I didn't know about Keillor's personal history, but Savage's recounting of it only reinforces my original reading of Keillor's piece. Keillor wasn't being hypocritical, as Savage alleges; he was being ironic.

Didn't this already come up in comments? Do try to keep up, labs.

PZM recounts other weird bits of Keillor's writing-- for example, the advice column stuff-- that suggests he really is uncomfortable with these newfangled contraptions.

I'm not sure how the ironic reading makes sense, since GK generally does seem to endorse the "it's about the kids now" line.

Hmm. I think the advice PZM complains about is generally good, but Keillor does seem to have trouble getting his mind around homosexuality. It's "timid?" That's strange. So yeah, the Salon piece is probably in earnest: he thinks of homosexuality as a choice, and an immature one at that. I really want to defend the guy, because he's going to be cast into the outer darkness over this, but I can't find a way to do it.

Cher isn't gay and Chastity (!) is, but supposedly Chastity once demanded that Cher "wear a mom dress" instead of going to a school event in character as Cher.

I originally took Savage's word on this one, but even many of Savage's own readers are willing to cut Keillor a break. Not PZ, though.

This is a little bewildering, not the least of which is that the kid with eight or nine grandparents is most likely the product of a "mixed-gender" marriage with a couple divorces, which really doesn't have anything to do with chartreuse pants.

It's funny, too, that PZ objects when Keillor advises a Catholic not to marry an atheist. I personally would be quite troubled if my son married a Catholic.

Religions which advise the wife to be long-suffering and obedient are one of the secrets of stable marriages, of course.

even many of Savage's own readers are willing to cut Keillor a break

This is one of the perks of being the "nice moderate white guy." It infuriates me.

We know, B. You're not nice, you're not moderate, you're not a guy, and being white isn't enough.

Keillor is pretty explicitly liberal, though, he's not Lieberman / DLC "moderate".

He is, but he plays the reasonable man on PHC, so much so that people are often surprised by his political views.

PZM reads those Keillor snippets very differently than I do. Most obviously: Keillor issues an explicit, even sentimental, endorsement of gay marriage. He directly compares the struggles of those fighting for gay marriage to the struggles of his own sainted parents. PZM reads this as being bigoted opposition to gay marriage. I don't see it.

Having reread the column, I have no idea what the fuck Keillor is up to. It's just as bad as Lileks, all rambling and pointless. Is the whole "simple truths we know in our hearts" schtick meant to be ironic?

The first and third paragraphs sound like they could be intended as satire. Who waxes nostalgic over boiled potatoes? And maybe the third paragraph is just meant to say 'gay men are just too fabulous to be dowdy like parenthood requires.'

But I think that's a stretch.

See, this is why I hate Keillor.

More than irony Keillor writes shaggy dog stories. So rambling is part of it. And he has a sort of shifting point of view where sometimes he's taking on the local persona and sometimes he's standing outside it and teasing.

I'm sure Keillor finds hip liberationism tedious and annoying, but so do lots of people.

This is one of the perks of being the "nice moderate white guy." It infuriates me.

As opposed to "hip, sex-positive, snarky gay guy," whose supporters are willing to look the other way on an egregious type of "dirty hippy" pro-war support and tacit approval of racial profiling. That's not infuriating at all.

Yeah, what Tim said. Back in Portland I knew ever so many hip, sexy, gay or gay-friendly centrists and libertarians who were either anti-labor, pro-war, anti-tax, and so on, or else just apolitical socialites who sucked up to anyone who could throw money around.

16: Word.

Savage's response strikes me as an overreaction. Even the least generous reading of Keillor's piece doesn't imply that he *hates* gay people.

There's a pretty big difference between somebody who simply buys into personal stereotypes, and somebody who genuinely hates gay people The latter is going to actively discriminate. They will show up at the polls for the sole reason of defeating gay marriage, and they'll vote Republican all the way down the ticket. Keillor would likely vote for gay marriage, on the other hand.

If someone like Keillor generates that much anger and venom in your mind, how do you react to the serious bigots -- go on a killing spree?

16: I thought, and think, that Savage's position on the war was appalling. 18 gets precisely at what's so fucking annoying about the moderate white guy thing: simply because Keillor's language is affable, he gets to say appalling things and people want to apologize for it; because Savage uses invective, his basically sound position gets dismissed as "anger and venom."

I agree with 16/17. Half of all the schmibertarians I've known have either been extremely likeable gay guys or extremely abrasive computer science guys. The common thread is a love of illegal drugs and a scorn for most of humanity.

Who waxes nostalgic over boiled potatoes?

I do. Why is that something you shouldn't wax nostalgic over?

yeah, hard to know how to score this one.
I have enjoyed listening to savage; i have also enjoyed keillor now and then, and was grateful to him for pushing back against bush during some of the darkest years--even before Colbert's beautiful attack on him at the banquet.

other thing is: gk says "being a good parent entails being less selfish and self-obsessed;" ds responds "most gay parents are unselfish and un-self-obsessed." I mean, it's not like ds is saying that gk is wrong about what parenthood requires.

still, gk was way out of line with the stereotypes. Maybe even deserving of the coulter comparison. And gk is a bona fide sleaze in his personal life, no doubt about that. His marital record leaves him wide open to ds's attack, and indeed deserving of it.

it's just lamentable as an instance of left-on-left violence, is my concern.

I don't think that what Keillor said was appalling. He has this thing of teasing people and apparently he finds the flaming lifestyle pretty annoying, but I don't think he's advocating anything terrible.

19: I'm not apologizing for Keillor, I'm simply pointing out that there's no evidence of the gay-hate that Savage attributes to him.

And Savage himself admits he's angry, so I'm not sure how recognizing that fact amounts to "dismissing" him. To the contrary, I take him at his word.

Keillor is saying that homos aren't good parents, and he's doing so in twee, patronizing language. "A mixed-gender marriage," haw! Good one, Garrison! Children need a mother *and* a father!

And Savage is angry because he's a gay man with a child. He has the right to be angry over having his family dismissed in such facile terms.

24: Having the right to be angry doesn't necessarily make it wise or productive. I've got the right to be angry about a lot of things too, but if I exercised that right to the extent I'm entitled to, I'd be pissed off 24/7.

The mistake is largely a strategic one: If you equate Keillor and Coulter, and insist on making enemies of both, you're going to make more enemies than you can conquer. You'll die trying.

Equating Keillor and Coulter is like Nader saying there's no difference between Gore and Bush. Keillor is not Coulter. He's precisely like my elderly father -- essentially liberal, and would vote for gay marriage, but he held the same stereotypes. What made him not-Coulter is that over the years, as he was introduced to more gay people, he eventually dropped the stereotypes.

The Coulters of the world will never get that far, precisely because they are motivated by hatred, not mere ignorance.

"well-known honky" == understatement of our young century. Is there a whiter man in America today?

25: Oh, I see. You're simply concerned that Savage--who has a national platform as a writer--doesn't understand the importance of tone.

"I really want to defend the guy, because he's going to be cast into the outer darkness over this, but I can't find a way to do it."

Yeah, I mean, I've read that article about fifteen times trying to figure out how it's a subtle, biting ironic commentary, and I just can't puzzle it out.

On the other hand, it gave me the chance to write the phrase "platitudinous midwesternisms," so, you know, on to Lake Woebegone

27: You insist on misconstruing my posts.

I'm questioning Savage's wisdom, not his tone per se. And there are plenty of unwise people with national platforms, unfortunately.

It's true, though, that Savage's tone was kind of uncongenial.

The "Asshole, asshole, asshole" gave it away.

It is possible to have a national writing platform and be intermittently tone deaf. But Savage isn't tone deaf or ignorant of the importance of tone. He's not trying to argue that he's giving a measured critique of Keillor, but that the silly "asshole" key keeps sticking. He's angry and raging, and he's admitting it.

I don't know whether it's wise or not. Probably pretty insignificant, all things considered.

24:"but if I exercised that right to the extent I'm entitled to, I'd be pissed off 24/7."

Use it or lose it, I always say. Was this thread about sex or gun control?

Nothing of Keillor's is biting and ironic. He has that rambliing, wandering thing, shaggy dog stories like I said, where it fades in and out of focus. You like it or you don't.

Just reread it. It's mostly about how life is different nowadays in various ways. Two short paragraphs and one line about anything gay. He wasn't hoping they'd all die of AIDS and go to hell, he was just being snarky, in his blundering way, about a version of the gay esthetique that gay persons might be snarky about too.

How seriously are we supposed to take his idealization of the past? No more than half, I'd say.

Why is that something you shouldn't wax nostalgic over?

You could. But why wax over nasty boiled potatoes when there are little red roasted ones to praise? Or baked ones? (now I want a potato.)

More seriously, the potatoes-in-tupperware phrase just sounded too deliberately folksy. You'd expect aprons, apple pie, and Mom's meat loaf and sunny days in the swimming hole with your yellow dog Rex to follow. That's just too clichéd.

That's sort of Keillor's line, after all. But he usually plays somewhere between being an outsider looking in critically and an insider o-earnestly offering their opinions. I can't figure out which voice the excerpt is supposed to represent.

He wasn't hoping they'd all die of AIDS and go to hell

Oh, well, kudos.

Some boiled Yukon Golds with butter and parsley—what's not to like? Sure, the roasted waxier ones are good too, but man does not live by relatively starchless potatoes alone.

Oh Savage is unwise alright:

"Say YES to War on Iraq"

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=12237

"invading and rebuilding Iraq will not only free the Iraqi people, it will also make the Saudis aware of the consequences they face if they continue to oppress their own people while exporting terrorism and terrorists. The War on Iraq will make it clear to our friends and enemies in the Middle East (and elsewhere) that we mean business: Free your people, reform your societies, liberalize, and democratize... or we're going to come over there, remove you from power, free your people, and reform your societies for ourselves."

I'm surprised he didn't add "and convert them to Christianity", as long as we're on the topic of Coulter comparisons.

Read the whole thing, and tell me he isn't strategically impaired.

Oh, if they're Yukon Golds. But there would be none of those in tupperware, for I would have eaten them all.

If you equate Keillor and Coulter, and insist on making enemies of both, you're going to make more enemies than you can conquer.

You know, it's at least possible that Savage thinks Keillor is equivalent to Coulter. We think of Coulter (I believe) as a bigot along many different vectors, including, but not limited to, homophobia. It's at least possible that homophobia is the only hate vector of Coulter's that Savage finds objectionable. In which case, he's right: for him and those who think like him, Keillor is equivalent to Coulter.

Comity!

I note in the first case, that there is excessive attention here on what DS said and how he said it. The thing in view probably ought to be be GK. Am I wrong about this? The thing about GK (and this has already come up some) is that he both glorifies and takes at face value the past, gets all sentimental on it, all the while affecting an ironic distance on it (and it is an irony that is rather neuetered); as far as I can tell the thing that is not neutered is the golden vision of a white-bread past. [sorry about the mixed metraphor!] In our multi-cultural world this is vision that deserves the interrogating that it has been receiving. I hardly need mention here in this company that such sentimentalizing, bristling with poorly sublimated reactive critique of our postmodern society, is understandably going to raise DS's, my, BPhd's hackles.

I'll bite the bullet and say that I think that it's OK for straight men to find certain sorts of gay culture annoying and silly, and to express that opinion maliciously, the same way that it's OK for gay men find certain sorts of straight culture annoying and silly, and to express that opinion maliciously. Isn't that what tolerance is all about?

I think it is OK to express such annoyance. Now I wonder if I am being inconsistent.

He both glorifies and takes at face value the past, gets all sentimental on it, all the while affecting an ironic distance on it (and it is an irony that is rather neutered); as far as I can tell the thing that is not neutered is the golden vision of a white-bread past.

I think that that's false. He's deliberately evasive, but there's no evidence that he takes the past at face value. (I suppose that some of his listeners do). He certainly is not proposing that we try to ressurrect or return to that past; I think that the pastness is pretty well wired into the story, and not only that, I don't even think that his message is "Wouldn't be nice if things were still that way?"

What I think he does is describe an irretrievably past life without any particular note of resentment or tragedy, but also without the note of anger and resentment that dominates most portrayals of that life.

In formulating this particular judgment, I am relying on a global impression of GK, if that makes any difference.

Tolerance is cool, but discussin' yuppie gourmet potatoes on St Patrick's Day is over the line. I am sure I lost family members to the Blight, or the Crossing, or somewhere in central Canada.

Not my place to demand a banning, but I have feelings too.

Keillor is saying that homos aren't good parents

No, he isn't. Savage's response isn't even worth responding to.

I am not making a critical affirmation of PHC. I have never turned PHC once in my life. If I happen to hear it, I like it mildly during the times when he isn't singing. I did read one of his books once and liked it

I like PHC as a reference point for my own ethnic sector, and as a non-hostile look at predominantly tacky, bland people who are really quite nice in most respects.

Yukon Gold potatoes aren't yuppy.

"What I think he does is describe an irretrievably past life without any particular note of resentment or tragedy, but also without the note of anger and resentment that dominates most portrayals of that life."

Hmm. So it is a sort of neutral representation, then. It sure can make you feel cuddly and warm. Encomium would secure orgasm, I guess.

But I take and want to think about your point, even as I poke at it a little. For the moment I cannot decide what the conditions for such a neutral representation are to be and how we can be know or reasonably suspect that we have come close enough to it (without sliding over into idealisation).

Jackmormon is from the Yukon, where she killed bears with her teeth. Yukon Gold potatos are ethnic for her, like Screech. So it's OK for Cala to eat them.

Not really neutral, affectionate. But it's defintiely gone in the past, and I don't even think that you have the Faulknerian sense of loss. I mean, how could you.

Some of John Updike's early stuff was along Keillor's lines. keillor doesn't overwrite the way Updike did, and when Updike moved to the suburbs I found him unbearable.

Yukon Golds aren't yuppie. The little confetti potatoes that come in purple, red, and gold at Trader Joe's are yuppie, but also delicious.

Someone needs to give the kids some fries and big bottle of ketchup. Yup.

Emerson's right. I've read Lake Woebegon Days, and it has the affectionate feel of a retelling of an old family story. Parts that make you wince, parts that you miss but not too much, parts that you remember fondly but embarass you, parts that you find kind of silly but don't resent. It's not neutral, since that implies disinterest, but it's not nostalgia.

Speaking of yuppie produce, I was amused to discover that at the Milk Pail Meyer lemons are $.99/lb, while at Andronico's they're more like $4.99/lb (or more, I can't remember). I will miss the Milk Pail when I move.

Oh and I forgot to buy soda water! There go my Tom Collins–related plans.

I'll bite the bullet and say that I think that it's OK for straight men to find certain sorts of gay culture annoying and silly, and to express that opinion maliciously,

Only if you've invested yourself in creating a certain credibility about your love of niche slurs by, for example (and quite rightly, I think), going after the Lurs.

It's probably true that the focus should be on GK. I saw someone (Emerson?) offer up what seemed to me to be a credible explanation that the whole piece was ironic, with consistent references to GK's own life. But I don't mind much if GK gets roughed up a bit on this; it's not going to kill him, and if it makes him more careful and and also instructs other people to be careful, that's probably primarily to the good.

I actually could get a comparison opinion. There were two (closeted) gay guys that I know of in my Wobegonian HS class. I could ask them how they felt about PHC, or could have once. (One of them is dead.) The one still alive was the quarterback of the football team and point guard of the basketball team (a finesse player, of course) and had a career as a HS coach before he came out. He seemed quite happy there, whereas the other guy didn't.

Wait, I thought the reason that DS was taking such an uncongenial tone with GK is that he had reason to believe that GK was inspired to write this attack by DS himself. That is, it's not just that he felt attacked as a gay parent, but also as Dan Savage, who had very recently done a reading with GK in which he made a similar joke about mixed-gender parents and talked about raising children as gay partners. I'm guessing his piece was, as his often are, slightly satirical about stereotypes rather than whining, and wondered whether GK wasn't taking his "snarkiness" as some kind of proof that all gay dudes care about is fulfilling stereotypes, rather than caring for kids.

Keillor responds:

"Ordinarily I don't like to use this space to talk about my newspaper column but the most recent column aroused such angry reactions that I thought I should reply. The column was done tongue-in-cheek, always a risky thing, and was meant to be funny, another risky thing these days, and two sentences about gay people lit a fire in some readers and sent them racing to their computers to fire off some jagged e-mails. That's okay. But the underlying cause of the trouble is rather simple.

I live in a small world -- the world of entertainment, musicians, writers -- in which gayness is as common as having brown eyes. Ever since I was in college, gay men and women have been friends, associates, heroes, adversaries, and in that small world, we talk openly and we kid each other and think nothing of it. But in the larger world, gayness is controversial. In almost every state, gay marriage would be voted down if put on a ballot. Gay men and women have been targeted by the right wing as a hot-button issue. And so gay people out in the larger world feel beseiged to some degree. In the small world I live in, they feel accepted and cherished as individuals, but in the larger world they may feel like Types. My column spoke as we would speak in my small world and it was read by people in the larger world and thus the misunderstanding. And for that, I am sorry. Gay people who set out to be parents can be just as good parents as anybody else, and they know that, and so do I. "

http://www.publicradio.org/columns/prairiehome/posthost/2007/03/17/ordinarily_i_dont_like_to.php

"Gay people who set out to be parents can be just as good parents as anybody else, and they know that, and so do I."

But then what is the column about? If GK was poking fun at his own simple childhood and then saying "My oh my, aren't we a bunch now?" before returning to talking about how even "diverse" children like to go "clop clop" with their hands, what was the point about gay people with fussy hair? He didn't once bring up, like, women who are obsessed with Botox or men who spend all their time buying gadgets (trying to think of some other stereotype of modern selfish straight-hood). This isn't a David Brooks column about the "me" generation; the only problem it raises w/r/t selfish parenting is about imagining gay dudes as parents. Right?

I would be willing to accept that this is an extremely poorly written piece by Keillor, but not that it's somehow brilliant and misunderstood. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of prior good feeling about GK to work around that poor writing and not just flat-out call him a bigot.

Commenter at NPR ain't buying it: "My guess is that you really are a bigot, and that you're now backpeadling to make up for it."

Seems to me that Keillor isn't the only person who talks fondly of the place that he came from (mentally or physically), while simultaneously recognizing that there are a lot of good reasons he's moved on.

I really don't think that Keillor is a bigot, but it does still seem to be forbidden for straight guys to speak maliciously about gay guys.

really don't think that Keillor is a bigot, but it does still seem to be forbidden for straight guys to speak maliciously about gay guys.

But what about the bi-theoretical?

I see some of this behavior in my grad program, actually, where about half of the most visible profs are gay men. Among those, half are out, but completely unflamboyant--stammerers in frumpy sweaters, and the other half might be seen by some as of the chartreuse-pants variety. I don't tend to think about these things until recruitment day, when all the prospective students come to hear about the program. I remember, on my own recruitment day, thinking some pretty judgmental things about, uh, chartreuse pants. I knew plenty of gay men before, but not as authority/parental figures in my life, and suddenly finding myself in that position meant that I had to face what were my own stereotypes about what I imagined would get in the way of a professor doing his job.

Over the past four years, I think it's become clear to me that I thought, back then, that I was one of those people for whom homosexuality is like brown eyes, but I wasn't. I wanted my gay authority figures to be "the right kind" of gay guy. Time has passed, things have changed, and now I really bristle when I overhear a new student using the phrase "gay mafia" to describe our faculty.

I really don't think that Keillor is a bigot, but it does still seem to be forbidden for straight guys to speak maliciously about gay guys.

Well, yes, just like it's forbidden (or, you know, frowned upon by a small group of liberals -- it's not like it doesn't happen all the time) for white people to talk maliciously about black people. Whether or not you're personally a bigot, when you're being rude at a group that is currently the subject of plenty of genuine bigotry, people are going to get tense and cranky.

So why can't we be bitches too? Not fair.

Lord a'mercy, if I post a comment in which I agree with Emerson on regional and ethnic identities in America will it create a singularity that consumes all of space and time?

I don't think this is one brilliant but misunderstood column. I think he sincerely thought everyone was in on the joke (especially the way in which he couldn't possibly be sincere about divorce given his own history) and whoops, they weren't. Dumb, but I don't think he's bigoted towards me or "my kind" or whatever. If he does genuinely find the screechy, flaming queens annoying, well, it's certainly not only straight men who do. Rah pointed out in conversation that this might well be Keillor's equivalent to a white guy with a lot of black friends busting out a "neighbor, please," and getting some very displeased responses, and I'd buy that.

Anyway, it's the weekend and I never Unfogged on the weekend and now I need to finish setting up Rah's new computer (suffice to say, the wireless card works).

Isn't Keillor objecting to the flamboyance or chartreuseness (and that only as it relates to parenting) and not the gayness? I think I'm on board with that, if so.

Who could object to Chartreuse? (Not to mention Chartreuse.)

If I'm reading Keillor charitably.. the nearest equivalent seems to be like some poor lurker stumbling in on an Unfogged conversation where we're maligning ogged for being a Mexican Lur, apostropher is insisting that B cut her kid's foreskin, and half of the people are calling the other half sexist, racist, or honky while wondering how to demean someone for being feminine without saying 'gay.' It probably looks very weird and rude.

I could see him, maybe, being very comfortable with teasing a gay friend or cattily remarking that X isn't ready to have kids, they'd cut into his manicure time.

But good lord, how could he misread his audience that badly?

"...GK was inspired to write this attack by DS himself. That is, it's not just that he felt attacked as a gay parent, but also as Dan Savage, who had very recently done a reading with GK..."

Aha, yes that explains it. Savage must have shown up wearing chartreuse pants and a polka dot shirt.

This reminds me of that dumb Mike Adams defense of Coulter in which he says his gay neighbor made a joke about his decorating style being "twenty-first century colonial faggot." Audience matters. You say that in your apartment as a "hey, this is a safe, intimate space," not in a national news column.

That kind of behavior on Unfogged is a special and weird case because, on the one hand, I consider it a safe, intimate space where I can say things that might be misunderstood elsewhere, but obviously not everyone who reads here is part of that group of people I would feel comfortable talking to that way. So it's a gamble.

Keillor's Salon / NPR audience really is pretty safe, though. It's not like Joe Sixpack or skinhead thugs will be provoked to violence by Keillor.

I'm willing to grant that now is not the time for that kind of thing. Maybe in 10 or 20 years.

Really? I can't be alone in finding NPR (especially) to be guilty of that "there are two sides to every story" crap in which they always admit there is something kind of disturbing about non-mainstream behavior. They fawn on people like Jonathan Franzen and Garrison Keillor for their "quirky" descriptions of white male midwesternness in a way that smacks of bourgeois condescension. Obviously, NPR doesn't cause anyone to go out and commit hate crimes, but it seems to revel in aestheticized stereotypes and self-satisfaction, which seem far more politically insidious (if not more dangerous) than outright bigotry.

BTW, WTF is up with the masthead mouse-over? How long has this been there? I assume this is w-lfs-n's doing.

Oh, go abuse yourself, alone and shivering, till you grunt and squirm as befits and merits you, AWB.

nah, couldn't possibly be w-lfs-n.
because he would never do anything as illiterate as using "contra" with the ablative, when it takes the accusative.

or even transcribing such a solecism.

35: B, I saw a performance of the Tom Stoppard play Arcadia on Friday night. There's an exchange early on between writer/academic Hannah and asshole lit prof Bernard:

H: "I'm putting my shoes on again."
B: "You're not going to go out?"
H: "No, I'm going to kick you in the balls."

I immediately thought of you.

I don't listen to NPR either, but Savage wasn't accusing Keillor of "aestheticized stereotypes and self-satisfaction". Savage may do that shit himself at times.

sorry 78 is mine.

and am I right in assuming it is from Richard Burton (the adventurer, not Liz's hubby)?

70:Did this thread move on to Henry Adams?

God, I am stimulated by w-lfs-n to resubscribe to Ray Davies. I am back up to 108 blogs.

It's from the Eroticon of that amorous Greek, Yoryis Yatromanolakis.

Apparently Larry Kramer told Savage to chill.

79: Why, thank you!

Could people not call Dan Savage DS? Cause then I will think they are talking about our own dear Dr. Slack and feel confused.

No one would ever trash our resident gay black Canadian metalhead!

I love Stoppard's Arcadia.

I'd like to get back to talking about potatoEs. I just had some tasty, small, red ones tonight.

I'd like to nibble on some small tasty red ones.

Unfortunately, there were no leftovers. You will have to procure your own small tasty red ones.

Leckere Himbeeren!

Hey, let's see if this works as well for me as for Catherine.

Someone should buy me this shirt!

Shut up, hooker.

I made a potato and zucchini soup tonight. It was good, despite being the sort of food that, if someone else made it for themselves on a Saturday night, would inspire me to cry for their loneliness.

Actually, I like a lot of the shirts on that site.

eg.

Hey, let's see if this works as well for me as for Catherine.

Shockingly, hot chicks get lots of free stuff, whereas hairy unshaven grad students do not.

Some hairy unshaven grad students are hot chicks.

What's with the Allemanephilia? (What's with the making up of words you ask? Beats me.)

I dunno—it got into my blood somehow.

I think they can cure that these days. But why would you want the cure?

An ambiguous gift, to be sure.

Is Catherine unshaven? I did not know that.

Unfogged could really save on the Internet's most precious resource -- bits -- by simply inventing an emoticon for "Shut up, hooker."

105: :$

"Garrison Keillor responds to his readers:

The readership gave me a good whack upside the head over last week's column, hundreds of them in fact. The column was meant to be witty, but two sentences about gay people aroused some readers to a high pitch of indignation, and I now know the meaning of the word 'scorched.' Oh well. You shouldn't write a column if you're afraid to be compared to weasels, sociopaths, Ann Coulter or Vlad the Impaler.

I live in a small world -- the world of entertainment, musicians, writers -- in which gayness is as common as having brown eyes. Ever since I was in college, gay men and women have been friends, bosses, associates, heroes, adversaries, and in that small world, we talk openly and we kid each other a lot. But in the larger world, gayness is controversial. In almost every state, gay marriage would be voted down if put on a ballot. Gay men and women have been targeted by the right wing and so gay people feel besieged to some degree and rightly so. In the small world I live in, they are accepted and cherished as individuals. My column spoke as we would speak in my small world and it was read by people in the larger world and thus the misunderstanding. And for that, I am sorry. Gay people who set out to be parents can be just as good parents as anybody else, and they know that, and so do I.

A man stood outside the theater where I did a show Saturday night and handed out angry pamphlets calling on the audience to protest my homophobia. A gay writer friend was at the show and got a big kick out of the pamphlets and had me autograph some for his partner and his partner's mother. I asked him what I had done wrong and he said, 'You mentioned us.' I looked at him quizzically. He said, 'I'll handle gay parenting and you stick to the Norwegians.' It's a deal."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/03/21/keillor/