Restaurant recommendation

You need to go the the Black Mountain Winehouse and you need to get their Goat Cheese Tart. It is amazing. And get the Sauvignon Blanc to go with it.

It's in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, just west of Park Slope. Take the F or the G train.

Atlas Shrugged. Chapters 1 - 3

Yes, after two weeks I've only managed to get through the first three chapters of Atlas Shrugged. Hey, I've been busy.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a handy flowchart for how to succeed as an Ayn Rand character. One of the hallmarks of success is having an angular face. This is no exaggeration. And conversely her villains have the opposite sorts of faces. I knew the basic plot of Atlas Shrugged but didn't know where James Taggart, who is introduced in the first chapter, fit in the standard Rand dichotomy. Since he is an industrialist, the president of Taggart Transcontinental, I thought he might be one of the heroes. But I was immediately enlightened as soon as Taggart was described:

...his posture had a limp, decentralized sloppiness... the flesh of his face was pale and soft.

In contrast, his sister Dagny's face:

...was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth  held closed with inflexible precision.

She can't possibly be related to James. Clearly Mother Taggart dallied with the mushy-faced mailman before James was born. Just what you would expect from a government employee.

In the second chapter we meet Hank Reardon, who is Dagny's business ally and the inventor of a new high-tech steel. He's basically Dagny with a penis - a superior being surrounded by weaklings. And of course:

His body was tall and gaunt... His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and a few sharp lines.

His mother, brother and wife, on the other hand are fops. His wife is graceful but her face isn't beautiful because of her lifeless eyes. Needless to say it isn't angular either. Rand doesn't bother to describe Reardon's mother at all - she's embodied by a constant scolding refrain about how Reardon is selfish. And his brother Phil, well he's

...always been in precarious health, though doctors had found no specific defect in his loose, gangling body.

Clearly Mother Reardon also dallied with a mushy-faced mailman (possibly the very same one as Mother Taggart) when Phil was conceived.

Not only are they fops, they are all financially dependent on Reardon, but treat him like shit, and don't care about his exciting new high-tech steel. And like to run charities to give money to losers. To which they expect Reardon to donate money.

In chapter three we meet Dagny's ancestor Nathaniel Taggart, the founder of her family's railroad, in statue form. You probably can guess what he looked like:

The statue was of a young man with a tall, gaunt body and an angular face. 

There is no mention of Nat Taggart having a weak, un-angular brother or son, but then these were the days before the US Postal Service sowed its mushy-faced seed across the land.

And it's not like a government employee would have gotten near Nat Taggart's family:

It was said that Nat Taggart had staked his life on his railroad many times: but once, he staked more than his life. Desperate for funds, with the construction of his line suspended, he threw down three flights of stairs a distinguished gentleman who offered him a loan from the government. Then he pledged his wife as security for a loan from a millionaire who hated him and admired her beauty. He repaid the loan on time and did not have to surrender his pledge. The deal had been made with his wife's consent...

So there you go. Nat Taggart and his beautiful wife hated the government so much that not only did they refuse a loan from the government (and Taggart assaulted a government representative without any apparent repercussions) they would rather risk selling the wife into sexual slavery. With the wife's consent. Wow, those were the days of true Libertarians. But then, as the "How to Succeed as an Ayn Rand Character" flowchart illustrates, rape is also an important indicator of success.

The funniest bit so far though, is Rand's imagining how non-angular businessmen talk, as in a scene from chapter 2:

It's been proved that every business depends upon every other business... so everybody ought to share the burdens of everybody else.

...

The public can't remain indifferent to reckless, selfish waste by an anti-social individual. After all, private property is a trusteeship held for the benefit of society as a whole.

...

But I guess there aren't many people in Washington capable of understanding a progressive social policy.

But hey, maybe businessmen were very very different when this was written, in the late 1950s, than they are now.

I'm looking forward to discovering if Dagny has any female relationships in her life. So far there's no mention of any friends, although she appears to have had a past relationship with Latin playboy Francisco d'Anconia, so she's had at least one person in her life besides her long-dead father and her weak-willed, baggy half-brother.

Her mother isn't mentioned at all, so far, and all we can surmise about her is a predilection for a man in a uniform who has good health insurance, all national holidays off, and a precipitation- and gloom-impervious work ethic.

KrugTron the Invicible

A well-deserved celebration of the many triumphant battles engaged in by Krgthulu (which K-man himself links to from his blog.) Noah Smith writes:

In the econ blogosphere, a similar (Voltron episode) dynamic has played out over the last few years. Each week a Robeast will show up, bellowing predictions of inflation and/or soaring interest rates. And each week, Paul Krugman...I mean, KrugTron, Defender of the Blogoverse, will strike down the monster with a successful prediction of... low inflation and continued low interest rates. Goldbugs, "Austrians", New Classical economists, and harrumphing conservatives of all stripes have eagerly gone head-to-head with KrugTron in the prediction wars, and have been summarily cloven in twain.

KISS-Gaga

My actor friend Renee makes her living as a Lady Gaga impersonator. Here she is at an event which also included KISS impersonators.

Looks like a great party.

My disappointment with Iris Mack

I discovered who Iris Mack was thanks to researching my next play, which focuses on a Brooksley Born type character. One of Born's nemeses was Robert Rubin and another was Larry Summers, and Iris Mack had very interesting dealings with both of them.

First, she was apparently fired by Larry Summers for blowing the whistle on questionable financial dealings:

In an e-mail sent May 30, 2002 to Marne Levine, chief of staff for then-Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, Mack detailed her concerns regarding what she deemed HMC’s “frightening” usage of derivatives and statistical modeling techniques, as well as the Company’s lack of a timely and portfolio-wide risk management system, high employee turnover rate, and low level of productivity in the workplace, specifically among managers.  

According to documents and e-mail records, all provided by Mack, Levine had initially assured Mack that their correspondence would remain confidential. But on July 1, HMC chief Jack R. Meyer called Mack into a meeting, in which she was presented with copies of her e-mails, according to a letter sent to Levine and Summers by Mack’s attorney. 

The next day, Meyer dismissed Mack, pointing to “these baseless allegations against HMC [that you sent] to individuals outside of HMC,” the letter says.

Now I've been criticizing Larry Summers long before I watched the excellent Frontline episode The Warning which portrays him, along with Rubin and Alan Greenspan as anti-regulation absolutists who shut Born down when she tried to regulate derivatives - the out of control "black box" financial instruments of mass destruction that almost took down the world economy in 2008.

No I was all over his shit because of his "women aren't as good at math/science as men" speech at Harvard, which some claim cost him the position as Secretary of the Treasury under Obama. If that's true - good! So nobody needs to tell me what an asshole Larry Summers is.

I wasn't as familiar with Robert Rubin, and Mack wrote a hum-dinger of an article about him in the Huffington Post - Bob Rubin Just Wants to Be Cuddled. She talks about her incident with Summers here too, but the real dirt is on (the married) Rubin:

I also remember teasingly inquiring as to whether he'd flown in on a Citigroup jet again. (He'd called me from one in December.) "It's one of the perks," he replied a bit sheepishly. 

Things were much more relaxed by the time I walked him back to the Ritz - which was along the way to my South Beach condo. When we passed a homeless man along the way he made a bit of a show of opening up his fat leather billfold and producing a dollar -- "There but for the grace of God..." he remarked melodramatically -- and I gave him a lot of heat for that, because who exactly did he think he was kidding? I said give the man a job. Heck, you're the head of a bank! But when we reached the hotel entrance, the tension returned. He got this funny look on his face, and asked: 

"Do you want to go upstairs and...cuddle?" 

So that's what this is about. For a moment I was totally speechless and had to dig into my Harvard trained PhD brain to figure out what the hell he meant by "cuddling"! What can I say; once a teetotaling math geek, always a bit slow to pick up on signals from the menfolk. So the former Treasury Secretary had a "crush" on me! And not long afterward the former Treasury Secretary had his tongue down my throat and hands everywhere sort of like an octopus. But as soon as the thought entered my mind -- the former Treasury Secretary has his tongue down my throat?! -- I came to my senses a bit and awkwardly went back home before we both got too carried away. This is to say, I said to myself that there would be no other former Treasury Secretary appendages entering any other of my orifices.

So I was prepared to love Iris Mack. And I'm planning to create a character based on her for my play - she's brainy, beautiful, ground-breaking (the second African-American woman to get a doctoral in Math from Harvard), a fan of whistle-blowers - she gave a shout-out to Brooksley Born, and gave grief to two out of the three members of the evil Trio (Greenspan, Rubin, Summers). But I should have worshipped her from afar. Instead I tracked her Facebook profile down and friended her.

Oh dear.

Here's what her home page looks like today.

In case you don't recognize that guy, he's Ben Carson, the right-wing homophobe who was so rude to Obama. Mack appears to love Carson as much as she despises Obama. Carson was so inappropriate that even Fox News' Cal Thomas said so.

This thing for Ben Carson, alone, would be enough to make me de-friend her in total disgust.

She also "likes" both Mitt Romey and Ron Paul, although she appears to be much more of a Libertarian than a Republican, she has much more pro-Ron Paul stuff on her page.

But she's not a standard conservative - the really weird thing about Iris Mack, based on her Facebook page, is that she's also a raw foods, anti-agribusiness type - she frequently posts anti-Monsanto stuff. She's indistinguishable from my old left-wing hippie friends here. And I can't find anything about Ron Paul being against agribusiness other than his objections to farming subsidies - nothing about Monsanto or the use of chemicals in agriculture, which is what Mack cares about.

Yet in spite of her apparent desire to regulate Monsanto's free-market use of chemicals, she's anti-government, and anti-taxes. But she posts an "Occupy London Stock Exchange" graphic on her page that says: "When the rich rob the poor it's called banking. When the poor fight back it's called violence."

Ron Paul is against regulating the markets. The same exact position taken by Greenspan, Rubin and Summers, causing Brooksley Born to come into conflict with them. The same Brooksley Born Mack applauds for her whistleblowing against those ideological soulmates of Ron Paul, for acting exactly as Ron Paul would have done.

And if her political incoherence wasn't enough she believes in conspiracies - the kinds of things that wackos on both the right and the left can agree about. Mack posts links to:
Anti-UN conspiracies
Anti-Eurozone conspiracies
Anti Illuminati/Rothschild conspiracies
and most appalling of all, anti-vaccine conspiracies.

Well that's too bad - here I thought I found someone besides Paul Krugman to read up on about financial issues. But turns out she's your standard Libertarian-anti-government paranoid. Dammit.

See also: Iris Mack - even further down the far-right conspiracy rabbit hole

Stomping at the Frim Fram Jam

Chuck Taylors - favorite shoe of Lindy Hoppers.

Well I finally - finally - did it! I started learning the Lindy Hop. I put on my Chuck Taylors and headed out after work to the pre-Frim Fram Jam 1-hour class tonight.

I've only been talking about it since early 2010.

But alas - I submitted to the traditional sexism.

It was a really big class - like 25 people. I think the instructor was overwhelmed by the turn-out. I didn't expect there to be more than six people, myself. On the plus side I had lots of different dance partners (we were made to switch partners like every five minutes), on the negative side, it meant there was no individual instruction, and we barely got a chance to learn any one step before we were commanded to use it. The first 15 minutes I didn't know the difference between a hop step and a step-step until one of my partners, who was pretty damn experienced for a supposedly raw beginner class, showed me. And in spite of such a large class I'm pretty sure I was the oldest person there. Bleh. Although it meant I got to dance with younger guys and a couple of them were very cute indeed. It's a trade-off.

Back to the sexism - the instructor told us at the top of the class to pick a role for the evening's lesson - leader or follower. Now since all established partner dancing springs from one patriarchal tradition or another, I figured that "leader" meant guy and "follower" meant lady,  but since the instructor didn't designate leader/follower by gender, and since it is the 21st century, I thought maybe people would switch it up a little. Not a chance - when the instructor said for the leaders to stand with their left foot forward and followers with their right, I was the only woman with my left foot forward. So, coward that I am, I immediately switched to right foot. For one thing, I already felt somewhat freakish by being the oldest person in the class, and didn't want to stick out even more,  but also if I was a leader it meant I wouldn't get to dance with men, only women. And I'm too much of a big flaming heterosexual to want to partner with women.

I'm such a traditionalist. *sigh*

Mind you, once I'm good enough at this dance, I do plan to occasionally switch it up, assuming I find a male partner who wants to go along with that. Because really, the dance moves aren't so flagrantly butch and femme that you can't switch up without losing your gender identity.

After the hour-long class was over, I didn't feel confident enough in my moves to join in the actual Frim Fram Jam though... maybe next week.

Like so many great aspects of American culture, the Lindy Hop was invented by African Americans - watch these amazing dancers.

Move Over, Little Debbie

Of course, some prefer to drink Virginia Dare.

I don't normally think about the racist web site VDARE.com but I couldn't help it today when I read the NYTimes news report that they've been excavating the site of the "Lost Colony" and apparently evidence of cannibalism was dug up:

Archaeologists excavating a trash pit at the Jamestown colony site in Virginia have found the first physical evidence of cannibalism among the desperate population, corroborating written accounts left behind by witnesses. Cut marks on the skull and skeleton of a 14-year-old girl show that her flesh and brain were removed, presumably to be eaten by the starving colonists during the harsh winter of 1609.

Oh no! They ate Virginia Dare!

Virginia Dare is VDARE.COM's ideal of white racial purity. As it says on their about page:

Today, Virginia Dare seems to be vanishing from American education too. But she was a fixture for earlier generations. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt felt free to give a speech commemorating the 350th anniversary of her birth. At one point, I planned to pay homage by bestowing her name on the heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in Alien Nation, about the flight of the last white family in Los Angeles. It seemed . . . symmetrical.
I was dissuaded. 

But multiculturalists will be happy to know that there is always the possibility that the colonists survived, merging with the local Indians. There are fables that Virginia Dare as a young woman got involved in a love triangle with a warrior and an angry medicine man, who transformed her into a white doe. And there have been serious suggestions that The Lost Colony is the answer to the historical problem of the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, an English-speaking group of unclear origin. 

(Anthropologists call such groups "tri-racial isolates." Significant of the times, and perhaps of federal subsidies, the Lumbees seem recently to have been emphasizing their claim to pure Indian status. For example, click here...  For more on the white doe legend, click here...) 

Actually, anthropologists and historians reject that "serious suggestion." But let us continue...

So Virginia Dare could be symbolic of the coming racial nirvana that immigration enthusiasts are forced to start fantasizing about when you compel them to look at the statistical consequences of current policy.

Or perhaps not. The actress Heather Locklear (Melrose Place, etc.) is claimed as a prominent Lumbee. But if, through some miracle of genetic recombination, Virginia Dare is reborn in Ms. Locklear’s beautiful face, John White might well have recognized her.

Well I guess the VDARE crew can rest easier now - this new evidence seems to indicate that rather than merging with the local Indians as the "multiculturalists" (the word has about the same meaning for VDARErs as "Satan" has for fundamentalist Christians) so fervently wish for, instead THEY ATE EACH OTHER!

Naturally the VDARE crew are huge fans of The Bell Curve, which they characterize as truthful and brave. They love to imagine themselves as defenders of dispassionate science in the face of political correctness. That's a constant refrain of Steven Pinker, who is so oppressed by political correctness that he and his ideological soulmates get to complain about it and expound on the glories of accepting the scientific truth of white male intellectual superiority (in so many words) in virtually every media outlet.

Naturally the VDARE crew love Steven Pinker - and Pinker's chosen defender Razib Khan.

Wikipedia has an entry on VDARE which includes this section - it gives you some idea of exactly where they are coming from - in spite of Steve Sailer's defense of interracial marriage.

Hurricane Katrina and IQ Steve Sailer argued on VDARE following Hurricane Katrina that the lower average IQ of African-Americans found in intelligence research correlates with "poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups resulting in the need for stricter moral guidance from society." He said that looting after the 1995 Kobe earthquake was minimal because "when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks."^[16] 

John Podhoretz called Sailer's comments racist.^[17] Sailer responded that his accusers admitted a correlation between low IQ and poor judgment by supporting the Supreme Court's 2002 Atkins v. Virginia decision "that, in effect, banned the death penalty for killers with IQs under 70."^[18] John Derbyshire defended Sailer, citing large variance in incarceration rates by race and birth rates for unmarried women by race.^[19]

John Derbyshire is infamous as being too racist even for the National Review.

It should be noted that Derbyshire is married to a Chinese woman, so Sailer would hardly come out against interracial marriage in general and insult his VDARE colleague. It could be argued that Sailer and Derbyshire aren't so much generalized racists as haters of African Americans.

While I was watching Obama's superlative White House Correspondents' performances I remembered that Al Franken had been a guest comedian twice during Clinton's administrations and got off a nice shot at Charles Murray, one of the authors of The Bell Curve:

...also here tonight is Charles Murray, who I understand has been hard at work on a sequel to the Bell Curve entitled "Jazz, the Music Created by Morons."

Others prefer a chaw of Virginia Dare.

UPDATE: I was amazed a couple of years ago when I saw right-wing racist Razib Khan used by Steven Pinker as a defense against an unfavorable book review in the New Yorker- but apparently Pinker used Steve Sailer(!) as a defense against Malcolm Gladwell's objections to Pinker's critique of his book:

That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published the Journal of Productivity Analysis,  analyze forty years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance—in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs—they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top ten positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.” 

 I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a marketing background who is best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl. 

Poor Steven Pinker - he's a wealthy, respected and famous author who suffers the slings and arrows of "political correctness" - which appears to consist entirely of the rare occasions when someone points out that he considers bona fide racists to be important colleagues and allies of his.

Steven Pinker is rapidly becoming a right-wing laughing stock, right up there with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. And the late Christopher Hitchens - and I'm not sorry he's dead, that misogynist Bush-supporting fuckhead.

It appears to me that far from suffering from left-wing political correctness, Pinker is the beneficiary of the most powerful form of political correctness of all - the taboo against seriously considering arguments against celebrity intellectuals.

Although fortunately the New Yorker has broken that taboo, at least in the case of Pinker.

You can tickle my Elmo any time

Obama crushes it at the White House Correspondents' Dinner

Obama has got to be the funniest president we have ever had. Here he is at the 2013 White House Correspondents' Dinner. He is so good - he's much funnier than Conan. And this is not a fluke - if you watch all his WHCD appearances to date you can see he is great every time - I can't help but have a big grin on my face the whole time I'm watching these.

He might have been the best at the 2011 WHCD - but my perception might be colored by the fact that while he was displaying his impeccable comic delivery, he was at the same time preparing to wipe out Osama bin Laden. Unless he screws up big time in the next few years, Obama is going down in history as one of our greatest presidents - the great comic delivery is just gravy. But I love it so much.

And who wouldn't laugh at this line: "why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?"

Not to mention the utterly perfect smack-down of Maureen Dowd.

The latest NYCPlaywrights video

Wow, I recorded five videos last week in one afternoon - that was exhausting. Now it's going to take me five weeks to get them all edited and online. And these weren't mini-movies like some of the videos I've done for the NYCPlaywrights Play of the Month project - these were "just" script-in-hand readings. Although I did get fancy with close-up shots and such.

Here is the first one - my actor buddy Clem here is awesome here - his hysterical laugh is truly creepy - and he did just as creepy for each of the three takes. I was impressed. And he recently scored himself a recurring role on Boardwalk Empire. Yay!

The Mikki Kendall lied abortion story controversy

Read all the posts about Mikki Kendall's career of lies and hatred here.

In May 2011, a few months before Mikki Kendall and her sycophants began a Tumblr smear campaign of lies against me, calling me a "racist" because I disagreed with the claim that John Lennon and Yoko Ono are racists (the result is that when you Google my name these extremists' Tumblr posts calling me a racist come up on the first page), Kendall had a piece published in Salon entitled Abortion Saved My Life.

Shortly after, anti-abortion activist Jill Stanek made an issue out of it.

Now I'm a liberal and an atheist and a feminist and I'm not about to start siding with a bunch of right-wing anti-abortion activists.

On the other hand, no anti-abortion activist has ever undertaken a deliberate smear campaign against me. It took a liberal feminist pro-choice advocate like Mikki Kendall to do that.


As much as I would like to automatically dismiss whatever any anti-abortion activist says, Stanek does get at something that cannot be dismissed. Stanek wrote:

I asked why hadn’t Kendall sued? Why didn’t she name both the hospital and doctor? I concluded my comments at Salon by writing the publication was negligent for posting Kendall’s story without fact-checking and should retract it. 

Pro-aborts went on to slam me with their standard fare of slurs, nor did Kendall handle the criticisms very well. She blogged on May 27 that pro-lifers were “motherf***ers” and threatened, “I’m not a nice girl, and you’re about to see that.” 

Then, on May 29, still aggravated by “the comments and emails that are flooding my inbox,” Kendall blogged: 

Some say I should name and shame the doctor that refused to do the procedure. If I knew why he refused I might have done just that, but since I know that there are many possible reasons that he did not do it? I’ve left him to deal with the internal procedures in place. 

Excuse me? Kendall’s entire Salon story was built upon her accusation that a heartless, negligent, anti-abortion doctor was willing to let her hemorrhage to death rather than provide a life-saving abortion.

Stanek does have a point. The sub-heading of the article is "I almost died in an emergency room because the doctor on call refused to perform a necessary procedure." And Kendall writes:

The doctor who didn’t do abortions was supposed to have contacted her (or someone else who would perform the procedure) immediately. He didn’t. Neither did his students. Supposedly there was a communication breakdown and they thought she had been notified, but I doubt it. I don’t know if his objections were religious or not; all I know is that when a bleeding woman was brought to him for treatment he refused to do the only thing that could stop the bleeding. Because he didn’t do abortions. Ever. 

My two kids at home almost lost their mother because someone decided that my life was worth less than that of a fetus that was going to die anyway. My husband had told them exactly what my regular doctor said, and the ER doctor had already warned us what would have to happen. Yet none of this mattered when confronted by the idea that no one needs an abortion... 

The article presents no evidence at all for the doctor's views on abortion. All we know is that he didn't do abortions. Kendall even admits that she doesn't know. Perhaps because he had no experience doing abortions? That could have been it, but Kendall doesn't care.

And then she suggests that the doctor deliberately left her to die (my emphasis):

Supposedly there was a communication breakdown and they thought she had been notified, but I doubt it. 

Kendall "doubts" that it was a legitimate communication breakdown. How convenient, since nobody would be interested in publishing her article if it was a story about a tragedy that almost occurred in a hospital due to a communication breakdown, because anybody who knows anything about hospitals understands that those kinds of situations happen all the time. It's a perfectly plausible explanation.

So on the basis of nothing more than "I doubt it" Kendall proceeds to accuse the doctor of attempted second-degree murder, stating that:

...(he) decided that my life was worth less than that of a fetus that was going to die anyway

The difference between her smear of me and her smear of the doctor is that she doesn't name the doctor. But of course she wouldn't because Mikki Kendall and Salon would have been sued for defamation if she had made such an ill-founded and outrageous claim against any individual.

She did name me though, because apparently it's legal to spread a malicious lie about someone on the Internet, if you "only" falsely claim they are a racist.

The article clearly does give the anti-abortion side a legitimate gripe - Salon published what appears to be a deliberate attempt to smear those with anti-abortion views as heartless murderers.

So thanks for giving the anti-abortion brigade the moral high ground, Mikki Kendall and Salon.

And thanks for making me agree with an anti-abortion activist, because I must echo something that Jill Stanek wondered about Salon - do they do fact-checking? Do they have any editors? How did Mikki Kendall's scurrilous sensationalist piece of yellow journalism come to be published by Salon?

Mikki Kendall hates white feminists

As I've recently blogged, it appears that what Mikki Kendall hates more than anything is white feminists.

A wise man once said:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Now I thought MLK's point was that we all deserve to be judged by the content of our character. But apparently Mikki Kendall doesn't agree with that - at least not when it comes to white feminists. We are all one big evil undifferentiated mass to her.

I found out who Mikki Kendall was because I found her smearing my name as a "racist" in Google results, because I disagreed with her claim that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were/are racists. At first I thought that Kendall (along with her white sycophant Rebecca Scott aka The Mad Gastronomer) was sincerely upset that I said John Lennon and Yoko Ono were not racists. But as I've studied her work over the past year and a half - since her smears against me keep coming up in my name's Google results it's hard to forget about her -  I've come to the realization that the real issue isn't the alleged social views of one octogenarian Japanese-American celebrity and one long-dead British celebrity (who of course were married to each other while being different races) it's the fact that I expressed an opinion that Mikki Kendall disagreed with - and I persisted in being a white feminist while doing so.

What finally brought Mikki Kendall's deranged hatred of white feminists home for me was the Salon abortion article controversy. I won't get into the controversy itself just now, although some interesting points were raised. For now I want to talk about Kendall's appalling response to Amanda Marcotte.

Marcotte is pretty famous in the blogger world - famous enough that when Marcotte was hired by then-presidential candidate John Edwards for his campaign, right-wing Catholic nutter Bill Donohue saw to it that she was fired.

When anti-abortion activists accused Kendall of lying in her Salon article, Marcotte came to Kendall's defense. That was May 2011.

Kendall expressed her gratitude nine months later by attacking Marcotte by name, implying that she was getting credit for something she stole from non-white bloggers.

Clearly it doesn't matter to Kendall that Marcotte has been blogging for quite a while and is most likely more famous than these other bloggers. To consider that possibility would be to give Marcotte the benefit of the doubt.

No, Marcotte is clearly guilty as sin, because she's a white feminist and Kendall wants to make sure you know that it's Marcotte's whiteness that makes her a WOC-blog content-thief.

Now I have certainly had my disagreements with Amanda Marcotte - most recently about a year ago we got into a debate about whether or not most Internet porn was misogynist - I wanted to know what Marcotte's empirical evidence was, and she didn't feel she needed to provide any. I objected to this.

But for Mikki Kendall to turn around and attack Marcotte for simply being better known than non-white bloggers - or probably more to the point, better known than Mikki Kendall - is a truly shitty thing to do. 

However, Mikki Kendall is certainly within her First Amendment rights to disagree with me, and Amanda Marcotte and to hate us and all other white feminists, loudly and publicly for her own satisfaction and for the satisfaction of her white-feminist-hater sycophants.

My problem with Mikki Kendall is that she didn't bother to engage in a debate with me about Lennon/Ono's alleged racism - probably because she didn't have a good argument. 

What she did was to try to shut the argument down. By smearing me as a racist thanks to Tumblr and her Tumblr zombie friends. Kendall wants to intimidate me right out of my First Amendment rights through the threat of smearing.

And while she's trying to intimidate me out of my First Amendment rights, she fully expects to have a legitimate career as a writer for Jane and Salon and Publishers Weekly.

More on Mikki Kendall's misogynist pal

You can read all my posts about the full-time career of hate-mongering by unethical journalist Mikki Kendall here.

The thing about Mikki Kendall's attempt to smear me via Tumblr-Google-bombing is that she doesn't vet the people who "like" her blog post smears. As I mentioned yesterday, Andrew Bellware liked one of her bullshit blog posts and he's as misogynist as they come.

But really, the Grand Wizard of the KKK could like and repost Kendall's smear about me and she wouldn't care - because what she really cares about isn't actual racism, or fighting actual racists, it's trying to shut white feminists up because she hates white feminists more than anything else. And the more people who repost or like her garbage, the more she can attack white feminists. And no that is not hyperbole. She is obsessed with her hatred for white feminists:

Here Mikki Kendall pushes the idea that white feminists hate Michelle Obama.
Once again, Mikki Kendall finds that white feminists fail.
And of course Mikki Kendall believes that white feminists are racists.

The best part though is that she actually appears to be attempting to make a career as a writer and/or academic while at the same time operating as a Tumblr-mob bully. More about that soon.

Andrew Bellware, Mikki Kendall supporter enjoys pictures of trussed up women.

Well it is a white woman in the photo. Maybe Mikki Kendall is OK with it, since it's only a white woman and they are the root of all evil. Especially Lena Dunham, who accepted an offer to have her own TV show and didn't refuse the opportunity on the basis that there is still injustice all over the world.

Because if TV executives don't do shows about women of color we all know who is to blame - white feminists.

When extremists attack

I've mentioned here before that I was the target of some extremists who, because I disagreed with them about John Lennon and Yoko Ono  (I said Lennon/Ono were not racists) decided to use their Tumblr accounts to tag me as a racist in Google results.

At first I thought the source of the smear was someone named The Mad Gastronomer - her real name is Rebecca Scott - but eventually I realized that Scott was just repeating something from Mikki Kendall's Tumblr account, called Esoterica. Kendall blogs under the name karnythia.

Who is Mikki Kendall? Well that's an interesting question, and one which I will probably be addressing in detail soon. It turns out that a friend of mine has a mutual friend of hers on Facebook, and I thought I'd see if contacting Kendall through a social network (she doesn't include her email address on her Tumblr account) would convince her to stop lying about me online. We'll see what happens.

But here's an interesting thing about extremists like Mikki Kendall - they are so extreme that they end up hurting their own ideological allies and aiding the very people they claim to oppose.

Here is an example - the thing about Tumblr is that as people repost somebody else's story, it goes higher on Google results. Now it turns out that a loathsome misogynist by the name of Andrew Bellware has a Tumblr account, and as you can see here, he decided to help push Kendall & friends' lie about me higher by liking her post - his Tumblr account is called pandoramachine.

Notice the bottom comment about "white feminists" - it's an increasingly unavoidable conclusion that for Kendall and her mob white feminists are the root of all evil.

For over a year I've just ignored Kendall and friends' slurs against me. But now that they are in league with a woman-hating* freak like Bellware, shit's about to get real.

I initially tangled with Andrew Bellware when I blogged about the fact that he was mentioned on the web site Nudity Required, No Pay, which chronicles the various attempts throughout the entertainment industry to exploit actors, especially female actors. This developed into a year long barrage of personal attacks from Bellware - not only publishing a parody I wrote in its entirety on his site without my permission, attacking me while publishing my name and personal email address (although he does that to his "friends" too), along with defamatory statements and "poetry" written specifically to attack me via my personal life, (yes, he has the emotional sophistication of an adolescent -but that's pretty obvious when you look at the dorm room aesthetic of his web site - including at least one photo of a trussed up woman, which Bellware declares is "awesome" - I wonder how Mikki Kendall likes that)  but even more grotesquely, through a series of search string texts with extreme sexual and misogynistic messages.  I blogged about that here. Here's a sample of the kinds of things he chose to enter into Google search, knowing that I would read them:

[my name] heavens mergatroyd needs it hard in the ass 

[my name] heavens mergatroyd slurps it down  

[my name] heavens mergatroyd can't keep cock out of her ass

There are plenty more where that came from - he did it regularly from March - December 2010.

So I find it very strange that Mikki Kendall is basically in league with this asshole. She seems to hate other feminists much more than misogynists. Which I guess is how extremists roll.

*Bellware does have female friends who aid him in making his "movies" and who have no problem with his intense misogyny - but of course there are also female Republicans and women who oppose abortion. There are all kinds of women out there who will work with misogynists, for reasons best known to themselves.

Frontline web site: a treasure trove of content

Damn I'm busy lately - I barely have time to spend hours on the Internet.

Recently I've discovered the treasure trove of stuff that is the Frontline web site, most especially the shows and online content devoted to examining the economic system and what went wrong with it. Just the interviews alone are incredible - they have Krugman and Goolsbee.

How could you not love Goolsbee, the way he expresses himself? He suggests that AIG deserves the "Nobel Prize for Evil."

Watch The FRONTLINE Interview: Austan Goolsbee on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

A great anecdote from Goolsbee at the end of the clip above:

"So the financial crisis is absolutely full-blown, and at the beginning of December, the president has named all of the [people] who are going to be taking the economic jobs in the Cabinet. And they have the first big briefing in Chicago at the beginning of December. Everyone comes in, and we get a blizzard in Chicago. So most of the leading economic officials of the last two decades, they can't get a cab. They are all taking the El in and traipsing through the snow to get to the transition office...

They go through, and they brief the president, and absolutely one thing after another. It couldn't be worse -- epically horrible. The GDP we thought at that time is going to be shrinking 3, 4 percent a year at annual rates, which is extremely bad. Job market -- horrible. Financial markets -- Tim Geithner says that we can't argue that there won't be another collapse; we don't know that they will vote the second half of the TARP; the stock market may collapse further. [It's] not clear there won't be contagion.

I talk about the housing market. Prices are down. People can't finance their mortgages. Home wealth, household wealth has fallen the most on record, bigger than the beginning of the Great Depression. We go through one after another. The briefing ends.

I go up to the president, who I've known for sometime, and I say, "Mr. President, that has got to be the worst background briefing that a president-elect has had since 1932, Franklin Roosevelt, if not Abraham Lincoln, 1861."

And he says: "Goolsbee, I hate to break it to you. That's not even my worst briefing this week."

You can see why Jon Stewart loves Goolsbee so much - he had him on the show six times. Which is alot for an economist, especially when you consider he had Elizabeth Warren on four times and Krugman on only once.

Here is part 1 of the extended Daily Show Goolsbee interview, the most recent one.

More Randiness

As I said, I couldn't resist reading the New Yorker's review of Atlas Shrugged before diving into the novel. I already knew the basic outline of the plot, but even so the review contains a few surprises, so

SPOILER ALERT

I had to LOL at this bit:

...with the country tumbling into ruins around their ears and armed marauders laying waste to whole states (the liberals) offer (John Galt) the post of Economic Dictator. He curtly declines. The desperate liberals, including Dagny's brother, are completely at a loss before a man like Galt. So they torture him.

"We want you to take over!... We want you to rule!... We order you to give orders!... We demand that you dictate!... We order you to save us!... We order you to think!..."

This sort of thing doesn't accomplish much. The electronic torture machine breaks down before Galt does (no fooling, these liberals can't do anything right), James Taggart goes out of his mind, and the Utopia branch of the N.A.M., revolvers drawn, dashes to the rescue, scattering terror and confusion through the ranks of the liberals.

"God damn you!" yelled the (liberal) chief, seized a gun with his left hand, and fired at the deserter. In time with the fall of the man's body, the window burst into a shower of glass - and from the limb of a tree, as from a catapult, the tall, slender figure of a man flew into the room, landed on its feet and fired at the first guard in reach. "Who are you? screamed some terror-blinded voice. "Ragnar Danneskjold."

I forgot to mention Danneskjold, because he is only a pirate. Anyway, John Galt and Dagny escape from the doomed world of liberalism and return to the valley of unfettered enterprise...

The bit "because he is only a pirate" killed me.

As I said, this is the last time The New Yorker mentioned Rand until 1995. No doubt after this review the New Yorker figured it was all up for Rand - who could take such literarily-challenged nutjob seriously?

Funny thing about that...  when they do finally mention her again in it's in "Twilight of the Goddess" marveling at how popular her work is after all these years:

Thirteen years after Rand's death, her books still sell more than three hundred thousand copies a year; "The Fountainhead," her slow-building blockbuster of 1943, was made an honorary Book-of-the-Month Club selection to mark half a century of unabating demand. But the size of her ever-renewing audience is only a part of the story. At a "Fountainhead" anniversary banquet held by the Ayn Rand Institute, nearly two hundred people paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars each to listen to excerpts from Rand's private letters, and to watch one another bid more than five thousand dollars for her blue-green metal ashtray with matching lighter and twenty-five thousand dollars for the manuscript of her last speech, for which Rand herself had been paid in gold. Throughout the festivities, responsibly conservative business executives, teachers, secretaries, lawyers, and a scattering of college students who'd been barely old enough to read at the time of Rand's death discussed the principles of heroic individualism by which she had taught them all to live..."

Speaking of delusional suckers, on one of the pages of the 1957 New Yorker review is this ad:

You just can't keep bad ideas down. 

And now it's time for that great quotation about novels that inspire cults (Krugman also likes to quote it):

-- There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

How to succeed as an Ayn Rand Character

Too busy to do much blogging - enjoy this humor at Ayn Rand's expense until I can write a longer blog post.

Whip Smart

In addition to my Ayn Rand related play, I'm also working on the full-length MISTRESS ILSA, and so decided to do research by taking Melissa Febos' memoir "Whip Smart" out of the library. Not surprisingly, this book is a much quicker read than "Atlas Shrugged." Although I have to admit that this is due in part to the fact that I skimmed quickly over the bits about Febos' struggles with drug addictions and her personal relationships outside of the dungeon. I was looking for useful details about life as a dominatrix, and also sorry to say I don't like Febos' literary style, which is inelegant and has a whiff of women's magazine perky self-helpiness. So that doesn't really put her ahead of Rand, aesthetically. But clearly she's well ahead of Rand subject-wise. So with the skimming I got through Whip Smart in one night.

As entertaining as it is, I really didn't learn much new about the lives of dominatrices. MISTRESS ILSA actually does cover quite a bit of the basics. One thing I did find interesting and a contrast to my play, is that whips aren't used all the time in real dungeons. There's quite a bit more of mind games and gross medical equipment-based scenarios and verbal abuse than actual whipping. Febos says that whipping was one of her favorite aspects of being a dominatrix because of the skill factor.

But except for some of the more outre and gross predilections of Febos' clients, it wasn't especially informative. I had the general framework of the dungeon world right already. I've never been in a dungeon but I know two women who worked as dominatrices so I did have some prior knowledge from them and from other readings.

And now that I'm done this book, it's back to "Atlas Shrugged." *sigh*

Leading Men Age, But Their Love Interests Don’t

Vulture has an article that possibly explains why so many middle-aged men on dating sites expect to get much younger women. The best part is the handy charts.

For each of our leading men, we tried to pick a representative sample of films — usually ten — where that A-lister had a notable love interest or wife, then we plotted the age gaps on our charts over the course of that star's career. (Because production dates for older movies can be hard to come by, we measured the stars' ages on the day the film in question was released.) The results confirmed our suspicions: As leading men age, their love interests stay the same, and even the oldest men on our list have had few romantic pairings with a woman their own age (or even one out of her mid-thirties). If our actor was sharing the screen with an A-lister of commensurate star power like Julia Roberts or Angelina Jolie, the age difference would drop somewhat, but in movies that relied solely on our guy's big name, the lesser-known love interests would nearly always be decades younger.

Harrison Ford has one of the most ridiculous age-gap charts:

While Tom Hanks has one of the least ridiculous:

Naturally the comments after the article include your standard responses from grumpy old men who point to bullshit evolutionary psychology theories (most of them developed by old men) in an attempt to justify this situation. But since Hollywood movies are primarily created by men for men, of course they're going to be chock-full of male fantasy scenarios. This is no doubt a major reason why I don't go to see more than one or two Hollywood movies at most each year. 

Reading Atlas Shrugged

Yep, that's what I'm going to do. I mean, like anybody else with an interest in the literary arts, I've laughed at the lameness of Ayn Rand's novels, but in truth I've only read The Fountainhead, and that when I was in high school. But I'm not going to go through that again just to have it fresh in mind. Instead I'm going to read her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged.

Atlas seems to be more popular with Libertarians anyway, if my former colleague counts for anything. He was a gay, devout Christian Libertarian (yes I can't figure out how that works either) and he would occasionally use the company email system to share information about libertarian predilections. Most memorably, when Farah Fawcett died he had to let us in on the fascinating tidbit that she was once in the running to portray Dagney Taggart in a movie version of the novel.

I can guarantee that he and I were the only people in that mass of blue-shirts who had any idea who "Dagney Taggart" was. And even a friend of mine at that company, a woman in her 60s who had been married to a French man and spent 20 years living in France - and so whom I thought was well-informed, had no idea who Ayn Rand was until I told her.

Although perhaps she can be forgiven for that since Ayn Rand's renaissance only began happening while my friend was living in France. Rand was a fairly obscure cult figure until the late 1990s. To get a sense of how her fame has waned and waxed consider that when you do a search on the name "Ayn Rand" in the New Yorker archives, she is mentioned in the review of Atlas Shrugged in October 1957, and then doesn't appear again until June 1995. Then another five years pass and she's mentioned in an April 2000 article about Alan Greenspan, called "The Fountainhead" - and after that she's mentioned about once a year through the 2000s and then after 2008 she's mentioned monthly, and even more frequently in the run-up to the 2012 election. That's no surprise since the cult she inspired turns out to include presidential candidates Ron Paul, son Rand Paul and Mitt Romney's running mate Paul Ryan. And of course Alan Greenspan, who was not only a member of the Rand cult but as The Fountainhead article explains, was a member of her inner circle.

I've bashed Ayn Rand in a previous play of mine, Christmas Blessings, but I want to really go after her in a new play I'm working on - I portray an Objectivist reading group - and so I feel like I really should read Atlas to get all the details right, even if there is no way I can read anything by Rand impartially.

I expect I will read Atlas one chapter at a time and report back here as I go.

But I couldn't resist reading the New Yorker's review of the book first...

It's Shakespeare's birthday time again

The people at the Shakespeare Birthday Trust gave me another heads-up about their annual birthday project for the Bard. I posted it on the NYCPlaywrights web site which should guarantee their getting a decent number of responses.

For 2011 I sent them a link to my post about getting turned onto Shakespeare via the BBC Shakespeare plays version of AS YOU LIKE IT with Helen Mirren.

Then last year I sent them a link to this piece about the solace of sonnets.

I turned that piece into a monologue which I made a video of last summer. I guess I'll use that as my entry this year.

Spring can really hang you up the most - 2013

This version of "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most" is the first I had heard, so maybe that's why I can't stand the versions that have an annoying preamble that goes:

Once I was a sentimental thing;
threw my heart away each spring.
Now a spring romance
hasn't got a chance.
Promised my first dance to winter.
All I've got to show's a splinter
for my little fling.

Ick. And every other version I've heard includes that preamble - Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand, Ella Fitzgerald, and on and on. And sorry to say the original version by Fran Landesman did include those lines, but Jones rightly left it out.

And really the actual lyrics aren't that important, it's the title/refrain, which is just sooo 1950s beatnick: Spring can really hang you up the most. Man. And it's just as true today as when it was written in 1955.

Mingus

When I first heard of the Mingus album I had no desire to run out and get it, since the description made it sound like it was more of a Charles Mingus album - someone I had never heard of - than a Joni Mitchell album.

And now that I have a copy in the Mitchell box set given to me by Rev. Bookburn, and can finally listen to Mingus, I can see my impression was correct - it is more of a Charles Mingus than a Joni Mitchell album. There are exactly two songs on this album that have words and music by Mitchell - all the rest are words by Mitchell and music by Mingus.

I'm not an especially big fan of Mingus. His music is from the free jazz period of endless improvisation, which just wears me down. His Pithecanthropus Erectus is a case in point. In addition to the amusing, punning title (erectus meaning upright - Mingus played the upright bass) it starts out sounding great - and then at minute 1:32 they fuck it all up with show-offy improvisation-sounding squawks and random tempos. And it just hurts my ears. Now I'm not necessarily against un-harmonious sounds - the guitar solo in the Pixies Gigantic is pretty dissonant, but the rhythm track never wavers, which keeps everything flowing. If everything becomes dissonant at the same time then you have noise. And that's a big reason why hardly anybody except hard-core free jazz aficionados listen to Charles Mingus any more.

So this is not my favorite Joni album.

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter

So here we are at Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. I'm a huge fan of the song Dreamland.

The rest, not so much. It's experimental, and experimental invariably means self-indulgent and incomplete and tiresome. It works OK as background music for a hipster coffee shop.

The songs/experiments are extremely forgettable. Mitchell was only 34 when this was released, but had been a pop star for ten years and probably figured she deserved to be a little self-indulgent. This is the first album Mitchell released that had no input from Crosby, Stills, Nash nor Young. Although Glenn Fry of the Eagles does backing vocals on "Off Night Backstreet" for one last sliver of California rock presence.

Apparently Dreamland was originally going to be on Hissing of Summer Lawns, which would have been amazing. I discovered this early version with kazoo solo(!) from the Summer Lawns sessions on Youtube.

Sunny Saturday out of the city

We rented a car (Prius - ah memories) and headed for deep South Jersey on Saturday to take the Reverend Bookburn out for dinner for his birthday.

Here we are arriving in the cul-de-sac.

The Rev, surprisingly, lives in suburban splendor. Back in our younger days the Rev was always heading for Philadelphia or New York City, but now he's out in what is practically the country, down in Gloucester County.

Here is Nome, enjoying some of the suburban splendor.

But there were no restaurants in the suburban splendor so we headed over to Collingswood NJ, where the Rev used to live in his younger days - many an itinerant punk rock band crashed on the floor of his apartment in those days. This was especially funny because at the time Collingswood was a quaint old town full of old people and thrift shops. But now it's this happening place, full of fancy and funky restaurants and artsy-craftsy shops and boutiques. Dig This.

We took the Rev to the Tortilla Press and got him a birthday brownie for dessert.

Rainy Friday in the city

Wow, the weather was crappy today, but I went out into the cold and the rain anyway. First I went with a co-worker to the New York University Torch Club for lunch - my co-worker is an alumni of NYU - to have delicious Senegal-fusion food created by chef Pierre Thiam. They even had a fire going.

I'm not sure who the guy in the portrait is - my co-worker told me but I forgot.

The view on the rainy street.

I liked the rug in front of the fire place - it needed some cleaning but I need a new rug soon - I wouldn't mind this one (if it was cleaner.)

And to cap off the day I met with my physical therapist which I love because she basically gives me a neck massage every time I see her and it feels awesome. On the way out I passed the abstract sculpture known as the Spillhous Sun Triangle. Of course there was no sun, but I couldn't resist taking this photo under one side of the triangle - the entire sculpture is reflective.

Here is another photo of the Triangle - I put a red box where I stood to get the photo above:

You can see more views of the Sun Triangle here.

This is all in a sunken plaza, which by the way, is right next door to the Death Star - aka the American headquarters of News Corp, the parent company of the dread Fox News. *shiver* Now if only I could find that thermal exhaust port.

Alyssa Rosenberg is a terrible writer, and Slate pays her to write

Slate paid an absurd person to trash ROMEO & JULIET.

Rosenberg makes a big deal about Juliet's age, and the fact that the play is not kitchen-sink enough for her tastes. And apparently the play isn't good enough for black actors either.

Romeo and Juliet's exact ages are not important to the plot. The important thing is that because of the blood feud between two groups, their children end up dead. This kind of thing does happen which is why it resonates enough to be in continual performance for over 400 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romeo_and_Juliet_in_Sarajevo

More importantly, Juliet was going to be married off to Paris - instead she marries a man of her own choosing. It's absurd to compare Juliet's situation to a young woman in the present time who has the luxury of waiting until she's 18 to marry whomever she wishes. And that's only in industrial societies - girls who are 13 years old and younger are sold into marriage by their families, often to much older men, right in the present time in some parts of the world.

But it's not like I expect Slate writers to be scholars with enough ambition to research such things - all she had to do was watch Shakespeare in Love, which not only presents bits of R&J but also makes it clear that Viola must marry a man chosen for her by her parents. As virtually all young women of the time, and most especially well-born ones, did.

Clearly Slate writers don't get paid for breadth of knowledge nor for depth of thought nor ambition of scholarship. I guess half-assed rants get more hits.

Exactly - Compulsive Love isn't actually about love

I haven't seen any more of the Compulsive Love web series since the last time I blogged about it, but I did find the only other review of the series besides my own: a web site called Comedy TV Is Dead has a review of the series. And while it is much more positive than my reviews (it would be hard to like this series less than I do) I was gratified to see that somebody shares my opinion about the way the series is being marketed (my emphasis):

I just can’t help but wonder who it’s (sic) audience will turn out to be. When it comes down to it, Compulsive Love isn’t actually about love. Those tuning in looking for something romantic will invariably be put off by the lack of it. Likewise, the comedy isn’t quite “College Humour” enough for the audience I feel it was intended for. In fact I think the name suggests this, and doesn’t seem likely to appeal to a young male audience.

Thank you!

Although I disagree with the last sentence - I think a young male audience is exactly who this series would appeal to.

In which I lament the pitiful state of women's fashions

I knew my chances were poor when I stopped in at Bloomingdales to attempt to find something to wear to work tomorrow - this sudden summer weather caught me with a closet full of cold-weather apparel.

But it's so convenient, that store, right at the Lexington Avenue N/Q/R station.

But I discovered that this season, like so many other seasons, fashion designers have conspired to rob women of all dignity. Nothing but wild clashing stripes and polka-dots and flower patterns. And odd, ugly, asymmetrical cuts. And three-quarter sleeves. When will they STOP making women's clothing with three-quarter sleeves? You don't see men's clothing with three-quarter sleeves. Because three-quarter sleeves are IDIOTIC.

And what is with the fucking sequins? Half of all the women's dresses have sequins all over them.

It's clear that fashion designers have decreed that adult women will be dressing this season like goddam clowns.

I scoured that store for something to wear that didn't make me look like a bad acid trip, and found a dress similar to the one above, except the one I found was black and dark-gray stripes. But you know, something that gave me a shred of dignity. Well guess what that garment, made of $3 worth of fabric and $5 worth of off-shore sweat-shop labor sells for? Two hundred and thirty-eight dollars. And I almost bought it because I was willing to pay not to look like a clown. I would have paid a hundred dollars for this $8 garment. But I had to draw the line at $238.

I have a sewing machine. I might just start making all my own clothing.

Playing Bill Shakespeare

I recently re-watched Shakespeare in Love and got to wondering about how many other times the man himself has been portrayed on screen. And the answer is not nearly as often as you might think.

Joseph Fiennes' Shakespeare is by far the hottest of them all. Here are some other portrayals:

Shakespeare gets punched on behalf of schoolchildren by Blackadder. Please note that Colin Firth plays Shakespeare here - in Shakespeare in Love he plays the jerkass husband of Shakespeare's lady love, played by Gwyneth Paltrow - about whom Kathy Griffin says many uncomplimentary but amusing things.

Doctor Who apparently had a storyline in which they go back in time to meet Shakespeare.

This was interesting - an entire 1978 British series about Shakespeare - who is played by Tim Curry.

And of course the scurrilous and deservedly quickly-forgotten Anonymous. It wasn't enough that they stole the man's work and gave it to Edward de Vere (because you know, how could a non-aristocrat write the works of Shakespeare?) - they had to add the insult of portraying Shakespeare as crass and a bad actor.

Derek Jacobi deserves to be visited by the angry ghost of Bill Shakespeare for his part in all this anti-Stratfordian bullshit. Would he have a total spaz attack like this?