Fraywatch

Enterfraynment Tonight

Ideas for a Slate face-lift.

In Best of the Fray, switters has produced a parodic masterpiece capturing the essence of Fray life and culture. Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of Slate, it seemed worthy of reprinting here in its entirety, with one modification: the neologism Enterfraynment Tonight© has been provisionally trademarked. Here goes:

Ready for “the new look”? Didn’t think so.

With a new makeover for Slate comes a new makeover for The Fray. Sassy, hip, fresh, “phat” boards. And we here at Enterfraynment Tonight© couldn’t be more excited about them. So here’s a sneak peek at some of the things on tap for Slate’s loyal readers, and our “new blood”.

Reality Roundup, focusing on today’s most important reality television shows, will be linked to articles reviewing, recapping and re-inventing reality as we know it, at least on our TVs. Good times!

Obituarfray will help regulars keep track of who’s dead but still manages to find time to post, and help make our new readers aware of the fact that some people here (most?) are truly troubled.

Go Fuck Yourself will tackle everyday life encounters with grass roots issues that really hit hard on the home front and come out smelling fresh on the other side.

Quake 3 Frayrena will be a one-on-one venue for flaming, complete with play-by-play “sidebars” by the editorial staff who announce the winners after all the spittle has settled.

I Write The Songs That Make The Whole World Puke, dedicated solely to the creepily insane army of Barry Manilow fans, or “Fanilows”, will allow you to make fun of him and them. [!!!Warning!!! Extreme density of earworm prevalence makes this board highly volatile, and the editorial staff highly recommends blasting Led Zeppelin’s epic Presence whilst visiting.]

Vanity Not Fair, dedicated solely to the creepily insane army of Vanity Fair fans, or “Fair Weather Friends” (ourselves here at EFrayT included), will allow you to make fun of it and them. One special feature of this board will be links to pictures, say, of Dominick Dunne’s head on Kate Moss’s body, and the like. Let the hilarity ensue!

Issues surrounding today’s parents will be highlighted in Hey Dumbass!, a new board where readers can explore the problems of kids having to grow up too fast, or not at all, and why the little brats have such an acute sense of entitlement not seen since the civil rights movement.

Shoot&Scoot, utilizing our patented new Censorizor™ software, will allow only “eom” posts. The soul of wit may be brevity, but a well-timed “drive-by” has been known to take out more than a few innocent bystanders.

Hegel And Bagels will feature a weekly Monday morning breakfast breakdown of Germany’s favorite omni-cosmologist, not to mention purple onions, cherry tomatoes, cream cheese and salmon! It’s BYOBagel, though.

We’re really excited about The Yammering Cunt, which, through the magic of our other patented new software program, ScourMate3000™, will earmark posts made by the “challenged” amongst us, yank them out of the other boards, and place them all in one convenient location for us to pour over and enjoy for days on end, and really feel better about ourselves.

The Golden Age will give old-schoolers a home to relive their glory days of yore, when The Fray didn’t suck. Cross pollinated with Nursing Home Nabobs, this should help keep the fast-moving boards free from the clutter of thoughtfulness, and hopefully will cut down on the intellectual incontinence of spammers. (Speaking of which…)

Cut&Waste, using a technology similar to that of ScourMate3000™ called ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZap!™, automatically, well, “zaps” posts that are little more than copied articles on other internet fora, usually msnbc.com, thus eliminating the much unnecessary middleman. Hey, isn’t that what we’re after: a clean Slate?

Gay Jew Central, Slate’s foray into all things conspiratorial, will cover everything from the latest trends in fashion, banking, and what it’s really like controlling the course of world events from a hermetically sealed killer 3 bedroom/2 bath “apartment” deep within the core of our planet, earth. We’re hoping GJC will make The X-Files look like The Parent Trap (the original, with Hayley Mills) and help reveal the anti-semite in all of us.

Dickhead, which, it turns out, you can say on National Public Radio, which Bob Garfield of On The Media did three weeks ago, will be devoted to discussing NPR personalities, their hobbies, and various and sundry Ann Taylor soup recipes. (Speaking of which…)

What’s For Supper? will be devoted to castigating France for being French with a zealousness heretofore not seen on these boards. But know that there will probably be no shortage of references to that one movie, The Freedom Connection, or that other movie, The Freedom Lieutenant’s Woman, or to the lovable character on the old Brian Keith TV show Family Affair, “Mr. Freedom” [www.eyeonsoaps.com]. Viva la Freedom sur la Marche! (Speaking of which…)

Go Play In Traffic won’t be so much a board as it will a complicated system of links and portals that will open up dozens of hardcore porn windows just as your boss walks by. Oops!

Be on the lookout for Regulation Hottie Retard Smackdown, the board to which posts made to an article stupidly linked to the “front page” of msn.com are redirected, posts which are summarily heckled to within inches of their lives by the likes of fraybabes rundeep, bright_virago, et al. Don’t get it? Okay. Say poor Troy Patterson, Slate’s go-to TV guy (and a great writer to boot) has the unfortunate assignment of writing about the upcoming Beverly Hills 90210 Reunion Show. Some nimrod editor links it on the msm.com front page, and faster than you can say, “Try thinking with your mouth closed,” every idiotic retard with a modem is posting anything and everything that crosses his or her walnut sized brain. E.g. “I better Melrose like than Code now even more with Jason Prester have logs on yummy hair”; “BRING IT BACK FOR GOOD!!! BEST SHOW EVER YES!!!”; “blothle snork taff mulket lurbie…” &c., and on. You just want to shake these people. And that’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to. What you can do is sit back enjoy the show when deep and bright do the smacking for us. Thanks, lovely ladies!

Meat Locker. This one’s a standalone. We’re just gonna see where it goes with a name like that. We’re hoping it creates the same sort of confusion Heavy Petting did when we launched that board. Hot stuff!

Then there’s Yahtzee, about board games. In every sense you want to interpret that.

And, of course, swittersville, Population: Funny! (note that I’m the only one who gets italics in his/her title), a new board linked to my flagship column about all things southern – with lots of racism, bigotry and profanity.

But we don’t want to give away too many secrets!

Yes, we here at Enterfraynment Tonight© are pretty dagnabbed excited about Slate’s, and The Fray’s, new look. You should be, too. Because when things get “a new look”, it usually means that they’re “taking something off the menu” that you really liked.

In the words of topazz, “we’re not worthy.” Contribute your ideas (legitimate or otherwise) for a Fray face-lift here (for BOTF-eligible) or in Slate’s 10th Anniversary Fray. AC12:51pm PDT

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Reactions to Apple’s latest spot, reviewed by Seth Stevenson, brought out strong feelings of operating-system partisanship and rivalry.

This, despite the fact that the distinction between Macs and PCs has diminished somewhat with the former’s adoption of the Intel processor, as carmen2u points out. Au contraire, saysmelvil: “new Windows that may be available by this time next year (after they beta test it on a million suckers) will be a slavish imitation of OSX.” 

PasadenaJake summarizes the shortcomings of Apple’s ad in this way:

Apple plays to their stereotype while turning off the corporate buyer, me. This campaign gives me no reason why I should have the technical department switch wholesale to Macs. Sure, Windows can be installed on Macs, but I’ve got a guy who installed OS X on a PC and without having to turn it off and on to run the other OS. Show me a Mac that can do that. Show me a Mac that can run cost-efficiently in the corporate world. Show me a Mac used by somebody you would want to hire. IOW, do not show me the smug, unshaved, yesterday’s clothes wearing Justin Long telling me about the PCs of eight years ago.

Self-appointed MacAdvisor rises to PJ’s challenge and makes a plug for Parallels Desktop, which “can have both Mac OS X 10.4 and Windows running at the same time, switchable between both, with copy and paste functioning. It is far superior to Bootcamp from Apple.” To show how serious he is, MacAdvisor is willing to quit his current job “with two-weeks notice” and offer tech support services exclusively. Interested parties can respond here.

While noting that Macs are already the environment of choice for advertising, graphics, and publishing, -Isonomist says that their appeal for everyone else is primarily cultural, not technological:

Mac users are in love with the iconoclast idea, though, and that’s where the new campaign comes in. This is the Big Brother campaign of the 21st century: more subtle, less brash, but the same message: only doped up clones would do the PC thing, and hip folks are on Macs. Preaching to the choir, yeah, sort of. But when I see writer friends showing off their new iMac (or insert any Apple product), which is (for them) basically going to serve as a word processor (it may as well be a Lanier) and maybe a DVD on the plane, some Internet porn downloads, what have you– I can only think that whatever Apple thinks it’s doing, people are digging it.

For Rhonda25555, Apple’s mean-spirited campaign backfires completely, as “these ads only cement my allegiance to the PC more firmly. A serious miscalculation on Apple’s part: when they designed these ads they created a likable underdog, forgetting that people like to root for the underdog.”

Shokanso pointedly disagrees with Stevenson’s grade of C:

The beauty of the spots is that they’re NOT mean spirited. The Windows guy isn’t a villian. He’s a nice guy, but he’s a bit nerdy. He’s a buttoned-up business guy (maybe because 99% of businesses are running Windows?) The Mac guy is all about cool media stuff (music, photos, videos) because Apple has spectacularly simple, elegant applications for these.

The Mac brand is young, hip and fashionable. The PC brand is… oh wait, there isn’t one.

I think an ad that makes its point brilliantly, no sets, no effects and no product shots whatsoever, is worth an A, not a C.

Where computer malfunction is involved, NeoModerateRevolution and Isonomist reduce the Mac vs. PC debate to a choice between “the spinning wheel of death” and the “frozen screen of death,” respectively.

Take sides in Ad Report CardAC11:50pm PDT

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Sometimes, what’s good for the Fray is very hard on your poor Fray editor. Emily Yoffe’s provocative article on the parenthood debates, “My Mommy War,” generated hundreds of responses. Even more daunting, the level of discussion in our Hey Wait Fray has been higher than any I’ve seen before. Apparently, almost everyone has been either a parent or not—and nearly all have something lucid and interesting to say about it. This synopsis can barely scratch the surface of the great material in our Hey Wait Fray.

Many readers of the original controversial Dear Prudence column kept their criticism focused on a procedural point—that it is inappropriate for an advice columnist to disregard the premises of a letter-writer’s complaint. Gilker_Kimmel writes:

I am a father of two. […]. I love my kids dearly and have loved being a father from the first breath they took. But that didn’t touch my decision to have a vasectomy shortly after my second child was born. […]

Even at that, we have had to endure the same stupid pressure to reproduce that originally sparked the letter. People who do not wish to have children, shouldn’t. They shouldn’t be pressured, they shouldn’t be cajoled, they shouldn’t be urged. Period.

It’s true that the letter writer was asking for advise - on how to deal with egregiously rude advise. That doesn’t open the door for heaping on additional egregiously rude advise.

But does rude advice call for rude response? Reader j_snare shares his polite correspondence with Yoffe:

I was one of the people that did write to Emily. […] Emily was overly thankful for the tone of my response, based on her words and tone in her reply back to me. What I was able to gather was that a huge number of people were terribly rude. She didn’t agree that my wife and I shouldn’t have kids, but she also didn’t press the issue. The way she phrased it, I was happy that we could agree to disagree. […]

So come on people, cut her some slack. Emily is a human being with real feelings. If you want to send her a hurtful note, keep in mind that she may be getting hundreds of such notes, and that getting such a strong response can be somewhat upsetting, especially considering the volume. Keep the tone civil and respectful, and I assure you she will do the same.

Many readers seem to find the topic of parenthood quite personal (go figure). The Fray abounds with testimonials of the precious antics of toddlers and the accomplishments of the childless. But, as wif notes, personal experience makes for a poor rhetorical tool in such discussions:

Without hesitation, I can say that having children is the best thing I have done in my life. I am all for reinforcing and encouraging people who need it to take the step. But what’s great about the experience cannot be conveyed in short, simple anecdotes which often grate like cell phone ring tones. It is a series of small often forgettable, often unnoticed details and psychological repositionings that add up to a rich, full life. In miniature it requires the talents of a poet. Expanded, it takes the sensitivity of a novelist.

Like kolmogorov,who finds evangelizing the childless “like trying to convince someone that life-after death is better than life—just follow me across the threshold on faith,” many readers express frustration at their inability to persuade the childless that a change of mind will lead to a positive experience. But, as with lee63, many of those who have opted not to breed resent the idea that they are ignorant of what they’ve forsaken:

I was angry by the response Prudence provided because I know how it feels to have EVERYONE second guess my decision. I don’t understand why people think the decision to not have children is this sudden thing that came about with no thought. Sometimes I think I’ll scream if I hear one more person tell me I can adopt, or tell me a story about a 45+ women who had a baby. I know what’s available out there, but I also know me and having a child is not the right thing for me. When someone goes on and on about why I should have kids, it’s the same as coming out and saying “you are wrong” and I find that offensive. I say hats off to all the parents in the world AND to all those who will not have children. There are ups and downs either way.

Some posters make a valiant effort to shift the discussion into a more neutral gear. rufus thinks the whole debate is pretty bizarre:

There is a middle ground between loftily deriding childraising as a mountain of diapers and insisting on its being an extremely expensive exercise in providing only the best and purest to an extension of oneself. It is actually possible to take it easy, push a baby around in a ratty old stroller, avoid worrying about the purity of every particle that comes into the baby’s airspace, and not spend every night worrying about whether Junior will make it into Harvard. The child often enough ends up healthy, without allergies to every earthly substance, and relatively free of neuroses. […] The whole Breeder/Proud Singles problem is pretty exclusively American, perhaps a product of everybody’s need to justify exactly why they’ve chosen their way of life. But who really asked for a justification?

switters, who is pretty bizarre, captures a central irony of the whole debate:

Having children today could quite possibly be the most pure, unadulterated form of optimism, hope, and belief in our inherent goodness, and, in another sense, the closest we approach the divine in all of us. Or it could just be a broken rubber. Jury’s still out.

For many other posters, the debate over child-rearing is political. 3dogs suggests licensing parents. Jaque argues that those without children should  pay more to society. By contrast, yerevan believes he’s subsidizing middle-class brats:

People who have had children should not place the burden of their personal choices on the rest of us. We should not have to work overtime because they want to go to a kid’s school play. We should not have to pay extra to cover their family’s health insurance. And if people get rebates from taxes to pay for private schools for their kids, then singles should get a rebate as well for having NO kids in the public school system. […]

I’ll be damned if I should support the personal lifestyle of the middle classes. You want the kid - then pay for the kid - with your time and money.

One of the stranger lines of argument is that parents must breed their politics into the next generation. Chauncy writes:

My wife and I are not “mindless breeders” We are educated, well-traveled, and involved in the community. Those that would judge me for having children remind me of the morality police from the right wing. Just because the decision to remain childless is not based on the Bible does not make it any less offensive to impose your beliefs on the rest of society. […]

[Besides]; who is going to carry on the fight against environmental destruction and conservatism if the Republicans are reproducing like mad and the self righteous left quits making babies? I’m not saying that you should have kids just to win a few seats in congress, but political opinions are shaped in the formative years just like anything else. The world isn’t going to get less lousy if you let the other side have all the kids and shape the values of our young people.

Xando finds such talk  patently silly:

I can’t tell you whether or not you should have children. But I can tell you that if your list of reasons for not having children contains silliness like social policy analysis, you need to seriously reconsider how you’re making such decisions.

There are also many threads that elude easy categorization, such as the parenting insights of Caromer:

I agree somewhat with the characterization of us reproducers as breeding morons. Why do we do it? Because we are programmed to do it. For the future, not for us. For our children.

Children are one of the creations that people put their lives and hearts into; art, the house, a love affair, a piece of carpentry or music. But unlike those things, which are made to have some purpose defined and centered around you, the creation of a child is mainly a gift of life to the child. So, the motivations of the creator are secondary. That is why reproduction is truly selfless and somewhat moronic. Sane people do not create things unless they have a purpose to them. The main beneficiary of a child is not the self, but the child. Sure, there are joys, but there is heartache too. There may be another hand to work on the fields, but there’s two more mouths to feed; the child and the pregnant spouse. And the child does not serve the parent. It’s a constant one way pouring of effort.

If you have the time, you should check out some of the other excellent posts in the Hey Wait FrayGA 2:30am EDT

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Emily Bazelon’s piece on whether to send your 6-year-old away to summer camp was a hot topic in Family fray, inspiring one noteworthy, if odd, exchange about the sex life of counselors:

A self-proclaimed summer camp administrator, CharlesWesley, offers reassuring words for parents:

While I don’t want to discount the many parents who have posted here about their negative experiences as children at camp, I do need to point out that summer camp now is a very different place than summer camp in the 60s, 70s or 80s. The focus on child safety - physical, mental, and emotional - is much greater, for obvious reasons as well as financial. In these litigious days, summer camps simply can’t afford to have non-qualified or sketchy staff around.

TheRanger forcefully dissents from this benevolent view of summer camp:

The counselors are high school or college kids who just wanted a summer job or just to be away from home. Many try to arrange to have a boy/girl friend to be a counselor as well. These agendas detract from the camp mission.

“If they’re spectacular and enjoy working with kids, does it matter if they hook up with a co-counselor in their free time?” shoots backCW.

In TheRanger’s next post, the conversation takes a digressive turn:

You neglected to tell exactly when counselors have not only free time, but free time to hook up with co-counselors. This would be valuable to know. Supposing that you got one night a week off. When do they do laundry?

CW earnestly replies:

Maybe the counselor needing to do laundry works at a summer camp with on-site laundry facilities, so they spend 10 minutes putting in their laundry before they leave for their night off. Or maybe their laundry is done for them as a cabin.

TheRanger’s true motive: “Please tell me how to do all my laundry in ten minutes.” But CW stays on message: “I don’t understand what the purpose of the laundry discussion is anyway. Counselors don’t spend all their time off doing laundry, nor do they need to.”

rundeep, for his part, sees summer camp for toddlers as part of a broader cultural rush to end childhood:

I know that childhood has been a flexible concept for the last century and a half. A hundred and fifty years ago, children were working and being injured in industry. Then we started to think schooling might be a good thing, and nurturing too. Then childhood became a full-fledged thing – a time when the young could learn and should play and spend quantities and qualities of time with their parents. Middle-class moms were encouraged to stay home to serve these interests.

Then, somewhere, family life like this got expensive and women got restive. Two working parents meant kids needed another form of care. Lots of it is terrific, some is not. Summer sleepaway camp is just the next trend in the industry of sending your kids off to be elsewhere while you work.

In her mini-treatise on Parents and Responsibility, MarieA indicts those who “comfort themsevles with the fact that they give their children a ‘lucrative lifestyle’ … just as sending them to camp helps them have a sense of ‘community’ and learn new things. How about giving them parents?”

And finally, for all those curious, FrayEditor05’s first confessional contribution to the Fray, detailing his own early traumatic experiences at summer camp, can be found here. AC

7:40pm PDT

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Seth Stevenson’s underwear manifesto, torn between its tendency toward confessional anecdote and its desire to pass as legitimate consumer research, elicited comment from medical professionals and fetishists alike.

Nurse caba11 offers some advice to young men:

As a mother of sons, I saw all of them go through the ‘Boxer rebellion.’ But I am glad to report one son prefers BB’s (boxer briefs). Personally I think they are way sexy and prefer to see my husband in them over any other style. I agree with you that they are probably a better choice health wise although I only have personal observation as proof (I am a nurse). I have seen many of the older ‘boxer generation’ with testes almost to their knees! Gravity works on all of us! So, my word of advise to all you young men is take gravity into consideration!

CuervoJones issues an even more dire warning about testicular torsion.

If their anti-gravitational boost is a plus, boxer briefs “don’t take to that much friction very well” according to runner Prometheus73 here.

The preferences of women were by no means absent from the debate, with johnboy779 openly admitting his wife’s role in the decision-making process:

As far as I’m concerned, underwear has 3 functions: 1) comfort; 2) support; 3) sexiness. The first two are decided by me, and the third by my wife. Most comfortable? Definitely briefs. Boxers are too loose and bunchy, and boxer briefs are too hot: I don’t need my upper thighs warmed. Most support? Briefs and boxer briefs score equal–again, comfort favors briefs. Sexiness? My wife loves those tight and short briefs. So briefs win, particularly if you have a sufficiently athletic body for them.

Indeed, mpose speculates that men’s underwear choices are in no small part “made by women who are tired of seeing their men in yellowed, moth-eaten, elastic-decayed underwear.”

Chiaus chronicles his long road from brief to boxer and back again:

It feels good to for once be ahead of the trends. I treaded this path from tighty-whities as a child/adolescent to boxers to boxer briefs. I first made the switch to boxer briefs back in the early nineties and was also full of evangelical praise; I often try to convert friends and people I met at parties. If you think girls like your boxer briefs, try making it the center of conversation at a party.

I didn’t realize I was an early adopter of the movement, but I must now report that I have gone back to plain boxer, after a brief retro-flirtation with tighty-whities, and am happy with the change. I believe it is because I live in hot and humid Houston that I prefer the light and airy boxer, but it was my year in even hotter and more humid Hong Kong that showed me the limits of the boxer brief.

I still keep a few pair for playing sports in, but like when I made the change to boxer briefs: I can’t imagine ever going back.

On a fashion note, Gilker_Kimmel declares boxer briefs to “have all the stylish glamour of a 1890’s men’s bathing suit. Or perhaps modern day bicycle shorts.”

In a Linda Richman moment, RichardSF notes that boxer briefs “are neither boxers nor briefs.” Talk amongst yourselves.

As for options not discussed in our limited boxer vs. brief debate, whatevs alerts us to the virtues of “square-cuts.” MoreChoices expresses disbelief that the “micro-brief” failed to get equal airtime in Seth’s manifesto.

Since Frayeditor05 had never heard of such a garment, he decided to enlighten himself here. Discuss your choice of lingerie in Fashion. AC10:26am PDT