47 responses to
“Thawing.”

1. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on February 5th, 2010 at 9:20 am

   Final link, I’m guess­ing — http://​www​.slate​.com/​i​d​/​2​2​43729/

2. Jolene said on February 5th, 2010 at 10:12 am

   Part of the prob­lem w/ the Ice House project is lack of archi­tec­tural inter­est of the house. It’s just a bedrag­gled old box, unap­peal­ing under pretty much any cir­cum­stance, I’d think.

3. adrianne said on February 5th, 2010 at 10:39 am

   This just in, from Akio Toy­oda, pres­i­dent of Toy­ota, grand­son of the com­pany founder: “I deeply regret that I have caused con­cern among so many peo­ple. We will do our utmost to regain the trust of our customers.”

   Good luck with that!

4. moe99 said on February 5th, 2010 at 11:02 am

   A friend of mine, an attor­ney in CA wrote this about the Satan sheep ad:

   
   The Firona com­mer­cial will test to what extent the 11th Com­mand­ment is finally dead. R’s attack­ing each other this viciously can only help the Dems.

   I think Fio­r­ina is going to play it coy with this ad and get away with it. She has to attack Camp­bell in the pri­mary because he has the advan­tage of a long and fairly inof­fen­sive his­tory in CA. If Camp­bell buys some blue jeans and man­ages to come across as a rea­son­able “Scott Brown” type can­di­date** and more likely to beat Boxer, then he might be able to pull it off. If any­thing, though, he is too mid­dle of the road for the folks in the Cen­tral Val­ley and behind the Orange Cur­tain, which are cru­cial to the Repub pri­mary, so she has to run well to the right of him. Hence the com­mer­cial. Expect more, and soon, because she has to crip­ple him early.

   Her weak points are that she was *not* loved at HP, and she comes across as a dilet­tante who is going into pol­i­tics because no cor­po­ra­tion its right mind would hire her now. In addi­tion, she made some state­ments in sup­port of over­seas out­sourc­ing that are sure to haunt her.

   How­ever, if Fio­r­ina takes the pri­mary, Boxer will have a lot to worry about. The higher the unem­ploy­ment rate goes up, the bet­ter a non incum­bent will look, even a dilettante.

   ** A bit of a stretch for him, but a lot eas­ier for him than for Fio­r­ina, who can come across as patrician.

   I found it sig­nif­i­cant that we really don’t see Fiorina’s face at all in the ad. Under­stand­able given its content.

5. coozledad said on February 5th, 2010 at 11:08 am

   I’m prob­a­bly just jeal­ous of Mar­tin in some way, but he seems to be get­ting squick­ier in his old age. Is it a gen­er­a­tional thing, or have guys always started to keep a nookie score when they’re start­ing to square off against obliv­ion? I sus­pect Martin’s cur­rent monogamy has a bit more to do with things “not going well with the girls for him” as opposed to him call­ing a uni­lat­eral cease­fire in the pussy wars.
   One of the big rea­sons I think Hilary Man­tel kicks his sad ass is she doesn’t have his self-awareness deficit.

6. Old-time Editor said on February 5th, 2010 at 11:33 am

   Ice House = scene from Dr. Zhivago.

7. Sue said on February 5th, 2010 at 12:02 pm

   Re the Demon Sheep ad: Tom Camp­bell needs to get Terry Gilliam on board, prefer­ably with some John Cleese action as well.
   http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​9​V​7​z​b​WNznbs

8. moe99 said on February 5th, 2010 at 12:13 pm

   C’dad – who’s Mar­tin?

   And now for some­thing com­pletely different:

   http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​_​p​o​p​u​p​?​v​=​9​x​w​C​G​0Ey2Mg

   I was in tears, but the good kind.

9. LAMary said on February 5th, 2010 at 12:15 pm

   Mar­tin Amis.

10. coozledad said on February 5th, 2010 at 12:16 pm

    Moe: A guy whose dad wrote a cou­ple of good books.

11. Jeff Borden said on February 5th, 2010 at 12:24 pm

    Moe,

    Thank you for that link. I’m also water­ing up. What a story. And what a dad.

12. moe99 said on February 5th, 2010 at 12:37 pm

    Ah, Mar­tin AMIS! I am a bit slow today.

13. beb said on February 5th, 2010 at 12:49 pm

    When you have to take your shoes off to count the num­ber of women you’ve slept with, per­haps its time to stop count­ing. And time to keep the pants zipped.

    The “What kind of girl reads Play­boy” was inter­est­ing. I won­der some times when did Play­boy cease to be an Amer­i­can icon. In the 60s and 70s it was the Big Time. Big time authors wrote for it, all the best artist con­tributed to it, all the most famous peo­ple wanted to be inter­viewed by it. And being a Play­mate was the gate­way to all kinds of suc­cess for a lot of woman. Back them every­one talked about Play­boy. Today, I’m not sure peple know that it still exists.

    I picked up the Marge Simp­son issue last fall and was sur­prised by how think it was com­pared to the 60s. That was the first issue I’d looked at in over a decade, maybe two. I hear at one time it was being run by Hefner’s daugh­ter, which I thought was awk­ward all the way around.

14. Rana said on February 5th, 2010 at 12:59 pm

    Heh. I was expect­ing some­thing more amaz­ing than the Ice House turned out to be — some­thing on a par with those ice cas­tles that you can go in and explore. This… well, it looks remark­ably like what a num­ber of the houses in the adja­cent neigh­bor­hood looked like last win­ter, includ­ing those crazy icicles.

15. Jeff Borden said on February 5th, 2010 at 1:02 pm

    I cov­ered Play­boy Enter­prises Inc. for more than a decade, when Christie Hefner was run­ning the com­pany. She was a smart, capa­ble exec­u­tive, but PEI never really did much as a com­pany. It is pub­licly traded, but Hef main­tains the vast major­ity of the vot­ing stock, so he has final say. (Ms. Hefner has since left the company.)

    There were sev­eral salient issues con­fronting the com­pany. The white bunny head on the black back­ground is a very well-known, very rec­og­niz­able logo, but it had been tar­nished by over-licensing. The brand Hef had seen as the epit­ome of the swing­ing cool cat was now stamped on every­thing from car air fresh­en­ers to shot glasses. Mean­while, the soft focus erot­ica that defined the brand was blown out of the water by the pur­vey­ors of hard­core pornog­ra­phy, which became ubiq­ui­tous with the arrival of the Inter­net and the anonymity it affords users.

    Basi­cally, Play­boy is “too dirty” for many main­stream users, but “too clean” for those who like their erot­ica explicit. It doesn’t help that poor, aged Hef remains the face of the company…a sag­ging, elderly man juiced up on Via­gra sur­rounded by pneu­matic young women lit­er­ally young enough to be his granddaughters…is more creepy than cool. Young men are far more likely to pick up an issue of Maxim or one of its rivals than Playboy.

    I’d love to see a good busi­ness school use Play­boy as a case study. What­ever you think about Hefner or the pub­li­ca­tion, it was a pow­er­ful, prof­itable brand for a good 20-plus years. But its inabil­ity to rein­vent itself, dri­ven by the deci­sion to avoid the really hard-core stuff, has left it gasp­ing and irrelevant.

16. MarkH said on February 5th, 2010 at 1:03 pm

    I wouldn’t make a bet, like your friend, on Fio­r­ina, moe. Boxer is going to have a tough time, no doubt, but employ­ment may be get­ting bet­ter (see today’s new 9.7% rate), and I lean more toward his descrip­tion of her as a dilit­tante and unloved at HP. I don’t think she’ll even get through the pri­mary as she reveals more of her true char­ac­ter. Here’s one of the best things I’ve read about her and what hap­pened at HP, for those who want a brief his­tory of LaCarla.

    http://​www​.time​.com/​t​i​m​e​/​m​a​g​a​z​i​n​e​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​0​,​9​1​7​1​,​1​0​2​7​5​0​6​,​0​0.html

    Also, after her fall from HP grace, she went on “60 Min­utes” to tell her story and came off as teeth-grindingly bit­ter. I bet that seg­ment is still in the archives on the CBS web­site for those interested.

17. MichaelG said on February 5th, 2010 at 1:45 pm

    “When you have to take your shoes off to count the num­ber of women you’ve slept with, per­haps its time to stop count­ing. And time to keep the pants zipped.”

    Why?

18. paddyo' said on February 5th, 2010 at 2:38 pm

    The ice house pic on Nance’s Tri-X set­ting DOES look like the win­try love nest in “Dr. Zhivago,” doesn’t it? But the rest, meh — it is an under­whelm­ing instal­la­tion.
    I would, how­ever, go to see an instal­la­tion of two-wheelers done up that way. You could call it, oh, how about “B-icicles”?
    Mov­ing on …
    Jeff B, another sign of Playboy’s mor­bid­ity is what they charge for a sub­scrip­tion now. I recall a snail-mail come-on some­time last year that offered a year’s sub­scrip­tion for 10 bucks. Clearly, Hef is now giv­ing it away, so to speak.

19. Jeff Borden said on February 5th, 2010 at 3:12 pm

    Pad­dyo,

    Right you are. I don’t want to be quoted on this because I’ve been too lazy and/or busy to look it up, but I’m pretty sure cir­cu­la­tion peaked at around 8 or 9 mil­lion. It was a real pow­er­house. I’m sure the adver­tis­ing rates have fallen in pro­por­tion to the steep decline in circulation.

    BTW, does any­one else see the future of our Con­gress in the amaz­ingly appalling actions by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama? Here is a tough-talking con­ser­v­a­tive icon hold­ing up every sin­gle appoint­ment Obama is try­ing to make unless Air­bus gets an Air Force con­tract over Boe­ing. Air­bus, you see, has some sup­pli­ers in Alabama, which appar­ently is good enough rea­son for this combed-over patriot to hold crit­i­cal appoint­ments hostage unless a for­eign com­pany gets the deal.

    Thanks to the Supremes, this is going to be a very com­mon event, where multi-national con­glom­er­ates will drown favored can­di­dates in money to achieve their aims. And if that means that jobs that might go to Amer­i­cans are instead sent to France, well, fuck it. A red­neck cracker sen­a­tor has got to do what he’s got to do.

    The U.S. Sen­ate is a dys­func­tional cham­ber of fools and char­la­tans. Amaz­ingly, the House sounds like the voice of rea­son in our national debate these days.

20. MarkH said on February 5th, 2010 at 3:26 pm

    Not really that sim­ple, pad­dyo’. Pub­li­ca­tions make their money from advertising,and rates and result­ing vol­ume in ad pages are directly tied to cir­cu­la­tion. The most eas­ily ver­i­fi­able cir­cu­la­tion num­bers come from the Audit Bureau of Cir­cu­la­tion, which is mostly from USPS mail­ing records. Since dis­tri­b­u­tion costs are a bal­ance sheet killer (about 70% of the cover price of a mag­a­zine is dis­tri­b­u­tion costs), mail subs can be a bar­gain for the pub­lisher in build­ing cir­cu­la­tion. I think you can still get Play­boy for $10/year in the mail. I would think what Hef loses on bulk mail charges, he makes up in ad rev­enues. It’s been almost 30 years since I’ve been in the pub­lish­ing busi­ness (Ohio/Living Sin­gle Mag­a­zines), so I may be off on some num­bers. But I think you already knew most of this.

    EDIT —  Jeff Bor­den, what do you mean “the FUTURE of our con­gress”? Hasn’t it ever been thus?

21. Sue said on February 5th, 2010 at 3:47 pm

    Unfor­tu­nately, Jeff Bor­den, the Shelby tantrum is being com­pared to Nelson’s grab on health care reform in terms of self­ish­ness. So the Dems’ expected “shocked, shocked” response will lose some of its punch.
    I am won­der­ing what the final straw will be, what the Sen­ate Repub­li­cans’ ver­sion of an inva­sion of Poland will be. Because, really, at this point I am will­ing to believe that the Dems will accept any behav­ior from the 41 – 59 major­ity Republicans.

22. paddyo' said on February 5th, 2010 at 3:48 pm

    Sure, MarkH, you’re right — but I wasn’t argu­ing a point, I was just remark­ing on the sticker price. Ten bucks a year is a LOT less than Play­boy used to charge. Con­trast that with, say, Peo­ple Mag, still one of the most suc­cess­ful in the busi­ness, which can still charge a pre­mium rate (com­par­a­tively speak­ing) around $95-$100 a year. I know, that’s a weekly, but if you pro­rated Play­boy to a weekly (now THERE’s a scary thought), it would still be about half that price. Time was, Hef could get that kind of price, too.
    But then, it’s tough all over for slicks, isn’t it …

23. paddyo' said on February 5th, 2010 at 3:54 pm

    God knows if it will ever change, but did the F’-ing Found­ing Fathers really intend that so many pres­i­den­tial appoint­ments required the Sen­ate to advise and con­sent? I’m amazed at the num­ber and level of posi­tions that the Bozos on either side of the aisle get to lay their grubby lit­tle hands on. The dys­func­tional thing in the Sen­ate is its ridicu­lous set of “rules” — you know, the ones that require “super­ma­jori­ties” and the ones, as Shelby is using, that allow any sen­a­tor, for any rea­son, to put a hold on any appoint­ment. Sen­ate rules aren’t the only rea­son for grid­lock, but they damned sure get in the way. And it’s needless.

24. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on February 5th, 2010 at 4:03 pm

    Sen­a­tor Robert Byrd once assured me that Sen­ate rules are the only thing that sep­a­rates Amer­i­can civ­i­liza­tion from bar­bar­ity, and are a thing of com­plex beauty, fit to be wielded by artists of leg­is­la­tion but incom­pre­hen­si­ble to the weary plebian.

    Or some­thing like that. His accent gets thicker as he gets excited.

25. Jeff Borden said on February 5th, 2010 at 4:04 pm

    Ben Nel­son is not much dif­fer­ent from Richard Shelby, but what sticks in my craw is that Shelby is a vin­tage flag-waving, tough-talking, self-styled con­ser­v­a­tive “patriot.” And at a time when the nation is deal­ing with high lev­els of unem­ploy­ment, he’s more than happy to ensure that Euro­pean work­ers get jobs that might go to Boe­ing workers.

    If this goober ever talks about “national secu­rity,” I cer­tainly hope a nearby sen­a­tor will beat him about the head and face with a large polo mal­let. He doesn’t give a shit. He wants more jobs in his god­for­saken state.

26. Sue said on February 5th, 2010 at 4:18 pm

    From Ezra Klein:
    “Repub­li­cans com­plain about all the czars, but they are oblig­at­ing Obama to appoint more czars than any pres­i­dent in his­tory, because they fil­i­buster all his actual appoint­ments. Czars route around the fil­i­bus­ter­ing of appoint­ments, and noth­ing more.

    To put this another way, the exec­u­tive branch needs a cer­tain amount of staff. Some of that staff sim­ply has to be con­firmed by the Sen­ate. The sec­re­tary of the Trea­sury, for instance. But some of that staff is in a gray area: It would be good to have them con­firmed by the Sen­ate, but if that’s too much of a pain in the neck, they can be named to posi­tions — either exist­ing ones or newly con­cocted ones — on the White House staff. Larry Sum­mers is an exam­ple of this route.

    If get­ting nom­i­nees through the Sen­ate keeps get­ting harder, you’ll see the Sen­ate con­sulted on fewer and fewer of these hires. In that way, this obstruc­tion mas­querad­ing as scrutiny will make the gov­ern­ment less account­able, not more.”

27. Jolene said on February 5th, 2010 at 5:37 pm

    After many years of being a big mag­a­zine sub­scriber, I’d let some sub­scrip­tions slip. Recently, though, I bought a cou­ple of mags to read on an air­plane and nearly choked on the price of a sin­gle issue. I think it was $6.99 for an issue of Newsweek and $7.99 for a copy of The Atlantic. Yikes! I’m renew­ing my subscriptions.

    Re Shelby, yes, he is an ass­hole. I don’t think it’s too smart for them to com­pare this sit­u­a­tion to Ben Nel­son because that deal has brought Nel­son noth­ing but bad news – even in his own state. If health care is ever passed, the Nel­son deal will be undone, but he’ll be stuck w/ the effects of his back­room deal on his reputation.

28. Jolene said on February 5th, 2010 at 5:41 pm

    On another topic, I’m think­ing about buy­ing an immer­sion blender, but have found that they range in price from thirty bucks to more than $100. Any advice? Is there one you’d rec­om­mend? Par­tic­u­lar fea­tures or attach­ments you’d recommend?

29. Dexter said on February 5th, 2010 at 5:43 pm

    The bliz­zard started a half hour ago. I gassed the car, bought the gro­ceries, picked up a few Mega Mil­lions tick­ets, and stopped into a lit­tle store to pick up the Super­Bowl snacks, and they had some really neat-o cakes, so I bought a nice round cake, frosted in white and adorned with a large “Saints” logo. It was only eleven bucks.
    As I was walk­ing the dog in the cross-blowing sting­ing hard snow, I decided to ven­ture out one more time. A straw­berry sun­dae from DQ, and what a sur­prise — they used fresh sliced straw­ber­ries. “Schtrrawburrees…” — and the sur­prise was so nice I began rolling my steel mar­bles around in my hand.
    http://​www​.bright​lights​film​.com/​4​2​/​4​2​_​i​m​a​g​e​s​/​c​a​i​n​e​b​o​g​a​rt.jpg

    By the way, did you know Bog­art took the role of Queeg for a pit­tance, just because he had this obses­sion to play Queeg? ‘Tis true.

30. Jeff Borden said on February 5th, 2010 at 5:54 pm

    “The Caine Mutiny” is one of my favorite Bog­art films. He gives a won­der­ful, meaty per­for­mance, par­tic­u­larly in that incred­i­bly poignant scene where he meets with the other offi­cers and more or less begs them for their sup­port while they sit in silence. It’s a sequence in which the captain’s vul­ner­a­bil­ity is painfully revealed to the junior offi­cers, who are too invested in mock­ing and under­min­ing him to lis­ten. Pow­er­ful stuff from an actor too fre­quently pigeon-holed for his tough guy parts. I can’t imag­ine any­one else in the part.

    The sup­port­ing roles by Fred Mac­Mur­ray, Van John­son and the superb Jose Fer­rer are also ter­rific. The romance angle of the young offi­cer is out of place, but oth­er­wise, it’s a damned good film.

31. moe99 said on February 5th, 2010 at 6:14 pm

    Word is there may be two Supreme Court vacan­cies soon: Stevens and Gins­berg. Reid bet­ter get some cojones or there won’t be appoint­ments til there’s a new administration.

32. Dexter said on February 5th, 2010 at 6:28 pm

    con­tro­versy of the day: Lind­sey Vonn, ath­lete or dirty girl? – your thoughts.
    This S.I. cover has gen­er­ated a lot of radio talk today. I heard the talk before I saw the picture-cover — it’s “dirty”…dirty young woman! No…it’s just a superb ath­lete perched to destroy her competition…no — it’s just a moral conun­drum.
    http://​latimes​blogs​.latimes​.com/​s​p​o​r​t​s​_​b​l​o​g​/​2​0​1​0​/​0​2​/​l​i​n​d​s​e​y​-​v​o​n​n​-​s​e​x​-​s​e​x​u​a​l​-​p​o​s​e​-​p​r​o​v​o​c​a​t​i​v​e​-​s​k​i​e​r​-​o​l​y​m​p​i​c​s​-​w​i​n​t​e​r​-​s​e​x​u​a​l​l​y​-​s​u​g​g​e​s​t​i​v​e.html

33. brian stouder said on February 5th, 2010 at 6:41 pm

    Reid bet­ter get some cojones or there won’t be appoint­ments til there’s a new administration.

    Moe — I dis­agree.

    Pres­i­dent Obama needs to STAY in the Harry Truman-mode he seems to be in now*, and in fact ramp it up. If Health Care Reform is dead now, as the pres­i­dent has said it could well be — then that’s all the MORE rea­son to turn the heat up to full-blast, and ride herd on the obstruc­tion­ist ‘Party of No/Party of Dough’ — so that there can be no doubt about the do-nothing/know noth­ing loafers and cow­ards in con­gress — right up ’til elec­tion day.

    I just read the Vari­ety arti­cle Nance linked, about the Jon Stewart/O’Relly iter­view — which was good enough; but then the com­ments sec­tion quickly took the shine off.

    I hear the same (insert vul­gar term here) every damned day, at work and on the local radio (and we’ll skip right past national radio); an “our team ver­sus their team” sort of unin­formed auto-pilot sub­sti­tute for think­ing. Today on Pat White’s local show, a caller com­plained that ‘all Obama ever does is blame Pres­i­dent Bush for everything’ — and that Repub­li­cans NEVER do that sort of thing — Bush didn’t blame Clin­ton for caus­ing 9/11, for exam­ple(!!), and ol’ Pat AGREED and agreed… so I called in and reminded him that Reagan/Bush-41/Dole ran against ‘the mess they inher­ited’ from Carter for TWENTY YEARS!! — and that, by the by, Pres­i­dent Bush-43 inher­ited a $200 bil­lion bud­get SURPLUS from Clin­ton (go ahead and blame his pre­de­ces­sor for that, eh?), and left a huge, spi­ral­ing debt for Obama — and a rapidly wors­en­ing eco­nomic cri­sis — to boot.

    And Pat said “yup, that’s what politi­cians do” — and went to commercial.

    (Insert long string of obscen­i­ties and curses here)

    But indeed, at the end of the day, I DO believe that vot­ers will do the right thing — pro­vided that our pres­i­dent goes onto the offense and stays there.

    *I think the return of Plouffe was the lead­ing indi­ca­tor that this IS the plan — but maybe that’s wish­ful think­ing on my part

34. Jeff Borden said on February 5th, 2010 at 7:05 pm

    Brian,

    I bow to no one in my fer­vent belief that the national Repub­li­can Party is a corpse rot­ting from the head down and that the GOP is not far away from an enor­mous reck­on­ing as the tides of change erode its aging, angry,entitled, race-baiting, homo­pho­bic, over­whelm­ingly white base. At some point, this party will need to con­front all the boogey­men (and boogey­women, I guess) it has cre­ated includ­ing immi­grants, minori­ties and gays if it wants to be viable out­side the old Confederacy.

    But the vic­to­ries in the Vir­ginia and New Jer­sey guber­na­to­r­ial races, and the spe­cial sen­ate elec­tion in Mass­a­chut­setts, are mud­dy­ing the waters. These results were not an Obama back­lash, or a ref­er­en­dum on HRC, or tor­ture. They were con­tests where attrac­tive, hard-working Repub­li­can can­di­dates defeated poor Demo­c­ra­tic can­di­dates, par­tic­u­larly in Vir­ginia and Mass.

    Yet these vic­to­ries –and you will prob­a­bly see a frig­ging Repub­li­can win Obama’s old seat this fall in Illi­nois because the Dem can­di­date who won the pri­mary has some very heavy, very ugly bag­gage– sup­ply just enough jolts of elec­tricty for this corpse to remain ani­mated and moving.

    Obama, but more prop­erly the Sen­ate and House Dems, need to quit pee­ing their pants every time the GOP stamps its feet and go on the offen­sive. The GOP lit­er­ally has no new ideas –I see even the idea of pri­va­tiz­ing Social Secu­rity is being floated by some of the right-wing braini­acs– and is dri­ven these days entirely by the three R’s: rage, resent­ment and racial fears.

    Mean­while, how­ever, we need to admit that a sub­stan­tial por­tion of our electorate…way more than we want to think about…wish we were back in the 1950s, when women were preg­nant and bare­foot, black peo­ple knew their place, immi­grants were white Euro­peans and Amer­ica was the only indus­trial power still stand­ing. These peo­ple are not going to go away soon, but they and their sad, out­dated beliefs even­tu­ally will fade from the scene. Until then, how­ever, they can con­tinue to do great dam­age to our repub­lic. And they are doing it.

35. Jolene said on February 5th, 2010 at 7:07 pm

    HBO has a new biopic re Tem­ple Grandin star­ring Claire Danes to appear tomor­row evening. Very good review in the NYT.

    For other enter­tain­ment, check out Barack Obama’s Face­book page.

36. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on February 5th, 2010 at 7:18 pm

    Jeff B., so data that con­tra­dicts your the­ory “mud­dies the water”?

    And what do you have against Muddy Waters?

    http://​www​.instantrimshot​.com/

    Thank you, thank you very much. Every­body have a quiet week­end with or with­out snowpocalypse.

37. Kirk said on February 5th, 2010 at 8:22 pm

    Dex­ter,
    Looks to me like a pic­ture of a skier who is pos­ing as if she is ski­ing. It’s not as though she’s fel­lat­ing a ski pole. Maybe they should have shot her ski­ing in a hoop skirt.

38. Dexter said on February 5th, 2010 at 8:29 pm

    yeah, Kirk…Mark Spitz is famous for a cheese­cake shot with all his medals and junk dan­gling, but S.I. posed him like this — under water.
    http://​tinyurl​.com/​y​emducd

    Remem­ber how Spitz influ­enced us back then? I and every other guy grew mus­taches , and they stayed with the cul­ture / look for a long, long time. I didn’t shave mine until 1988.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    I’m cook­ing roasted brus­sel sprouts from a mem­ory of the recipes posted here at nn.c a while ago. This will be a great mem­ory test. “LIZA! Where’s my blasted slippers!”

39. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on February 5th, 2010 at 9:12 pm

    350 oven, a driz­zle of olive oil, 40 – 45 min­utes — and some­one sug­gested sprin­kling pine nuts over ‘em as they roast, which i haven’t tried yet.

    Why trust mem­ory when you have the frail­ties of the internet?

    Y’know, I tried. I looked at the pic­ture, twice, and she has admirably mus­cu­lar thighs. I could develop an inap­pro­pri­ate inter­est in them if I really worked at it, but in gen­eral — she’s ski­ing down­hill. And smil­ing. C’mon, guys. It’s called, as I recall from Swiss Valley’s patient ski patrol coaches, the tuck position.

40. Joe Kobiela said on February 5th, 2010 at 11:07 pm

    I get sports Ill,and the last thing I thought was that was a sex pose. Don’t the fem­anazi have any­thing bet­ter to do. Dex­ter, a bit dicey fly­ing the mid­west tonight, Clev­land was a treat. Sur­pris­ingly smooth above 3,000 but really bumpy down low.
    Pilot Joe

41. Dexter said on February 5th, 2010 at 11:20 pm

    Joe…at least you don’t have to go to DCA or BWI and be turned back because that town is shut down under a poten­tial 30 inches of snow. My daugh­ter just returned from 10 days at Long Island, Bahamas, Clarence Town…her man took a vaca­tion from Net­Jets and flew a doc­tor down in the doc’s plane; she just said it was a “small jet” but didn’t say any more about it. Smooth skies.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I couldn’t remem­ber, so I did indeed look up the recipe for brus­sel sprouts…and I added hot sauce, pre-roasting, and ruined them. Damn me.

42. Rana said on February 5th, 2010 at 11:49 pm

    The thing with the Lind­sey Vonn pic­ture isn’t that it’s hoochy, it’s that it’s a posed model shot that’s been tipped to make it look like she’s “ski­ing” (see the angle of her hair?) and she’s been all made up and fluffed and pret­ti­fied… instead of acknowl­edg­ing that she’s a phe­nom­e­nal, tough ath­lete, who deserves cov­er­age of her skills, not merely her looks.

    I mean, check out this far more typ­i­cal pic­ture of the woman, doing what she’s rightly become famous for:

    http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site36/2008/0222/20080222__LindseyVonn~p1.jpg

    Why isn’t some­thing like that on the cover instead? I mean, it is sup­posed to be Sports Illus­trated, right? Not boobs, butt, and lip­stick illustrated.

43. MarkH said on February 6th, 2010 at 11:14 am

    Ever hear of the Swim­suit Issue, Rana?

44. Rana said on February 6th, 2010 at 2:20 pm

    Heh. Of course. I never under­stood the logic of that one either.

    (I sup­pose we should be grate­ful that Vonn wasn’t posed ski­ing in a bikini.)

45. MichaelG said on February 6th, 2010 at 5:32 pm

    I think sug­gest­ing there is some­thing sex­ual about the SI cover says more about those mak­ing the sug­ges­tions than it does about the picture.

    Rana, I can see your point but I still have no objec­tion to the way SI posed the cover pic­ture. It seems to me that the idea was to give the read­ers a good look at a star rather than to present a ski­ing picture.

    One of the swim­suit issue stars is doing pretty well in the NASCAR ARCA race which is grac­ing my tube right now.

46. MichaelG said on February 6th, 2010 at 5:35 pm

    Jeff B, I’ve been say­ing for years just what you’ve pointed out about the Dems pee­ing their pants. The total lack of a spine any­where in the Demo­c­ra­tic party is one of the things that has me depressed about the state of the country.

47. nancy said on February 6th, 2010 at 5:55 pm

    I’m get­ting to the SI cover way, way late, but I don’t see any­thing hinky at all about that pic­ture. That’s what ski rac­ers do, and that’s how they dress, and the fact she’s turn­ing her head to smile is about the only thing about it that’s even remotely sex­ual. Very remote. How­ever, I get the idea peo­ple who would bring such a thing up don’t get smiled at dur­ing sex very often. Or any other time.

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