Wednesday, April 01, 2009 - Posts
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Jezebel has a delightful layout from French Vogue's April issue in which motherhood gets a grand sendup. Ah, ze French. So naughty. Lovely lithe, model-of-the-moment Lily Donaldson stomps about smoking cigarettes and ostensibly caring for her "baby." Clad in pink hot pants and skyscraper heels, the model tosses the tot into the air without a care, blows toxic smoke into its cherubic face, and tests the bottle milk on her arm with a stance that suggests she's fondly reminiscing upon her pre-baby heroin addiction. Not to mention, she's got another bun in her designer-dud-clad oven. Shot by Patrick Demarchelier but born from the dangerous mind of French Vogue editor-in-chief Carine Roitfeld, the pictures are a hilarious poke at one of the world's last sacred cows—motherhood. Perhaps if American magazines weren't so whimpy about getting provocative, they wouldn't be dying in droves.
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In honor of college basketball's March Madness, Best Week Ever is running a supremely satisfying ‘90s Movie Madness competition, in which 64 movies, seeded and in brackets, face off against one another so users can vote to determine which is the most quintessentially ‘90s. If that sounds complicated, it boils down to this: Which is more ‘90s, Reality Bites or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Clueless or Showgirls? Billy Madison or Silence of The Lambs? Friday or Point Break? You know you have an opinion.
The brilliance of the Best Week Ever contest lies in both the accuracy of the seedings, i.e. the rank BWE assigned to the various ‘90s films (For example, Clueless, Billy Madison, Encino Man, and American Pie are the No. 1 seeds), and the unerring understanding of '90s-ness voters possess. (For example, in the third round of play, Encino Man fell to No. 8 seed She's All That, because, well, it obviously deserved to.) Voters' uncanny comprehension of what makes House Party so much more ‘90s than Varsity Blues buoys my spirits: We Americans may not agree on much, but at least a certain segment of the blog-reading population, well-versed in middling cinema, intuitively understands that flat tops mattered more to the decade than James Van Der Beek. This is a good sign.
As with trivia contests, this competition takes useless knowledge—real familiarity with scores of mostly lame movies—and makes it momentarily valuable: It really is good I’ve seen Half Baked, if only so I know for sure that Singles is that much more '90s than it. Movie Madness also instructs us on how to watch the real March Madness: To enjoy a sporting event, you have to pick a side. It can be for the silliest reason-a guy on one team is wearing sports goggles. Aww—but if you don't have a dog in the race, the race is really, really boring. If you can care as much about Michigan State winning as Clueless, this weekend's Final Four just might be fun. If you can't, rent Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead instead, because it's definitely been a long time since you've seen that one, and, lord, it is really '90s.
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Bold move by Attorney General Eric Holder to drop the charges against Ted Stevens. The corruption case against the crusty, rascally former Alaskan senator involved lengthy toil by career lawyers at the Justice Department—the ones who work there long term, as opposed to political appointees. It was also a case that the prosecution appears to have screwed up completely, in the process denying Stevens his right to due process. TPM Muckraker highlights the money quote from Holder about prosecutors withholding evidence. The really big decision here isn't just the dismissal of the indictment, but also the decision not to start the case over again with a new prosecution. In light of Stevens' age, and his exit from office in November, you can see why that makes sense. But it also means that the probable crime Stevens committed—and let's not forget, there was pretty good evidence that he accepted $250,000 in unreported gifts and renovations to his ski homes—goes into a small black hole of politician wrongdoing with no redress. Holder probably made the right call. But it sure would have been better if he hadn't had to make it. Of course that's the whole point of sending a strong message that prosecutorial misconduct won't be tolerated.
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And an update to my earlier post on Vermont teetering on the brink of opening the m-word to same-sex pairs: The Swedes have just done it. Sweden has had an all-but-marriage regime much like civil unions, called registered partnerships, for about 15 years. Today the country passed a law gender-neutralizing marriage entirely, 261-22, joining the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Canada, South Africa, and Norway in going all the way—beyond partial recognition to full equality.
Watch for the rest of Scandinavia next. Which may or may not include Vermont.
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A quick follow-up on my earlier post about the software application Freedom. Its creator, Fred Stutzman, plainly did not have his software in use this morning, because he promptly replied to my e-mail asking if he'd take donations to develop a version for us non-Mac-users. Don't bother him with more e-mails: He explained that the skill sets for developing for Mac and for Windows are entirely different, so he's not the man for the job. But he said the interest in a Freedom for Windows seems to be immense, so he's hoping somebody out will rise to the challenge. Me too! I'm ready with a donation.
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Speaking of another kind of freedom, last week, the Vermont Senate has passed a bill that would enable same-sex couples to marry, and not just get civilly unionized (civilly united? civilized?).The Vermont House is expected to pass the bill this week. The governor says he'll veto it—despite a survey showing that 55 percent of Vermonters are in favor, a few percentage points more than last year. No one knows whether there will be enough votes to override his veto. If the bill passes, Vermont would be the third American state with full marriage rights for same-sex pairs—and the first to have successfully done it via the legislature. (The California legislature passed marriage bills twice, but everything in California ends up in the initiative process and in the courts ... more details here.)
I am sure that some of you thought that civil unions and marriage were functionally equivalent. Not really. Vermont public radio interviewed me yesterday about the difference between civil unions and marriage, the hilarious history of marriage, the hard-fought and incremental gender-neutralization of marriage law over the past 150 years, and why same-sex couples belong today. Listen here, if you have a couple of extra minutes to kill.
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I'm desperately seeking Freedom, but didn't know it existed until I read Rebecca Traister on the new software application by that name devised by Fred Stutzman, a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. It blocks your computer's networking capacities, evidently for as little as a minute or as much as eight hours. A godsend for us online workers/addicts (is there a distinction?), or some of us anyway, if my fruitless efforts to fend off the endless distractions of the internet are any guide.
But it's available for use only on Macs. I have a dumb old Dell (and this isn't the season, alas, for an upgrade). Help! So far of the 10,000 people who have downloaded Freedom, 50 have responded to Stutzman's request for donations. I don't want to flood the poor guy's inbox, but non-Apple-users of the world, unite! Let's email him-- fred@fredstutzman.com--and see if donations from us might be used for developing a non-Mac version. Worst is, we've wasted a little bit of time before embarking on "real" work this morning. I don't know about you, but despite my vows to get down to uninterrupted writing at 8 a.m., I would have been noodling around anyway-and this, or so I'm telling myself, has been all in the cause of future improvements in discipline.
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Two notable pieces of news about women's rights and rape.
On the domestic front: Could the recession end up leading to a drop in rape convictions? Yesterday, ProPublica noted that the Los Angeles County police department is severely backlogged in processing rape kits—which sometimes contain DNA that leads to arrests and convictions. According to the site,
The Los Angeles Sheriff's Department has 4,700 untested rape kits, which potentially contain DNA evidence taken from sexual assault victims. The police department's backlog, which was the subject of a ProPublica and Los Angeles Times investigation [2] in November, is currently more than 4,000 cases. LAPD officers never sent many of the kits to the department's lab, which is underfunded and understaffed. ...
This LAPD says they hope to catch up on their backlog within four years.
Meanwhile, on the foreign front: Is Afghanistan sliding backward in its treatment of women? According to the United Nations, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has signed a bill that is a blow to women's rights; and it looks like he did so in a craven bid to gather votes before the summer elections. From what I can tell, not a peep yet from the White House about this bill. But activists are already demanding a response, and you can see why. According to the Independent,
the new Shia Family Law negates the need for sexual consent between married couples, tacitly approves child marriage and restricts a woman's right to leave the home. ...
The bill draws explicit lines in the sand about consensual sex within marriage. It apparently "stipulates that a man can expect to have sex with his wife at least 'once every four nights' when travelling, unless they are ill." There is, however, a silver lining, as Beliefnet points out: The bill's proposed marriage age for girls was originally 9; in the final version, it's 16. It also originally contained "provisions" for temporary marriage, which some believe to be a form of legalized prostitution; those provisions were removed.
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