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Now there's a manly headline. What should he name him, ladies? Muffin?
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That's quite a stat you unearthed, my dear fellow Emily, about the number of Portugese water dogs in need of rescue: a scant two. When Obama said in November that his family wanted a dog from a shelter, he joked about how "a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me." Endearing, but how to ensure that a mixed-breed dog wouldn't make allergy-prone Malia sneeze? Never fear, PETA rushed to assure, there are plenty of purebred dogs in shelters. The thousands of rescue poodles you found on Petfinders.com, Emily, proves as much. I'm partial to standard poodles like Julia—I grew up with a lovely apricot one. But rescuing a Portuguese water dog when it's from a breed that doesn't appear to need rescuing is a long way from cheerfully embracing one's mutt affinity. I feel bad chiding the Obamas for their choice of dog. Must their every family act be laden with symbolism? But hey, so it goes when you're picking the nation's first pet.
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Surely the first family's decision to get a Portuguese water dog will mean that that the long reign of the Labrador as this country's family dog of choice is at an end. (Farewell, Marley!) Not only is the Portuguese water dog sufficiently manly and low-allergenic to meet the first family's criteria, the choice of one also has a political dimension: It is the favorite breed of Ted Kennedy. Kennedy is so enamored of his PWD named Splash (no, I'm not making that up) that he wrote a book about him: My Senator and Me: A Dog's-Eye View of Washington, D.C. Surely in announcing this selection, the Obamas are paying tribute to the man who put the power of the Kennedy name behind Obama's campaign at a difficult time in the primaries. Michelle says in her People magazine interview that the family is interested in getting a grown, rescue PWD. Since they were able to get the Jonas Brothers to entertain for their girls' first night in the White House, I have no doubt that the Obamas have the kind of clout to have their pick of rescue PWDs. But from browsing through the used dogs available on Petfinders.com, the pickings are slim. I found only two rescue PWDs listed in the entire country. Compare that to 2,133 rescue poodles. Julia, if the first family is serious about a rescue, I agree with you, the poodle is the way to go.
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People breaks the news that the Obamas have settled on a breed for their new pup: Portuguese water dog. In January, the president revealed that two breeds were in contention, the Portuguese water dog and the Labradoodle (a cross between the poodle and the Labrador retriever). Allow me to posit a theory about these choices: The Obamas really wanted a poodle.
Consider the evidence. The family narrowed the field to two breeds that are not very allergenic and of good size. A third breed that fits this description and shares the desirable traits of being smart, friendly, and easily trained, is the standard poodle. (To my knowledge, most other less allergenic dogs are on the small side, and the prez has famously dismissed smaller dogs, like Barbara Walters' Havanese, as too "girly.") What's more, the Labradoodle and PWD both look a lot like the poodle. The poodle, however, would be an unacceptable choice for a modern president, especially one who has already confessed that he prefers wine to beer and considers arugula a staple: It is derided, incorrectly, as a a froofy pet for mincing elites who enjoy bedecking hounds in rhinestones and taking them to the hairdresser. Could it be that the Obamas considered the optics of poodledom and demurred?
If so, for shame! At the risk of sounding like a poodle partisan (which I am), I will note the breed's superior intellect and working-class roots. An all-time great Slate "Explainer" reveals that the traditional poodle haircut kept the dogs hydrodynamic but warm-jointed when they were hunting in marshes and moors. If Obama wants us to look past idle stereotypes and embrace change, he should put his doghouse where his mouth his: Standard poodle '09!
Check out Slate's slide show of presidential pooches.
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Whoever thought the shiny, cheesy Eurovision Song Contest could become the site of radical protest? The Israeli singer Noa, who interests me less for her droopy ballads than because she shares my daughter's name—has decided to use that stage to make a diplomatic point. For years she has collaborated with an Israeli Arab singer, Mira Awad. Now she is insisting Awad share the stage with her in representing Israel, and everyone is up in arms. The right, expectedly. But even the left is now on her case, complaining that she's putting a shiny face on the war in Gaza. What's impressive about Noa's request is the smallness of it. This is the musical equivalent of Hillary's recent creative diplomacy in China—a tiny act of connection that makes its point gently. What's even more impressive is that it comes at a time when the left in Israel has long given up and grown entirely cynical about the possibility of co-existence. So let's all support Noa by joining hands and singing ... Abba?
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I agree with the consensus that Obama was at his best last night. Even in these terrible times, it is a pleasure to watch him at work. One feels grateful for his intelligence, his confidence, his quick mastery of policy, his charm. And yet, when he mentioned that one of his goals was to cure cancer, I thought of the sandstorm scene in The English Patient. Ralph Fiennes and Kristen Scott Thomas find themselves stranded as a desert sandstorm descends. She asks him if they are going to be all right, and he answers "Yes. Absolutely." She replies, " 'Yes' is a comfort. 'Absolutely' is not." When Obama mentioned cancer, I started to feel less comforted. How in the world can he keep shoveling money at the economic crisis and provide universal health care, achieve energy independence, reform our school, cure cancer—while cutting taxes for 98 percent of Americans? I doubt the 2 percent who aren't getting tax cuts are still rich enough to provide the trillions necessary. And I wondered if it is better for a president to have an ambitious agenda and not deliver or scale back his goals so he can possibly actually meet some of them.
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TMZ reports the San Fernando Valley-based adult production company Vivid Entertainment has offered Nadya Suleman $1 million to star in an adult movie. Taken at face value, this story is all kinds of wrong. How the story of a freak-mother has twisted itself into a tale of a would-be MILF? OctoMILF? is beyond the scope of my limited brain capacity. Whatever those parties involved or not involved have in mind, I know I do not want to see it. What the story does testify to truly is that the adult movie industry is suffering mightily during this recession if these are the lengths it has to go to to get attention these days. Once upon a time, XXX was outre. After a while, it went mainstream. Now, I guess it's just passe. For some reason, the conflation of OctoMom and pornography brings to my mind the ancient Japanese tradition of tentacle erotica and The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, in which a woman finds herself in the erotic embrace of an octopus. I suppose these United States really have been pornified, when starring in an adult movie is the punch line to the new American Dream.
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Anyone have reactions to Obama's speech last night? John Dickerson does a great job analyzing it here, and Politico's Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen have an interesting translation of what Obama really meant in his key passages. And then, of course, there's the chatter about Michelle's "super-sculpted arms."
I don't have much substantive to add to the analysis already going on, but I do have two incredibly superficial additions! One was the apt comparison some of my friends made of the setup last night to a bar mitzvah, both in terms of the relentless standing and sitting ("not another Amidah!" one groaned, as the 2,000th standing ovation erupted) and also the beaming parents sitting in large wooden chairs behind the bar mitzvah boy, inadvertently (or possibly deliberately) stealing his spotlight. Hard as I tried, I just couldn't take my eyes off Nancy "Oh please please can I stand up and clap again this instant" Pelosi and Joe "I'll just scribble some quick notes for my rebuttal" Biden.
My other superficial realization of the night was finally pinpointing why Timothy Geithner has always creeped me out and why I keep picturing him all sweaty and frantic and secretly evil. He looks just like Carl, the Patrick Swayze killer! I Googled it this morning, and I'm not the first to draw the comparison. But man did it put me at ease to pinpoint the source of my discomfort.
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It's pretty difficult to argue that gays should not be allowed to see their ailing partners in the hospital, E.J., but your post reminded me of Ariel Levy's article in this week's New Yorker about radical lesbian feminists of the '70s. The feature focuses on Lamar Van Dyke, née Heather Elizabeth, a woman who help found the feminist separatist movement the Van Dykes, "a roving band of van-driving vegans who shaved their heads, avoided speaking to men, and lived on the highways of North America for several years."
At the end of the article, with an "almost incredulous maternal disappointment," Van Dyke tells Levy, "Your generation wants to fit in. ... Gays in the military and gay marriage? This is what you guys have come up with?" Van Dyke's disappointment in the lack of radicalism in the feminist and lesbian movements is something I've thought about. I'm no radical myself, and the idea of "making the National Organization for Women look like an appeasement policy," as Levy says the Van Dykes did, holds no personal appeal. But I wonder if part of the reason the feminist movement is currently so disparate and fragmented is partially due to a lack of radical thought and action.
Van Dyke also says of my generation, "We didn't sit around looking at our phone or looking at our computer or looking at the television. ... We didn't wait for a screen to give us a signal to do something. We were off doing whatever we wanted." Which reminds me of the study Emily Y. wrote about yesterday, the study that claims technology is permanently infantilizing us, ruining our attention spans and ability to communicate. But Van Dyke's fear, that my generation is narcotized by all the screens, is potentially more troubling than accusations of mass ADD.
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Jessica, it doesn't surprise me that tailors are getting rich these days. Last weekend, I was perusing the Bureau of Economic Analysis' quarterly data on Personal Consumption Expenditures by Type of Product (don't judge, it's a more amusing pastime than Sudoku in these apocalypse days) and noticed that it's the repair industries, like auto or jewelry repair, that held steady or did well in the gloomy fourth quarter of 2008. And among retailers, it's "health and personal care" stores (body repair!) that have experienced the biggest recession boom. (I do have to say, though, that the spend-money-on-repair phenomenon seems to have skipped over my household, whose Saturn lost the use of its horn last month in its slow, untreated process of multi-organ failure.)
I wonder, too, whether family-owned businesses aren't seeing a boost compared with chains. The article on tailors you linked to suggests that the "bright smile and homespun advice" customers receive at Andy's Secrets tailor are a big part of the store's recent success. That anecdote jibed with a shopping experience I'm having. The last time I bought glasses, a few years ago, I went to an outlet of the hippest, most pretentious Washington chain and felt as though I was being fleeced of all my money by unctuous hipsters, for whom fashion was all about the price tag—but hey, those were flush times. Now I need new ones, and while I swung by the Pretentious Chain, I ended up at the slightly dowdy little glasses shop next to my office, whose rather bootleg Web site boasts that its staff "hasn't changed in 15 years." I walk by the Dowdy Little Shop every day and know and like the guys inside. In the end, I'm going to pay nearly as much for what I'm ordering as I did at the Pretentious Chain. But the purchase feels less like a commodity-for-cash trade and more like an exchange of gifts. Giving the Dowdy Little Shop a substantial gift in thanks for their earnest, friendly work to find just the right frame to fit my narrow nose-bridge establishes a bond between us, a sense of integration and community in an unsettling moment.
Unfortunately, the Census Bureau tells me it doesn't monitor retail sales broken down by corporations versus small, family-owned businesses, and I haven't seen another group out there that collects these data. But I wouldn't be surprised if little family-owned oases in cities are seeing some extra business.
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You Know You're A Nerd When ... you treat a national policy address as serious entertainment. I've never watched the Academy Awards—I get too bored too easily—but I am a State of the Union junkie. Last night I was amazed by how moved I was to see that particular triangle of faces—Biden, Pelosi, Obama—up onscreen: one white-haired white guy, one white woman, one black guy.
I was wowed. Who expected to see that in their lifetimes? Not me.
For those keeping score at home, I counted 39 standup applause moments, an important part of any nerd's drinking game (although I didn't actually drink ... weeknight and all that). Pretty run of the mill for these things, which are all pomp, circumstance, and rhetoric. I counted only one obligatory mention of this being A Great Country. I liked the "in crisis there is opportunity" theme, and the nyaah-nyaah moment in which he said, "The United States does not torture."
Most inspiring moment to me was when Obama told young folks that graduating from high school was their obligation to their country: if you drop out, you're not just letting yourself down, you're letting down your country. I hope teachers across the nation are pasting that on their bulletin boards today.
And how cool was it to see the lines of D.C. powerbrokers getting Obama to sign their copies of the speech as he left? The man's a rock star.
Of course, there's another way to view the speech: as a signal moment in the world's downward slide into financial apocalypse. Perhaps that's how we'll remember it, ruefully, in 30 years. An economist reminded me last week that the United States is losing 20,000 jobs each day. Or as the Onion wrote after the inauguration, "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job ":
WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans. ... Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."
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I'll be the first to admit that I can't turn down free stuff. It's an impulse that defies logic. I hate key chains, and I don't really like ice cream, but I still find myself grabbing the tacky keychain at the convention booth because it's free and I religiously wait 45 minutes every Earth Day in line at Ben and Jerry's on free cone day. Something about those four letters messes with my brain.
Thankfully, there are people out there with more will power. Today, the gorgeous and brilliant Dambisa Moyo is arguing that the temptation to accept what's free at the expense of what's best is wreaking havoc in Africa. In her book Dead Aid she argues that one of the best things that could happen for the continent is for leaders to start defying the impulse to accept free aid from the likes of Bono and the U.S. government. In her fabulous interview with the NYT she gives a Capitalism 101 lesson that should be required reading for celebrities and congressmen who might have slept through economics class. (Or if you are Lawrence Summers, Obama's head of the National Economic Council, that would be sleeping through last week's "Fiscal Sustainability Summit." He literally was asleep on the podium.)
A handful of Republican Governors are also resisting temptation. Govs. Rick Perry of Texas, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Sarah Palin of Alaska are refusing—or at least talking about refusing—to take some of the free money from Obama's massive stimulus bill. They're essentially echoing Moyo, arguing that the money will only leave them dependent down the road. In this moment when corporations are asking for handouts on the order of billions, this level of restraint should count as saintly.