Author: theogeo

Ezra Klein, chiming in tangentially regarding the Maureen Dowd piece I wrote about yesterday, links to what he calls an interesting study by a couple of researchers: That the editorial copy in Playboy pictorals, by and large, does not use terminology that implies the women (who are usually splayed like filleted meat across hay bales and fuzzy rugs) are submissive or vulnerable. Instead, the research shows, the women are often described as strong, career-oriented, and…

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Liz Garrigan over at the Nashville Scene has published her take on the bullshit happening between Sidelines and their adviser over Flash, which she nixed without input from any of the student editors. You know I have much, much more to say on this topic, but it’ll have to wait until after work. Suffice it to say that Garrigan writes exactly what I have been feeling all along: Let the students do their thing and…

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Since Bush nominated Sam Alito to the high court, there has been much talk of his views on abortion as seen through the prism of his dissent from a decision that struck down a law requiring women in Pennsylvania to get their husbands’ permission before obtaining an abortion. I hear a lot of talk about the statute requiring “spousal notification,” which implies that the woman is just obligated by law to tell her husband she’s…

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Feminism gets blamed for everything, perhaps even more than The Gays get blamed for stuff. Pat Robertson has famously asserted that feminism causes women to kill their children, leave their husbands, and become capitalism-hexing lesbian witches. Leon Kass, in an excruciating three-part essay, has blamed feminism for the degeneration of the correct traditional form of courtship, which, of course, has led to the utter depravity of the modern state of our society’s romantic — and…

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It’s a good thing Halloween is over because the jack-o-lantern is getting moldy and smelly, not to mention the fact that his head is caving in and he could use some dentures. We actually had trick-or-treaters tonight, but we were caught unprepared and had to give the poor kids peppermints. When those were gone, we had to tell kids we didn’t have any candy. Then we just stopped answering the door. But then I felt…

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You know what’s hilarious? Sitting at the drive-in, watching a scary movie, when some poor schmuck’s car alarm starts going off. And the headlights are flashing up on the screen and into everyone else’s car, and the horn is honking in regular intervals. And the poor guy can’t get the alarm to go off. He tries to start the car — not once, but twice! — but that, of course, does nothing, as it would…

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Well, it’s 9 and I’ll be damned if I’m not more or less done for the night, but I can’t leave ’til midnight, so I am bored out of my skull, trying to think of things to do on this computer that don’t involve Googling “Memphis sucks” (which results in a surprising number of sites for Nazis and skinheads) or the names of people I know. One thing I’m doing constantly is gazing at the…

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Garrison Keillor has written a really nice column this week for Salon. It’s just beautifully worded, like everything Keillor ever writes. Despite his embarrassing efforts to get a T-shirt maker to stop selling a shirt that’s emblazoned with “A Prairie Ho Companion,” Keillor remains one of my favorite humorists (alongside Michael J. Nelson, both of whom are, oddly enough, from Minnesota). In this week’s column, he writes about fall and Halloween, naturally, but only as…

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You wouldn’t know it from watching TV, but the Pakistan earthquake death toll is inching close to 80,000 and will grow tremendously once the nation’s bitter cold winter sets in, since hundreds of thousands of residents will be homeless for an indefinite amount of time. I know that Scooter Libby’s indictment and Harriet Miers’ withdrawal are important, major events, but this earthquake is one of the deadliest of modern times and deserves more than the…

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Last night I posted about the lady who hung herself and was mistaken for a Halloween decoration. And then I went and dreamt about it. In my dream, the lady hung herself right outside her home, which was a trailer (I don’t know if this was the case in real life). Her homemade gallows were right beside her cedar porch. And she had even taken care to dress herself up in rags and a hood,…

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