Author: Aaron Weber

Flogging

I have decided that my blogshares investment strategery is to buy only blogs that I actually like. I don’t care if it’s popular and likely to become more so, only whether I like it. rc3.org is such a blog: intelligent and nuanced and readable.

Abort, Retry, Fail?

Abstinence-only education has always struck me as a bad idea. It’s ideologically biased and doesn’t present children with all the information they deserve. And it’s going to make abortion illegal down the road.

When I was a clinic defender for Planned Parenthood, a nearby Catholic church organized protests every weekend. There were no abortions performed on weekends, but that was when that protestors and defenders were free, so it worked out OK. In an equally odd arrangement, the Protestant churches in the area protested at the Blackwell clinic, a few blocks away. The two clinics were the only ones within hundreds of miles– everything else had been protested or zoned out of existence– so this was the division of labor for all anti-abortion protesting in eastern Pennsylvania and significant portions of Jersey.

The typical crowd was five or ten elderly white suburbanites hassling the largely young, urban, black and latina women coming into the clinic. Plus of course five or ten defenders, a paddy wagon, a police car, and three or five cops standing around bored and wary. We all knew the rules: touch somebody and you get arrested, but you can yell all you want. The defenders were instructed to ignore the protestors, and just stand between the protestors and anyone trying to get into the clinic.

It was mostly a gay neighborhood, and there was one guy, with perfect hair and cute sweats and a teeny dog and a really stereotyped lisp, who would get really mad and try and engage them in… well, not debate. He’d just yell in his “I moved to a gay neighborhood so I wouldn’t have to deal with people like you” moral outrage, and they’d yell about hellfire and brimstone, and meanwhile his dog would inspect the lamp-post and women would sneak around them both and go on into the clinic to get pap smears or birth control pills or prenatal care or whatever nonsurgical services were performed on weekends.

The third weekend of each month there was mass in the street. This meant a turnout of about one or two hundred, including people’s kids and grandkids. I was angry that they brought babies in strollers with pictures of aborted fetuses and signs saying “Survivor of Abortion Holocaust.” But what got me was the teenagers in hip clothes. It was 1996 or so, which meant baggy pants, suede skate shoes, and big t-shirts with big silver-ink slogans. The slogans said things like “Jesus has a Posse” or “Look Don’t Touch” or “Proud Virgin.”

One other guy who’s a defender looks over at these abstinence-only, anti-abortion teenagers, who were looking cool and sullen like any other teenagers except for the whole “no sex, drugs, or fun” bit, and he says, “Why is it always the ugly chicks that are in favor of abstinence?”

Smooth

I’ve been thinking about the way that people use humor to deal with tragedy. Like the jokes about dead babies that began to appear around the time of Vietnam reports of massacres of innocents. Or the jokes about shuttle disasters (Had dandruff? Really? Oh yeah, they found his head and shoulders on the beach).

I love funny things. I think humor is the best way to cope with insoluble problems or tragedies or misfortune, or just the difficulty of life. Sometimes it’s not related to anything in particular, and sometimes it’s topical. Best recently: Guardian article about Saddam and Bush having body doubles, and two different LiveJournals purporting to be by Saddam Hussein, and best of all, the Kim Jong Il LiveJournal, detailing how painful it is to be ignored by Bush, like some cross between international terror and Bridget Jones.

Therefore, I hereby resolve to be funnier and enjoy life more. I resolve to be a funny, charming gentleman who is always ready with a joke to lighten the mood on any appropriate occasion. In other words, I am a single man in my twenties aspiring to be a swingin’ bachelor of years gone by.

This does imply certain obligations, however. I must always keep on hand the following items: eggs, cream, oranges, (or at the very least, orange juice), and champagne (by which I mean inexpensive California sparkling wine). This will enable me to produce a fantastic breakfast at a moment’s notice for anyone who cares to drop by of a weekend morning, or to stay the night. Like maybe my parents or my brother visiting from out of town.

Sleeping around like a two-bit whore isn’t really a productive reaction to any of this, and it’s not even funny, but it beats lying around feeling sorry for myself and freaking out about the war. Besides, I’ve already priced out the work it would require to turn a barely-insulated fourth-floor studio into a bomb shelter or airtight panic room, and it’s way out of my price range.

Portfolio

My blogshares portfolio includes shares in RandomWalks, Not So Soft, and Follow Me Here.

You can’t buy shares in my blog because it is worthless. Until it gets worthful, it won’t be listed on the exchange. To gain worth it needs to get links from blogs listed on weblogs.com. As I mentioned earlier, inbound links determine worth, and worth determines the value of outbound links. The more popular you are, and especially the more the popular kids like you, the more you’re worth, just like in junior high. Remind me again why I care?

Room Temperature

One of the first things that Daria and I found that we had in common was that we both liked Nicholson Baker. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he’d gone to our college. I hadn’t read all of his stuff, and for some reason never got around to reading a favorite of hers, Room Temperature, until this week. It’s about a man giving his infant daughter a bottle and his thoughts of love and intimacy. There’s this whole part about how he was living in Boston and visiting her at school near Philadelphia, and it talks about the appreciation of style and color he learned from her and helping her decorate her apartment in Ardmore. He goes over all their pet names, their arguments, their desire to know what the other is thinking and understand the other, the paths of action and decision and chance that brought them together and kept them there.

Obviously, I’ve given up about twenty pages in.

Whirl Mart, Mall Wart

Last month, there was this really laudatory Fortune article about Wal*Mart, pointing out how it has lowered prices and brought competition to every area it could, shrinking the margins of every competitor and benefiting even the consumers who hate it.

Of course, when a band or fashion trend gets that kind of coverage from a major magazine, I assume it’s on the way out. I don’t know as much about business, though. News coverage for the company points to flailing competitors and an open field to become a trillion dollar firm. It can get larger and it probably will.

A lot of people say they dislike Wal*Mart because it’s a big-box, sprawl-based, homogenizing merchandiser. But I think it’s because it’s got what Fortune calls a “downhome twang.” I argue with people who dislike Starbucks — are you opposed to it because it’s bad, or because you prefer your version of cafe culture? Starbucks makes pretty good coffee, they offer organic and fair-trade coffee, and it’s a pretty good place to work. Now, Wal*Mart has fewer of those plusses, and it really is a bad place to work: low pay, no unions, no employee power, allegations of unpaid overtime. Still, it’s got one major advantage over any other store: it’s cheaper.

It’s the bottom line that matters most to the most people, and that vast majority is the Wal*Mart customer base. That’s what makes the company so big. Fortune points out a few tidbits of bigness: its annual loss through theft, incorporated as a business, would be a Fortune 1000 company. It is the largest employer in 21 states. It has more employees than the Army. It is the largest customer for a huge number of huge manufacturers: Tandy, Rubbermaid, P&G, Clorox, Revlon…

Wal*Mart has a wider appeal than most other stores, and its growth has been organic rather than through acquisition. They don’t waste money. They have a fantastic distribution system. Even their annual reports are printed on no-frills paper. They have an amazing reputation for cutting costs all along the supply chain. All of these things are good signs.

Still, I wonder about the example of McDonald’s: associated for so long with cheap food, McDonald’s is now regarded as the food of poor, stupid, fat people. Also, I’m concerned about overextension: they sell staples and groceries and media and electronics and gasoline, and are adding cars, computers, software… at some point they’re going to make a mistake and add something that their customers simply won’t associate with them. But for now, they look like one of the few stable retailers out there.

Obituary

The Weavers had a line about getting up in the morning and reading the obituary section in the newspaper: “and if I’m not there, I know I’m not dead, so I roll myself over and go back to bed.”

Fives, from Kung Fu Grippe has a rather different set of obituary requirements, like “there will be no use of the phrase ‘looking down on us.'” Of course, I think that Kitty Winn at Vomitola really would prefer to be described as “looking down on us” no matter what. I mean, if it’s accurate now, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be accurate after she dies.