While observing a variety of straight and gay couples one Valentine’s day, I worked out a theory about attraction:
- If you want to date a man, you must take care of yourself and dress well. Hence, the hordes of straight women and gay men at gyms and dressed well at work.
- But if you want to date a woman, you can be slovenly, ambulatory bacon. Hence, straight men and lesbians.
I dubbed this “The men are picky” theory of attraction. Women tend to look the way their men want them to look. (I suspect that the unsubtle dominance of gay men in women’s fashion is a way for queer men to live vicariously through women, who use their fabulous designs to land straight men.) Only once safely coupled do women attempt, usually unsuccessfully, to change how their men look.
Amber disapproves of the movie Knocked up; specifically, she doesn’t like the slovenly guy getting the hot girl. The hot guy sticking with the blowsy chick simply doesn’t happen often enough in real life; it’s asking audiences to suspend too much disbelief, so it’s not going to happen in Hollywood anytime soon. Movies are mirrors of reality, but there’s only so much a funhouse mirror can distort things.
Hubbard posted this at 12:23 PM HKT on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 as I don't know--but it's a Tradition
3 Comments »
Liquor gets banned on the Long Island Railroad on St. Patrick’s Day, and the Irish are upset:
Anticipating an inebriated crowd commuting into and out of Manhattan to celebrate the holiday along the parade route Saturday, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s two commuter railroads, the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad, are banning alcohol from their property that day and into early Sunday, making the Roman Catholic feast day the sole religious holiday when bar cars are closed for business and stations and trains run dry.
“It definitely looks like stereotyping, and that’s what the MTA should be faulted for,” state Senator Martin Golden, a Republican of Brooklyn who is Irish, said. “Some people do get out of control, but to focus on that day, and on certain segments of the population like that, is totally wrongheaded.”
I found this comment amusing:
“It’s not fair that on other holidays they don’t ban alcohol if they do it on St. Patrick’s Day,” Don Rogers, a vice president of a large New York Police Department Irish fraternal organization, the Emerald Society, said. Mr. Rogers also noted that the New York Police Department steps up enforcement of rules prohibiting drinking outside during the St. Patrick’s Day parade — rules it is more likely to overlook for other parades, such as the Hispanic Day and Gay Pride parades. “Those laws should be enforced all the time, not just in this parade,” Mr. Rogers said.
It just seems like common sense to me to limit the booze in public transit. Perhaps I simply haven’t been to enough Gay Pride parades, but there really isn’t (so far as I’ve seen) the kind of massive drunkenness there that happens on St. Patrick’s day. College students don’t start drinking at 8 a.m. to commemorate the Stonewall riots, but they do for St. Patty. But if the gays riot, by all means limit the booze.
If I recall correctly, doesn’t Chicago have two separate St. Patrick’s day parades to prevent riots?
Hubbard posted this at 2:13 PM HKT on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, I don't know--but it's a Tradition
No Comments »
Interesting bit about low libido in The Atlantic: From author Joan Sewell’s interview about I’d rather eat Chocolate:
At what point did you decide to write a book about it?
Well, it wasn’t until Oprah. I saw a show, in 2000 or so, and she was saying millions and millions of women are having problems with sexual dysfunction, and they’re all ashamed to say anything about it. It was brought up by her gynecologist, who said the most prevalent problem she heard was women with low libidos. And this study had just come out from the University of Chicago. I looked at the study, I actually went to the library and looked at it, and then I looked at a Kinsey study, and I was thinking, well, if so many tens of millions of women—estimated—are having problems, and they’re saying that’s nearly half, what is the basis for normality? What is the definition of dysfunction? And what standards are we using?
Intrigued, I looked at the subscriber-only article and saw this:
No wonder no one wants to talk much about real sex, dirty sex, hot sex—because the true nuts and bolts can’t be made to suit any forward- looking social agenda [blogger's emphasis]. Maybe, in this sense, female sexuality really is a culturally subversive little beastie. Not only do many women enjoy it best alone, but of their fantasies, perhaps the less said the better (in terms of humanity’s social progress). For women, though, the bizarre and the irregular might just be “normal.” And if so, as Sewell suggests, widespread pressure—from both the left and the right—for women to have a “normal,” at-least-two-times-a-week sex life may ultimately be geared to serve not women’s natural tendencies but men’s. Who sets the pace anyway? As Sewell notes, about the husband/wife divide:
No one is trying to lower men’s sex drives. I don’t hear, “Doctor, my sex drive is too high [emphasis in original]. Please, do something about it. I feel guilty and ashamed that I don’t want less sex. It’s killing my marriage.”
No one suggests, continues Sewell, that men take estrogen supplements to mellow out so they better complement the moods of women. Although that could have measurable benefits. After all, elevated testosterone levels in males have been linked to such social ills as murder and rape. And I have to admit, the urge to slap my own husband and vomit in a ditch comes not from sex but from what I feel is his kamikaze driving. When he’s at the wheel (i.e., always), I white-knuckle it, I close my eyes, I can barely restrain a scream. (Many wives feel this way. As a girlfriend said recently about her husband, “If any woman drove as ragefully as Ron, she’d be hospitalized!”)
Food for thought about the sex differences. Nature laughs last.
Hubbard posted this at 3:36 PM HKT on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, I don't know--but it's a Tradition
No Comments »
Punxsutawney Phil didn’t see his shadow. So it’ll be nice and warm this weekend, right? Weather.com says Sunday’s high will be 29 F. Well, at least Phil’s as accurate as most weathermen. . .
Hubbard posted this at 1:11 PM HKT on Friday, February 2nd, 2007 as I don't know--but it's a Tradition
1 Comment »
I’m a fan of a certain kind of psychoanalysis. Great works of art and literature can sear one’s soul, and writing about the blending of art and life is a difficult but rewarding task in the hands of a great writer. My gold standard for this kind of writing remains Edith Efron’s anaylsis of Clarence Thomas. Based on an interview Thomas gave to Reason, Efron was able to tease out what was going on inside Thomas’s head during those terrible confirmation hearings. This kind of writing is dangerous to do, however, because any set of facts can be given a false theory that fits.
The Anchoress poses an interesting hypothetical along these lines:
The film ET, The Extra-terrestrial is Steven Spielberg’s baby – his intellectual property, his copyrights, etc. Obviously, if I wanted to write a play or a book or whatever using that story and those characters, I’d run into all sorts of copyright issues, and perhaps Spielberg would be exceedingly protective of it and not even allow a purchase of the rights. Is there a way around such a circumstance?
For instance, suppose rather than write a variation of the story of ET, I decided to write a fictionalized account – a play or book – about the life of Stephen Spielberg, and within that media I tried to weave ET throughout as a subconscious parallel – a means of digging into Spielberg’s psyche. Since ET is a historical part of Spielberg’s life and I’m writing a historical fiction of that life, wouldn’the ET story then be fair game, used within the context of the newer work? You can’t copyright life details, can you? Wouldn’t I be able to write a story that said, essentially: Spielberg lived, he created art, this was the art he created, this was why.
It depends a great deal on how much Spielberg wanted to haggle over things. He might want to avoid it altogether, given that the legal hassle could lose in court and lead to huge publicity over the book, rather like the mistake Margaret Mitchell’s estate made over The Wind Done Gone. Still, even though Spielberg would probably lose in court, the sheer legal mess of it all would make me want to avoid writing fiction with ET characters and names woven in with Spielberg’s actual life. It’s probably safest to write a roman à clef like Bellow’s Ravelstein or Welles’s Citizen Kane, or to stick to a nonfiction essay like Efron.
Hubbard posted this at 12:31 PM HKT on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 as Belles Lettres, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, I don't know--but it's a Tradition, The Law Is An Ass--An Idiot
4 Comments »
It’s often interesting when two people with fairly similar backgrounds reach very different conclusions. A case in point is Mark Steyn and Rabbi Marc Gellman on Seattle’s Christmas Tree mess. (Note: until I read Steyn, I hadn’t seen Gellman’s article, but I became intrigued and looked it up.)
The facts are that another Rabbi, Elazar Bogomilsky, threatened to sue the Seattle-Tacoma airport for having only Christmas trees up; Rabbi Bogomilsky wanted to install a Menorah. Rather than fight a lawsuit, Sea-Tac removed the trees. Rabbi Gellman’s take:
The cowardly response of the airport officials was to order workers on the graveyard shift on Sunday night to quickly remove all eight trees. Their first articulated (and insane) reason was that the airport officials did not have time to play cultural anthropologist and evaluate whether other local religious symbols should be included. Then all hell broke loose as the conflagration burned its way through the wire services Monday and the sheer lunacy of this decision became obvious to most. The next reason the public relations geniuses at the airport came up with to justify the removal of the Christmas trees was that they did not want to authorize an outside organization to erect any display and conduct a public ceremony for its lighting. Now, the Port of Seattle commissioners who oversee the airport Christmas tree display and are promising to reconsider the tree removal at their meeting Monday night. One of the officials is reported as saying that he knows at least three of the five commissioners want the trees put back up.
So what, as they say in the Talmud, do we learn from all this? First we learn that the rabbi should never have threatened to sue the airport. (His lawyer now says he won’t no matter what happens.) Using our courts to prohibit the displays of Christmas trees is more than frivolous. It is stupid, divisive and frivolous. It generates ill will towards Jews or the ACLU or whoever brings the suit, and it unnecessarily burdens the court. People who are offended at decorated trees with no angel, no star and no crèche need to get a life, and need to reconsider what constitutes a true offense against the First Amendment.
The right solution here is obvious. Put back the trees and erect a menorah display paid for, like the trees, by the airport and not by a small Hasidic group. There is no ceremony for the lighting of the trees and so there is no need for a ceremony for the lighting of the menorah.
Where to begin? I hardly think that Sea-Tac was behaving cowardly when removing the trees; given the state of the courts, they’d almost certainly have lost a lawsuit. And it’s not obvious to me that putting a menorah in airport is a good solution: it rewards threatening lawsuits.
Now look at Steyn’s take on the matter:
So the airport goes, “Oh, dear, you’re threatening a lawsuit? OK, we’ll take down the trees.” And in an instant the trees were history. Not “history” in the sense of a time-honored tradition legitimized by its very antiquity. But “history” in the sense of the contemporary American formulation of something you toss in the landfill in the interests of “diversity.”
So then the rabbi and his lawyer are reeling under a barrage of negative publicity and suddenly it’s their chestnuts being roasted on the open fire. “Whoa,” they say. “Why are we the bad guys? We love Christmas trees. What made you think we had anything against Christmas trees? Just cuz we threatened to launch a gazillion-dollar lawsuit? What could be more American than that?” In Newsweek, Rabbi Marc Gellman managed to miss the point and deplored the “cowardly response” of the airport. But what “cowardly response”? Instead of going to court and almost certainly losing, they raised the stakes, put the plaintiffs on the defensive and forced them to call off the dogs. The “holiday trees” are now back.
Everyone who knows Rabbi Bogomilsky says he’s an affable fellow, he doesn’t want to Scrooge up anybody’s Christmas, he’s an all-around swell guy. No doubt. But in the week when the president of Iran hosts an international (and well-attended) Holocaust Denial Convention (which simultaneously denies the last Holocaust while gleefully anticipating the next one), this rabbi thinks it’s in the interests of the Jewish people to take legal action against “holiday” decorations at Seattle Airport? Sorry, it’s not the airport but the plaintiff who’s out of his tree. An ability to prioritize is an indispensable quality of adulthood, and a sense of proportion is a crucial ingredient of a mature society.
Interestingly, Rabbi Gellman comes to a similar conclusion priorities, though he states it less pungently than Steyn (yes, I realize you can be VERY pungent and still be less so than Steyn):
As for those secularists who want no religious symbols anywhere in sight on public properties, I respect your objections and I understand your fears that any breach in the wall of separation is deeply troubling. I do not agree, however, that holiday displays are such a breach. They are colorful and benign and easily disregarded by those who wish to walk by them and go on to instead admire the great and sublime beauty of the fast food signs in the food court. Most of all I believe that the greatest threat to our freedom is in the careless confusion of trivial issues with issues of great importance to our freedoms and our culture. I invite you to guess where the issue of Christmas tree at the Seattle airport fit.
Odd, but interesting to compare two writers whom I generally like.
Tangential thought: lawsuits are as American as arrested development; I wonder when someone will sue over the word “holiday” since it derives from “holy day.”
Hubbard posted this at 3:00 PM HKT on Monday, December 18th, 2006 as I don't know--but it's a Tradition, Kulturkampf
No Comments »
A scrooge asks:
I’d still like to know how much this cost the taxpayers, and what, exactly, anyone hoped to get out of it.
It seems odd to pardon a turkey. The turkey is neither cute like an Easter lamb, nor intelligent like the Christmas ham. Turkeys manage a double play of being ugly and stupid, so dumb they don’t have the brains to sit down when they lay eggs (a special carpet had to be developed to spare the eggs that domesticated turkeys fire away). Yet we have a tradition of pardoning the turkey, this undeserving bird. Why?
Perhaps we pardon them because they are undeserving. Pardoning animals at every holiday might be an ironic overkill, but one pardon a year prevents diminishing marginal utility. That literal turkeys are pardoned means that perhaps there’ll be mercy for all of us metaphorical turkeys. Perhaps, like the original Scrooge, the Thanksgiving scrooge will find out what he’s been missing.
Hubbard posted this at 6:33 PM HKT on Sunday, November 26th, 2006 as I don't know--but it's a Tradition, Random Bloggish Things
1 Comment »