Month: June 2004

On the Suspension of Disbelief

Saw the new Harry Potter movie this weekend, ate popcorn, and suspended my disbelief and critical functions to just enjoy the damn thing, with very few exceptions. One, the perhaps inevitable budding romance and tender moments between Ron and Hermione were kind of cliched. Two, butt-and-boob shots that remind the viewer that Hermione is nearly a young woman now, and wearing low-rise jeans (with a long-enough shirttail carefully tucked all the way in, fortunately), also make the viewer feel kind of creepy for noticing it. Three, when the werewolf teacher is resigning because “someone has let slip the, er, nature of my ailment” and people don’t want a teacher “with his condition” to be near their young ones, I couldn’t help but read it as an allegory of homosexuality. You can take the sensitive young man out of the liberal arts college, but he’s ruined for life by even one class in gender studies.

(I did think the Sirius Black prison tats were awesome).

Similarly, I was able to enjoy most of last week’s Somerville Memorial Day parade, except for the Aleppo Shriners Oriental Marching Band. Yes, Oriental. As in, “exotic” purple satin capes, turbans, funny trumpets, and curly shoes you’d thought we’d left in the 20th century, if not the 19th. I can’t have been the only person immediately reminded of Edward Said’s Orientalism and its sound debunking of most of the views espoused by Patai’s The Arab Mind. After all, The Arab Mind has just been reprinted, and is apparently being used as a general handbook for neocon rule of Iraq, which means that it’s also finding use as one more explanation for the international clusterfuck that is the Bush administration. And, when faced with that sort of blind willful fuckupedness, I once again cannot suspend my disbelief.

Friday Linkiness

CT on why upgrading software is bad.

Build your own hi-res LCD projector for WAY less. Want want want.

Rather old article on what Paxil is like, in the style of a consumer-products review. This was reposted recently since Paxil’s manufacturers are facing a lot of arguments about whether it’s helpful or dangerous for children and teens. It got me through high school, I’ll tell you that much.

And since certain French Guys seem to think I’m “militantly gay” I’ll post the requisite gay item: The American Family Association (don’t expect to hear them singing “We are family” though) has been posting web polls about whether the world should have, oh, a gay-oriented TV network. They have tried a number of ways to prevent cheating, but they have found, unsurprisingly, that the majority of Americans, or at least the majority of Internet-poll responders, don’t hate freedom as much as the AFA does. Besides, there’s already a network for (presumably) heterosexual men, and several networks for (presumably) heterosexual religious fundamentalists.

Article: This Could Really Be Our Year (for Real Estate Disaster)

As the weather warms up, the season moves into full swing for Boston’s most lucrative spectator sport: real estate. People swap stories at bars and parties: I hear he paid six-fifty for a one-bed condo, there’s a basement studio in Davis asking four hundred grand, a ramshackle Victorian can’t be had for under a million. Every Sunday afternoon, it’s time to browse the open houses, whistling at prices and dreaming of appreciation, refinancing, and that ultimate luxury, off-street parking.

The statistics are familiar to anyone by now: the average median price for a single-family home in Cambridge passed half a million dollars last year, and three hundred grand for a condo. Somerville sold its first million-dollar single-family home this year. There are only two communities inside route 128 where a condo can be had for under $250,000. Prices keep rising, bids keep coming in over asking price and within days of opening. Winter is normally slower in the real estate market, but not this year, when the market barely paused. After all, this is a market which saw a penthouse condominium sell within fifteen minutes. For five million dollars. In cash.
Continue reading “Article: This Could Really Be Our Year (for Real Estate Disaster)”

Just to Prove to You that I am Not Uncritical

I tried to read the article on teenagers and sex this weekend in the NYT Mag, but it was so poorly researched, and so full of broad generalizations, and so full of dumb teenagers, that I gave up a few pages in. It seemed that the kids were indeed reckless sexually, but also that the journalist was being suckered. Chicha has a better analysis than I ever would.

Also, w/r/t housing, I told you so.

Ring My Bells

My grandfather the Rear Admiral (ret.) Joel Parks would complain to my father that the New York Times was too liberal and too influential, and he stuck to the San Diego local paper, which was staunchly conservative in those days, San Diego being a dusty Navy town with an Air-Force base and a small college. My father, his son-in-law and a bearded Jewish academic from New York, was the only one who was willing to disagree with him. He’d say “The NYT is influential because it’s the best paper in the country, and you should read it.” The admiral liked that. Nobody else engaged with him and he was terribly lonely.

I think about that when I read up on suicide, the abstinence-only “education” our kids get these days, and the particular approach of personal essays about HIV that the paper chooses. Those topics are hard to cover objectively, and no matter how they are covered, the right is probably going to shriek about bias whenever they’re discussed.

Now, I’m not as mindful about bias when I read up on household-junk hoarding and animal hoarding, because, dammit, that’s just cool. Still, mental illness is another topic that I tend to follow — obsessively, perhaps? — and one prone to real or percieved biases in coverage.

Clean and Dry

It has not been very long now that I have owned dress shirts that I actually wear on a regular basis, and therefore take them to the cleaners rather than wash them myself. But I have a couple. And today I brought them to the cleaners down the street, where the old lady behind the counter knows me, despite the fact that I only bring in two shirts, and only every other week or so. But she had popped out for a moment– it was a bit after nine and I guess she’d taken a break after the pre-nine-am crowd had gone by. I went on by and dropped the shirts at the place near work, and now I feel horribly guilty for betraying her.

I’m such a freak.