Dylan and Ronan Farrow - still non-persons at the New Yorker

There appears to be an editorial policy at the New Yorker prohibiting the discussion of anything that might possibly embarrass Woody Allen.

Meanwhile Jessica Valenti in the Nation, which I am beginning to like more and more, addresses the issue of the presumption that Woody Allen is innocent of molestation and the refusal by almost all Woody Allen partisans to presume the innocence of Mia and Dylan Farrow. Instead, the Woody Allen partisans feel it's a closed case - Mia Farrow was a woman scorned, and we know how hysterical bitches can get. That Mia Farrow would devote her life to a malicious evil campaign to destroy Woody Allen through charges of pedophilia is considered an absolute no-brainer by these champions of the presumption of innocence.

A much better piece on the whole presumption of innocence, and which Valenti rightfully links to, is Woody Allen's Good Name by Aaron Bady. He addresses the presumption of innocence and burden of proof issue:

What is the burden of proof for assuming that a person is lying? If you are a famous film director, it turns out to be quite high. You don’t have to say a word in your defense, in fact, and people who have directed documentaries about you will write lengthy essays in the Daily Beast tearing down the testimony of your accusers. You can just go about your life making movie after movie, and it’s fine. But if you are a woman who has accused a great film director of molesting you when you were seven, the starting point is the presumption that, without real evidence, you are not telling the truth. In the court of public opinion, a woman accusing a great film director of raping her has no credibility which his fans are bound to respect. He has something to lose, his good name. She does not, because she does not have a good name. She is living in hiding, under an assumed name. And when she is silent, the Daily Beast does not rise to her defense.

Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown

I took this screen shot at 6:50 PM on Sunday, February 2, 2014. It had been announced a few hours earlier that Phillip Seymour Hoffman had died.

Dylan Farrow's open letter in which she charges Allen with molestation was posted online by the NYTimes Saturday night. Normally the New Yorker would be all over that celebrity tragedy crap - as can be attested by the speed with which they got one of their staff writers to do a piece about Hoffman within hours. They have yet to acknowledge Dylan Farrow's unique contribution to American celebrity history.

I saw the Hoffman news pop up on Facebook while I was arguing with fans of Woody Allen over their belief that Mia Farrow had attempted to destroy their idol through a conspiracy involving her daughter, Allen's therapist and the judge who refused to grant Allen custody of Dylan and the other kids. It's pretty clear that Allen, who could not tell the judge during the custody case the birthdays of the other children and who was pretty well known not to care much about children generally only cared about getting custody of Dylan.

I am inclined to believe Dylan Farrow, considering that prior to the incident in question Allen had been seeing a therapist, at Farrow's insistence, to try to end his compulsive habit of shoving his thumb into the little girl's mouth. This is covered in Farrow's autobiography What Falls Away, published 17 years ago.

But whether you believe Dylan Farrow or not, it's on the public record that Woody Allen is a grotesque human being. Farrow included the ruling of the custody battle with Allen, in which the judge said concerning custody, in part:

None of the witnesses who testified on Mr. Allen's behalf provided credible evidence that he is an appropriate custodial parent. Indeed, none would venture an opinion that he should be granted custody. When asked, even Mr. Allen could not provide an acceptable reason for a change in custody.

And concerning visitation he said:

The common theme of the testimony by the mental health witnesses is that Mr. Allen has inflicted serious damage on the children and that healing is necessary. Because as Dr. Brodzinsky and Dr. Herman observed, this family is in an uncharted therapeutic area, where the course is uncertain and the benefits unknown, the visitation structure that will best promote the healing process and safeguard the children is elusive. What is clear is that Mr. Allen's lack of judgment, insight, and impulse control make normal noncustodial visitation with Dylan and Satchel too risky to the children's well-being to be permitted at this time. 

It is unclear whether Mr. Allen will ever develop the insight and judgment necessary for him to relate to Dylan appropriately. My causation is the product of mr Allen's demonstrated inability to understand the impact that his words and deeds have upon the emotional well being of his children.
I believe that Mr. Allen will use Satchel in an attempt to gain information about Dylan and to insinuate himself in her good graces. I believe that Mr. Allen will, if unsupervised, attempt to turn Satchel against the other members of his family. I believe Mr. Allen to be desirous of of introducing Soon-Yi into the visitation arrangement without concern for the effect on Satchel, Soon-Yi, or the other members of the Farrow family. In short, I believe Mr. Allen to be so self-absorbed, untrustworthy, and insensitive, that he should not be permitted to see Satchel without appropriate professional supervision until Mr. Allen demonstrates that supervision is no longer necessary.

Allen may not have been tried for child molestation but it's clear that based on what the judge has heard, including the refusal of Allen's own witnesses to commit to claiming he would be a good custodial parent, he did not trust Allen with Dylan.

It's not entirely surprising that the New Yorker has refused to acknowledge Dylan Farrow's existence, since the New Yorker adores Woody Allen and publishes occasional pieces by him. A search of the New Yorker web site reveals that Allen has contributed a piece to the New Yorker each year for the past four years, and is mentioned in the New Yorker at least several times a month besides. Dylan Farrow is mentioned in passing in an affectionate profile of Allen from 1996, and that's it. Even more interesting, Ronan Farrow is not mentioned a single time. Farrow now has a job with MSNBC, as this Guardian article mentions. Both the Guardian and MSNBC no doubt share a big chunk of reader/viewer demographic with the New Yorker. That the New Yorker has never seen fit to mention Ronan Farrow once cannot possibly be just a coincidence.

It seems Ronan and Dylan Farrow are Soviet dissidents to the New Yorker's PRAVDA.

One of the fascinating aspects of Facebook is that it's very possible to end up talking to - and especially in my case arguing with - celebrities with whom, in a previous technology age you would never have access to.  This weekend I have been arguing with the Allen partisans, notably in a discussion started by Letty Cottin Pogrebin. She's a feminist celebrity, which means she's not exactly a household word, but she is a celebrity in my book.

Pogrebin and I are on the same page actually, Pogrebin's comment was:

Dylan was 7-years-old when Woody Allen started violating her. He has never been punished for this horrific abuse of his little girl. Not only has he gotten away with it all these years but he continues to win awards with impunity. When will the law catch up with him? Check out Nick Kristoff's blog.

But then I got into it with a lesser celebrity, Sheila Weller. OK, she's not exactly a celebrity but I own a book by her, Girls Like Us, which I blogged about last March, although I didn't know the same Sheila Weller was that author until I googled her, well into the debate. Since I rather enjoyed the book I would normally have been favorably inclined towards Weller, but when I commented it was odd that The New Yorker hadn't mentioned Dylan Farrow's piece, Weller defended the New Yorker, as you can see here:

Apparently Weller has a problem with my defending my position by providing evidence that in fact the New Yorker often does consider celebrity scandals worthy of mention and by the fact that Allen has contributed to the New Yorker in the past year. And for my efforts Weller decided to retaliate by psycho-analyzing me, suggesting I'm "unusually angry and sarcastic."

Her viciousness was not at all unusual in Allen partisans, I found. On the same thread, those of us who believed Dylan Farrow were informed we were part of an hysterical witch hunt, and Allen's plight was compared to - and I kid you not - black men who have been lynched.

A big issue with Allen partisans is the presumption of innocence. They had to be continually reminded that a comments thread on Facebook is not the same as a court of law, and that some people stating that they believed Dylan Farrow was telling the truth was not, actually, the equivalent of a rampaging lynch mob.

I think it's very likely that Woody Allen did molest Dylan and got away with it, and even if he didn't molest Dylan in the attic there's plenty of evidence in the public record that he's a loathsome person who has nevertheless lived a wonderful life of wealth and critical adoration. Much like the Noah Cross character in Chinatown, directed by Woody Allen's soul-twin Roman Polanski. Although Noah Cross was not adored, just wealthy. 

And the take-away of the whole affair, for those of us who do believe Dylan, is portrayed by Jack Nicholson's dazed character as he's led away in the last scene of the movie and somebody says to him: "forget it Jake, it's Chinatown."

Woody and His Worshippers

I had a bunch of nasty fights with Woody Allen worshippers on Facebook this past week after Woody Allen's friend and director of the authorized documentary about Allen, Robert B. Weide wrote a piece published in the Daily Beast suggesting that Mia Farrow was lying about what Allen did to their adopted daughter Dylan.

That the author of the Beast piece, Robert B. Weide is an Allen sycophant who created a hagiography is obvious in this NYTimes review:

Everything in “Woody Allen” comes from within the bubble, and none of the actors, colleagues, family members or critics who appear have a surprising or even slightly equivocal word to say. When Mr. Weide cuts together five of them, including Diane Keaton, using the word “compartmentalize” to describe Mr. Allen’s mindset, it has a comic effect, but it also makes you wonder whether they’re all reading from a prepared script.

One of the favorite defenses of Allen is that he was never taken to court over this. Well in Farrow's autobiography What Falls Away she not only recounts what Dylan alleged happened to her, she recounts all kinds of witnesses who saw Allen acting like a freak around Dylan, including a therapist of one of Farrow's other children who told Farrow, without prompting that Allen was behaving inappropriately. If it was all a pack of vicious lies by "a woman scorned" (and I was amazed at how often people - usually older men - used that phrase in reference to Mia Farrow) why didn't Allen sue? As Weide pointed out, even convicted child rapist Roman Polanski was able to successfully sue against false allegations. And Allen is famously litigious.

From the book:

His behavior with Dylan was getting worse. "Obsessed" was the word most frequently used by my family and friends. He whispered her awake, he caressed her, and entwined his body around her as she watched television, as she played on the floor, as she ate, as she slept. He brought her into bed when he was wearing only his underpants. Twice I made him take his thumb out of her mouth.  

But even more than any of these specifics, there was a wooing quality in his approaches: a neediness, an aggressive intensity that was relentless and overpowering. Now, at the sound of the doorbell and the slam of the front door, Dylan fled from the kitchen to closets, bathrooms, under beds and desks. "Hide me... Hide me! she would scream to her older brothers and sisters. It was not a game. 

Please don't hunt her down like that I said for the umpteenth time. If you'd just let her come to you she wouldn't be so scared, it's too much. But he wouldn't listen. 

Most of the time Dylan was a bright, chatty little girl, brimming with opinions and observations. But in his presence he withdrew, her talk became sketchy and hard to follow, and instead of answering his questions, she looked around the room. When he became more insistent she hummed, talked like a baby, barked like a dog, sang, did anything to deflect his attentions; and this only made him more insistent. When she wouldn't say good-night, when she wouldn't even look at him, he pinned her shoulders to the bed and demanded a response while her head thrashed back and forth.  

"C'mon, just kiss her good-night and leave it at that." I begged, tugging him off of her. I found myself policing his behavior, which made him angry.
If there was a problem he insisted it lay with me, in my misinterpretations of his very normal paternal affection. I was accustomed to thinking he was right about everything; he had to be right about this. I couldn't accept any other explanation. 

"Spoilsport," he exploded angrily when I pulled Dylan out of the bed where he had been wrapped around her like a python in Jockey underpants.
"What sport?" I asked him. "Exactly  what sport am I spoiling?" 

A psychologist who was already helping another child in the family (Woody believed everyone would benefit from therapy) witnessed only a brief greeting between Woody and Dylan, but it was enough for her to mention it to me, and express her concern that Woody's attitude was "inappropriately intense, because it excluded everybody else; and it placed a demand on a child for a kind of acknowledgement that I felt should not be placed on a child." 

That was nothing! I told the therapist, and the years of fear, disbelief, silence and denial welled into words. I told her all of it, and I prayed she would be able to help.  

To my great relief the therapist began to work with Woody, to help him to understand that his behavior with Dylan was "inappropriate" and had to be modified. Now many of the things that so disturbed me seemed to improve. She made him stop putting his hands under Dylan's covers, stop putting his face in her lap, stop the constant caressing, stop hunting Dylan down, stop having her suck on his thumb.  

Although the therapist addressed the specifics, she was unable to modify the overall wooing quality of Woody's approaches, his own neediness expressing itself to Dylan. And if I left a room with Woody and Dylan in it, when I returned, I was still likely to find him doing those same things again.
At least now when he got mad at me, he was more likely to come around and say, "Look, I'm really sorry. You're right to tell me when this kind of thing happens. Just tell me. It's OK. 

So we had come a long way, I had articulated my concerns, he had acknowledged there was a problem, and a therapist was in place addressing the issue with him. He was making an effort.  I had to believe that everything would be all right. I had to.

Now the Woody Allen worshippers usually claim that Mia Farrow was out to get Allen and that she coached Dylan into saying all these things against Allen. But here Farrow claims that Allen was being treated by a therapist for his deeply disturbing behavior around this little girl - do they also claim that the therapist was lying? Or a figment of Mia's imagination?

In the Saturday bombshell in the NYTimes, Dylan herself tells a similar story:

For as long as I could remember, my father had been doing things to me that I didn’t like. I didn’t like how often he would take me away from my mom, siblings and friends to be alone with him. I didn’t like it when he would stick his thumb in my mouth. I didn’t like it when I had to get in bed with him under the sheets when he was in his underwear. I didn’t like it when he would place his head in my naked lap and breathe in and breathe out. I would hide under beds or lock myself in the bathroom to avoid these encounters, but he always found me. These things happened so often, so routinely, so skillfully hidden from a mother that would have protected me had she known, that I thought it was normal. I thought this was how fathers doted on their daughters. But what he did to me in the attic felt different. I couldn’t keep the secret anymore.

She also give explicit details about what he did to her in the attic, which I don't feel like reading again - follow the link if you want to read it.

As always, the Onion gets to the heart of things:

Oh, sure, you could try to defend me in an argument by saying, “Well, he was never convicted, and it’s possible that this little girl just made all that stuff up,” but, c’mon, anyone who says that is bound to sound like kind of an asshole, right? Even if your intentions are good, that line of argument does sort of make you look like you’re throwing a potential molestation victim under the bus in order to defend, at all costs, that funny, neurotic guy in the glasses who makes you laugh, doesn’t it? No, obviously you can’t do that. But then again, what are you going to do? Never watch Annie Hall again? Not to sound too conceited or anything, but you know you don’t want that.

Fun Facts about Atlas Shrugged

Thanks to a Russian web site which has placed the entirety of Atlas Shrugged on a single web page, it is now possible to do a quick search on the novel and quickly discover some fun facts:

• The word "vermin" only appears once, to my surprise. In reference to a tax collector - that was not a surprise.
• The word "parasite" appears 23 times.
• The word "moocher" appears only 7 times. Big surprise - I would have thought it showed up at least as much as parasite.
• "Looter" shows up 115 times - wow I thought looter and moocher were used almost equally. I was so wrong.
• "Sneer" appears 16 times.
• The word "chuckle" appears 133 times.
• "Contempt" appears 109 times.
• "Hate" appears 309 times.
• "Angular" appears 24 times.
• "Gold" appears 110 times.
• "Despise/despised" appear 45 times.
• "Evil" appears 236 times.
• "Cigarette" appears 98 times.

Social Justice Warriors - come out to play-ay

ELSEWHERE
by Will Shetterly

Got a shout-out from Will Shetterly who runs the web site Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage. I've been getting the word out about his site too - and it seems others are also starting to take notice.

Shetterly's the only social media contributor I know of who has identified what Mikki Kendall seems to be leading - the fetishizing of ethnic identity in order to punish allies and gain power. Just knowing what to call these loonies has been hugely empowering - thanks Will.

I should point out that in addition to being on the cutting edge of analyzing Internet phenomena, Shetterly is known for his science fiction authorship. Regrettably I haven't been familiar with his work because I'm not a big sci-fi reader, early Vonnegut and The Foundation series notwithstanding. I think I have some reading-up to do.

I'm actually hoping I won't have to keep tabs on Kendall too much going forward - with any luck the Nation article has caused Kendall-fever to break. But I have a nagging suspicion that we haven't heard the last ethnicity-based campaign by Kendall.

Mikki Kendall figures she can mob people without consequences

Hey mazzie's mean-girl gang! Read more about the exciting antics of you and your fellow Social Justice Warriors here!

In addition to being the social media darling of the Left, and an unethical journalist, Mikki Kendall must have the most amazing case of lack of self-awareness ever - probably a good thing if you're a demagogue.

I've never been able to communicate directly with Kendall about her Google-bombing smears - she did not provide contact information on her Tumblr account. Not that it would have done any good - if I had complained directly to her I have no doubt she would have doubled-down and Google-bombed me even further with her smears.

So it's funny that she would say "you can't get logic through, or facts" since I've never had direct communications with her. But you don't get to communicate with Kendall - she smears you and you can just STFU and take it, forever, as her smears appear in your Google results year after year.

It's only thanks to Twitter having such an open-door policy that I've had this much communication with Kendall, after she initially smeared me three years ago.

This is pretty amusing though -

- to be called "fixated" by somebody about whom the Nation says is:

...obsessed—she talks at length about slights made in the comment threads of blogs more than five years ago...

As the Nation article points out, Kendall has a family and graduate studies - and in spite of this she appears to spend almost every waking minute tweeting a combination of mundane trivia about her life and attacks - most often against unnamed enemies. But because I chose to devote a series of blog posts to Kendall's disgraceful career... but really, you can't expect fairness from extremist demagogues - they cannot fathom the concept.

"uncle sugar" or @mazzie is such a devoted Social Justice Warrior that she even out-Kendalled Kendall by blaming white feminists for the Patriarchy. And her tweet, about white feminists writing "hit pieces" is a reference to the Nation article.

We have a winner!

I predicted this would happen an hour or so before it did - the hashtag #PatriarchyIs turned into bashing white feminists as representative of the Patriarchy.

Apparently #PatriarchyIs was started by Mikki Kendall, so actually it took longer than I expected for this to turn into hating white feminists.

Mikki Kendall and SJWs still claim Lennon/Ono racists

Mikki Kendall has naturally not ceased her hatred of white women, because that is who she is, and she gets attention for it from liberal media and praise from fellow Social Justice Warriors.

Here we see the evidence that they still believe John Lennon and Yoko Ono are racists because they pointed out that women are on the lowest rung of any social ladder. That the song was not meant as an attack on black people in any way has been completely, deliberately ignored by SJW because Lennon/Ono used the N word to characterize the position of women.

The idea that the N-word cannot be used in any context (except in hip hop) without being racist is one of the pillars of the SJW movement. That is the same reasoning that is used to ban Mark Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

And it was on the grounds that I defended the Lennon/Ono song as not-racist that Tumblr bully Mikki Kendall and her zombie mob smeared me.

Here is a tweet that Mikki Kendall re-tweeted on January 31.

The song is naturally the fault of white women, as we see thanks to the hashtag #WhiteFeministRants, although Lennon was a white man and Ono is an Asian woman. But Mikki Kendall is a leader of the SJW movement and she has a deranged hatred of white women, so of course...

Here we see Kendall crowing over how she "rattled some cages" with her bigotry-inspired #solidarityisforwhitewomen.

However, she also claims to have done the same thing with #fasttailedgirls and #foodgentrification, and there she is dreaming. Most people don't know what fast tailed girls are, and if they did would hardly be opposed, and as far as food gentrification - it's not a real thing and nobody is defending it. Although Kendall always like to declare there are hordes of enemies at her gate - that way her sycophants give her attention, support and praise.

But as any demagogue knows, nothing works quite as well as pure hatred aimed at a group of people based on some shared characteristic, and Kendall works that with all her might.

Currently Kendall and her gang are running a hashtag #PatriarchyIs, which is sure to be just as ignored as #foodgentrification until they find a way to blame the Patriarchy on white women - or even better, white feminists. They haven't yet, that I've seen, but give them time.

Mark my words, eventually Kendall will be shilling for a right-wing think tank.

Primo rant from Jon Stewart

This is a fine piece of work.

Yellow journalist/Tumblr/Twitter bully Mikki Kendall finally called out by liberal media

Well it looks like there's a new Twitter tag in town - #IStandWithKarnythia - because finally, one liberal media outlet, The Nation has decided that maybe, just maybe, professional hater Mikki Kendall has issues.

Mikki Kendall is unmoved by complaints about the repressive climate online. An Army veteran, graduate student and married mother of two in Chicago, Kendall is both famous and feared in Internet feminist circles. Mother Jones declared her one of the “13 Badass Women of 2013”—along with Wendy Davis and Malala Yousafzai—for her creation of the #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag. But as Kendall well knows, many consider her a bully, though few want to say so out loud. “I kind of have a reputation for being mean,” she says.

On the phone, Kendall isn’t mean. She seems warm and engaging, but also obsessed—she talks at length about slights made in the comment threads of blogs more than five years ago. As she sees it, feminist elites have been snubbing women with less power for years, and now that their power is being challenged, they’re crying foul. Their complaints, she argues, are yet another assertion of privilege, since they’re unmindful of how much more flak Kendall and her friends take. 

“If you look at the mentions for me, for @BlackAmazon, for @FeministaJones, for a lot of other black feminists, it’s hard for us to see this other stuff as bullying, I’ll be honest with you,” she says. “Because we are getting so much more than ‘I don’t like your article.’ And we’re getting it all day. I had someone who spent four hours last week dumping porn images into my mentions. I’ve had people send me pictures of lynchings. So then when somebody says, ‘Oh, this article is terrible,’ and a bunch of people talk about how terrible an article was, and you say that’s bullying—I’m going to side-eye your definition of bullying.” 

The problem, as she sees it, lies in mainstream white feminists’ expectations of how they deserve to be treated. “Feminism has a mammy problem, and mammy doesn’t live here anymore,” Kendall says. “I know The Help told you you was smart, you was important, you was special. The Help lied. You’re going to have to deal with anger, you’re going to have to deal with hurt.” And if it all gets to be too much? “Self-care comes into this. Sometimes you have to close the Internet.”

Look at her go - bullies always have a justification for why they are bullies. And notice how much absolute unshakeable contempt she has for white women - suggesting that white feminists are so completely stupid and ignorant that our frame of reference for racism is a recent movie, "The Help."

She just can't hide how much she despises white women even for a moment.

The only power Kendall cares about is her own - attacking feminists has made a nice career for Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Somers and Katie Roiphe - why shouldn't Kendall try for some of that anti-feminist money, especially when she has the extra angle of attacking white feminists? I would not be at all surprised if Kendall eventually parlays her obsession into a gig at a right-wing think tank.

I was disappointed - although not surprised - that the article doesn't mention Kendall's comrade in bigotry, the Nation's own Aura Bogado.

Kendall isn't only a bully though. She also wrote a piece for Salon in which she implied that a doctor tried to kill her out of anti-abortion fervor on the basis of zero evidence. She's completely unethical and utterly unashamed of her lack of ethics. And for the most part has gotten away with it.

But on the other side it didn't say nothing - that sign was made for you and me.

I teared up at work this morning when I heard Pete Seeger died. Although more for the beauty of what he stood for rather than for his death - he lived to a ripe old age and died of natural causes. And he lived by his beliefs and got to live long enough to do this:

This performance makes me tear up every time I watch it. There's nothing more ineffably beautiful than Peter Seeger and Bruce Springsteen performing together. And for the inauguration of our first black president yet.

Even though Woody Guthrie wrote this song, it's about Pete Seeger - he lived a truly authentic life.

Nobody living can ever stop me
As I go walking on freedom highway
Nobody living can make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

Downton Abbey Spoofs

This is pretty good - the first number is just OK, but the number with "Thomas" and "O'Brian" is very good indeed, and the recurring joke with Daisy is very good.

This one has famous people in it. I enjoyed the reference to "Larkrise to Candleford" - the actor who plays Bates on Downton had a leading role in it, and the character wasn't all that different from Bates.

Sesame Street's Upside Downton Abbey

P Diddy on Downton Abbey - the funniest one I've seen.

Famous people version Part 2

The ballad of John and Paul

One facet of the Lennon/McCartney partnership I've always wished I knew more about was their two-week trip to Paris. A relative of Lennon's gave him 100 pounds for his birthday and it must have been burning a hole in his pocket because apparently the Beatles had gigs lined up in the next two weeks and Paul and John just completely blew them off on the spur of the moment.

I pride myself on being pretty well up on Beatles lore but I didn't even know there were photos from the trip, which took place in October 1961.

This might make a good play. According to Lennon the fate of the Beatles was up in the air at this time, which of course would be the dramatic issue of the play.

There are two movies I know of made about the Beatles lives - both focused on John - 1991's The Hours and The Times which I haven't seen and is impossible to find, and 2009's Nowhere Boy which I just bought and about which I will have more to say later. And of course there Backbeat which focused more on the short-lived Stu Sutcliff. I own two signed posters of photos taken by his girlfriend Astrid Kircherr.

Apparently there was a reason for the bowlers - it was their belief that it was easier to get rides while hitch-hiking if you had a gimmick. According to McCartney:

We planned to hitchhike to Spain. I had done a spot of hitchhiking with George and we knew you had to have a gimmick; we had been turned down so often and we'd seen that guys that had a gimmick (like a Union Jack round them) had always got the lifts. So I said to John, 'Let's get a couple of bowler hats.' It was showbiz creeping in. We still had our leather jackets and drainpipes - we were too proud of them not to wear them, in case we met a girl; and if we did meet a girl, off would come the bowlers. But for lifts we would put the bowlers on. Two guys in bowler hats - a lorry would stop! Sense of Humour. This, and the train, is how we got to Paris.

Generally the only time this trip is mentioned is to note that this is when John and Paul had their hair cut in the first incarnation of the "Beatles" style by old Hamburg buddy Jürgen Vollmer.

Hipster Disney Princesses

Recommending Nick

My actor buddy Nick Fondulis asked me for a letter of recommendation yesterday which I was happy to write - he's not only super talented but a consummate professional and just an all-around great guy. And he's getting himself quite a bit of work these days which he well deserves. Just look at him in his reel. You have to love his maniacal laugh in the scene from 30 Rock.

In the picture above we see him in a scene with Dagny Taggart, from the short-lived hospital drama Mercy. It's funny because he's so super-competent as an actor and they had him playing an incompetent young doctor - that was to give Dagny a chance to show off the super-nurse skills she learned on the front lines in Iraq - she never shut up about being on the front lines in Iraq. That's probably what tanked the show.

Anyway, Nick is great and if he isn't a big movie star by the time I finally get around to funding JULIA & BUDDY I'm going to see about casting him as Buddy.

"Would a crazy person laugh like this?"
Nick as Jayden Michael Tyler on 30 Rock

Another Weather Channel Slide Show

Somebody at the Weather Channel has a pile of vintage photographs from 1850 - 1980 and likes to share them. We saw their beach collection last May and now they are featuring the Vintage Photos of Tourists collection. Unlike the beach collection there are no celebrities in this bunch.

But we do discover that Victorians liked to have fun in the sun at the beach.

Here are some Victorians enjoying the sight of Scottish women boning herring.
Whoohoo!

Mummy! I want to go to the looooo!

Polar Vortex: Stop making such a big freaking deal!

Meterologist Tom Niziol is not comfortable with the way the term "polar vortex" is being hyped lately:

Click to watch

J & J and movies and blogging

I've finally watched Julie & Julia and I quite liked it. True, it wasn't especially dramatic but it was fun to watch - the Julie segments were shot in Long Island City and I recognized some of the sights. Although Julie and her husband move there from Brooklyn because it's so much cheaper in Long Island City - clearly things have changed in LIC since 2002 when the movie is set.

But even better were the Julia segments, most of which are set in Paris in the 1950s, which was absolutely gorgeous. Tres bien.

And I agree with this Slate review which points out:

...the relationship at the heart of this movie—between a female mentor and pupil who never meet but who share a common passion and a drive to reinvent themselves—is one you don't often see depicted in the movies. Julie & Julia makes deboning a duck a feminist act and cooking a great meal a creative triumph. The stakes may not be as high as the kill-or-be-killed suspense of a summer action movie, but the sauces are way tastier.

Actually, has there ever been a movie about a female mentor and a pupil who never meet...? I'm going to hazard a no.

It was also fun to see another blogger depicted on the screen. Julie Powell started her blog in 2002 - I started mine in 2005. Obviously hers led to much greater success than this one... so far. I also agree with the Slate review which noted:

(I know it's supposed to be 2002, but haven't these people ever heard of hit counters?)

Or as we bloggers call them, web analytics.

Powell's story also shows up in the Cracked piece 6 'Based on a True Story' Movies with Unpleasant Epilogues which is fairly depressing but I did enjoy their imaginary sequel graphic.

Social Justice Warriors disagree with Martin Luther King, Jr.

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. I have a dream today!

As can be seen with hashtags like #SolidarityisforWhiteWomen and #WhiteWomanPrivilege, what Social Justice Warriors do is take legitimate gripes about racism - about people being judged for their color and not for their character and turn it into judging people based on their color.

King would have been appalled by SJWs.

Stupid shit Mikki Kendall says, part 1000

Mikki Kendall must have felt that her fifteen minutes of fame was almost up and so it was time to attack white women again. Although Kendall, while of course promoting the hashtag for all she's worth, says she isn't the one who came up with it. 

Naturally she says @Auragasmic is "speaking from her experiences" which means that if a white woman agrees that white women as a group are guilty of all these sins it must be true!

Maybe Beth of Auragasmic wanted to get in on all that white-woman-hating celebrity that Kendall has been getting for the past several months. There's apparently nothing that leftist media outlets love more than charging white women, as a group, with all the evil on this earth. 

But the real issue is that if you don't agree with Mikki Kendall and the other SJW you are automatically racist. So if you agree with them, maybe they'll forgive you for your congenital racism which is due to your being a white woman.

And you can't hate all white women without relying on the assumption that all white women are rich. Apparently all the white women that Anat Shenker-Osorio and Aura Bogado know are rich. I had no idea that The Nation paid so well. And I wonder if Paul Begala knows that Anat Shenker-Osorio is suffering from the delusion that being rich and exploiting your nanny are characteristic traits of being both white and female.

And if you dare to question one of these bigots they will strike back with their usual sense of proportion and diplomacy:

Mind you, Shenker-Osorio makes a living as "a communications expert."

It looks like the Social Justice Warriors are going to play the role for liberals that the equally extremist, bigoted and hate-deranged Tea Party plays for conservatives.

Either this Social Justice Warrior is scolding ghosts, or she thinks women living right now are guilty of slavery. And she doesn't care if her idiocy hurts "your delicate fee fees."

And Lynx apparently is angry at suffragettes for fighting for the vote. How that prevented WOC from fighting for the "right to be seen as human beings" is a mystery that can only be explained by the deranged hatred of the SJW mind.

And naturally the idiots at Jezebel felt the need to promote another example of moronic SJW bigotry.

John Hodgman as Ayn Rand - thank you Internet

His accent is more German than Russian. I very much enjoyed the joke about Rearden Metal and Fresca cans.

Would it have killed someone to let me know that Hodgman does an Ayn Rand impersonation in this show?

So sad I missed John Hodgman's I STOLE YOUR DAD. It's running at the Public Theater until Saturday but it's ALL SOLD OUT thanks no doubt to the NYTimes review of the show in which Charles Isherwood reveals that:

Mr. Hodgman strikes out for loopier territory, in an impersonation of Ayn Rand, whom he recalls watching with fascination on the “Phil Donahue Show” (of all things) in the late 1970s.

Stripping down to his underwear (thanks!) to don a hilariously fusty frock, Mr. Hodgman employs a thick pseudo-Russian accent to impersonate Rand in a role she never played, as advice columnist for Parade magazine, the middlebrow Sunday newspaper supplement. In between urging readers to live up to their birthright, the right to be utterly selfish, she makes cranky comments about the difficulty of opening soda cans and the cultural scourge that is Alan Alda. 

Even Mr. Donahue’s wife, Marlo Thomas, must be upbraided for spreading an evil philosophy: that popular self-esteem-boosting children’s album she produced would not be so bad, Rand insists, if only she’d called it “Free to Be ... Only Me.”

I read this a few days ago and thought to myself I must see this. And then I slacked off only to find out that no tickets are available. Dammit Hodgman, now all I have is your New Yorker piece Ask Ayn Rand.

Tracking down Miss Bound

Miss Bound - and if

I'm not mistaken that's

Kathy Spitz and 

Bernadette Matusek 

in the front row 

of little girls, and

Denise Grabowski 

at the top.

I hadn't thought of Miss Bound in years, probably, when I saw her in the first holy communion photo on an old classmate's Facebook page - I posted the photo a week or so ago.

I knew almost nothing about this woman. She was my second grade teacher. And since she was young and not a nun and wore hip 60s style clothing she was easily the coolest teacher at Our Lady of Fatima school. And I was something a teacher's pet in second grade until Miss Bound and I had a falling out...

But it's truly remarkable that I knew so little about her considering how important she was in my life when I was seven. I only knew her first name was Dolores because it was on my second grade report card.

But thanks to the Internet, the world is a strange and tiny place. I knew so little about her - until yesterday. After looking again at the communion picture it occurred to me to see if I could find out whatever happened to her, and within ten minutes I had the outlines of her entire life. It seems that she was a Bensalem local and had always gone by Dori Bound -  which I never realized, but that's because I knew her as "Miss Bound."

She apparently married a Brenenborg, which is how she is listed in Facebook. Yes, I sent her a friend request, although I'm sure she has no idea who I am. She is 68 now, according to this web site which means she was about twenty-two when I knew her. She left Our Lady of Fatima when I was in third or fourth grade but I can't tell if she taught anywhere else. She appears to have lived her entire life in Bucks County PA, and is a member of Our Lady of Grace parish in Penndel, just north of Bensalem.

Apparently she was a clown in the 1990s.

Lately she's been a judge at the Hulmeville Garden Club and won a community pride award.

For some reason she favored me in the early days of second grade. I always got picked to help her erase the blackboard or hand out papers, that kind of thing. I was golden and I knew it. And then one day, I was sitting at my desk doing my school work and I was making noises with my mouth, sort of duck-like noises, just experimenting with the kinds of sounds I could make, as seven-year-olds will, I guess. And Miss Bound said "Nancy, is that you making those noises?" to which I replied "no" because I wasn't aware I was doing it. In a moment I realized I had been making sounds, but by then it was too late. I was no longer golden. She stopped asking me to help her do things after that. I learned a bitter lesson then - life isn't fair.

That's not really true. I learned that lesson in first grade. The first day of school I suddenly realized that unlike the half-day sessions we had in kindergarten, we were required to attend first grade classes all day. "We have to be here all day?" I remarked to a child sitting nearby. "This is like jail!"

"Who said that?" said Sister Martin Joseph*, who, it would turn out, was batshit crazy. I'll never forget the shock of her getting into a fist fight with my classmate John Michelfelder which ended with her swinging the kid by his arms in a circle until John's sister Ellen (they were in the same grade because John had been left back) shrieked at her to stop. Sister Martin Joseph left Fatima soon after that and I heard she washed out of the nunnery too. Although her shenanigans were nothing compared to those of Father Hermley. Hermley didn't teach at Fatima but he was called in to pinch hit to say Mass  occasionally - my father was some kind of mass attendant in those days (I suppose there must be an official term) and he did mass with Hermley on several occasions.

I didn't know Martin Joseph was batshit on the first day of school, of course, but I could sense the threatening tone of her voice. So I said nothing, and instead meditated silently on the prison that is life on earth.

Which is why it was such a relief to get into second grade and find this hip 60s chick would be my teacher instead of a nun. And for a little while, the only time in my school career, I was golden.

---

*I don't have Martin Joseph's civilian name and so can't find out what she's up to, but she is mentioned in her father's obituary in December 1966.

What have I been up to these past eight years?

Alison Bechdel dedicated a blog post to random excerpts from her various journals from January 15 since she was 11.

I've never been good at keeping a journal but I've had this web site for just over eight years now (wow!) and have been writing fairly regularly. So let's see what I have for January 15 for all those years:

• 2006 - In which I scoop the Village Voice. Go me.
• 2007 - About my play HUCK FINN - this is the essay I included with the program for a production of my adaptation of the Twain novel. I only blogged four times that month.
• 2008 - I love me some Carl Forsman - this is actually from January 13, I didn't blog January 15. I was pretty busy that month, gearing up for the JANE EYRE production in February. I interviewed Forsman for the NYCPlaywrights web site a couple of years ago.
• 2009 - Beatles - every now and again I go on a Beatles kick. Almost always cheers me up.
• 2010 - Hot Man in Regency Period Clothing of the Week - January 15, 2010 edition - that was a nice little project I had going for awhile. I stopped because I eventually ran out of photos - almost all the ones that showed up in net searches were already on my blog.
• 2011 - Reading at the Dramatists Guild - I actually posted 4 entries on this date, the last of which is the one I linked to. The photo on this post was taken in the Dramatists Guild office. I especially like the photo because I'm standing next to the issue of The Dramatist (yellow cover) that ran my story The Strange Case of EDWARD EINHORN VS. MERGATROYD PRODUCTIONS. The reading was of my play JULIA AND BUDDY, which I still haven't produced (as a full-length play) yet after trying to do so for the past two years. *sigh*
• 2012 - Things that could have happened 50 years ago, technically... - an interesting blog post making what I still think is an interesting observation - the video performance of the band Walk Off the Earth, and the street art of Joshua Allen Harris both could have happened 50 years ago. All the equipment needed (acoustic guitar, plastic bags and subway vents, respectively) already existed half a century ago. The key missing ingredient, I would maintain, is cheap video equipment and Youtube. I'm really glad the Walk Off the Earth performance is still up and running - one of my favorite video clips of all time.
• 2013 - Maybe the best New Yorker cartoon of all time - I still think so.

So that's what I've been thinking about on January 15 for the past eight years. Could be worse I suppose.

Is it possible to praise Mac Wellman too highly?

And the answer of course is no. It is absolutely against the code of contemporary theater to say anything bad about Wellman. Here is another ecstatic paen of worship for Mac Wellman.

Meanwhile it seems that The Flea Theater, of which Wellman was a founder (which explains why he was given the job of teaching the worst theater class ever) is doing well these days, thanks in part, by exploiting actors.

The Flea board of directors is full of millionaires. But you can hardly blame them for exploiting young people - it's so easy to do and almost nobody will criticize them for it.

Instead we are expected to bow down and worship them for their generosity in funding the arts.

Mind the jammy dodgers

It's been six and a half years since I've been in Great Britain - I took a week long trip there with my daughter. We spent three days in London and then took the train to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival.

I've been thinking about it lately because via the BBC America Facebook presence I came upon a web site called Mind the Gap which is for British people living in the United States.

London is gigantic so it's easy to get lost. Everywhere you go is historical for one reason or another, especially where we stayed, in the City of Westminster area not far from Regent's Park, the Sherlock Holmes museum (Baker Street is in Westminster) and as I distinctly remember seeing, this stone relief plaque of Charles Dickens. We were only there three days so we didn't get much of a chance to see anything. We did go to the reproduction of the Globe theater - couldn't miss that. And we had afternoon tea at a posh hotel, although I could not say exactly where it was, at this point. We got around walking and by taking the subway, or officially, the Underground. They also call it the Tube, which I accidentally called the loo, to my daughter's chagrin.

The loo is what they call their bathrooms, which they don't call bathrooms, they call the toilet. Which I never got used to calling the bathroom, it seems so crass. Although as I said, it was only three days.


I did enjoy the English breakfast, although not so much the watery baked beans.

I had no Jammy Dodgers while I was there and apparently the British are nuts for Jammy Dodgers. I think they might be available at Tea and Sympathy shop in Greenwich Village here. I still have the Midsummer Night's Dream teapot I got from there fourteen years ago. I'll have to go back again soon.

Another thing that annoyed my daughter in London was my observation that the loo Tube was crawling with little blond boys who liked to address their mothers as "Mummy" as in "Mummy, I want to have some Jammy Dodgers now, Mummy" in their high-pitched voices with their funny accentuated Ts. When we got off the train I just could not stop myself from imitating them. "Mummy! Mummy!" I'd say "I have to go to the loo now" as my daughter grimaced and accused me of being an embarrassment to her personally as well as the United States of America.

It happened pretty often, too,  because it seemed like every time we took the Tube there was at least one little blond boy, talking to his Mummy. It was freaking uncanny.

A wine recommendation

Although I do love sauvignon blanc I have lately been enjoying pinot noir, and recently discovered a wine from a Chilean grower D. Bosler, called Birdsnest. This reviewer gives the 2008 version an excellent review although I had the 2011. He writes:

Shockingly floral, spiked with ripe strawberries and an oily Viognier-like finish. Carey may have just grimaced—I discover it’s just surprise. She noticed the white wine: “it tastes like it was blended with Champagne.” The palate is distinctly red berry driven and lushly rosy. I remember a Wine Library TV episode where Gary commented on the importance of eating roses from time to time—I thought of that. 

For such an inexpensive Pinot Noir, it does smooth out expertly—it becomes increasingly linear, in a good way, with time. Young and vibrant, a touch of finesse, and a more complete nose than palate. Hints of graham, anise, and muddled spices. Very tasty.

Although the best description comes from the wine bottle:

Exuberant aromas of fresh strawberries, rose petal and spice box. Lush and inviting on the palate with ripe seductive red fruits and smooth tannins. Deliciously smooth Pinot with plenty of length and substance.

What really caught my attention when reading the bottle in a Brooklyn liquor store, where it was sold for $15, was the part about the rose petals. Really? Rose petals? was what I thought, so I bought it because it seemed implausible and I wanted to see if it was just hype.

Which shows how little I know about Pinot Noir because comparing the aroma of a Pinot Noir to rose petals is not at all uncommon.

And sure enough after a few sips I did sense the rose petals. I was impressed. However, the rose petals are delicate, as you might imagine, and if you plan to have a glass from a bottle and save the rest for another day you will be disappointed - the rose petals will have disappeared, although it was still pretty spicy, which is what they mean by "spice box" I assume. So your best bet is to share this D. Bosler Pinot with a friend or two and finish the bottle the same night you open it.

Mikki Kendall, professional hater, complains about haters

The irony never stops. Here's Mikki Kendall, yet again given a soapbox to advance her career of hatred by NPR.

Mikki Kendall had no problem smearing me as a "racist" because I disagreed with her claim that John Lennon and Yoko Ono are racists. I got some nasty messages from her followers including: "good job, stupid white bitch."

Nobody should be threatened with rape or violence of course, but apparently Michel Martin isn't bothered by the viciousness of Mikki Kendall and her bullying, her bigotry against and hatred of white women, and her shockingly unethical brand of journalism, accusing a doctor, with zero evidence except her paranoid suspicions, of wanting her dead for seeking a life-saving abortion.

These people are completely shameless.

So who is Michel Martin and why does she relentlessly promote a professional hater like Mikki Kendall? She appears to be quite the journalist celebrity with an impressive list of credits.

Thank you me from 16 years ago

I was arguing with a proponent of evolutionary psychology (like you do) and I needed to quickly find Marvin Harris's list of bio-psychological constants. I even looked on my own cultural materialism web site, (which sorely needs an upgrade) and for some reason it wasn't there. So I did a Google search on "bio-psychological constants, marvin harris" and what should turn up but my old web site!

I took it down long ago but part of it lives on at archive.is, which appears to be a German version of archive.org. I'm sure glad I put it there back in 1998, guess I knew it would come in handy some day.

I kind of feel like Bill and Ted.

More on the predestination paradox vis-a-vis Bill and Ted.

PS - here's the list of bio-psychological constants:

1. People need to eat and will generally opt for diets that offer more rather than fewer calories and proteins and other nutrients.
2. People cannot be totally inactive, but when confronted with a given task, they prefer to carry it out by expending less rather than more energy.
3. People are highly sexed and generally find reinforcing pleasure from sexual intercourse -- more often from heterosexual intercourse.
4. People need love and affection in order to feel secure and happy, and other things being equal, they will act to increase the love and affection which others give them.

Well done, Khan Academy

I happened to come across a web site that does a really good job of explaining financial issues, including this discussion of credit default swaps as financial weapons of mass destruction. But there's so much more - check it out.

Fun Home

I took my daughter and her girlfriend to see FUN HOME at the Public Theater. It was really great - it was funny and sad and surprising and really well done. One of the best theatre pieces and the best, bar none, musicals I've ever seen.

We had amazing seats - I didn't realize how good they were when I bought them - right in the front right next to the (small) orchestra. We were so close that at the end, although we wanted to join in the standing ovation, we were afraid to stand because we would have been almost in the faces of the actors taking their bows.

And Joan Rivers was there too - she was in my way when I was trying to exit up the stairs. We had better seats than Joan.

The show closes next week. With any luck it will appear elsewhere, hopefully Broadway, soon.

The version of the bottom panel of this Alison Bechdel comic page from the original comic book version of Fun Home, as well as a version of the caption was projected on the wall at the end of the musical. Yes, I cried at the end.

A Social Justice Warrior primer

Although my favorite critic of professional bigot Mikki Kendall is What About Our Daughters blogger Gina McCauley I am indebted to Will Shetterly of Social Justice Warriors: Do Not Engage for putting Kendall & company's brand of bigotry in context.

When I first became aware of a faction of Academia who were claiming that the Slutwalk movement was racist because the faction decided to give the word "slut" racial connotations that did not previously exist in the English language, I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever heard.

Until I heard their followers declaring that John Lennon and Yoko Ono were racists for this feminist song they released in 1971.

It was the Lennon/Ono issue that first brought me in contact with Mikki Kendall and her band of Tumblr sycophants because my disagreement with them resulted in them smearing me by name a few years ago. And then I discovered Kendall was also responsible for yellow journalism and the organized campaign of gender/ethnic bigotry #solidarityisforwhitewomen on Twitter. The campaign so beloved of Salon, Jane, Jezebel, NPR, Al Jazeera, The Guardian and Mother Jones. 

I thought Kendall and the Slutwalk saboteurs were just random dumbasses but thanks to Shetterly, I've learned that in fact there is an organized movement of dumbasses that has taken root in Academia known as Social Justice Warriors. Shetterly is working on a book called Social Mob Justice which focuses on Social Justice Warriors (SJW), especially those he knows from the science fiction community. Shetterly explains what SJW are all about:

This book is about social justice warriors, the angry people who rant and mob online. It’s not about social justice workers like Dom Hélder Câmara who said, “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why are they poor, they call me a Communist.” It’s about the people who believe a righteous cause entitles them to do unto others as they would never want others to do unto them. It’s about the people who have, to use a term loved by warriors, “appropriated” the name of social justice, a concept created in Europe during the social unrest of the 1840s by two Catholic priests, Luigi Taparelli and Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, who wanted to help the poor while preserving the status quo, and which has been adopted by liberal capitalists of many beliefs. 

This book's focus is on a subset of warriors in science fiction fandom. If I ever write about Maoists, McCarthyites, or any group that believes their ends justify their means, I’ll remember fandom’s SJ warriors. 

While claiming to believe in racial diversity, they hounded a Cherokee author from the field. 

While claiming to celebrate strong women, they prevented a woman who was a pioneer in two male fields from being the guest of honor at a feminist sf convention. 

While claiming to believe in protecting women, they exposed a pseudonymous young woman’s legal identity, left a threatening note in her office, contacted her employers to try to get her fired, and google-bombed her online with dozens of blog posts about her to ensure anyone who searches for her name will immediately find their version of her past. 

While claiming to believe in tolerance, they call for boycotts and censorship of people who reject their ideology, even if—or perhaps, especially if—those people also want to make a world where everyone is treated equally.

While I have not suffered the wrath of the social justice warriors anywhere like the people listed here, I got a taste of what Shetterly rightly calls "mobbing." It's so good to find out that there are at least a few people aware of this phenomenon. 

I've been wondering lately if Kendall and her gang have been monitoring Shetterly's site, and sure enough... Shetterly is not shy about pointing out (as has Gina McCauley) that as much as the SJW fancy themselves heroes of the oppressed, in fact they are generally from privileged backgrounds - privileged enough to attend college. 

Turns out they do monitor Shetterly. Kendall is too cowardly to name him by name so instead references him by his initials - but her in-crowd knows who she means. And this Twitter screenshot will help me demonstrate the truth of Shetterly's description of them as "people who believe a righteous cause entitles them to do unto others as they would never want others to do unto them."

Kendall complains that Will Shetterly is "convinced that education = middle or upper class background."

If Mikki Kendall had any problems with some of the outrageous accusations made against the all-purpose white woman scapegoat  created by #solidarityisforwhitewomen I didn't hear about it. I don't remember her speaking out when the contemptible Aura Bogado of The Nation equated being a white woman with being wealthy:

1. 
   Aura Bogado ‏@aurabogado3h

   #solidarityisforwhitewomen when you build career on the low wage work of immigrant nannies whom you don't pay a living wage or offer benefits

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1. Aura Bogado ‏@aurabogado2h

   #solidarityisforwhitewomen when you tell your already underpaid immigrant nanny to teach your child Spanish--for free.

   Expand

1. 
   Aura Bogado ‏@aurabogado53m

   #solidarityisforwhitewomen when your organization offers internships without pay, which means most WOC can't afford to do them

   Expand