Dowd Sizzles, Dubya Fizzles (Memailed)

Ouch! (Times Select, sorry, folks)

 

From Dowd's memailed column:

 

Poppy Bush and James Baker gave Sonny the presidency to play with and he broke it. So now they're taking it back. 

****

Two trusted members of the Bush 41 war council, Mr. Baker and Robert Gates, have been dispatched to discipline the delinquent juvenile and extricate him from the mother of all messes.

 

 

 

All The Lonely People

This NYT article (yes, it's memailed, or it's at number 7, anyway) describes a recent study by some sociologists that shows most adults have few or no friends-- fewer than they did in the past.

Well, that's depressing. Especially when I think about how long it's been since I've hung out with a lot of my friends.

I have a pretty active social life... considering the schedule of a law firm associate.  But reading this article reminds me that spending time with family and friends is a more important than another hour of poring over other peoples' e-mails and spreadsheets...

On that note... I'm out of here!

You Say Tomato / I Say Harpoono

Deborah Tannen (author of something about moms and daughters) has a great (MEMAILED!) piece in the NYT comparing the reactions of women in Greece and New York to public molestations by men.

According to Tannen, Greek women are much more likely than Americans to smack, slap, kick, punch, curse, or stone their molesters.

My mom told me about a friend of hers who used to ride the subways with a long hatpin in her purse, and would stab it into the thigh of men who groped her.

Excellent, excellent.

It ain't a harpooning, but it's a step in the right direction.

Memailed #4: We Are the Creditors

Suketu Mehta has a great opinion piece in today's New York Times called "A Passage From India" in tribute to the E.M. Forster novel. A better title, I think, would have been "We Are the Creditors":

Read more below the jump.

There is a perverse hypocrisy about the whole jobs debate, especially in Europe. The colonial powers invaded countries like India and China, pillaged them of their treasures and commodities and made sure their industries weren't allowed to develop, so they would stay impoverished and unable to compete. Then the imperialists complained when the destitute people of the former colonies came to their shores to clean their toilets and dig their sewers; they complained when later generations came to earn high wages as doctors and engineers; and now they're complaining when their jobs are being lost to children of the empire who are working harder than they are. My grandfather was once confronted by an elderly Englishman in a London park who asked, "Why are you here?" My grandfather responded, "We are the creditors." We are here because you were there.

There was a time when arable land and minerals were the real growth sectors.
When (non-oil) natural resources made military conquest of some places profitable.
When a few thousand Englishmen could run the subcontinent.
When a nation with an elite made up of professional soldiers could effectively dominate others.
And the merchants and the people with technical knowledge were relatively less important.

But now, for a healthy economy, a country relies much more on smart, well-educated people and a relatively orderly and free society.
Not so easy to retain the value in that after you've marched in with guns.
Pretty hard to make it happen at home while privileging your majority ethnic group above people with high-value labor who want to immigrate.

The world's high school math club has grown up, and they're realizing they're in much better shape than the kids on the football team who made their lives so unpleasant.

We Are Not the Problem

Dear The Livak:

I write, beseeching you as the one human who has provided, in the venerable pages of The Litvak Chronicles, a platform for the rights of those your society would otherwise ignore (here and here and here, sort of).

I write in response to this thoughtless NYT editorial complaining that random testing of cattle for Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy ("BSE") is inadequate to protect humans against a threat from eating our brains.
The piece thoughtlessly refers to BSE as "Mad Cow Disease," as if we cattle were all female, and as if our dementia--the result of being fed by-products of our own kind while in captivity by humans--were something exotic.
If it weren't for the fact that cattle are completely incapable of living in the wild, I think my disgust for humans would prompt me to flee the ranch.
As it is, however, I accept that I'm food for hairless apes, and simply ask for some consideration.

But the Times writes:

There is only one answer to this mess. It is to create a national identity system for all cattle so they can be tracked more easily and to test them one by one until we know without a doubt the incidence of mad cow disease.

This infringement of our civil rights cannot be tolerated. You can milk us, fatten us, slaughter us, breed us, brand us, and make us wear bells (actually, I rather fancy my bell), but a national ID system impermissibly infringes on our natural rights.

Dear The Litvak, hear our plea, and let the humans know that Big Agriculture is to blame, and not the privacy of good, honest cattle.

Sincerely,
Dottie

Subways and Slurring and SHPOSes

I hope everyone enjoyed avoiding the Puerto Rican Day parade as much as I did.

I'm sure the Irish are annoyed that everyone picks their parade day to be phony Irish and puke green beer on the sidewalk.

Plenty of Italians want the cast of "The Sopranos" out of their parade.

And I know Puerto Ricans resent that the entire parade route is boarded up the day before to protect against people (largely non-Boriqua) who think PR Pride Day has something to do with celebrating the bygone days of Caribbean piracy.

Personally, I don't want people coming out for the Salute to Israel Day Parade thinking they'll get to secretly control the world for six hours. Not gonna happen. And would be hard to express on a parade route.

I find ethnic pride parades kind of creepy in a nineteenth century nationalism kind of way. Besides, who's proud that his ethnic group's least well-groomed members and various hangers-on have gathered to cheer trucks decorated with flowers?

Anyway.

This mostly irrelevant Reuters piece about mandatory elocution lessons for announcers on the D.C. Metro reminds me of something I want to blather on about.
Something, eh, fascinating.

You are probably a New Yorker (all of my readers who aren't giant tuna or fruit flies are) and don't see the relevance.
D.C.? Where's that? Why'd we ever move the capital from here to that burg?

But the piece does have a bit about NYC:

Washington is hardly alone in spurring this kind of complaint. Commuters in New York City have groused for years about announcements that give only tantalizing hints at critical information.
Now some New York subways have upgraded public address systems that offer clearer, more timely announcements, replacing the squawky talk that frequently left patrons wondering where they were and what was happening when the train stopped. On some lines, there are prerecorded announcements.

See? See?

But have you heard the new announcers on the trains?
There's some guy on the C train who's like a museum curator in training. His spiel is full of historical information, jokes, sage advice... that is not New York.

I want my SHPOS back.
The guy who's clearly not with it enough to be operating the train.
Who's angry and mutters.
He sounds like he's trying to speak and incubate a clutch of eggs in his mouth at the same time.
The only words you can understand him say are "...onger in service" and "..town" and "...ee train" and "HankuVeriMuh."
That's the NY announcer I love.

He goes with the toll booth attendant who feigns death until you're actually banging your fists against the window, then acts indignant and threatens to call the police. But calls her co-workers (instead of the cops) if it looks like an interesting fight is breaking out. And takes your $76 but hands you a one-week instead of one-month metrocard and steals the change. They're not mostly like that.

But that's the MTA I know and love.

If SHPOSes don't belong in the actual, troglodytic professions-- subway tunnels, sewers, prisons-- I know they won't find fulfillment. And I'll know the furies are out of balance, which can be bad news for the whole subterranean urban ecosystem, viz.:

Memailed #3: Monkeys' Business

Greatest. Article. Ever.

Read it now-- Monkeys who use money! Monkeys engage in prostitution (with other monkeys)!

Plus, there's Yale economist Keith Chen's great explanation of the monkeys:

The capuchin has a small brain, and it's pretty much focused on food and sex. You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want. You can feed them marshmallows all day, they'll throw up and then come back for more.

It's like me, but with no student loans!
And-- I admit-- cuter:

Memailed #2: Dear Human Scientists

Human Scient15ts:

Please. I am an ad0le5cent male fruit fly six days of age. I do well in sch00l but I am just an ordinary guy. Listen.
I know from this piece in the NYT that you have altered the genes of some fruit flies to make them into lesbians.


My parents were really annoyed. Before they died last week on their 6-day anniversary they were all "Humans are playing God," and "Whatever happened to the sanctity of heterosexual mating?" and "What? It's not enough they make legs grow where antennae belong?"

But I was just quiet and ate my sap, thinking.

My girlfriend is a day younger than me and very shy. I don't think she'd ever gently touch the leg of another female and sing to her with her wings, let alone kiss one.

Still, I have fantasized about it happening ever since I read your article over the shoulder of The Litvak a few hours ago. As you can see, my GF is very hot (pic bel0w).


Could you make a fly who'd kiss my GF? I think she'd like it if she gave it a try.

P.S.: I like red eyes.

Memailed #1!

Congratulations to Dinitia Smith, whose piece in today's NYT (discussing Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd's new book, "The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution") is now MOST E-MAILED (MEMAILED!).

Ooh!
I call coinage:
"memailed"-- Described the NYT's Most E-mailed article.
Ties together an acronym (Everybody Loves an Acronym -- ELA) and the word "meme," to denote the fact that memailed articles stick in the mass consciousness.

Anyway, sounds like a great book.
I like that it pushes artifacts-- byproducts of the way we develop or are put together-- over evolutionary just-so stories that a clever biologist can make up to fit any trait.
A little Occam's Razor to take the wind out of the sails of people who thing attached / unattached earlobes and innie / outie belly buttons are for avoiding saber-toothed cats or communicating via pheromones, or whatever.
Anyway, I'm never going to read it. Busy, busy.

But if I link to it I can make all sorts of references to sex.
Which is sure to boost my readership.

So, let's all hear it for the female orgasm!


Which, according to Dr. Lloyd (or, according to Smith's account of Dr. Lloyd), probably doesn't provide any evolutionary advantage, so women shouldn't feel bad if they don't have them frequently.