Category: Other People

Kitty has been posting some disjointedly beautiful stuff recently. I always feel guilty, reading beautiful writing and knowing it’s coming from someone’s life falling apart in slow motion, watching someone suffer and knowing that it’s a major force behind their creative efforts.

My buddy Duncan just got a new URL, and now he and Erik make a good intro to a joke: A Chinaman and a French guy walk into a bar…

The skater/slacker aesthetic relies on appropriation of blue-collar trappings, but it can go too far: on the way to work today I saw a skinny skater boy in paint-spattered workpants, cut off at the knee, and an oversized work shirt like those worn by contractors, gas-station attendants, and their emulators. He was carrying a fold-up toolkit and a 10-gallon bucket of tools. And riding a skateboard. And stuff kept falling out of the bucket.

Other strangeness: race bicycle, clipless pedals and shoes, messenger bag, and sundress.

Suddenly, cutting healthy babies beacuse they look funny seems like a bad idea. I wonder how many transsexuals are, in fact, people who were born with anomalous genitalia and were then raised as the ‘wrong’ gender.

It’s safe. It’s more hygenic. It’s traditional. You want him to look normal, don’t you? Do the words “botched circumcision” mean anything to you?

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.

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.

People sure are weird: hooked on virtual drugs, and getting fatter by the minute.

The BMI, though, is absolutely stupid as a measure of health. Sure, too many of us are fat, but that’s no excuse for stupid statistics.

New book alert: sexist proverbs.

Via Low Culture, the following quotation from a shining example of the trade magazine, Broadcasting and Cable:

“I’m not gonna get suckered into voting again,” she says. “Why should we sit here and waste two hours of our time when our votes aren’t going to be counted?”

As the snark notes, “The article, subtitled ‘An in-depth look at America’s most popular show reveals a seriously flawed voting system,’ might have better read, ‘An in-depth look at America’s most popular show reveals a seriously flawed America.'”

For more bitchiness, look for reviews of the latest from Ken Haruf and David Brooks, both of whom have committed the mortal sin of producing more of what worked so well last time.