Time Killer

Anyone bored and looking to kill time could download this "Coal For Kids" coloring book. I'm no propagandist, but what is gained by this -

Additionally, FOC ladies auxiliary members have visited children in West Virginia hospitals to give them a “special present“: Mr. Coal, “a small, black Labrador stuffed puppy meant to bring a smile to kids’ faces during hospital stays.” (Coal pollution kills 24,000 Americans each year.)

Last year, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), another industry front group, also tried to make coal seem warm and fuzzy by creating the “coal carolers” — illustrated lumps of coal singing Christmas carols whose altered lyrics praised coal power. After widespread scorn, ACCCE took down the carolers. Find out more on what coal is really doing to Appalachia at Appalachian Voices.

Do adults with fond memories of hospital visits by Mr. Coal turn into big coal industry investors? It reminds me of the cartoon Joe Posnanski saw in Tampa Bay that warns kids of the evils of statistics with the villainous character Dr. Stat.

It seems that Dr. Stat — and I’m quoting from the cartoon now — wants to “use his knowledge of useless statistics to destroy the game.”

Yes, I’m completely serious here — I saw the thing twice. This Dr. Stat them appears on the Superfriends monitor, and he asks them who was the highest paid umpire in 1888. The Rays, of course, don’t know, and they make it clear to him that it is a stupid and pointless question. Dr. Stat then says, “Wrong answer,” and he says as punishment he will point his stat ray direction at Tropicana Field in order to make it impossible for people to enjoy the games.

The stuff of nightmares.

Hardy is good at defense

Fangraphs is ranking the top 5 defensive players during the past 3 years and so far they've done the bottom 3, which look like this -

5. Ryan Zimmerman
4. Omar Vizquel

And then JJ Hardy -

Hardy’s inclusion should not be too much of a surprise. Unlike the previous two profiles, Hardy does not have much in the ways of peaks or valleys in UZR. Instead, he is rather consistent with UZRs always in the level a tad more elevated than simply ‘above average’.

If you wanna get lost in the weeds, you can read up about how UZR is measured here. In short, it takes into account range, arm, double plays, and errors and the numbers are how many 'runs' above or below average he is.

I watched a bunch of Brewers' games with Jared this year and he hates JJ Hardy - thinks he's awful in the field as well as at the plate. I can understand the reaction because Hardy has a way of moving that makes it look like he's never truly going his hardest, but I was also aware that you don't have to be a Brewers' apologist to think Hardy was actually a very capable defender. This is important because his bat completely disappeared and his trade value needs to come from somewhere. Maybe he can get sent to Philly because he looks exactly like Mac from It's Always Sunny -



Also, Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder both rank near the bottom of the league in defense over the past 3 seasons, hopefully Braun is only there because of his experiment at 3rd base, but he looks lost out in left often enough to make me hope he gets better.

The Berlin Wall

Sponsored by MTV. You can't make this stuff up -

The show, which was free to 10,000 ticket holders who snapped up the tickets online last week in just three hours, drew some controversy because of the barrier surrounding the gig.

Both Berliners and tourists alike saw the irony in building a wall around a concert dedicated to the wall that already has come down.

"It's completely ridiculous that they are blocking the view," said Louis-Pierre Boily, 23, who came to Berlin even though he failed to get U2 tickets. "I thought it's a free show, but MTV probably wants people to watch it on TV to get their ratings up."

Boily, from Quebec City, was among several hundred people who gathered earlier in the day against the new fence, which was draped with a white tarp that blocked the view of the stage from the street. Some fans already were trying to tear down the tarp before the concert.

This is fantastic -



ochocinco is taking notes, mental notes cuz paper just ain't ballin'

Stuff I don't like reading

Thought that hearing admitted luddite John McCain unveil plans to destroy the internet would be the most aggravating thing to read, but then there's this, which is even worse.

I like how the government and corporations are trying to rein in the internet and turn people into criminals in order to prevent people from stealing Shakira's album or streaming episodes of CSI on non-approved sites.

Here's more on it -

A large number of organizations and people have written President Obama asking that he end the secrecy of the negotiation. It is doubtful this will happen unless newspapers write about the issue (aren't they big advocates of the right to know?), members of Congress weigh in, or if the critics of the secret negotiation can mobilize public opinion.

There is a lot at stake. Civil rights, privacy, rules for injunctions and damages against businesses and individuals, chilling of speech, the first sale doctrine, the global movement of medicines and other commodities, etc, will all be impacted by this ridiculously secret negotiation.

The ex-pat life

Without Stopping by Paul Bowles gives an account of living the ex-pat life in the 1930s that makes me jealous. He seems to be able to hop-scotch around France, Germany, Morocco, and Algiers without describing any way of making money besides being given it from friends' parents -

The problem thus was to get hold of money quickly. This was solved during a visit of Harry's parents to New York, when I had to meet them and explain the situation to them. They did not react at all well to me; I could see that they considered me an objectionable character and one likely to wield a destructive influence over their son.

Apparently, back in the day before the internet or phones, you kept correspondence with people through letters(?) and then these people, no matter how well-known, would invite you into their life -

Soon Gertrude Stein appeared, looking just as she did in her photographs, except that the expression of her face was rather more pleasant. "What is it? Who are you?" she said. I told her and heard for the first time her wonderfully hearty laugh. She opened the door so that I could go in. Then Alice Toklas came downstairs, and we sat in the big studio hung with Picassos. "I was sure from your letters that you were an elderly gentleman, at least seventy-five," Gertrude Stein told me. "A highly eccentric elderly gentleman," added Alice Toklas. "We were certain of it." They asked me to dinner for the following night to meet Bernard Fay.

...

Aaron [Copland] told me I was not working hard enough. This was not surprising, since I wasted so much time moving around Berlin trying to see people. I decided, for instance, that I had to know Naum Gabo, the constructivist sculptor, and spent a whole day in his studio out at Potsdam...Another day I followed up a series of introductions which finally led me to the office of Walter Gropius, the architect, who looked like any businessman sitting at his desk, and who must have been mystified by my desire to talk with him, particularly since I had nothing at all to say...I leaped at the opportunity because Bad Pyrmont was not far from Hanover, and in Hannover lived Kurt Schwitters, whom among all Germans I wanted most to meet...I have no idea of how I worded the wire I sent to Schwitters, but I recall my feeling of triumph when I...read his answering telegram inviting me to Hannover.

And who knew that back in the day even famous directors treated their homes like a college dorm?

Another day Thoma took me around to the rue Vignon to visit Jean Cocteau. A maid let us into an antechamber one of whose walls was a huge blackboard with scrawls and doodles on it. This was where friends left messages when Cocteau was not in.

I'm enjoying the book now as it's turned into a fantasy description of what living in Europe would be like when you're young and rich, although Bowles seems like kind of a prick, but since its pointed out to him quite often I don't mind. As in -

It did not take me long to understand that while I undoubtedly had her personal sympathy, I existed primarily for Gertrude Stein as a sociological exhibit; for her I was the first example of my kind...After a week or so, Gertrude Stein pronounced her verdict: I was the most spoiled, insensitive, and self-indulgent young man she had ever seen, and my colossal complacency in rejecting all values appalled her. But she said it beaming with pleasure, so that I did not take it as adverse criticism. "If you were typical, it would be the end of our civilization," she told me. "You're a manufactured savage."

Christian health care

The LA Times reports that -

Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.

The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments -- which substitute for or supplement medical treatments -- on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against "religious and spiritual healthcare."

It would have a minor effect on the overall cost of the bill -- Christian Science is a small church, and the prayer treatments can cost as little as $20 a day. But it has nevertheless stirred an intense controversy over the constitutional separation of church and state, and the possibility that other churches might seek reimbursements for so-called spiritual healing.

LGM and Kevin Drum cite all the reasons this is an awful, dumb idea. I just wanted to post that picture and wonder how government health insurance exchanges could cover the cost of something that is so not health insurance -

"We'll talk to them about their relationship to God," he said. "We'll talk to them about citations or biblical passages they might study. We refer to it as treatment. It's an affirmation of their relationship with God, and the understanding that comes from their prayer, of their relationship with God."

During the day, Davis may see multiple patients and pray for them at different moments. He charges them $20 to $40 for the day, saying, "I think that it would be considered modest by any standard."

I'm thinking of starting a business that will create music mixes for patients to listen to prior to and during surgeries. And then suggest movies and books to keep patient's spirits up during recovery. Can insurance cover that? But, of course, substituting prayer for medicine has actual consequences -

Dale and Leilani Neumann of Weston, Wis., are facing charges of second-degree reckless homicide after their child, Madeline Kara Neumann, died on Easter after slipping into a coma. The death, likely preventable with insulin, has renewed calls for Wisconsin and dozens of other states to strike laws that protect parents who choose prayer alone in lieu of medical treatment.

...

In another recent case, a 15-month-old child in Oregon died in March from a form of pneumonia and a blood infection after her parents opted to try to heal her with prayer. Oregon law provides no defense for parents charged with causing the death of a child through neglect or maltreatment, and the couple has been charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminal mistreatment.

...

The Christian Science church doesn't provide guidance on whether members may seek medical care, says Mr. Davis, the church spokesman. He says the church does not bar members from getting medical care, nor does it advise members when they should do so.

Church founder Mary Baker Eddy believed it was "fear that creates the image of disease and its consequent manifestation in the body." Spiritual practitioners, who are trained by the church to heal through prayer, get patients to think differently about their relationship with God, says Mr. Davis, who also is a spiritual practitioner. "It's an affirmation [of truth]," Mr. Davis says. "It's that understanding that restores harmony."

...

But three years later, Minnesota's Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion. The court dismissed second-degree-manslaughter charges against Christian Scientists William and Kathleen McKown. Her son, Ian Lundman, died at age 11 of diabetic ketoacidosis, or severe, untreated diabetes. The justices ruled that the government couldn't allow someone to "depend upon" Christian Science healing methods "then attempt to prosecute them for exercising that right."

...

Church lobbyists are now asking that the state allow insurance plans to reimburse prayer practitioners, who can charge $20 to $50 for a day's worth of prayer, says Wanda Jane Warmack, the church's legislative manager.

Looks like they're succeeding.

Eating dog

Dogs have come under attack in 2 recent op-ed articles. Jonathan Safran Foer in the WSJ asks why don't we eat dogs and Jonah Goldberg, in his normal nonsense way, pivots off an idea in a new book entitled, "Time to Eat the Dog?: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living", to make the claim that environmentalists want to take away your dogs and that we shouldn't worry about climate change because it is politically impossible and we'll just reflect sunlight back to space when it gets bad. Not joking. There are some interesting thoughts in both, though I wouldn't wish anyone to actually read the Jonah Goldberg article. The Safran Foer article is genuinely interesting. Here's JSF -

Of course, something having been done just about everywhere is no kind of justification for doing it now. But unlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten. Three to four million dogs and cats are euthanized annually. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.

In a sense it's what we're doing already. Rendering—the conversion of animal protein unfit for human consumption into food for livestock and pets—allows processing plants to transform useless dead dogs into productive members of the food chain. In America, millions of dogs and cats euthanized in animal shelters every year become the food for our food. So let's just eliminate this inefficient and bizarre middle step.

...

Food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, craving and identity. Responding to factory farming calls for a capacity to care that dwells beyond information. We know what we see on undercover videos of factory farms and slaughterhouses is wrong. (There are those who will defend a system that allows for occasional animal cruelty, but no one defends the cruelty, itself.) And despite it being entirely reasonable, the case for eating dogs is likely repulsive to just about every reader of this paper. The instinct comes before our reason, and is more important.

I think that I could eat dog. At least try it. I drink milk that comes from a cow's tit, which when I think about I find rather disgusting, but not disgusting to the point that I'll stop drinking milk. Compared to that, dog meat seems like a rather clean and rational thing to do. I don't think I'd feel any moral repulsiveness if I came across "Doberman" in a meat freezer (although it'd be highly amusing in a macabre way if you could memorialize dogs on their food label, like under the price it'd say "Daisy, Yellow Lab, Occasionally drank beer left in her dog dish by owners, Walked semi-occasionally, Displayed symptoms of mental deficiencies, Was a good dog, Defrost before grilling", you could collect dog meat price stickers like baseball cards). There is a sense of revulsion, though, that I have when I think about what a dog slaughterhouse would exist as, which is strange because I just accept that millions of dogs are already put to death yearly. I never thought that they used the body for animal feed; I guess I just assumed they put all the euthanized dogs into dog caskets and buried them in dog graves or cremated the dogs and put the dogs into little dog urns. Anyway, after watching The Cove I feel like a slight hypocrite being a carnivore and then making distinctions between what animals are morally acceptable to kill and which aren't - so I should be a vegetarian but I'm, y'know, lazy...

And here's Jonah Goldberg -

The government cannot have my dog.

Don't tell that to the authors of the new book, "Time to Eat the Dog?: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living." The authors calculate that dog owning is much worse than SUV driving for the planet. So when you see a car heading to the dog park with some very happy labs drooling out the window, you should think "climate criminals."

Meanwhile, in less surprising news, cats (long known as the handmaidens of Satan) have roughly the ecological paw print of a Volkswagen Golf.

Ditch the SUV, walk the dog.

And a nice dog story to end -

Not long before his death, Harry and I headed out for a walk that proved eventful. He was nearly 13, old for a big dog. Walks were no longer the slap-happy Iditarods of his youth, frenzies of purposeless pulling in which we would cast madly off in all directions, fighting for command. Nor were they the exuberant archaeological expeditions of his middle years, when every other tree or hydrant or blade of grass held tantalizing secrets about his neighbors. In his old age, Harry had transformed his walk into a simple process of elimination—a dutiful, utilitarian, head-down trudge. When finished, he would shuffle home to his ratty old bed, which graced our living room because Harry could no longer ascend the stairs. On these walks, Harry seemed oblivious to his surroundings, absorbed in the arduous responsibility of placing foot before foot before foot before foot. But this time, on the edge of a small urban park, he stopped to watch something. A man was throwing a Frisbee to his dog. The dog, about Harry’s size, was tracking the flight expertly, as Harry had once done, anticipating hooks and slices by watching the pitch and roll and yaw of the disc, as Harry had done, then catching it with a joyful, punctuating leap, as Harry had once done, too.

Harry sat. For 10 minutes, he watched the fling and catch, fling and catch, his face contented, his eyes alight, his tail a-twitch. Our walk home was almost…jaunty.

Successful rival leagues

The conversation is limited to the Negro Leagues and the ABA, right? Unless someone wants to make the case for the XFL... Keith Law talks about the ABA here.

I found this story particularly interesting -

The NCAA, always looking for ways to limit student-athletes’ rights, had a “Four-Year Rule” that prohibited college players from leaving for pro careers until they had played four seasons for their schools. The ABA decided to challenge that rule, and the Denver Rockets signed a University of Detroit sophomore named Spencer Haywood to a three-year deal worth $450,000 (with most of the money deferred). They chose Haywood because he was dominating his college competition, but also because they could argue that he was a “hardship case” and needed to earn money to support his mother and nine siblings.

After a year of lawsuits, a judge ruled that the “Four-Year Rule” had no basis in law—similar to this February’s ruling by an Ohio trial judge that the NCAA’s by-law prohibiting players from using agents was invalid. Haywood was able to suit up for the Rockets, winning the Rookie of the Year and MVP awards before jumping ship and signing with the NBA’s Seattle Sonics for more money.

It's borderline criminal (and sometimes straight-up criminal) how the NCAA and the professional leagues team-up to exploit student-athletes. Things like not compensating athletes for using their likeness in videogames should be stopped and revenue shared among the athletes -

O'Bannon's suit seems like a solid one to me: It's obscene that the NCAA doesn't have to share any of the estimated $4 billion it makes in licensing agreements with the former athletes whose talents provide the basis for those agreements. To take just one example, here's a screenshot from EA Sports' NCAA Basketball '09 game that shows two avatars who are obviously UNC's Ty Lawson and Duke's Greg Paulus; but these guys don't see any money from the videogame (and, while Lawson should be okay financially, I think Paulus is going to need the cash.)

The requirement that basketball players be one year out of high school before being eligible for the draft is awful as well, and just another reason that I'm a fan of Brandon Jennings. Maybe it's that I grew up playing tennis where if you aren't a pro by the time you're 18 you've probably hit your ceiling, but I can't help but chafe at the idea of a league dictating requirements that athletes must fulfill before they are able to capitalize on their talent for themselves, instead reduced to offering cheap labor to the NCAA for which it benefits greatly. So Brandon Jennings couldn't play at Arizona because he didn't meet the minimum score for the SAT - playing in Europe was probably the smarter, more beneficial choice anyway, and it's only a matter of time before other people realize it too.

Lake Michigan Surf

The Journal-Sentinel has a story up about two brothers who make hollow wood surfboards that work particularly well for the surf season on Lake Michigan near Sheboygan that runs from September to May.

After some research, they discovered that the hollow wood surfboard was invented by water sports legend Tom Blake, who was born in Milwaukee in 1902. The Wisconsin tie appealed to them, and since they were working construction jobs they had access to scrap lumber.

So in 2007 they began a process of trial and error to build three surfboards. Each board took about 120 hours, a time they have since cut in half.

...

While wooden boards are significantly heavier than the typical surfboard, Kaftanski said the weight is an advantage for Great Lakes surfing where momentum is needed. Wood boards also are more durable, and Kaftanski said they are more environmentally friendly.

I had no idea there was a surfing 'season' on Lake Michigan; I thought I heard it was only possible a couple times a year when the weather cooperates just perfectly. I imagine surfing during the winter would be quite a trip, and sounds like something I could convince John Beck to do sometime. Of course, I'd have to learn how to surf first.

Redd, Alexander, Yount

Michael Redd is out at least 2 weeks. $35 million dollars will buy a lot of suits so at least he'll look sharp sitting at the end of the bench. At least it will guarantee a lot more emphasis placed on Brandon Jennings and Hakim Warrick whose mistakes are more interesting to watch than the rest of the team.

Joe Alexander is gonna be the highest drafted player to have his rookie option declined. Who would have thought the 8th leading scorer at basketball powerhouse West Virginia would have trouble in the NBA? Reminds me of the Gladwell/Simmons article from awhile ago that argues that NBA general managers over-think themselves into bad teams.

So why do I think I would be better? There's a famous experiment done by a wonderful psychologist at Columbia University named Dan Goldstein. He goes to a class of American college students and asks them which city they think is bigger -- San Antonio or San Diego. The students are divided. Then he goes to an equivalent class of German college students and asks the same question. This time the class votes overwhelmingly for San Diego. The right answer? San Diego. So the Germans are smarter, at least on this question, than the American kids. But that's not because they know more about American geography. It's because they know less. They've never heard of San Antonio. But they've heard of San Diego and using only that rule of thumb, they figure San Diego must be bigger. The American students know way more. They know all about San Antonio. They know it's in Texas and that Texas is booming. They know it has a pro basketball team, so it must be a pretty big market. Some of them may have been in San Antonio and taken forever to drive from one side of town to another -- and that, and a thousand other stray facts about Texas and San Antonio, have the effect of muddling their judgment and preventing them from getting the right answer.

I'd be the equivalent of the German student. I know nothing about basketball, so I'd make only the safest, most obvious decisions. I'd read John Hollinger and Chad Ford and I'd print out your mid-season NBA roundup and post it on my blackboard. I'd look at the box scores every morning, and watch Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith on TNT. Would I have made the disastrous Marbury trade? Of course not. I'd wonder why Jerry Colangelo -- who I know is a lot smarter than I am -- was so willing to part with him.

Would I have traded for Curry? Are you kidding? All I know is that Chicago is scared of his attitude and his health, and Paxson knows way more about basketball -- and about Eddy Curry -- than I do. Trade for Jalen Rose? No way. One of the few simple facts that basketball dummies like me know is that players in their early thirties are pretty much over the hill. And Jerome James? Please. I have no idea how to evaluate a player's potential. But I'd look up his stastistics on NBA.com and see that's he's been pretty dreadful his whole career, and then I'd tell his agent to take a hike.

Now would I be as good as GM as Jerry West or Joe Dumars? Of course not. But just by sitting on my hands, and being scared of looking like a fool, and taking only the safest, most conservative steps, and drafting only solid players that everybody agrees are a can't miss, I could make the Knicks a vastly better team than they are today -- as could any reasonably cautious and uninformed fan....

That's Thomas in a nutshell: He knows so much about basketball that he believes that he knows more than anyone else about the potential of previously undistinguished players. He thinks he can see into the true basketball soul of Jerome James. The truth is, of course, that James doesn't have a basketball soul.

By the way, while we're on this topic, let's play a real world application of this. Let's say I'm so dumb about basketball that all I know is that the best college programs in the country are Duke and UConn, and so as a GM my rule is only draft and/or trade for the first and second team players, in any given year, from those two schools. So I fire all my scouts. I disband my front office, and basically say that I cede my basketball judgment to Jim Calhoun and Mike K. What's my team? It's some combination of Elton Brand, Emeka Okafor, Ben Gordon, Luol Deng, Shane Battier, Mike Dunleavy, Rip Hamilton, Corey Maggette, Jay Williams, Caron Butler, Donyell Marshall and Grant Hill -- which is a really wonderful team. Now, of course, in the real world I couldn't get all those people, because lots of them were really high draft picks. But let's say I got Brand in a trade, after Chicago soured on him, and I was lucky enough to be in the lottery for Okafor. Maggette was a 13; Hamilton and Deng were 7s; and Butler was a 10 -- so at least some of them are doable, particularly since in off-years for Duke and UConn I can trade down and stockpile picks. Battier I wine and dine in the free agent market, because who wants to be stuck in Memphis? Ditto for Gordon, who, it seems, Chicago is thinking of moving anyway. Is that the best team in the league? No. It is better than the Knicks? Absolutely. The point is that clinging to a very simple rule of thumb here -- that doesn't require knowing much about basketball -- can leave you looking pretty smart.

I probably shouldn't have any strong opinion on this because I've only been following the Bucks for the past, uh, week, but I remember being slightly perplexed when I heard the Bucks picked Alexander, especially considering 'name' players (i.e. players that I had heard of before the NCAA tournament) like Brook Lopez, Roy Hibbert, Brandon Rush, and Marreese Speights were still available. Obviously, I have the benefit of hindsight, but considering the Bucks wasted a lottery pick the prior year on Yi Jianlian I don't think it is unfair to assume the Bucks suffer from what Gladwell was describing.

Finally, Robin Yount may have used a corked bat. I'm curious if anyone will care. I don't, but then I don't even really care about steroids/HGH so whatever.

Book reading, Jeff Dunham

I can't stand to look at that ad so I'm going to post this up to knock it down.

I have to read Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang for class. Gotta have it finished by next Tuesday. According to the blurb on the book it is a "classic gem of destructive mayhem and outrageous civil disobedience - the novel that sparked the environmental activism movement!" Since the 5 people that I know that read this blog are dirty hippies you might be interested in reading it too and we can talk about it like intellectual people and then I'll steal your written thoughts about it and pass them off as my own. My class has a discussion board up for what we read and I'll post the funny things my classmates think and we can make fun of them together. Here's an example of what they offer from earlier this semester -

Alicia makes a really good point here. There are lots of women (wives/girlfriends/etc.) that compare themselves to actresses in porn videos to the detriment of their sex lives. At the same time, I wonder if the increased availability of porn nowadays has had a beneficial effect on individuals sexual relationships.

One of the biggest causes of domestic and sexualabuse within relationships seems to stem from men's lack of understanding about the needs and desires of women. If you view sex as just a means to achieve orgasm, you end up treating women as just a means to an end, rather than a person with her own sexual needs. This is incredibly dehumanizing. It's from this mentality that leads some people to rape and otherwise sexually assault.

But with the mainstreaming of porn, it has led to a more education discussion (even subconsciously) of what men, and especially women, want within the confines sex. It's common knowledge now that women have just as much sexual desire as men and have as many or more orgasms as well. Women aren't an empty vessel to be taken advantage of, quite the opposite in fact. The purpose of sex is about, as Alicia says, being in a mutally pleasing relationship.

(all spelling errors and awkward constructions are his)

I can't tell if that is something that genuinely doesn't make sense or just doesn't make sense to me because I'm actually familiar with pornography. Regardless, I find it hilarious. Here's an article in Salon talking about porn, too.

There's something cold and sad and deeply unerotic about being in the throes of it with somebody and thinking, "I saw this in 'Weapons of Ass Destruction 4.'" As a friend said recently, "Just because it looks good doesn't mean it is. Then I wind up feeling inadequate because I'm not enjoying it." Soon after, another friend mentioned a man she'd been dating, whose erotic repertoire included withdrawing his member at key moments to thump it on her. After puzzling over it with friends, she finally figured out: It's a porn move. Listen, if you're a professional showing off his stuff for the camera, that sort of thing almost makes sense. Out of context, however, it's another situation entirely. You know what description you never want a woman you've slept with to apply to your sexual technique? "Baffling."

I'm also finally getting around to reading Without Stopping by Paul Bowles after Kole gave it to me over a year ago. For most memoirs and biographies I end up preferring the portions of the book devoted to the subject's adolescence, before they do whatever they did to warrant memoirs and biographies to be published about them, but I'm not feeling that right now with Bowles. It has to do with the fact that I have no idea who is so I have no idea why he is so amused with myself and why I should be amused as well (probably what people are thinking about me right now, but this is for the greater good, I'm bumping that uncomfortable ad down the page). Anyway, Bowles' wikipedia page informed me of what he did and I suspect I'd be more interested in his later years regardless of my familiarity with him.

*I really don't find Jeff Dunham funny, the news that his sitcom received the highest ratings of any premiere on Comedy Central was distressing, and even his appearance on 30 Rock last week made me shudder a bit. That being said, this NYTimes article about him was a good read. I find ventriloquism to be just sorta weird (and creepy) and the article is as much about the ventriloquism community as it is about Jeff Dunham. Ventriloquist acts always strike me as just versions of this clip from Freaks And Geeks when Neal can only confront his dad's affair by doing a comedy routine with his new dummy. Ventriloquists wanting to be able to say the things they sometimes feel without having to associate/take responsibility for saying it, or y'know, I can't remember where I heard it, but take off the stupid puppet and start losing friends like the rest of us. It's like you're watching someone mentally lose it on stage like they're compartmentalizing themselves -

Already, during one of the convention’s featured performances — while Dunham and Murdick sat unassumingly in the last row, near the door — the ventriloquist onstage did a bit in which his dummy harangued him for envying Dunham: Dunham’s screaming arena crowds, Dunham’s expensive cars, Dunham’s hot girlfriend. “I’m not jealous; I’ve got my own style,” the vent told his dummy, but a little too vulnerably. Few people laughed; it felt as if something unsettlingly psychotherapeutic was being hashed out.

Other stuff from the article -

Peanut, a hyperactive purple Muppetish dummy, kicked off his portion of the show just by saying different words for breasts — “bodacious ta-tas” got the biggest laugh — and closed with a bit about ordering Chinese food, done in a preposterous Fu Manchu accent. By the encore, when Dunham brought out his redneck character to do a routine from his first DVD, all 7,000 people in the arena were ecstatically chanting the dummy’s punch lines together — a choir of thrown voices. (Dunham: “Do you have a drinking problem?” Everyone: “No! I’ve pretty much got it figured out!”) Then, when it was over — after Dunham fired some balled-up Jeff Dunham T-shirts into the upper decks with the kind of air-powered bazooka you see during N.B.A. halftimes — he literally ran out the arena’s back door and onto his bus, where he went back to work on the Umpire....

...Everyone read to himself. Dunham didn’t like one of Peanut’s first jokes, about how another reality-TV star, Kim Kardashian, would pass gas on a baby if it meant getting some publicity. “We’ve got to get away from the poop jokes,” he said.

McCall spoke up: “It’s not really a poop joke.” He was making a sincere, semantic point, but not too assertively. Dunham didn’t answer directly; he told a long story about an audition he did in the 90s. Eventually he said: “Just come up with something different about Kim Kardashian, that’s all. Something about her butt or her boobs.”...

...He spent a great deal of time safeguarding the integrity of his characters — “Peanut’s not going to ask her to freakin’ marry him right away! He just met her!” — and also swatting away jokes that felt too scatological or easy. “Again?” he said at one point, hitting a joke about pornography in another sketch. The scripts had too many porn jokes in them. Also condom jokes. For a time, Dunham just sat there, picking lint off his laptop — not in a passive-aggressive way; he just couldn’t hide his discouragement. “This show’s gotta have some art to it,” he said.

He was trying to train the writers to see what he sees: a kind of mindlessness that’s not totally idiotic. But they couldn’t yet, and maybe understandably: there are porn and poop jokes all over Dunham’s DVDs....

...Dunham does concede that he’s extra-sensitive to one of his largest constituencies: the conservative “country crowd.” “That’s why I don’t pick on basic Christian-values stuff,” he told me. “Well, I also don’t like to, because that’s the way I was brought up.” He then stopped himself short and said: “Oh, boy. I’m walking into something here.”

Dunham started to explain — as if realizing it for the first time — that this would appear to make the jokes he does about Islam with Achmed “hypocritical.” But he quickly unburdened himself of the idea. “I try to make the majority of my audience laugh,” he said. “That’s my audience. They’ll laugh at the dead terrorist.”

In fact, the jokes that get some of the wildest, loudest reactions aren’t really even jokes, just statements. Like when one puppet shouts that all Mexicans should learn English, or when Dunham wishes Walter “Happy Holidays” and Walter responds: “I’ve been wanting to say this for a couple of years now: Screw you, it’s ‘Merry Christmas’!” And the crowd doesn’t laugh; it riotously applauds. Dunham describes them as moments of “catharsis,” when the dummy says something “everyone wants to laugh about, or that you snicker at with one or two friends, but that you could never say out loud.”...

Like nearly everyone I met at the ConVENTion, Wade tried to convince me that Dunham — both by inspiring other vents and as an ambassador to pop and youth cultures — was leading a renaissance for the art, a return to mainstream prominence in America and maybe even coolness. Ventriloquism is finally transcending its stereotypes, Wade told me. “Jeff’s helping us all take that step forward, opening up these new vistas,” he said, adding: “I don’t even use a boy puppet in my show now. I’ve got a bird. I’ve got a talking horse.”

And here's Thomas Pynchon's introduction to 1984 -

It is the boy's smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that the world, at the end of the day, is good and that human decency, like parental love, can always be taken for granted - a faith so honourable that we can almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever being betrayed.

Yikes

Creepiest ad I've ever seen -



Sociological Images

The apocalypse

Chanda Phelan wrote her thesis on the changes and trends in post-apocalyptic literature looking at 423 books, poems, and short stories. Being a huge fan of reading and watching tons of people kicking this mortal coil at the same time I found it interesting -

That was the idea behind this chart – I wanted to see if there were patterns in how writers saw the monster. As it turned out, the patterns were clearer than I imagined. Nuclear holocaust was really popular after 1945; that's to be expected. But the precipitous and permanent drop in nuclear war's popularity after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 (see chart)? That surprised me.

Predictably, the human-made apocalypse is a perennial favorite. The way we go about it, though, is always changing, as you can see on the chart, where I've broken up the "human made disaster" into subcategories.

The post-apocalyptic technological utopias of the turn of the century are replaced by dystopias and robot rebellions after World War I (the first expansion of the green region devoted to human-made disaster), when everyone began to suspect that technology was only going to help us go about killing each other more efficiently, not cure us of the need to kill in the first place. Other trends are there, too: anxiety about pollution and global warming tend to spike whenever nuclear fears fade, for example.

The easily spotted trends make the patterns' total collapse in the mid-1990s even weirder. Human-created apocalypses shrink dramatically, and there's a sudden spike of unexplained apocalypse scenarios at the turn of the century. What happened? One possibility is that every End started to feel clichéd. The terror of a possible nuclear war faded, and no new extravagant ways to kill ourselves appeared to replace it.

It really gets you pumped up to go see 2012, right? Or maybe begin reading the Left Behind series...

Post-Halloween Malaise

My little cousin Blase showed me this thing. It took an inordinately long amount of time to find out how this thing worked, but since I was already extremely frustrated by the Packers I wasn't going to let this site break me. It was sort of worth it.

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