Sweatpants

The last two years of my life captured in a New Yorker cartoon.

"Look at you! Breaking out the good sweatpants today."

To the extent this was anyone's fault, it was mine.

iPad Ad

On the back of the May 3, 2010, New Yorker, there is an ad for Apple’s iPad. Here is a description of the ad: top right corner – Apple logo and “iPad”; photo dominated by a straight-on picture of an iPad displaying a page from an “e-book,” obviously being held (and thus read) by a woman (manicured lady hands and feet in women’s shoes blurred in the background).

The e-book displayed on the iPad reads as follows (sections in brackets are not displayed—I just included them for fun (the reason there are partial sentences in brackets is that the woman reading it in the ad is starting to “turn” the page and the “page” is starting to fold over)):

The Last Song

[He paused, chastened. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” He reached for his glass again. “What did the judge say about her shoplifting?”

“Just what I told you on the phone,” she said with a resigned expression. “If she doesn’t get into any more trouble, it’ll be expunged from her record. If she does it again, though…” She trailed off.

“You’re worried about this,” he started.

Kim turned away. “It’s not the first time, which is the problem,” she confessed. “She admitted to stealing the bracelet last year, but this time, she said she was buying a bunch of stuff at the drugstore and couldn’t hold it all, so she tucked the lipstick in her pocket. She paid for everything else, and when you see the video, it seems to be an honest mistake, but…”

“But you’re not sure.”

When Kim didn’t answer, Steve shook his head. “She’s not on her way to being profiled on America’s Most Wanted.] She made a mistake. And she’s always had a good heart.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s telling the truth now.”

“And it doesn’t mean she lied, either.”

“So you believe her?” Her expression was a mixture of hope and skepticism.

He sifted through his feelings about the incident, as he had a dozen times since Kim had first told him. “Yeah,” he said. “I believe her.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s a good kid.”

“How do you know?” she demanded. For the first time, she sounded angry. “The last time you spent any time with her, she was finishing middle school.” She turned away from him then, crossing her arms as she gazed out the window. Her voice was bitter when she went on. “You [could have] come back, you know. You could have taught in New York again. You didn’t have to travel around [the country, you] didn’t have to move here… you could [have stayed part of] their lives.”

Her words stung him, and [he knew she was right. But it] hadn’t been that simple, for reasons they both understood, though neither would [acknowledge them.]

The charged silence passed [when Steve eventually cleared] his throat. “I was just trying to [say that Ronnie knows right from wrong. As much as she asserts her independence, I still believe she’s the same person she always was. In the ways that really matter, she hasn’t changed.”

Before Kim could figure out how or if she should respond to his comment, Jonah burst through the front door, his cheeks flushed.

“Dad! I found a really cool workshop! C’mon! I want to show you!”

Kim raised an eyebrow.]

So, some comments:

(1) When I read the text of the book in the ad I thought: I bet that’s Nicholas Sparks. My guess was based on the subject matter and how bad it is, but there’s a chance that I subconsciously remembered that the recent movie The Last Song, staring Miley Cyrus, was based on a Sparks book.

(2) As for how bad it is, I’m temped to rewrite the whole thing to demonstrate how it is awful, but I don’t feel like taking the time. Examples of things that have to go: “she said with a resigned expression”; “‘If she does it again, though…’ She trailed off”; “she confessed”; “Her expression was a mixture of hope and skepticism”; “She turned away from him then, crossing her arms as she gazed out the window. Her voice was bitter when she went on”; and “Kim raised and eyebrow.”

(3) This dude sells many, many books, despite how bad the writing is. He clearly knows how to tell a love story that a large segment of American women find enthralling. So one could say who am I to say Sparks is awful. But I’m saying it anyway and I’m right. Call me a snob if you must.

(4) This is the original reason I wanted to write about this ad: Of all the books Apple could’ve put on the screen, they pick that? Really? They couldn’t aim a little higher, offer a challenge? But then I remember, Sparks sells a lot of books. Maybe they are trying to attract those currently thinking about beach reading, which for some reason many people consider as the time to lighten it up. Maybe they have a deal with the publisher.

(5) Maybe this isn’t the best ad for the back of the New Yorker?

(6) There are some who think the iPad ads are sexist. The claim is that the ads featuring women show the women either reading Nicholas Sparks or organizing their photos, while the ads with men show the men reading the New York Times. I haven’t paid enough attention, or seen enough of them, to figure out if there is anything to this.

(7) I saw a Kindle ad on TV where a woman was reading Where the God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom. The man she is with is reading something on his Kindle but I can’t make out what it is. I know nothing about this Bloom book.

Reading The New Yorker with Me: Notes from the Late February Issue

My observations from the February 15 & 22 issue of The New Yorker, some of it at least:

And the Oscar Goes to . . .

The Comment in The Talk of the Town is about the Academy Award nominations, primarily the best picture battle between Avatar (or, Pocahontas in Space) and The Hurt Locker. A contextless excerpt:

Cameron knows a lot about science, but he’s happy to bag it when necessary, as suggested in this colloquy, from a recent interview with a men’s magazine:

Playboy: How much did you get into calibrating your movie heroine’s hotness?

Cameron: Right from the beginning I said, “She’s got to have tits,” even though that makes no sense because her race, the Na’vi, aren’t placental mammals.

Oh, where to start? How about here, at the first thing?

First: James Cameron is a loathsome and contemptible man. I have felt that way for a long time, but this just gives me more proof.

Second: Why does The New Yorker refer to the interview in “a men’s magazine” just to call it Playboy in the excerpt? What’s the point in keeping the magazine title secret just to disclose it on the next line?

Third: Cameron thinks only placental mammals have “tits”? Has he never seen a chicken or turkey? They have breasts. Oh, wait. He must mean teats. Nipples? But marsupials have nipples, last I heard, and marsupials aren’t “placental” mammals. So why talk about “placental” mammals, Mr. Cameron? Just to sound smart, or what?

Fourth: OK, Mr. Science (Fiction) guy: What difference does it make that, according to you, only “placental mammals” have “tits”? We're talking about aliens, or extraterrestrials, or whatever. So what difference does it make which Earth animals have “tits”? None. No difference. What’s the point of making up alien civilizations if you’re going to bind your vision to what makes sense on Earth? God I hate James Cameron.

Irony 101 (at Yale)

A group of current Yalies and alums working with the Yale admissions office created a 16-minute video entitled “That’s Why I Choose Yale” that has created quite a stir among those who care about such things. Apparently it’s kind of ridiculous. Here are some bits from the article, with commentary in brackets:

Three minutes into watching [it] Christopher Buckley, Class of ’75 . . . paused to pour himself a “stiff one” and dashed off an e-mail to another alumnus: “OMFG!” On the screen an actor dressed as an admissions officer had begun singing generic collegiate propaganda in bouncy rhyming couplets. (“Of course you’ll get a first rate edu-cation, / But also thrive on classmates’ conver-sation!”)

. . . more collegians bursting into song, accompanied by “Up with People”-style dance numbers, and even some electric-guitar shredding in the art gallery . . .

[James Goodale, Class of ‘55] added, “My God, if you’re a hockey player, you think, I’ll go to Princeton.”

[Undoubtedly loathingly uttered “PRINCE-ton.” And, what the hell?]

“Halfway in, I said, ‘These people are kidding,’” the former Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham, Class of ’56, recalled the other day. “Then I realized, ‘No they’re not.’ And I was depressed.” IvyGate, a college blog in the Gawker mold. Noted the video’s debut with the headline “‘That’s Why I Chose’ [sic?] to Ram a Soldering Iron Into My Ears.”

[Tony Award-winning librettist Doug Wright, Class of ’85] mentioned Yale’s “underground reputation as ‘the gay Ivy’” . . . and said that, either way, “with this, the admissions office has all but planted the flag.”

[Ha! Is it homophobic, or whatever, to find that funny? What about enjoying the fact that it was the theater guy who made the ”gay” comment?]

“Milton would be absolutely and perfectly appalled by this,” Professor Rodgers [Yale’s English Department’s resident Milton scholar] said. But he thought the video might be effective with kids today. “It says to a younger generation, ‘Yale is saturated in an ironic mode that your parent’s can’t understand,’” he said. “This is aristocratic and privileged irony—an aristocracy not of moneyed fathers but of generational ironic sensibility: “I can speak with more quotation marks than you.’”

[Great. Just what we need, more irony. I’ll let my son go to school wherever he wants (as long as it isn’t USC, Notre Dame, or Ohio State), but I’d rather he not go somewhere “saturated in an ironic mode.” And it isn’t because I’m too old or uncool to get it.]

Count Dick Cavett, Class of ’58, among the enthusiasts. “It sounds sappy, but I thought it was delightful,” he said, adding, “I wondered if it really was made in America, because there are no fatties.”

[ROTFLMAOQXZ!!!!!!1!! (While “LMAO” would be an accurate description of my reaction, this is meant to be “ironic.” And there is at least one “fatty” in the video.) [n.1]]

I kind of like the video. But, as far as I could tell, most of it is spent praising the awesomeness of residential colleges, something that is not unique to Yale. Hell, my beloved undergrad school, which is awesome in many ways but is certainly no Yale in many other ways, has ‘em. I think it’s a great way to structure a University, by the way, but it’s not terribly unusual.

Someone in the article mentioned that the video producers were probably trying to play off the "Glee" phenomenon, which is probably right. And: maybe this isn't fair, but it creeps me out when someone of Christopher Buckley's age writes something like "OMFG!"

A Thousand Days

So, some dude named Reid Stowe is setting a record for the longest non-stop ocean voyage (a record he broke more than year ago). There are probably many things I could say about this, but I’ll just write about this: He had a crewmember, his girlfriend, for the first 306 days, but she disembarked after she realized that her vicious seasickness was actually morning sickness. She got off at sea, met by another boat off of Australia, and has since had their baby. Reid, the father (obviously), has continued to sail around by himself ever since. I’d think that he might abort the mission to be there for his girlfriend and the birth of his son (born in July of 2008), but no. I mean, he was less than a year in, it's not like he was weeks away from setting the record or something. Maybe his backers/advertisers would've been pissed.

Taking Names

Suzanne Vega, long since dropped by her record label, has been recording acoustic versions of her songs on her own dime. She notes that other artists have done this so that they have something they can own (they don’t own the originals—the record companies do). Her career has been like a parabola—she started by working small shows, taking names and contact info for the people that are interested in her stuff, and she’s back to doing that again. Good for her. Solitude Standing was a great album, and one that meant and continues to mean a great deal to me. [n.2]

The Trial

[These are going to get shorter than the discussions above, because I’m getting tired and am starting to realize how long this issue is.]

Take 1: I don’t envy Eric Holder. He’s currently in a shit-storm over how and where to try alleged terrorists. Take 2: My God, people who should know better really are stupid, or at least disingenuous.

Riding High

An article about the resumed use of mules by the military. Highlights:

“[A mule] will carry as much as three hundred pounds, seven hours a day, twenty days straight.”

“...[A] mule knows its limits. It is characteristic of the breed to have an inviolable commitment to self-preservation, which is often misinterpreted as stubbornness. In truth it is probably a form of genius. A horse will eat until it founders and dies; a mule will only snack, even if it happens upon an open bin of oats. A horse can be enticed to gallop, fatally, over a cliff. In 1942, the Army was researching ways to deliver mules to combat zones. Someone thought that teaching the animals to skydive would be a good way to do this. As an experiment, twelve mules were fitted with parachutes and taken up in a cargo plane. The first six, caught by surprise, were pushed out the door and immediately fell to their deaths. The next six survived. This is because they must have figured out what was going on and absolutely refused to go near the door.

The mule’s commitment to survival is interesting in a Darwinian context, because mules . . . have an uneven number of chromosomes and are therefore sterile. Every mule, then, is sui generis; it leaves no legacy beyond itself, no radiating gene pool to mark its visit to this world. It is as if each mule knew that it had one shot at being here on earth, and risky behavior, such as jumping out of an airplane at ten thousand feet, would interfere with that.”

“… mules did every sort of farm job: they pulled plows, dragged carriages, hauled loads, were ridden, and were happy to labor for a decade or two in exchange, as William Faulkner once wrote, ‘for the privilege of kicking you once.’”

Drinking Games

A Malcolm Gladwell essay. Gladwell is usually very, very good at what he does, which is to say, telling interesting stories tied to some research or findings or whatever. I’m not sure how good he is at getting the research right—I know people who think he’s really sloppy, or, worse, twists things to better fit his idea—but he is good at the story telling. No matter what he might be getting wrong, he sells a lot of books for a reason.

But this essay . . . this essay I just don’t get. The gist can be found in the subtitle and the caption to the artwork on the second page: (1) How much people drink may matter less than how they drink it; and (2) Culture and customs help shape the way alcohol affects us. I don’t know what to say, but I’m tempted to drop a “Duh.”

OK, so those two related ideas are interesting, but the essay doesn’t really do it for me. Over the course of a great many words (for a magazine article that doesn’t say much), he makes the following points: (a) There was this couple of anthropologists who went down to Bolivia to study something that had nothing to do with drinking. After the couple got back they met some guy from an alcohol journal and he wanted to know how the Bolivians drink, so the anthros write an article about it. It turns out that they, this subset of Bolivians, have these interesting parties every Saturday night (that sometimes last until Monday) where people tend to drink a lot. But! that's the only time they drink, and there is no alcoholism, no drinking related violence, no aggression of any sort. Also, the stuff they drink is 180 proof. (b) In New Haven the Italians drink quite a bit everyday, but it is relatively ritualized and is spread out over the course of the day. The Irish, on the other hand, are a bunch of crazy drunks (I’m summarizing here, but that was what I took from it). CONCLUSION: Repeat #s 1 and 2 from the paragraph above.

It just didn’t come together for me. Unlike some of my favorite stuff from Gladwell: his TED talk about pasta sauce and cola; and his New Yorker piece about genius.

The Guam Caper

OK, I’m seriously running out of steam here. So, a few quick points:

- St. Clair McKelway is an awesome name. It is also the name of an Army Air Corps officer who was stationed in the Pacific and worked with the B-29 squad. After going totally crazy he was quietly and gently pushed out of the way in the Army and contributed some amazing stories to the New Yorker about working with the Twentieth Air Force.

- B-29s are badass but a bitch to fly.

- Damn, B-29s killed a lot of Japanese people even before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I knew this before, but I didn’t know the numbers. They are very high, more than 300,000 in less than five months, which is nearly six times what we lost over the entire course of the lengthy Vietnam War.

- Plus 1,000,000 points for use of the word "caper" in the title.

Done

OK, I’ve petered out here. I’ll just say, about the rest of the stuff in the issue: there is a nice spread of pictures of people who were involved in the Civil Rights movement; the short story takes place in Ireland and isn’t bad; and James Wood has a review of a couple novels about bankers and stuff, and it’s kind of boring.

Note 1: You’re the one for me, fatty.

Note 2: Tom’s Diner is, of course, a classic for people around my age, but Luka will always remain the most significant to me.