"Don't fill up on sody pop and candy, junior. Or kill anyone."
Pamela Almli, an experienced hiker from Oso, Snohomish County, who was aware of hunting seasons, was killed Saturday on a marked hiking trail on Sauk Mountain, Skagit County. She was shot from about 120 yards by a 14-year-old who told police he thought she was a bear.
The boy and his 16-year-old brother had been dropped off at the mountain by their grandfather. - Seattle Times, August 6, 2008
I find this whole story just appalling. (An earlier story found it necessary to mention that the victim's family wasn't "anti-gun", a line of inquiry and reportage that's insulting to the poor woman's memory.)
It's incredible to me that in our state you don't even have to be old enough to drive yourself to the woods. Just get grand-dad to drop you off like it's the matinee. "Don't fill up on sody pop and candy, junior. Or kill anyone." It would have been illegal for the 16-year-old to drive somewhere with the 14-year-old in the car, for God's sake! As far as I'm concerned, giving those kids high-powered rifles and dropping them off at the forest's edge was negligence per se
at best. Really, why shouldn't the grandfather face criminal charges? Criminally negligent homicide, perhaps.
And why should I or any hiker have the slightest responsibility to do anything special to avoid being shot by a hunter? Of course, it could be
wise to take some precautions, like wearing some colors not normally sported by deer and bears. But the onus should be
entirely on the hunters to not shoot any human beings in the wilderness.
Any subtext in this article suggesting unarmed hikers bear responsibility to stay out of hunters' way is gross, and there's definitely some of that tone here, including the sidebar headed "Staying Safe." It's the hunters who need a sidebar. "Don't shoot any humans. Use your fucking binoculars. Supervise your grandchildren." Meanwhile, the article doesn't even tell us whether these
children were even carrying binoculars.
Labels: Don't shoot any humans, if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it, things that seem stupid to MWR (abridged version)
Worse than "kidlets"
"interwebs"
God, I shudder to hear or read that . . . I hesitate to call it a "term". It embodies a certain vaguely aspergic, affected knowing breeziness just repels me. It's one of those words that, as you are about to use it, should prompt you to bash the heel of your hand against your forehead—smartly—and ask "WHAT AM I TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH!?"
Labels: if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it, things that seem stupid to MWR (abridged version)
The awful Hillary Clinton
I remain amazed that anyone I know has the slightest lingering good feeling for that Macbeth-hermaphrodite Hillary Clinton, or will feel any sadness at her much-belated departure from the nomination contest besides their regret that my party could not have been earlier. [
pauses to admire sentence]
If you are one of those people, be sure to read this
excellent Op-Ed piece by Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post. Consider what it reveals (or reminds us yet again) about Hillary Clinton. Her conduct in the Florida and Michigan delegate drama has been so disgusting and sordidly self-serving that I can only think her remaining supporters don't know about it, don't understand it or have blinded themselves to reason. Hillary herself at this point displays the motivational complexity and moral compass of a brine shrimp, albeit one with an extraordinary lifespan.
Labels: 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton's delusional architecture, if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it
Vile purveyors of vulgar smut and filth
This April 30, 2008 Wall Street Journal editorial deserves to be quoted in full:
Readers with little girls at home don't have to be told who Miley Cyrus is. Their daughters want to be Miley Cyrus. The Disney Channel singer/actress is the star of "Hannah Montana," one of the most popular shows on TV. Her latest album is No. 3 on Billboard magazine's bestseller list. Reports estimate that she will bring in $1 billion in business to Disney this year.
She is also 15. Thus this week's uproar over a seminude photo by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair magazine. The photo – showing Miley draped in a sheet, back bared, hair tousled, with a come-hither smile – upset countless parents who immediately grasped the photo's essential vulgarity.
Such ordinary wisdom apparently escaped every so-called grown-up involved in the photo shoot. The sophisticates at Vanity Fair defended the picture as a "beautiful and natural portrait." Absent sensible adults, Miley herself stepped forward to issue a statement saying that the now-embarrassing photo shoot was supposed to be "artistic."
Next to what crosses TV and computer screens every day, Miley's photo is relatively tame – save for the fact that Vanity Fair was trying to lower the bar on this stuff to the age of 15. Parents have enough difficulty teaching their daughters how not to expose their bodies in a vulgar way; this makes it harder. If there's good news here, it's that folks in Buffalo, Charlotte or Iowa City are still insisting on cultural norms alien to the elites of Manhattan or Hollywood.
"Essential vulgarity"? "This stuff"? (and, for that matter, "come-hither smile"?) Is there some standard I don't know about where art directors and iconic photographers are supposed to speculate about (or even concern themselves with) what may or may not "upset countless parents." And did this tame photo really "upset countless parents"? Whose even more countless kids were reading
Vanity Fair? Looking at the VF website, we see that her (so-called grown-up) parents were present for the photo shoot, which appears to have taken place on a farm.
Labels: "The Wall Street Journal editors lie without consequence", if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it, parenting, photography, things that seem stupid to MWR (abridged version)
Keep
lines
--------------------
together!!!!
Did you ever notice that the "Keep lines together" selection in the "Format > Paragraph > Line and page breaks" menu in Microsoft Word does not actually work?
I notice this every f***ing time I need to do something like, oh, I don't know, KEEP SOME F***ING LINES TOGETHER. What the f***!?!
Labels: if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it, Too much to ask?
Call a spade a spade
Why is it acceptable to use "diplomatic" euphemisms when speaking about race in certain contexts? Two quotes from today's Wall Street Journal:
"you've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate" - Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania
"Race still matters. White working-class voters tend to be more conservative in terms of social beliefs and that is going to spill over." - Prof. John Russo, Youngstown State University
Translations:
"not ready . . ." = racist
"more conservative in terms of social beliefs" = racist
I guess the idea is that we shouldn't want to offend anyone by suggesting they are racist just because they wouldn't vote for, or date, or whatever, a black person. We'd be better off calling racism by its right name and not letting people off the hook because they're "not ready" for this and "more conservative" than that.
("So old is
this expression that it wasn't original with Plutarch, who used it back in the first century when writing about Philip of Macedon.")
Labels: 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it, race, things that seem stupid to MWR (abridged version)
I ask you
Hillary's "Face the Nation" interviewI suddenly remember exactly why I can't abide Hillary (did it seem that I had forgotten, you ask). Pay attention to the questions asked here, and how she "answers" them. She has no intellectual integrity. Notice how she pretends not even to grasp the thrust of the "party of ideas" question. Shamelessly disingenuous. I don't see how anyone could watch this performance and ever want to see this person again, let alone see her on a daily basis for four or eight years.
I was going to literally ask you something just to make the headline work. But it would only have been rhetorical anyway.
Labels: 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it
Color me non-intrigued
In a related vein, physician and social scientist Nicholas Christakis of Harvard is now questioning the supremacy of genes over culture, saying that he has changed his mind about whether “culture can change our genes.” Like Pinker, he now believes that “human evolution may proceed much faster than I had thought.” Even more intriguing, “humans themselves may be responsible.” In societies where a stable supply of milk is available, for instance, people evolve genes making them lactose-tolerant, as has occurred in just the last 3,000 to 9,000 years several times in Africa and Europe. In societies where population density is high enough to spread epidemic diseases such as typhoid, some populations evolve genes that confer resistance to the disease.
Christakis concludes, “It is hard to know where this would stop. There may be genetic variants that favor survival in cities, that favor saving for retirement, that favor consumption of alcohol, or that favor a preference for complicated social networks. There may be genetic variants (based on altruistic genes that are a part of our hominid heritage) that favor living in a democratic society, others that favor living among computers.” - Newsweek, January 1, 2008
Even more intriguing?? Shouldn't it really be blindingly obvious that if we change the environment, that can change what constitutes "fitness" in the operative environment? What is interesting is that the fitness advantage of being able to consume dairy products would likely to have to be very significant in order for it to become prevalent in those short evolutionary timeframes.
The shorthand construction "people evolve genes" is just horrible. It promotes fundamental misunderstandings about how evolution occurs, which the last time I checked was through natural selection among random, heritable genetic mutations. It's not that having milk around promotes the development of a "milk gene"—such a "milk gene" would be expected to crop up just as often in non-agrarian cultures, but there it would confer no fitness advantage and there would be no reason for it to become prevalent in those populations. "[S]ome populations evolve genes that confer resistance to the disease." Huh? How about "the survivors mate"?
Labels: if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it, things that seem stupid to MWR (abridged version)
Crying Naomi Wolf
The slippery slope is now, I mean, right on schedule, this kid, we're going to see more and more people being hurt by the State, for speaking up. Right on schedule this kid in Florida was Tasered for asking a question about impeachment. Because I've read Goebbels, I wasn't at all surprised to find that that was at the University of Florida, a state university answerable to the state legislature, which has close ties to Jeb Bush. - Naomi Wolf, interviewed on KUOW's Weekday program [DOWNLOAD MP3]
Comical. The interview is filled with "instant classics". Here's another:
When I went up to Vermont to edit this book, I opened my suitcase, where my computer was, and there was a letter from the TSA in my suitcase—inside my suitcase.
I guess it's all over. Citizens should report to the nearest gulag.
That's Naomi Wolf, Yale '84, Rhodes Scholar, by the way.
Labels: if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it
No show
When did it become common for people in the under-50 set, in Seattle at least, to refer to any kind of band performance as a "show" or a "live show"?
If I could stand this usage, I wouldn't be blogging about it.
Labels: I know . . . hipsters are boring, if I could stand it . . . I wouldn't be blogging about it, mocking others, things that seem stupid to MWR (abridged version)
