Category: Thoughts

Sarah Silverman

I liked her in “The Aristocrats” and I liked her in “Jesus is Magic.” I haven’t yet seen her sitcom, but Slate seems to like it. It’s definitely got an angry edge that will leave it very little middle ground:

“She’s a white female, kinda Jew-y but totally hot, not out-of-your-league hot, just cute, long neck, really nice skin. She could easily pass for 20,” or so says a convenience-store shopkeeper (Masi Oka) in the episode “Batteries.” He’s giving this description to a cop because Sarah, who is 36, has just wrecked his store and stolen a four-pack of double-As. The cop gets on his radio: “Dispatch, we have a black male.” Force of habit.”

Minims

Jon Swift, a Reasonable Conservative, argues for a lower minimum wage: “It now takes an entire day for a CEO to earn what the average worker earns in a year. Many small businesses cannot afford to pay any wages at all let alone the artificially high minimum wage and America’s bottom-heavy wages are making it increasingly difficult for us to compete in the global economy.”

Note: sarcasm.

Norah Vincent: Self-Made Man

Norah Vincent’s book Self-Made Man is a sort of research report on men and the cultural roles they inhabit. Norah gets a personal trainer, some theatrical makeup, a voice coach, and a flattop haircut, and becomes Ned. Ned joins a bowling league, gets a hard-charging entry-level sales job, goes to a monastery and a men’s retreat. He goes on dates– actually, Norah and Ned both go on dates, for comparison.

Little or none of Ned’s experience is shocking or revelatory (dating sucks, men go to nudie bars), but they’re still insightful and thought-provoking. It’s one thing to know that a lot of men are afraid of being emotional or needy, and quite another to experience it, even vicariously, as Ned. And it’s brilliant to watch Norah become more and more familiar with the social roles and requirements of men. This is a hell of a good story, and it’s told with humor, humility, and style.

Still White and Nerdy

Sometimes I worry that, by maintaining celebrity-gossip websites, I’ve lost all the geek cred I had when I wrote instruction manuals for Linux software. But recently I’ve had a couple reminders that I’m still an irredeemable nerd.

This weekend I was annoyed by 93.7 Mike FM’s assertion that they are “random radio.” They play a wide variety of songs, but it’s far from being mathematically random– it’s carefully selected to appeal to a specific demographic. I know, I know, it’s a figure of speech. Still, it sometimes annoys me that “random” is used to mean “unexpected” or “improbable.”

Second, I got life and disability insurance through work today and the paperwork referred to AD&D. I immediately thought “what does Advanced Dungeons and Dragons have to do with this?” I actually had to ask: it stands for accidental death and dismemberment.

Two Good articles in the Times for a change

Maybe I only like the one titled “Expert Ties Ex-Player’s Suicide to Brain Damage” because I’ve always thought football was a brain-damaged sport. But still, it’s a decent look at what repeated minor head trauma does to athletes.

“What 1.2 Trillion Can Buy” explains the cost of the Iraq war in terms of things we can understand: what we could ahve bought with that money if we hadn’t dumped it into a hole in the desert. It turns out we could have pretty much the entire Democratic agenda, plus tax cuts. If we had 1.2 Trillion. Which we don’t– the US is quite literally writing checks its ass can’t cash. (The ass is in the White House).