For some reason, a couple of you have been spam-booted today, including the fab Laura, and I don’t know why. If you’re posting comments and they’re not appearing, let me know.
And this is for all the mothers, struggling hard every day to do the best job we can. On days when it’s difficult, I always ask myself one question:
What would Sharon Stone do?
I was at the pool, watching all the bodies in their scant coverings of spandex, when I started thinking about abstinence programs. (Gee, I don’t know why, either. Actually, first I thought about tattoos for a while, then abstinence programs. My thoughts on tats are unchanged, which is why I moved on to abstinence so quickly.) Recently I had taken one of those left-right-left turns on the internet and ended up at an account of the Sex Lady, Jennifer Waters, and her entertaining presentation to middle-schoolers:
Jennifer Waters calls herself the Sex Lady. She likes to play matchmaker with Miss Tape and unwitting teen boys.
She slaps a piece of clear tape across Julian’s arm. He winces.
“It’s gonna hurt when I take it off,” the lanky boy protests.
“But it’s fine now, isn’t it?” Ms. Waters whips back.
The puzzled looks on 18 eighth-graders at Carrollton’s Arbor Creek Middle School brighten. The Sex Lady has made her point: Bad relationships hurt.
Is that her point? Actually, the point comes later in the hour:
The Sex Lady tells Julian to break up with Miss Tape.
“I don’t wanna,” Julian screeches before obeying. He cradles his arm as he sits down.
Ms. Waters shows Miss Tape to the class before calling up another boy, Spencer.
“We got some skin, Julian’s hair,” she says. “Spencer, did you get a good look at Miss Tape?
“You bond with Miss Tape,” she says, slapping the strip onto Spencer’s arm. “Everything Julian had has now been passed on to you.”
Ms. Waters does this again with a third boy, Jonathan. This time, when they break up, the tape comes off pretty easy.
“What happened to the bond?” Ms. Waters asked the class.
“It didn’t hurt as much,” a girl replies.
Get it? Sleep with too many people, and you’re like an old piece of tape. Note that the tape is female. Of course. In these little presentations, women hardly ever get to be actual human beings. Don’t buy the cow if you can get the milk free. Remember that one? Then I read something where the woman was a tree, climbed by a man, and honestly, if the writer hadn’t said, “This is a metaphor of marriage,” I wouldn’t have had the first clue what he was talking about, except that it sounded pretty Freudian, the guy clambering around in the branches and all.
Now it’s tape. I don’t think this is a good thing, going from a hooved mammal to a tree to a piece of sticky plastic. No wonder abstinence programs don’t work.
But we shouldn’t be surprised. I had drug education in high school. You remember that: There was a movie featuring Sonny Bono in an orange satin suit, talking about the dangers of mary jane. The story was that the movie was part of Sonny’s community-service sentence on drug charges, which sounds like a crock, but I don’t know. (Hey, I wonder if it’s on YouTube. Are you kidding? Everything’s on YouTube. Parts one, two and three.) Rewatching it today, I can see that the film makes a number of sound points — yes, I would rather the pilot of an airplane I was a passenger on to have recently smoked a cigarette rather than a joint — mixed with the usual heapin’ helpin’ of bullshit. I’ve known people who wrecked their cars when they were high, not because they were so tripped out and groovin’ on the cool summer day that they actually drove off a cliff, as the film shows, but because they tried to take the curve too fast.
There was another movie where a girl, babysitting and tripping on acid, puts the baby in the oven, thinking it’s a turkey. You don’t need me to tell you it was greeted by guffaws and several cries of “I’ll have what she’s having” from the darkened classroom.
I always wonder why we can’t try the truth. Is subtlety too hard for teenagers to grasp? We expect them to understand moral ambiguity by junior year (in English class, anyway); can’t we also tell them that taking drugs is a bad idea, but like many bad ideas, there’s a time when they seem like a very good idea. (I always thought everything you need to know about marijuana could be summed up by Samuel L. Jackson’s great exchange with Bridget Fonda in “Jackie Brown:” “That shit robs you of your ambition.” “Not if your ambition is to get high and watch T.V.”)
Same with sex. Nothing — even a bikini wax, even tape on your arm — hurts like your first heartbreak, but like virtually every other human being on the planet, you’ll live to love again, and better. Sex is a bad idea at 14, a less-bad one at 18, and if you’re not having sex, married or not, by 25, you’re missing out on a big part of life at the best time of your life to enjoy it. I’ve always found the fetishizing of virginity to be deeply creepy, medieval, Islamic. And get a clue, Sex Lady: Women are not tape. Nor are they trees, or cows.
Lecture concluded.
It’s another beautiful day in the neighborhood; lately I feel like I’m living in southern California. An enormous storm system passed through the area yesterday, and true to form, voided about eight raindrops on our little patch of heaven. It’s like all the heat rising off this asphalt island repels rain, or something. Anyway, the temperatures have moderated, the humidity’s down, and I’m off to Ralph’s Kroger for supplies.
Via Metafilter: Blogging the Definitive 1,000 Songs from 1955 to 2005 and Counting to 1 million — on the internet — has blogging reached its wank-rific nadir?
No, that would be this site.
Thanks for all the suggestions on how to spend my windfall. Making final decision soon, and I’ll let you all know.
Have a swell day.
Only Hollywood thinks this is a good idea:
Mitch Albom and Adam Sandler, working as one: The untitled project is a comedy with emotional elements set in the world of baseball. I’m booking Kevorkian for release day minus one.
(Thanks — of a sort — to Jason T., for pointing this out.)
When I first signed up for Google AdSense, the money came in at, if not a brisk clip, then certainly a found-money sort of way. For about three days, my little craptastic monument to personal narcissism and avoiding my paying gigs was bringing in about $5 a day. My goodness, this will pay the cable bill and have money left over for lattes, I thought giddily. Why didn’t I do this years ago?
I don’t know what happened. It’s as though Google sniffed around for a while, then left me behind, because soon I was getting bupkis, pennies per day. Apparently your demographically desirable eyeballs are worth a mere fraction of your stupid click finger. Not that this should be construed as a prod to click on the ads, because I’m forbidden by my user agreement to tell you to do so — I’m just explaining how the system works. (You’re starting to see, perhaps, why web advertising doesn’t even bring a wan smile to publishers’ faces.) I think I mentioned, the day of my Lileks screed, when I got linked all over the place and saw something like 9,000 unique visitors in a single day — about 10 times the usual traffic — I made 15 cents. So much for the new-media business model.
After a while I stopped checking daily, it was so disappointing. They don’t write you a check until you reach $100, after all. The other day was my first log-in for some time, and I saw that I had cracked $93 and would maybe get to $100 within a few more …weeks, maybe. But it felt like a C-note in my pocket, so I decided to do what my friend Fatih advised the last time I was broke: “Nancyderringer,” (he always called me by my married name, mushed together like that) “in Turkey we have a saying: ‘You must spend your money so the money that’s trying to find you will know where you are.’” Someone else will have to tell me if this is true, but Fatih is such a dear, and it sounded so amusing in his accent, that I’ve used it ever since as an excuse to stay broke.
So I decided to give most of the $100 away. To other bloggers. I spend $600 a year to get the New York Times delivered to my home, and a couple hundred more in magazine subscriptions; surely I can spread a little to the volunteer pundits of the world. There won’t be many bequests — I’m parceling it out in $10 to $20 chunks so as not to be entirely insulting — but I’m hoping it will be a small gesture of thanks to some of my favorites, who amuse me daily with the work they give away free. I sent $10 to the Send John Scalzi to the Creation Museum fund, which raised an astonishing $5,118.36 for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a worthy achievement indeed. (And I can’t wait for the report from the Creation Museum.) I sent TBogg a bauble from his Amazon Wish List. Lance got a tenner in his tip jar. The Poor Man suggested a donation to Oxfam in the name of The Poor Man Institute for Freedom and Democracy and a Pony. I asked Roy to make a wish, too, and he declined, because he’s prosperous at the moment, but did tell me his birthday, so I have to think of something. (I think, for Roy, it has to be a gesture in the Bob Evans/Joe Eszterhas note-in-vagina spirit.)
That’s about half my stash. Who else deserves a little spare change? I went through my bookmarks, and my other faves either aren’t asking, haven’t replied to e-mails, have well-paying professional jobs or would, I’m convinced, spend it all on crack. Make a suggestion, you folks who follow the blogosphere with more attention than I do. Someone out there has cancer or is facing foreclosure. For a gesture this small and meaningless, the sky’s the limit.
(Or maybe I should take the remaining $45 down to the casino and try to figure out craps once and for all. I’ve read the rules a million times, and they go through my head like grass through a goose. Every time I’ve been to one of the three downtown gambling palaces, it’s the only game that interests me even a little. The slots are full of crabby old people with oxygen tanks, the poker tables populated with guys who watch way too much poker on TV, and yes I’m talking about you in the sunglasses, and blackjack, my old favorite, seems to have lost its mojo — it’s all funereal mopes at those tables, too. Whereas at least one craps table is ringed by seven or eight threatening-looking rapper types, laughing and having a high old time and waving cash around like flags at a GOP convention. I want to go to that party.)
The good news about summer: I’m getting more sleep, at least at night, as long as the AC is on and I’m not awakened at dawn by squabbling blue jays, surely a sound they will play on infinite loop in hell. The bad news: Lawn services. Times are tough in the Mitten, and I’m reluctant to criticize anyone who’s found a way to make a living, but the other day I was grilling at something like 7:30 p.m. on a freakin’ Saturday, and the people two doors down had their service there, running two gas blowers and a string trimmer. It was like standing at the end of the runway with the Concorde taking off five inches overhead, only louder.
They have a noise ordinance in Bloomfield Hills, and I’m told it’s never questioned and strictly enforced. Ah, to live in Bloomfield Hills.
I have no tasty bloggage for you, no wait, I do. Those of you who spend less time online than I do may not be familiar with the LOLcats phenom; go here for a dry, Wikipedia take on things. It’s not hard to understand, as the wildly addictive I Can Has Cheezburger can attest. (Warning: FLYPAPER!)
And it was only a matter of time before someone took it in a new direction:
Have a hot, sticky day with scattered thunderstorms. That’s what I’m planning for.
Sorry for the late start today. I had to run my wounded VW out to the body shop, and came home in the closest thing to camouflage Detroit has to offer — a silver Chrysler Sebring, rented from Enterprise. I felt invisible, driving home on the freeway, just another auto-industry drone in a car the color of cement. Automatic transmission, too. Every so often the government posts a list of most-stolen cars, and bland ones like the Sebring are always right up there. If you were going to rob a bank, would you nick a red Ferrari for your getaway, or a black Corvette? Of course not — you’d pick the one in my garage right now, merge into traffic and never be seen again.
Sitting at a light, I saw four PT Cruisers pass through, not in a caravan, just four drivers who chose PT Cruisers. Kate has a new game she plays in the car; when you see a VW Beetle, you say, “punchbuggy!” and punch the driver on the arm. PT Cruisers are known as “PT bruisers” and get you a squeeze. If she were strong enough, or I were easily bruised, my arm would be purple by now. Not so many punchbuggies; scores of PT bruisers.
Not much to report from the weekend, so let’s get right to the bloggage, which has a bummer theme today:
In my night-shift work as a news farmer, this story has been one of the most fascinating — and disturbing — to track. It’s still virtually ignored outside of the NYT/WSJ journalism orbit, but I predict that sooner or later it’ll get some major ink, perhaps when a dozen or so American kids die of glycol poisoning from their cough syrup.
The story is, specifically, about how sweeteners tainted with glycol, a poison found in antifreeze, are finding their way into pharmaceutical and personal-care products like cough syrup and toothpaste. You dog owners know why you’re warned to keep pets away from antifreeze spills — glycol tastes sweet. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous factory owners, primarily in China, find it an acceptable way to extend supplies of glycerin, used to make the medicine go down easier. At least 100 people died from taking poisoned cough syrup in Panama late last year. It was recently found in some dollar-store-brand toothpastes in Miami, and in some counterfeit name brands elsewhere. The first story linked above is how the Panama case is an echo of a similar one that happened in 1996 in Haiti, where 88 children died, and every effort to track the problem ingredient back to China ended in a brick wall. Depending on your level of ambient cynicism, it’s possible to find a certain pitch-black humor in these comedies of errors:
Federal investigators sought help from senior Chinese drug regulators, who promised to help find the manufacturer, but said it “will take time,” records show.
When another month passed without any word from either regulators or Sinochem, the embassy tried again. Chinese regulators said they had done nothing to find the factory, according to a confidential State Department telegram from September 1996.
Sinochem did finally offer the manufacturer’s name: the Tianhong Fine Chemicals Factory in the city of Dalian in northeastern China. But Sinochem “refused” to provide an address, saying it was illegible. A telephone number would have to suffice, it said.
That, too, was unproductive. When American investigators called the plant manager, Zhang Gang, they were told he was not available. Send a fax, they were told. That did not work either. “The phone was always busy,” investigators reported.
Finally, they got Mr. Zhang on the phone, but he, too, refused to give out his factory’s address.
All of this would merely be one of those tragedies that happens elsewhere — yet another South American bus plunge — if it weren’t for the far scarier implications. As we all know, the world’s marketplaces are global now. Coincidentally, the NYT had a story Saturday about Sara Lee’s efforts to maintain a semblance of oversight over their ingredient supply chain, which you’d think wouldn’t be so hard, but when you’re shopping the planet for the best price on gums, stabilizers and “foaming agents,” it gets complicated. A lot of dogs and cats paid the final price for adulteration of their food earlier this year, and if you think it’ll be different because you walk on two legs, wake up and smell the pound cake. Or, more likely, the “putrefying bacteria” on that Chinese seafood.
I don’t know why I get so irritated when I read stuff like this. Probably because Asia is such a glorious example of “the market” that is supposed to spare us the horrors of government intrusion like the FDA. Wouldn’t you love to live in this place of such glorious freedom?
As Nguyen Van Ninh needles his chopsticks through a steaming bowl of Vietnam’s famous noodle soup, he knows it could be spiked with formaldehyde. But the thought of slurping up the same chemical used to preserve corpses isn’t enough to deter him.
I’m also flattened by those numbers. Nearly 90 kids dead in Haiti. A hundred in Panama. How many did the Tylenol killer get? Seven, eight? And the country freaked out over it — rightly so. Food and drug safety in much of the rest of the world is approximately where it was in this country when Upton Sinclair was writing about meatpacking. And now we’re shopping there.
Not that I wish to bum you out. (Here’s a funny Jon Carroll column to lighten your mood.) Why look, it’s nearly lunchtime. Have a nice day.
Just another day in the D, or in this case, Dearborn Heights:
But I did anyway:
Today is a big housekeeping post, plus bloggage. I’m hoping that tying up loose ends and answering reader requests here will inspire me to do the same in my physical space. Kate brought home the contents of her desk and locker this week, which apparently are like those little cars that the clowns pile out of. What am I bid for a pink plastic recorder, people?
Starting things off, someone — Joel Nelson, it says on the packing slip — sent me this CD, “Lazarus Beach,” by a band called Through the Sparks. I’m having a horrible senior moment, wondering if someone offered to send it and I said yeah, or if it was just unsolicited. Whatever, I appreciate it. Noodling around the band’s website, it seems they’re blurbing their blog mentions, so let me add one. Disclosure: I stole it from my husband. Ahem:
“Reminds me of Guided by Voices.”
I simply cannot top the band’s own self-description, from their website again: While there are still the noise and synth-laden marshes, horn and big-harmony choruses and crescendos loom over beds of ukulele, honky-tonk piano, funeral home organ and pedal steel. Of course, there’s still a copious amount of gleaming guitars and a few signature triplet beats.
Booyah.
A few random snapshots (click for larger):
The new behind-the-garage space, by reader request:
You can see the grass is starting to come in. Spriggy can’t wait to pee on it. No, I don’t know why that tree is already dropping yellow leaves. I suspect it has Detroit Tree Death Syndrome; you have never seen so much standing deadwood in your life as in this area. Most of it is because of the emerald ash borer, another product of globalization — it’s an Asian native. That tree is not an ash, but maybe it’s dying in sympathy.
This handsome devil was waiting on my pool chair the other day:
Yes, it’s the dawning of fish-fly season here in the Pointes. Last year I vowed to have a new video camera by June, so I could shoot my long-planned short feature: “Night of the Fish Flies.” Oh, well.
If you’re trying to reach me via cell phone lately, try an e-mail. I lost it yesterday (bad news). Now I can get an iPhone (good news). Not really — I need a $600 cell phone like I need a $100 million diamond skull – but I guess I can dream. Besides, I have faith the pink Razr will turn up somewhere. As I tell Kate, it’s not lost, you just can’t see it at the moment.
UPDATE: Found it. And Alan, I also found your GPS quick-start guide, missing for eight months, in the same place (under the driver’s seat in my car).
LA Mary wants a T-shirt with this on it, and OMG, so do I:
Mitch Harper says he has a line on custom T-shirts; maybe he can hook us up.
Because I know how bad summer Fridays in the office can be, Iron Butterfly line dancing:
I said I had bloggage, but I don’t want to break the mood of the Iron Butterfly. But if you’re in a self-punishing mood, join me and Glenn Greenwald in our mystification that a journalist with a national platform (Chris Matthews), would say something like this about a presidential candidate (Fred Thompson):
Does [Fred Thompson] have sex appeal? I’m looking at this guy and I’m trying to find out the new order of things, and what works for women and what doesn’t. Does this guy have some sort of thing going for him that I should notice? . . .
Gene, do you think there’s a sex appeal for this guy, this sort of mature, older man, you know? He looks sort of seasoned and in charge of himself. What is this appeal? Because I keep star quality. You were throwing the word out, shining star, Ana Marie, before I checked you on it. . . .
Can you smell the English leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man’s shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of — a little bit of cigar smoke? You know, whatever.
Yeah. You know, whatever. Have a swell weekend.
Every so often I wonder if I’m destined to move again, and where it might be. I wonder if I was wrong to leave Columbus, and if I’ll ever go back there on a semi-permanent basis. It’s where my family is, good ol’ Aunt Pam and Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie owns a bar, which would seem to be a nice thing to have in the family in your golden years. My mom, who toiled for the Bell System her whole career, got free long distance for life after she retired. I think, when your brother owns a bar, you might get a free beer every week or so.
(I must always remember, however, the story Charlie told at our dad’s wake, which I think I’ve told here before, so I won’t. We call it “Michelob 3-5-7,” and it involves the entrepreneurial spirit, and its moral is: There is no free beer.)
But eventually I consider that even though I was wrong about Columbus being a hick town, and while I now frankly admit it’s a fine place to live and work, it’s no longer for me. There’s not enough nature there.
Central Ohio is a flat place, cleaved by two brown rivers. It has parks, and it tries very hard with what it has, but ultimately: Bleah. I once covered a suicide at a place called Antrim Park, which has a running/biking path that surrounds a charmless, man-made pond about the size and shape of a football field. A man in a wheelchair had turned it 90 degrees on the path, leaned into his chin switch and drove himself down the bank to his death. I looked around at his surroundings and thought, well, you can see why he did it. There are two “yacht clubs” in Columbus; both sail on reservoirs. The area is so desperate for liquid resources that Buckeye Lake, in my day a fetid near-swamp, is now sprouting $600,000 weekend retreats. My friend Cindy was out boating on it once when they ran out of gas. “Do we wait for someone to tow us in?” she asked the skipper. “Actually,” Skip replied, “we could walk from here.”
Fort Wayne has brown rivers, too — three of them, but they have the advantage of being historically signficant. In their day, they were as important to commerce in the area as the Port of Seattle is to the Pacific Rim. Now they’re pretty well ruined — a doctor once warned me not to kayak in the St. Marys without an immune globulin shot — but at the right time of day, in the right light, you can still see the Indians and soldiers on the banks, going at one another with muskets and tomahawks. If you squint. Also, the Fort is just east of the glacier’s stallout, and one county to the west begins Lake Country, dozens of pretty little kettles and potholes where, if you break down, you can’t walk home, but at least it’s safe to swim.
Detroit is in many ways an environmental disaster. I interviewed someone involved with reclaiming the Rouge River, another flaming ditch that caught fire once, like the Cuyahoga. She said she used to live in southwest Detroit, near where the Rouge meets the Detroit River, and sometimes in the middle of the night tanker trucks would roll into her neighborhood, put their outflow pipes down city sewers, and throw the switch. She’d call the police to report these crimes against the environment and be told, “Oh, they do that all the time.”
But Detroit has the big lake, and the big river, and even as fouled as they’ve been in the past, even with the pressure of millions of people flushing their toilets and running their boats and driving their cars close by, they still retain magnificence. Yesterday afternoon I had an interview in a conference room high up in a nondescript building downtown, and afterward one of them invited me to her private office, to show off her Saarinen furniture. She had giant windows overlooking the south and east, and I stepped in and gasped. It was simply breathtaking. The river is blue, not brown, wide and powerful, carrying ore freighters down to Erie and Ontario. The Ambassador Bridge is framed in the south window like a painting; at certain times of year you get great sunsets there, she said. It’s the kind of office that tells its occupant she has arrived, although I’m sure if it were mine, I’d get no work done. I’d be looking out the windows with binoculars all day long, spying on Canada.
OK. The week is limping toward its finale. It’s more exhausting than the holidays, this end-of-school thing. But at least today it’s over. I need to run off to school for the grand finale, yes, an awards ceremony.
Bloggage:
You may not be able to get a flying car yet, but someone is once again taking a run at the aqua-car. Click-through recommended, if only for the photoillustration that suggests a freak accident where two Aquadas collide where the water meets the land.
I’m going to print this story and give it to my Korean dry cleaner. He has a sly sense of humor, and would appreciate it.
This afternoon I plan to catch up on e-mail. If I owe you one, you’re in line. Later, folks.
As a rule, reporters hate 89 percent of all “localizations” they’re assigned to do. A localization is when you take a big national story and find the local angle. For all the times it’s worthwhile — local people in New York City on 9/11 describe the scene — most times they’re just lame. Worst of all are man-on-the-street reaction stories, which editors believe capture the rough-hewn wisdom of the common man, but almost always boil down to: Ill-informed Morons Find Their Voice.
But every so often, you get one that’s fun to do:
It may not have been another “Bullitt,” but the Ford Expedition has again made the Blue Oval part of Hollywood history thanks to its cameo role in one of the climactic scenes of Sunday night’s final episode of “The Sopranos.”
You know which one: The Phil Leotardo whacking scene.
The camera then shifts again to the Ford logo, this time emblazoned on the wheel of the Expedition. The wheel begins to turn, rolling slowly over Leotardo’s head, which is crushed with a sickening crunch.
I bring this up to single out and mock the expert quoted low in the story, who said:
But automotive marketing expert Jim Hossack of AutoPacific Inc. said there is such a thing as bad publicity, and he thinks the depiction of the Blue Oval in Sunday night’s Sopranos climax definitely crossed that line. “I don’t think that is the way you want to get press,” Hossack said. “I sure wouldn’t have paid for it.”
If you’ve ever wondered how stupid the management class thinks you are, well, there you are. We’d better not buy that car, Martha. Someday I might be getting out of it and someone could mistake me for Phil Leotardo and put a bullet in my head. I have a lot of gray, you know. I mean, you want to talk lousy product placement Sunday night, the people who have something to complain about are the ones at Nissan, who now have millions of people believing their vehicles will burst into flames if parked in leaves.
Nice shout-out to “Bullitt,” by the way. That movie did for Mustangs what “Risky Business” did for sex on trains.
Once again I have a day loaded with appointments that don’t want to accommodate blogging. (Last full day of freedom before school dismisses for good tomorrow.) I have a big picture/roundup post due for this week, so bear with me. In the meantime, let’s doff our hats to NN.C commenter Brian Stouder, whom you are all now instructed to call Jimmy Olson, citizen journalist. I’ll be back in a bit.
