s your favorite, but insist she take it. Later on, if she won’t put out, “it’s time to cash one in.” That’s when you say (“jokingly”), “Wow, I let you take my favorite seat at dinner, and I can’t even get a kiss.” According to the authors, “She’ll smile at this clever, unexpected comment, and might reconsider.” Well, other girls’ mileage may vary, but a man gets all sweaty about his “favorite chair,” and he will be going home, almost immediately, but not with me.
Why would you want to scam a girl into liking you? Not only is it a highly ineffective way of getting a girlfriend, isn’t it kind of degrading if somebody only wants you because she’s too dumb to see through your con? And then, on the off chance you are successful, there’s always the problem of keeping up the British accent or remembering to stick the “war wounds” back on after showering. Instead, try a novel approach: Be real. Just walk over and say hello, and maybe open with a real knee-slapper like “Do you live in the neighborhood?” Talk to a woman like you’re genuinely interested in her -- which involves actually listening to her, not waiting for her lips to stop moving so you can continue your monologue on your own greatness. Remember, it’s a conversational exchange, not a used-car sale with martinis. (column continues at the link above)
photo by my personal funnyman, Gregg Sutter
I Know What You Did Last Summer
Well, at the very least, I can probably piece it all together if I fork over $110 or $160 to buy your cell phone records. Frank Main writes in the Chicago Sun-Times:
The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone -- for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts....Some online services might be skirting the law to obtain these phone lists, according to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for legislation to criminalize phone record theft and use.
In some cases, telephone company insiders secretly sell customers' phone-call lists to online brokers, despite strict telephone company rules against such deals, according to Schumer.
And some online brokers have used deception to get the lists from the phone companies, he said.
...To test the service, the FBI paid Locatecell.com $160 to buy the records for an agent's cell phone and received the list within three hours, the police bulletin said.
Representatives of Data Find Solutions Inc., the Tennessee-based operator of Locatecell.com, could not be reached for comment.
Frank Bochte, a spokesman for the FBI in Chicago, said he was aware of the Web site.
"Not only in Chicago, but nationwide, the FBI notified its field offices of this potential threat to the security of our agents, and especially our undercover agents," Bochte said. "We need to educate our personnel about the dangers posed by individuals using this site and others like it. We are stressing that they should be careful in their cellular use."
Hot Vat O' Fat, Hollywood Style
Not Worried About The Rise Of The Religious Right?
Oh, ho-hum...you've got more important things to think about? Well, check out all the parallels between the way the Christian Right talks about gays and the way Hitler and friends talked about the Jews. (Comparison boxes are midway down the page, the purple section.)
Just wondering, but does the KKK get a tax exemption like all these religious groups do? Not that they should, or the church groups should either, but at least the KKK is honest about their intentions.
Talking Tough Instead Of Talking Green
Bush and company talk tough on terror, but they think it's sissy to talk about going green at home, writes Thomas Friedman in The New York Times. It's time we had a leader smart enough and powerful enough to get America to start conserving (and innovating) in hopes of relieving our energy dependence on the axis of oil. I don't usually link to the Times Select stuff, but this excerpt of Friedman's column is worth considering:
The biggest threat to America and its values today is not communism, authoritarianism or Islamism. It's petrolism. Petrolism is my term for the corrupting, antidemocratic governing practices - in oil states from Russia to Nigeria and Iran - that result from a long run of $60-a-barrel oil. Petrolism is the politics of using oil income to buy off one's citizens with subsidies and government jobs, using oil and gas exports to intimidate or buy off one's enemies, and using oil profits to build up one's internal security forces and army to keep oneself ensconced in power, without any transparency or checks and balances.When a nation's leaders can practice petrolism, they never have to tap their people's energy and creativity; they simply have to tap an oil well. And therefore politics in a petrolist state is not about building a society or an educational system that maximizes its people's ability to innovate, export and compete. It is simply about who controls the oil tap.
In petrolist states like Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Sudan, people get rich by being in government and sucking the treasury dry - so they never want to cede power. In non-petrolist states, like Taiwan, Singapore and Korea, people get rich by staying outside government and building real businesses.
Our energy gluttony fosters and strengthens various kinds of petrolist regimes. It emboldens authoritarian petrolism in Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria, Sudan and Central Asia. It empowers Islamist petrolism in Sudan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It even helps sustain communism in Castro's Cuba, which survives today in part thanks to cheap oil from Venezuela. Most of these petrolist regimes would have collapsed long ago, having proved utterly incapable of delivering a modern future for their people, but they have been saved by our energy excesses.
No matter what happens in Iraq, we cannot dry up the swamps of authoritarianism and violent Islamism in the Middle East without also drying up our consumption of oil - thereby bringing down the price of crude. A democratization policy in the Middle East without a different energy policy at home is a waste of time, money and, most important, the lives of our young people.
The Religious We'll Be Right Back After These Messages
Steven E. Landsburg writes on Slate of a cancer patient whose life support was turned off for non-payment of bills:
Tirhas Habtegiris, a 27-year-old terminal cancer patient at Baylor Regional Medical Center in Plano, Texas, was removed from her ventilator last month because she couldn't pay her medical bills. The hospital gave Ms. Habtegiris' family 10 days' notice, and then, with the bills still unpaid, withdrew her life support on the 11th day. It took Ms. Habtegiris about 15 minutes to die.
Where were all the Congressional Schiavo jockeys when they unplugged this lady's respirator?
A Course In Something Other Than Miracles
Such as, evidence that life is random, and there is no god. Greg Saunders writes:
...I can’t let the Boston Herald’s awful (and in retrospect, horribly inappropriate) headline go without comment. Now that we know the twelve miners were killed, does this mean America’s prayers weren’t answered? Just like gambling addicts remember their big wins but not their losses, the fate of the twelve miners has transformed from a faith-inspiring act of God to another horrible tragedy in which it’s impolite to mention religion at all. Cute little sayings like “the Lord works in mysterious ways” are cop-outs for the logical conclusions that many of us draw from experiences like this. If something fantastic and improbable can be used as proof that there’s a benevolent god, doesn’t the reverse point toward the conclusion that a higher power is indifferent at best? If you believe in a god that could have saved these men’s lives (which I don’t, btw), why didn’t he? People are quick to throw around the word “miracle” when something wonderful happens, so what the hell do we call this?
"Little Bundles Of Misery"
Perfectly titled article in The Washington Post. Again, in the words of my boyfriend, on Thanksgiving, upon hearing the voices of the neighbor's child and some others outside:
"Isn't it wonderful, the sound of children, and the knowledge they aren't ours?"
My sentiments exactly. And I say that as somebody who has about seven kids as friends -- but I hang with them for a while then I leave and go back to my life.
Elizabeth Agnvall writes in The Washington Post that parenthood isn't the circus of joy it's cracked up to be:
Just as we're taking down the tree, organizing the new toys and stepping onto the scale comes a study finding that may make us wonder why we do it all: Parents are more likely to be depressed than people who do not have children.Published last month in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, the study of 13,000 U.S. adults found that parents, from those with young children to empty nesters, reported being more miserable than non-parents. The researchers analyzed data from a national survey of families and households that asked respondents how many times in the past week, for example, they felt sad, distracted or depressed.
Unlike earlier studies, this one found moms and dads equally unhappy.
So: After all the sleepless nights and drowsy mornings, the cycles of feeding and throwing up, the American Girl doll accessories bought on credit, the toothpick models of the solar system and the algebra tutors . . . we would have been happier without it all?
In a word, says study author Robin Simon, an associate professor of sociology at Florida State University, yes.
"Parents don't do as well as non-parents," she said.
Simon's own kids -- she has an adult daughter and a teenage son -- were unimpressed by the study results. "They're like 'Whatever,' " she said.
For her part, Simon felt oddly cheered: "It's validating and consoling to know that you're not alone."
But how can the findings stand? Politics, culture and history -- to say nothing of those annoying Baby Gap ads -- all reinforce the message that having children is the greatest pleasure in life.
Michael Lewis, professor of pediatrics and psychiatry and director of the Institute for the Study of Child Development at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, N.J., says that the idea of parenthood as pure joy "was always a bit of a wonderful myth." He said he's surprised the study findings were not even more negative.
Over the last 150 years, he said, children have moved from being an economic advantage to an economic burden in the United States. We used to be able to send children to work in the fields; older kids tended to the babies. When not pressed into service, they mostly stayed out of the way.
With the advent of Dr. Spock, the parenting industry, obligatory music and soccer lessons and a colossal marketplace that propels kids to desire and parents to guilt, children have become the center of the household.
Consider the "Mom's Letter to Santa" e-mail that went zapping around just before Christmas: the mom is hiding in the laundry room using a crayon to write her wish list on the back of a receipt while the laundry is between cycles: She wants a car with fingerprint-resistant windows, a radio that plays only adult music, a television that won't broadcast programs with talking animals and a place where she can talk on the phone in peace.
"It would be helpful if you could coerce my children to help around the house without demanding payment as if they were the bosses of an organized crime family," she writes to St. Nick.
As I think I've mentioned before, part of my problem with all the people pumping out children is the expectation that the rest of us will pay for their schooling. Sure, this has been the status quo for eons -- but why should it remain the status quo? I have no problem whatsoever paying for poor kids to go to school -- and including in their education whatever psychological boosters they need to succeed in school.
But, if you're middle class, or earn whatever income level would be considered not living in poverty, pay for your own damn brats to be educated. Oh, does this mean you can only extrude one little replica of yourself instead of three or five...or nine? Boo frigging hoo. And no, this won't destroy public schools. We can add your fees for public schooling right into your tax bill.
But, but...then having kids will be something only the rich can do! Yeah, just like living in Bel Air. The parallel disturbs you? Well, you have no more right to have children you can't afford than to live where you can't afford. There's a Spanish proverb Nathaniel Branden once quoted to me: "Take what you need and pay for it." First of all what many people "need" and what they decide, without thinking, they need, are two very different things. And finally, too many people never get that the proverb is a two-part statement -- the "pay-for-it" part being an essential part of the deal.
photo by Gregg Sutter
A Thin Blonde Liar And The Conservative Determined To Expose Her
When Brad Friedman was about to debate Ann Coulter on a radio show, he got the usual bile-filled emails:
Then, into this spectacle of spittle and disputum came an email from the gentlemanly Daniel Borchers, expressing that he was (and notice the archaic restraint) “highly critical of Ann Coulter.” Borchers is, if you will, the anti-Coulter, a position he arrives at from a decidedly unexpected corner. He loathes the queen of contumely not because he’s a liberal who’s taken the bait, but because he’s a conservative who thinks she and her kin are a disgrace to the conservative movement.Borchers works for a labor-management organization dealing with health and safety issues, headquartered in Washington, D.C. He fashions himself an old-school conservative, and has been on a singularly lonely fight for true conservative values and policymaking in America for quite a few years. In 1996, he began publishing a newsletter called BrotherWatch, to combat what he describes as the “growing extremism within the Conservative Movement.” It runs stories about and interviews with personalities from across the broad political spectrum, “from Alan Keyes to Alan Colmes,” says Borchers.
His title as editor earned him media credentials at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), along with permission to distribute his newsletter to attendees. That is, until he actually did so. In 2002, he showed up carrying a special anti-Ann edition of BrotherWatch, which called Coulter on the carpet for, among other things, the “mass of contradictions which abound in her life” and for the “extremist” positions that, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, seemed to push the “acid-tongued blonde” toward a descent “into madness.”
“BrotherWatch cannot abide her rhetorical excesses and ideological extremes, and the underlying emotional cauldron of hatred which animates so much of what Ann Coulter says and does,” Borchers wrote. “Nor can we tolerate the consequential dysfunctional behavior which is manifested as hypocrisy and mendacity, hate-mongering and abuse of power. These are traits which Coulter exposes in others, traits which no one who calls themselves ‘conservative’ should emulate.”
The issue depicts Coulter on the occasion of the death of her friend Barbara Olson in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, and decries her disinterest in taking the moment to reflect on Olson’s life of “Christianity, spirituality and graciousness,” preferring instead to “scrounge through the wreckage, find a piece of her…and beat Hillary Clinton over the head with it.”
...Now Borchers is at work on a documentary film titled The Truth About Ann, due out in June to coincide with the anticipated release of Coulter’s next book. Early press materials promise the film “exposes the extremist nature of Conservatism’s preeminent diva and reigning political icon.” Employing liberal doses of Coulter’s many media appearances and miles-long paper trail, it promises to reveal how her brand of “‘New McCarthyism’ is poisoning millions of minds.”
Borchers is starting to produce some smaller PowerPoint presentations highlighting various examples of Coulter’s opportunism. His first presentation, “The Gospel of Ann,” displays Coulter’s “jaw-dropping expression of faith in God…a faith which otherwise seems so empty in everything Coulter does.” Borchers says Coulter’s “track record of practicing what she preaches is pretty dismal.” He hopes the presentation will “call to the attention of fellow Christians (left and right)” the anti-Christian tendencies and hate-speech practices of those, like Coulter, who declare their fealty to the conservative movement while eroding its tenets.
“Honor requires outing,” Borchers says. “Silence is complicity.”
The True Meaning Of Christmas
Despite the phony baloney mewlings of O'Reilly and all the rest, it mostly came down to this, didn't it? Don't look at me. I stayed home alone in Venice and watched a French movie on Christmas eve, and spent Christmas day writing. Still, it didn't stop me from saying Merry Christmas to all the people who believe in "virgin birth," or, at the very least, are seasonally propping up the economy in the name of religion.
"I Was Interested In Your Site Until..."
A reader (or, I should say, a now-former reader) emails:
Seriously,why not try tackling some issues like people starving in oh I don't know 5 out of 7 continents on the planet. Why not try to help solve world peace? Why waste your time with someone who hit your car, or a telemarketer that called you. You have a very good way of writing I only wished that I was blessed with such a gift. However, to dress up your dog and complain about someone who sent you a e-mail that you could just delete and get on with your life, maybe write something with meaning instead of grabbing someone's attention for 5 seconds like you are currently doing.
I'm sorry I wasted my time on your site, I wish you would write about something important!
I wish people like yourself would stop wasting their lives and do something more important! I understand paying a $500 excess is bad for you i really do my fiancee's car was recently written off while she was in a carpark shopping. However to spend that amount of time and energy on that where it could be put to better use elsewhere?
i still fail to understand people like yourself who are so selfish!
My response:
Shouldn't you be out giving out food to the poor instead of writing to tell me what a shallow person I am? Perhaps my site is my hobby. I also, horrid girl that I am, sometimes read crime novels and watch silly old movies on TV. Bad Amy! Bad Amy!PS When I'm not obsessed with the trivial, I do sometimes do stuff like speak about separation of church and state to high school students, and then there are the hundreds of requests for advice I answer every week, free of charge...but don't let that get around!
And then, I added:
I'm so embarrassed to have lapsed from my mission to be trivial, but there you have it:Advice Goddess Blog search/Sudan
FYI, the small stuff is what Rudy Giuliani called "quality of life" issues, and it matters, too. Well, not to saints such as yourself, but to the rest of us mortals. Well, off to cure bird flu!
Science Must Destroy Religion
Sam Harris calls for the necessary intolerance to religion, suggesting we "find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require the abject embrace of the preposterous":
Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live. Despite the ecumenical efforts of many well-intentioned people, these irreconcilable religious commitments still inspire an appalling amount of human conflict.In response to this situation, most sensible people advocate something called "religious tolerance." While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive. It has also obliged us to lie to ourselves — repeatedly and at the highest levels — about the compatibility between religious faith and scientific rationality.
The conflict between religion and science is inherent and (very nearly) zero-sum. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science. It is time we conceded a basic fact of human discourse: either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not. When a person has good reasons, his beliefs contribute to our growing understanding of the world. We need not distinguish between "hard" and "soft" science here, or between science and other evidence-based disciplines like history. There happen to be very good reasons to believe that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Consequently, the idea that the Egyptians actually did it lacks credibility. Every sane human being recognizes that to rely merely upon "faith" to decide specific questions of historical fact would be both idiotic and grotesque — that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad's conversation with the angel Gabriel, or to any of the other hallowed travesties that still crowd the altar of human ignorance.
Science, in the broadest sense, includes all reasonable claims to knowledge about ourselves and the world. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Faith is nothing more than the license that religious people give one another to believe such propositions when reasons fail. The difference between science and religion is the difference between a willingness to dispassionately consider new evidence and new arguments, and a passionate unwillingness to do so. The distinction could not be more obvious, or more consequential, and yet it is everywhere elided, even in the ivory tower.
Religion is fast growing incompatible with the emergence of a global, civil society. Religious faith — faith that there is a God who cares what name he is called, that one of our books is infallible, that Jesus is coming back to earth to judge the living and the dead, that Muslim martyrs go straight to Paradise, etc. — is on the wrong side of an escalating war of ideas. The difference between science and religion is the difference between a genuine openness to fruits of human inquiry in the 21st century, and a premature closure to such inquiry as a matter of principle. I believe that the antagonism between reason and faith will only grow more pervasive and intractable in the coming years. Iron Age beliefs — about God, the soul, sin, free will, etc. — continue to impede medical research and distort public policy. The possibility that we could elect a U.S. President who takes biblical prophesy seriously is real and terrifying; the likelihood that we will one day confront Islamists armed with nuclear or biological weapons is also terrifying, and it is increasing by the day. We are doing very little, at the level of our intellectual discourse, to prevent such possibilities. In the spirit of religious tolerance, most scientists are keeping silent when they should be blasting the hideous fantasies of a prior age with all the facts at their disposal.
Buy Harris' brilliant book, The End Of Faith, now a bargain in paperback, here.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, back at the Stupid Factory...
The Mustard Seed Project
No-strings-attached aid to poor people around the world from the fundies, via World Vision and other programs -- or are these programs a sneaky way to persuade Buddhists to convert to Christianity?
I have done a comprehensive study of their activities in the Divisional Secretariat areas of Kebitigollewa and Horowupotana. They are trying to make use of the innocent pre-school teachers for their surreptitious and manipulative Christian evangelical activity. World Vision has already conducted training courses for these preschool teachers where they have been told that World Vision respects all religions and as such would prefer for classes to commence with two minutes silence respecting all religions without giving pride of place to one religion only. This is a surreptitious method of not only preventing the teachers but also the children from respecting the Buddha, the Dhamma and the Sangha. That World Vision is a Christian relief organization they have hidden from the innocent pre-school teachers....This is a hearts and minds operation to win the confidence of all the village communities and to bring them to a point that they would sincerely believe that World Vision could do no wrong. It is at this stage that the cross will be introduced. This is similar to their Mustard Seed project where the cross was introduced in the ninth year after much poverty alleviation work in villages of the Ratnapura district. The long-term intention is to convert the community as a whole so that any objection from the village temple could be overridden without opposition.
...We have therefore to organize ourselves to counter their moves. We do not have the financial resources available to World Vision but we are self-motivated and have the will power to fight their surreptitious methods. All we got to do is to educate firstly the preschool teachers and secondly the villager on what the ultimate aim of World Vision is. There is still a tremendous will among the people in Sinhalese Buddhist villages to protect and preserve their Sinhalese Buddhist way of life. We must exploit this spirit of the Sinhalese Buddhist villager to establish a strong defensive mechanism at village level against foreign funded manipulative Christian evangelical organizations.
...At the seminar for Buddhist Monks of Horowupotana and Kebitigollewa held after the preschool teacher seminar that very evening, they were informed of the type of evangelical activity that has commenced of late in their respective areas in the name of poverty alleviation and of the threat such activity would pose to Buddhism. We intend to mobilize the Buddhist Monks in the village temples to educate the Sinhalese Buddhist villagers on the true intentions of manipulative Christian evangelical organizations such as World Vision. Some of the poorer village temples need to be assisted as they lack the necessary resources to participate in our efforts.
In the famous legendary story David was able to beat Goliath. We can do the same.
Yours sincerely,
A. Amarasekera.
This was long-winded and hard to cut up, but the entire letter is at the link above. If you search "Mustard Seed Project" on Google, you should find more information.
New York City Subway Redecorated!
During the recent strike, NYC Transit employees used their free time to spruce up the place and hang a few of those pine tree air fresheners here and there. (Those things don't make the smell of urine and dead bodies go away -- nothing short of a meteorite hit can do that -- but they will vaporize your nose hairs so you shouldn't smell a thing!)
And yes, I'm just kidding -- about them sprucing up the subway. That's actually Cinch in Santa Monica, where glam Swiss-Italian journo/TV host Claudia Laffranchi and I went for a drinkiepoo the other night, but squint your eyes, all you ex-New Yorkers, and it's the Bleecker/Houston #6.
"Link Exchanges"
Kindly refrain from writing me to ask if I'll join you in the Internet version of "you show me yours and I'll show you mine," ye old link exchange. Here's my position on it, from an email to some chick with an advice site who wrote me:
Thanks for your nice words about my site. I don't do link exchanges, which I consider a form of Internet prostitution (while not meaning to cast aspersions on actual prostitution, an honest exchange of goods and services, the law notwithstanding). If people like my work, they should link to me. If they don't, they shouldn't. PS I even link to people who think I'm an idiot. Best,-Amy
For the record, I think most people out there giving relationship advice suck, and write terribly to boot -- aside from Dan Savage, Playboy's Chip Rowe (who may or may not be an actual human being), and Dear Prudence (aka Ann Landers' daughter Margo Howard). (Yes, there may be some brilliant advice columnists I have yet to discover, or have forgotten, especially since my mind compares unfavorably with a steel sieve much of the time.)
Dan Savage once said "analingus" a number of times -- slowly, methodically, and with great ennunciation -- while speaking on a panel to a bunch of daily newspaper features editors panting to get younger readers (but generally unwilling to do anything other than what they've been doing all along). While I'm a fan of his column and of the occasional op-ed pieces he writes for The New York Times, for this, I will love him forever.
Smart People Have Big Heads!
Brain size correlates with intelligence, posts FuturePundit, from a McMaster U study:
Brain size matters for intellectual ability and bigger is better, McMaster University researchers have found.The study, led by neuroscientist Sandra Witelson, a professor in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine, and published in the December issue of the journal Brain, has provided some of the clearest evidence on the underlying basis of differences in intelligence.
The study involved testing of intelligence in 100 neurologically normal, terminally ill volunteers, who agreed that their brains be measured after death.
It found bigger is better, but there are differences between women and men.
In women, verbal intelligence was clearly correlated with brain size, accounting for 36 percent of the verbal IQ score. In men, this was true for right-handers only, indicating that brain asymmetry is a factor in men.
Spatial intelligence was also correlated with brain size in women, but less strongly. In men, spatial ability was not related to overall brain size. These results suggest that women may use verbal strategies in spatial thinking, but that in men, verbal and spatial thinking are more distinct.
It may be that the size or structure of the localized brain regions which underlie spatial skills in men is related to spatial intelligence, as was shown in previous research in Witelson's lab on the brain of Albert Einstein.
In a further sex difference, brain size decreased with age in men over the age span of 25 to 80 years, but age hardly affected brain size in women. It is not known what protective factors, which could be genetic, hormonal or environmental, operate in women.
In the early 90s, when I stayed with Marlowe on Christopher Street for a few months, she had this doorman from some Carribbean island who spoke almost no English. As we were all dressed up and going out the door, we'd each point to ourself and ask him (as if looking for his approval)..."Head too big for body?" He'd always say the same thing: "Oh, yesssss, lady! Yessss!"
The fun didn't last. I had to move out after Marlowe's Lorikeet, Otto, tried to rape me. And I'm not even kidding. (I think he was beside himself about the red hair, seeing a giant girlfriend opportunity in me.) On the day of the incident, I actually had to barricade myself in the bathroom, where he chased me, until Marlowe got back from the deli.
When Otto wasn't on the make for me, he was often on the telephone. Marlowe trained him to say "guten tag," and a bunch of other things, and when he answered the phone, people sometimes thought it was us. For a little bird with a little blue head, he came off as pretty clever.
Are There Chair Personals?
This one in Staples had taken to standing just inside the door and begging by the end of the day on December 24.
Catharsis Can Brighten A Lackluster Kitchen
For the girl who has everything...but the boyfriend she just caught in bed with another woman? Via Kate Coe, this stylish knife holder makes quite the statement!
Meet The Bellydancing Librarian
Oh, the sites one stumbles onto on the 'net while looking for something else:
Our dedicated Info Pro spends her days in sensible footwear, assisting her clients with a multiplicity of information needs. Cataloging books, searching online databases, fixing printer jams, teaching people how to use indices, and explaining why everything knowable is not yet on the Internet are among her many tasks.But man -- and woman -- do not live by information alone. At night, our gal trades her Birkenstocks for beads and serves her adoring public's entertainment needs with the music and dance of the Middle East.
Also not to be missed is The Barbarian Librarian, quite the nasty little hottie. And then there's this paper on librarian-inclusive porn -- from "Bang The Librarian Hard" to "Sex Behind The Stacks," and more! Also not to be missed is "The Modified Librarian" -- the "concept and practice of body modification as it relates to librarians as persons and professionals."
And yes, I know what you're thinking: Suddenly, the Dewey Decimal System is taking on a whole new meaning.
And Then There's This Original Bit Of Richard Quest Porn
He's the adorable CNN Europe anchor SFGate's Tim Goodman calls "part business anchor, part news anchor, part British Muppet or something." But check this out -- even the literacy-challenged have the hots for him.
Cathy Seipp Spanks David Ansen
In her end-of-the-year media review in National Review, Cathy Seipp writes:
Reviewing Brokeback Mountain in Newsweek, film critic David Ansen writes about director Ang Lee: "Maybe because he's not an American, the Taiwanese-born director is neither afraid of the material nor impressed with himself for 'daring' to make it." Now there's a thought: Gay cowboys more at home on the range in relaxed, transgressive Taiwan than the bad old homophobic U.S. Bonus points: Ansen's air quotes around "daring."
Is That A Trash Can In Your Penis...?
The Athens paper prints a selection of wacky letters to the editor from the previous year (use bugmenot.com for registration). Here's my favorite:
Even trash cans reflect sexualizing of AmericaI couldn't help noticing the other day that the trash cans outside the Wal-Mart bathroom are distinctly phallic in nature. I do not mean cylindrical or tubular, rather they are cylindrical and at the top have what appears to be a head - just like a penis.
How can this be an accident? What is next? Doors which resemble vaginas? Anus-shaped windows? I am disturbed by the sexualizing of American culture.
Duplicating SystemsPlease speak out against this rather than wasting your time writing about President Bush and his efforts, or lack thereof, to deal with Katrina. Frankly, virtually no one is listening to your lamentations concerning Katrina; it's all happening 500 miles away. Take a stand on local issues.
J.G.