Today was overcast and rainy, a rare break from the sun this summer. It’s been hot and it’s been hotter and occasionally it’s been cooler, but mostly it’s been sunny. So I’ve been thinking more about the sun than I usually do in the summer.
Every day I marinate Kate in SPF 30, and she dutifully dabs it on her face. I do likewise. By the second day of this, she had turned her customary summer shade of Brown Bunny (love that cottontail!), and I’m only a few degrees behind. Today one of those freebie stay-healthy magazines arrived from our HMO, and I felt guilty. There were the usual warnings about sun exposure and wrinkles and cancer and the exhortation to go get a spray-on tan instead, and all the rest of it. I considered trading up to SPF 45, but honestly, my heart’s not in it. Brown Bunny looks good on my brown-eyed, brunette daughter. Her nose is dusted with freckles, her hair is acquiring a highlight job you couldn’t buy for any sum in a salon, and she looks…irresistible. How can something that makes her so beautiful be so wrong?
Well, the article will spell it out for you. I’ll keep coating her with sunblock, but it’s not exactly the equivalent of avoiding cigarettes. As for me, I think: What exactly am I preserving here? My skin was never that great to begin with. Might as well get as wizened as SPF 30 will allow.
Bloggage: Jon Carroll discusses his fear of flying in his usual just-right way, but includes details from the pre-9/11 skies that seem so long ago, it might as well have been the Middle Ages. In fact, I think it really was: Sometimes, on cross-country flights, I would repair to the bathroom for a little medicinal marijuana. I was nervous about getting caught, but it never happened. Maybe smoke detectors hadn’t been installed yet. Once, I came out of the bathroom just as a flight attendant was walking by. She looked at me; I looked at her.
“If you point the air blower at the sink and pull up the stopper,” she said, “you get a nice cross draft. There’s no odor to bother the next person.” I thanked her. Flying wasn’t just relaxed; it was enabling.
I remember when I used to ask for the smoking section. You met more interesting people there, I thought. Never mind the marijuana.
(I once knew a nurse who worked in a cancer ward, and had approximately the same attitude toward self-medicating patients — after visiting hours, anything went. “They have cancer,” she’d say. “And I’m going to tell them they can’t get high? Sorry, no.”)
Richard Cohen touches one of my deepest fears today — the way nothing dies on Google, and dammit, sometimes we wish it would.
I don’t know why this woman has a job. Every line of this lazy, wrong-headed, oversimplified piece o’ crap column is so wrong that if I were so inclined, I could take it apart piece by piece, the way you disassemble a chicken. But it’s late and I’m tired and I’m especially tired of her, so why bother? You can do it yourself.
You could sell snake oil, or you could sell celestial drops. Katherine Harris — yes, that one — is buying. Or was. You have to read it to believe.
Tomorrow’s forecast: Sunny. Time to break out the Coppertone. Again.
brian stouder said on July 5, 2005 at 11:37 pm
agreed about Kathleen Parker. She seems avid to make sweeping assertions, and apathetic about actually supporting them.
I don’t know what to think about the sun tan thing. It’s all natural, eh? to be morbid about it, ultimately SOMETHING is going to lead to the demise of each of us – so that the best we can do is play the percentages so as to minimize the chances of some ‘really-unwanted-finish’.
Moderation in all things, I suppose
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mary said on July 6, 2005 at 1:05 am
When I google my own name, I find a very nice woman with the same name who teaches at the University of North Carolina. She’s a professor in the Education department. She and I once had an interesting real time chat while a hurricane was approaching her home. There are no google references to me anywhere. My brothers, my nephews, my ex husband all googleable. Not me. Under the radar as usual. I consider that an accomplishment.
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sammy Jo said on July 6, 2005 at 1:24 am
try http://www.zabasearch.com if you are unlucky, that might scare you
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ashley said on July 6, 2005 at 4:42 am
I google myself every now and then. Turns out I’m a slutty model, a minor league goalkeeper, an Aussie realtor, a top female student, a frumpy botanist, and a hot chik.
The regular google searches are revealing, but the picture searches are the best.
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Mindy said on July 6, 2005 at 7:58 am
Two other women with my name are married to two other guys with my husband’s name, and all of them live in Minneapolis. There are a few others of both of us. At least we all have different fingerprints.
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Dorothy said on July 6, 2005 at 8:18 am
When I self-Googled I brought up some PR stuff about plays I’ve been in. There haven’t been too many so the list is short.
I Googled this weekend for the Kola Peninsula, Murmansk, Severomorsk and foreign exchange students because we are hosting one next month for the first time ever. My library had next to nothing on those subjects. Once we know our student has been accepted at the local high school, we’ll be given his e-mail address. I can hardly wait for this new adventure to begin!
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Pam said on July 6, 2005 at 10:06 am
So…if I would have posted to Google in the spring of 2004, the fact that I purchased a pair of winter shoes to be saved for wearing during the winter of 2004, then I wouldn’t have totally forgotten them until they suddenly reappeared during the summer of 2005??? Is that how it could work? If so, I’m totally for that! As it is, I now have to wait until the winter of 2005 to wear them. I might forget about them again or they may be out of style by then!
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Laura said on July 6, 2005 at 2:40 pm
Google me and you’ll find I write an awful lot for those freebie stay healthy mags–only the really good ones, though 🙂
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Angie said on July 6, 2005 at 4:47 pm
Glad to hear the all-knowing Kathleen Parker annoys the hell out of someone else.
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Nance said on July 6, 2005 at 5:05 pm
Have you seen her website? It’s like: I paid for these glamour shots, and dammit I’m gonna use ’em!
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mary said on July 6, 2005 at 7:14 pm
The photo on the “journal” page is especially insipid.
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Deborah said on July 6, 2005 at 8:15 pm
This has nothing to do with your latest entry… but what do you think about the Judith Miller situation, as a journalist?
I’m finding myself (ordinary person) in a situation where I don’t know what to think. On the one hand it seems absurd to send a journalist to prison for refusing to reveal their source (this day and age, post Watergate), on the other hand it couldn’t happen to a more appropriate person. As far as I’m concerned Judith Miller helped start the war in Iraq by turning up the volume on the echo chamber. How many American soldiers and innocent Iraq civilians died because she aided and abetted that deceitful cause?
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yamb said on July 6, 2005 at 9:10 pm
You think Kathleen Parker is bad–how about taking about this column
http://www.iwf.org/inkwell/default.asp?archiveID=1384
about how it’s too bad we don’t have “attractive” flight attendants anymore.
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Nance said on July 6, 2005 at 9:42 pm
Oh, yeah. i remember when this came out. Do these people know they’re self-parodies, or do they just don’t care?
Re: Judith Miller. It takes iron ovaries to go to jail. But yes, you’re right — she was part of the problem, too.
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