If you’re one of the three people who reads this here premier “web log,” you may have once checked out the New York Times op-ed page. You might even recognize the names of the columnists, who every day spout the most conventionally wise of the conventional wisdom. This is a feature that is dedicated to these folks, highlighting one line that is either funny, ridiculous, strange, or actually intelligent or well-written. Today\’s is from David Brooks, who in his column today, \”The Employer\’s Creed,\” writes: But if you fear leaping out in this way, at least think...
Continue reading...Life
Watch this excellent \”True Detective\” parody
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHWLpJRlBYA] True Detective may be over for now (although I\’m a couple episodes behind!), but here\’s a terrific parody starring Community cast members Joel McHale and Jim Rash to help tide you over.
Continue reading...Poems for the Cruelest Month
T.S. Eliot was wrong. February is the worst. February by Bill Christophersen The cold grows colder, even as the days grow longer, February\’s mercury vapor light buffing but not defrosting the bone-white ground, crusty and treacherous underfoot. This is the time of year that\’s apt to put a hammerlock on a healthy appetite, old anxieties back into the night, insomnia and nightmares into play; when things in need of doing go undone and things that can\’t be undone come to call, muttering recriminations at the door, and buried ambitions rise up through the floor and pin your...
Continue reading...Feminist rant of the day
[I’m sure this won’t actually be a daily feature here at V&V, but it’s a pretty reliable description of what much of my blogging is about, so.] This is how it goes. You tell me you’ve figured out what the “77 cents to a dollar” means, and it isn’t that a woman working the same job as a man gets paid that much less. It’s comparing women’s median pay with men’s median pay, without accounting for the jobs they’re in or hours worked or what. And also there’s a study that among educated 22-30 year old non-parenting...
Continue reading...John 14:27
I park the car behind the house, on the grass on the far side of the driveway. I come in through the back door. I’m expected. The back door leads directly to the kitchen, and nothing’s cooking. It’s only 11:15, so nothing would be. No one greets me. The long walk from the door through the kitchen takes years. I remember last week. I remember how frail she looked, how much frailer than the week before, and the week before that, and the month before that. My foot hits the threshold of the living room. It touches...
Continue reading...Faking It
From the Department of Blindingly Obvious Scientific Findings: A hundred-plus page report, The National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, came out recently, documenting self-reported information about the sexual activity and behaviors of thousands of adults and teenagers. Among a myriad of results (some others are detailed here, there was this shocker: About 85 percent of men report that their partner had an orgasm at the most recent sexual event; this compares to the 64 percent of women who report having had an orgasm at their most recent sexual event. (A difference that is too large to...
Continue reading...Weekend Roundup
I\’m reading Freedom, and it\’s way better than The Corrections, which I read and promptly forgot pretty much the entire contents of. Yeah, I know, pretty novel for me to rave about Jonathan Franzen\’s latest, but there you have it. It\’s quite riveting. I always forget, though, when I embark on a Serious Contemporary Novel, how such books never ever have happy endings (or beginnings or middles, typically). Sometimes this bums me out. Like, there\’s enough true sad stuff without having to spend one\’s leisure time reading about fake sad stuff. I watched The Social Network, and...
Continue reading...Florida and Gay Adoption Laws
Kudos to Florida\’s Third District Court of Appeal, which last week overturned the state\’s thirty-year-old blanket ban on gay adoption. According to NYT, Florida was the last state in the country to have such a law, and Newly Progressive Gov. Charlie Crist came out in support of the decision, saying it was \”a great day for children.\” It was an especially great day for plaintiff Martin Gill and the two boys (biological brothers) who he had been trying for years to adopt. Ironically, the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF) strongly urged Gill to take in...
Continue reading...From the annals of minor hypocrisy
I know some enterprising young girls who like to set up lemonade stands on warm days. Lucky for them, they live in a well-to-do neighborhood where folks tend to tip high (“a lot of times,” they tell me breathlessly, “people give us a dollar and say to keep the change” for the 50 cent cups). It’s also a well-trafficked area. Among other things, there’s a large synagogue just down the street. On Saturday, the girls tell me, they made “so much money.” “Lots of people who were going to services got lemonade and cookies,” they inform me. ...
Continue reading...This is not okay
True story. In the early evening; still really light out, I was walking near my apartment a couple nights ago when some creep waggled his penis at me. It was kind of awful and also so absurd. Why would anyone want to do that? I wasn’t very scared for my safety- he seemed content to just stare at me walking by, from about two feet away, while displaying his penis. Here’s how you know I’m a bleeding heart liberal. Amid my shock and disgust and anger, part of me also feels bad for the guy. My evening kind of...
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