Snappy up the dialog a bit and I'd watch this sitcom:

[Former head of CNN] Walter Isaacson is pushed hard by Moyers and finally admits, "We didn't question our sources enough." But why? Isaacson notes there was "almost a patriotism police" after 9/11 and when the network showed civilian casualties it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and "big people in corporations were calling up and saying, 'You're being anti-American here.'"

...

Phil Donahue recalls that he was told he could not feature war dissenters alone on his MSNBC talk show and always had to have "two conservatives for every liberal." Moyers resurrects a leaked NBC memo about Donahue's firing that claimed he "presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

The whole thing.

Caffeinated soap.

I can't decide what I think of this.

We all know that fast food doesn't look anything like how it's pictured in ads, but to scroll down a page of ad photos juxtaposed with photos of the real thing is pretty damn funny. Thanks to Charlie Whitaker for the link.

I went to see my gynecologist for my annual exam. He'd recently switched offices from Park Slope to a less pricey neighborhood in Brooklyn. His old office was in a gleaming, sterile medical center; this one was in a converted townhouse. The waiting room was OK but the examination room gave me pause - I've seen dorm rooms that looked cleaner. The cardboard box lined with a biohazard bag and the sharps container that was so overflowing it was out of room kind of creeped me out.

I went into the changing room and thought they'd forgotten to give me a gown. The room had the sheet I figured I was supposed to put on my lap but nothing to change into. When I asked the nurse, she said they didn't have gowns. I should just wrap the sheet around me.

I think the final straw was when she asked for a urine sample and handed me a paper Dixie cup instead of a specimen jar.

Looking through our referrers, Julian should be flattered:

David, less so:

A list of predictions, published in the Ladies Home Journal in 1900, about what the year 2000 would bring. It's interesting to see how nearly impossible it is to make credible predictions that aren't basically extrapolations from what exists. Something like nuclear power, for example, was more or less unthinkable, and even if something like it had been conceived, it would have been indistinguishable from saying "And then, magic!" Also notable is how optimistic things like this tend to be. Everyone will be fit, life will be easy, and the food will be great. I wonder if this tendency is American, or characteristic of the period after the Industrial Revolution, or just endemic to those sorts of people who are likely to make predictions. If I were to guess, I'd say that by 2100, the practice of medicine will be almost unrecognizably more sophisticated, but in most other ways, life will be a lot shittier than it is now. Sucks to be you, my potential descendents.

via mr

Alec Baldwin leaves a voicemail.

This has to be some kind of joke, right? "I don't give a damn if you're 12 years old...you have humiliated me for the last time."

(Thanks to one of our anonymous readers for this fantastic link.)

Should she go for it? Or is he just not that into her?

There's a guy I like. Call him John* I met him at a Christmas party hosted by some people from my church. The question is: have I done enough to signal my interest in him. Should I just leave it in his court? Or, should I say something like, "John, I really value our friendship, and I don't want to do anything to jeopardize that friendship, but I really want to be more than friends." If I say something that explicit, and it turns out that he's not interested in a relationship with me (or isn't ready for a relationship), how do I keep him as a friend?

The Relevant History/ Timeline.

* In December I invited him (via e-mail) to a black-tie event. I didn't frame it as a date. I said that I had an event to go to and that it would be really nice to have someone under 40 there. Mutual friend Louisa thought that he would have a tuxedo and might be willing to go.

John e-mails back and declines, saying that he is on call and has a department dinner that evening. He's sure that I can find someone with a less congested schedule to go with me. The day before the dance he e-mailed me to ask whether I've found someone to go with me. I wrote back to say that I hadn't. He offered to come for a couple of hours after his dinner, though he'd be without his tuxedo and couldn't guarantee that he wouldn't be paged. I should feel free to page him. I did page him from the ball to thank him for the offer, and I said that I thought he would feel out of place without a tuxedo. He thanked me for thinking of him.

* I later e-mailed John to tell him about the party and to ask him about Christmas. John mentioned that he had brought his tuxedo back from his parents to avoid being caught without it again. I said that I thought tuxedos were like passports: one should always have them ready to go. We started e-mailing each other a lot opening up to each other a fair amount, and he started showing up at church a lot more often than he had. (This could also be explained by the fact that he's probably spent the last several years socializing with people from work and wants to branch out a bit.) He gave me a ride home once, and we often found ourselves talking over coffee. He tends to remember what I say and write. These are all good signs. Once when he was really exhausted, John sent me an unsigned e-mail that said only, " I need a drink." So, later when my grandmother died, I told him about it and said that I could really use a drink. He sent his condolences and said, "Much as I wish it were over, I'm on call through the end of the week."

Another friend, M, who doesn't know him well, but has seen him, convinced me that I should invite John to a friendly dinner, something she described as "not a date exactly." I e-mailed him to say that I was near his work on Tuesday evenings until sort of late and wondered whether he would like to grab a bite to eat sometime. He said, sure, but that he was busy on Tuesdays for the next several weeks, but he could do dinner that night (a Friday) or that we could have brunch some Sunday after church; the implication was that there would be other people around if we did the brunch thing. I e-mailed him back to say that my Friday plans had been canceled and that I could do dinner that evening. I asked him to suggest a place, gave him my cell phone number and told him to call me when he was leaving work. He e-mailed me back to suggest a time and place. I said, "Sounds good" or something to that effect. He never called.

We had dinner. The restaurant was kind of busy, and the waitstaff seemed eager to get us out of there quickly. When we got the bill, I went for my wallet, but he wouldn't let me pay. I thought, "Okay, this is a date," though it should be said that he makes a lot more money than I do, and he probably knows that. John then asked if I'd like to go for drinks. "Anything," he said "to avoid going back to the hospital or home."

We sat and talked for about three hours about all kinds of things--medicine, his work, politics, our family backgrounds, the nature of relationships, trust and sex. I was very flirty in a drunken sort of way and kept touching him on the arm and leaning in with my head bowed. We were quite close. I asked him a question about his brother, and JOhn said "I'll have to tell him that you said that." John also said at some point, "If you meet my Mom--not that you'd meet my Mom..."

The subject of his ex-girlfriend only came up, because I was trying to find out how it was that he had recently bought an apartment but didn't have any furniture with which to furnish it. He'd been living with her, and they had even talked about getting married. He broke it off, because her approach to stress bothered him, and there were other behaviors that were very self-destructive. I can't go into the details, but I think he was right to do it. I think that he feels kind of bad, and he said, "We would have worked it out if we'd been married, but I just couldn't." He also said that someone from the hospital had invited him out a while ago and that it was just too soon. Then he said either "I just wasn't ready" or "I'm just not ready." I don't remember which.

* I sent him an e-mail thanking him and saying that I hoped that he would let me take him out for a beer. In his reply he said that it was great to get away and really nice to see a friendly face outside the hospital, thanked me for being flexible on short notice and said that he was miserable to schedule around, but that we should do it again some time later in the spring and that we could bring others along--if I thought that would be fun. (Ugh!) He has a conference to attend, has on-call responsibilities and is moving, so the time frame isn't so unreasonable.

* I later e-mailed him about an NPR piece on the mortgage industry--because the terms of his loan had been changed at the last minute, and he was sure that it was his fault. He said that the NY Times had an article about the subject. (I was confused about what he was referring to, because in the same e-mail I had mentioned that I was helping Louisa and her husband to pack, and I accidentally thought that he was talking about "It's Not You. It's Your Apartment." I plead sleep deprivation for my stupidity and sent him another article. He found out that it wasn't his fault and promised to fill me in on the gory details of his loan saga at some point. There were a couple of e-mails around Easter. There was one sort of embarrassing e-mail that I sent, and I haven't heard back since.

The upshot: Louisa thinks that I might as well go for it, though she said that if she had gone forward in my shoes she'd have been too mortified to remain friends if she had been turned down.

Friend M thinks that he likes me, but that I've done enough, and he needs to get off his butt and take some initiative. Mineshaft, what should I do?

Advertising was different when I was a kid, I gather. I was only a couple years old when this ad came out, so I can't really judge: would this have been seen as shocking in 1970? Was it trying to be shocking?

Too bad Mr. Leggs are no more. They seem like the very pants Ogged wanted.

I don't have a fully formed thought about this, but joking about the Blackberry outage in terms of addiction is only funny because it's true, and we don't take it too seriously because it seems "productive" and people don't physically decline because of it, and all the addicts are fairly well off, but have you ever hung out with someone addicted to his Blackberry? It sucks. I'm not sure how people swing marriages and kids when they're like that. Maybe it works if everyone goes online and interacts that way, but I reserve the right to be nostalgically depressed about that. And I speak as someone who doesn't have one, but who will drop whatever I'm doing at home if I hear my email ding; so I know it's bad, I would hate for it to be even worse.

Whoa, Cho sent pictures and a video to NBC news. (There's more of the video linked at that page.)

There's some crazy talk going down at Catherine's, where she claims to drink 7 liters of water a day. Let's stipulate that she's not a weaselly liar. That's a lot of water. I work out for about 15 minutes in the morning and 45 minutes mid-day and my total liquid intake throughout the day is maybe two liters, and definitely no more than three. What is the point of those other four liters? A while back I read someone who compared people and their water bottles to kids with pacifiers, but pretend I didn't just say that.

Armsmasher is going to be in NYC on May 4 and has requested a meetup. Since it's a Friday, I figured I should give everybody an early heads up.

Save the date!

A very odd story from LGM. While researching some goddamned thing or other, d-- who, if Althouse is to be believed, is actually Scott Lemieux's penis-- came across this auto shop. So he called the owner...

Among other things, the chap clarified that the owners aren't Japanese-American, nor do any "Orientals" work there. The shop has been called "Happy Jap's" for 19 years now, and the name and the logo "just kind of happened, just seemed to fit" with the fact that the shop worked on Japanese cars. He added that his father -- a World War II vet -- has always hated the fact that his son works on Hondas and Subarus, because they remind him of "some hard times" that he prefers not to discuss. The father evidently bears some "resentment" toward the Japanese, sixty years after the fact.

What a weird conversation.

The Supreme Court just upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act by a vote of 5-4.

The people I'm most upset at by this are the Congress members who thought it was a bad law but still voted for the ban in order to get re-elected, thinking that its lack of a health exception would mean that it would surely be overturned. Do your fucking job, Congress. Don't hope that the courts will come along and clean up your messes. You can't count on it.

I was neckin' with a really cute woman and I was even playing hookey from work to do it. Work being conveniently dreamically located in a hotel, where we were in a room, and then we were naked! And we gonna DO THE DEED. Then she told me she had HIV. But I was undeterred! I was all, "Oh babe, I'm sorry. Well, we could..." and then she said she was hungry. I suggested room service, but I could see on her face that she'd rather go out, so we got up and got dressed.

...

I also dreamed that this blog had become ugly, with lots of black on gray and updating feeds on both sides of the main column. I'm sure my dead body was around somewhere.

You understand that I have no choice but to post this.

Oh no! Alli/son Wag/ner isn't giving private lessons anymore! Now what, people?

A reader asks for advice with dealing with an online harasser below the cut.

Please no links to the reader's blog in the comments if you figure it out.

I have a problem with an ex-coworker, Pat, who was fired months ago. There's clearly a chemical imbalance going on here (which was quite clearly revealed in what happened after Pat was fired, which I can't go into here for legal reasons), so most of it I've just brushed off. No use worrying about it.

For a few weeks afterwards, it seemed like everything was in the clear. But I and other coworkers in the past month started receiving a series of scarily awful emails from Pat, which we also ignored (and sent to HR). But of course the emails have a harmful overall effect; it's difficult to not be affected by them, and constantly reminded about our stressful experience in dealing with this person. And now, Pat is making forays into my personal blog, leaving nasty comments about me as a person (anonymously, but I verified it was Pat through the magic of the internet).

I'm not very bothered by the content (I was at first, but when I realized it was Pat, well, I'm used to dealing with it and and put no stock in whatever Pat has to say), but more by the fact that this is happening. It seems to cross a line that Pat, despite the dozens of emails, hadn't crossed before. And I believe Pat has mental problems and has proven to be completely unhinged, and I have to admit that, though this is a total overreaction, the situation at Virginia Tech has me on edge and wondering what's to ever stop Pat from doing something more harmful down the line.

So how do I get this person out of my and my coworker's lives? Do I contact Pat directly about the blog and emails; ignore the situation (beyond making sure HR is aware of other contact); or something else I haven't thought of?

The ass of one of the Pilates instructors at the place where I swim is about as big as my hand. Maybe half-again as big, I haven't checked. Verdict: too small! Looks like I might have some Mauritanian in me.

I'll freely admit that the combination of digital photography and Picasa has turned me into the world's laziest photographer. Why take the time to frame a photo just so when I can instead take five and figure out which was the best angle later? And then crop and color correct it once I'm home?

I'm very pleased that people are coming up with even more ways for people like me to slack:

Take the problem of getting a good group shot, for example. In the coming version of Photoshop, users will be able to stack up a series of group shots against each other and quickly splice together the photos that contain each subject's most flattering facial expression.

If, say, Joe has his eyes closed in one shot, you can just swipe the cursor over his face and see if he looks better in the next shot down in the pile. The software will swap heads for you, and chances are good that none will be the wiser when you send that spring break photo around.

Arabs and their backward culture.

In America, they would be envied for their tiny waists, yet their mother sees them differently. Asked which daughter is the prettiest, she waves her hand dismissively toward the model-thin sisters, saying, "Definitely those two are not beautiful." Her oldest daughter, like her, has garlands of fat on her belly and voluminous thighs. "This one," says the mother, "has the face of a queen."

But seriously, the article is about standards of beauty in Mauritania, a historically nomadic culture where fat means rich means beautiful, and it's more evidence that it doesn't much matter what the standards are, because women will be forced to suffer regardless. There, women (about 10% of women under 19) have been subjected to force-feeding.

(What's freaky is that even in a culture where 10% of young women and about 30% of women of older generations have been subject to force-feeding, the rate of obesity is still lower than it is in the US.)

I don't know if this is obvious or not, but you're not going to get rid of standards as such, and insofar as a standard is tied to status, some folks will always go to extremes, but the real problem here is the lack of respect for female's autonomy. Most parents force their kids to eat at some point, but when the kid is vomiting from overeating, it's safe to say you've gone too far. We should probably invade their countries, kill their leaders and put them all on diets.

Va henley, an interactive map/timeline of bombings and attacks in Baghdad over the past four years. The trauma of the shootings yesterday gives us a sense of the scale of what people in what is, after all, just one Iraqi city, deal with.

(Play around with the check boxes in the lower left of the map, they bring out some useful information.)

Conservatives are worried about the Don Imus firing because it's a "short leap from firing Imus to going after Rush Limbaugh." Dick Morris helpfully clarifies things by saying that:

I think there's a vast difference between humor that seeks to demean, or rhetoric that seeks to demean and issue positions that happen to be against the views of a certain community.

So racist jokes are bad but racist policies are A-OK? If the Right is going to do some soul searching about racism, conservative talk radio, and community standards, perhaps they might want to look at whether their policies make them sound like racist assholes rather than brainstorming Newspeak replacements for the term "Fairness Doctrine".

The site's getting a little creaky with the refreshes on the other thread.

For practical joke purposes I need to send an email that purports to be from someone else. Ideally, a response to that email would go to me, not the listed "from" or "reply to" address. Is this easy?

UPDATE: called off! A couple of weeks ago one of my dear colleagues emailed a former student; I was trying to create an email that appeared to be from the student saying, "hey, I'm sorry to do this, but I forwarded your email to the provost, because it was pretty inappropriate." But! In a crazy twist of fate, she emailed back. With interest and everything! So no practical joke after all. Instead, teh hott coed sexx0r!

The news coming out of Virginia Tech keeps getting worse and I'm terribly sorry for the families affected.

Reading these excerpts in the news coverage still seem weird but I guess it's what to expect these days:

...Madison Van Duyne said she and her classmates in a media writing class were on "lockdown" in their classrooms. They were huddled in the middle of the classroom, writing stories about the shootings and posting them online....

...an Internet webcam is broadcasting live pictures of the campus...

..."We're all locked in our dorms surfing the Internet trying to figure out what's going on," Kanode said...

I dropped a link to this story in the comments to Becks' post below, but figured I'd give it a thread of its very own because I've been so very unmotivated to blog recently. Get on the bus!

It's 11:30 on a Friday, and a dozen students from Dalton, an elite Manhattan private school, are splayed out on nap rugs, munching graham crackers and sipping boxes of Mott's apple juice. Raffi plays quietly in the background, and a young woman with a maternal voice reads aloud to them from a stack of children's books, starting with The Cat in the Hat.

A few missing details:

It's 11:30 at night; the kids are on the floor of a yellow school bus that's parked not in Manhattan but a desolate lot in Williamsburg; and everyone on the bus, including the storyteller, is in high school. Oh, one more thing: they're all on 5-methoxy-N N-diisopropyltryptamine, better known as the club drug Foxy.

Every two weeks, in some forsaken corner of the city, New York's privileged teenagers go to "Sindergarten," a traveling party for 17-year olds who, for a few carefree hours, want to feel like they're five again. Nursery school-style accessories--snacks, children's music, storybooks, finger-paints--are supplemented with multiple doses of Foxy methoxy, a hallucinogen similar to Ecstasy said to facilitate a childlike sense of wonder with the world.

On the one hand, heaven knows I'm not the type to judge what (or who) others put in their bodies, and I've spent a not inconsiderable amount of time in my past alteredly marveling at, say, orange slices or boingy door stoppers or ice cream melting all over a kitchen counter. So, you know, people in glass houses shouldn't throw pots and kettles or something. On the other hand:

"They want to get in touch with those basic emotions and experiences that were absented from their childhoods. These kids have been fast-tracked since nursery school for Harvard, they grew up in the sterile bubble of Fifth Avenue penthouses, they had nannies instead of parents. I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this take off around the country, even among the middle class."

This makes me want to find one of the busses and go play kindergarten bully to watch them all cry.

Update: And, of course, there's a much larger risk only hinted at in the article.

Oh my god, I was reading this WaPo Style section trend piece on "Intellidating" and realized some of my friends have gone to the exact events they describe. If we become the people they talk about in Styles, who are we going to mock? And how will we ever look in a mirror? And then would they just torment us by writing a column in Styles on how people hate themselves when Styles covers something they've done? Is there no escape?

Here, on this lazy Sunday afternoon, are the latest referring searches for the site. Even they're boring. People are apparently interested in sex.

military urbanism naypyidaw
can i see brad pitt's toes
cocksucking
who wrote you and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals?
club reunion jokes
fuck me heels
heel fuck
scary things that pop out at you
fleur delacour nude
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naked rome screencaps
unfogged
women fucked by horse
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cild fuck
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uncircumcised
bug crush
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beauty and the beast sexism
michael jordan underwear pictures
"the bulge" speedos
kucinich flag-burning
cop gives waitress $2 million tip
is malcolm gladwell gay
"sophisticated eroticism"
bug crush
the union pacific southern pacific railroad merger social responsibility
excess honesty
fl noodz
haircut 10th ave nyc
locker room etiquette
"patent lawyer" "long hours"
"fucking acne"
fairnymph1
how to make pizza express pizzas
pa villages and hamlets
hug benefits
feminine orgasm mental images
oldest civil war widow
shirtless athletes
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how to use a dildo properly
unfogged
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j
silicone doll
crotch shots
eternal return
unfogged
your cheatin heart movie clip

I'm all for this.

What on earth is a story about a designer who's been accused of rape by a number of models, some underage, doing in the Style Section? Because the women were models, it's a trend piece?

A truly fascinating note is the contrast between the headline on the story: "The Designer Who Liked Models," and the title appearing at the top of the web page: "models-rape-sexual battery-Anand Jon - New York Times." The web-monkey who came up with the latter title appears to live on the same planet I do; I can't say the same for the headline writer.