Date: 11 Jul 2009 13:09 Subject: Sauce for the goose Security: Public Mood: disgusted

Whenever sexual harassment comes up, somebody always pops up to say "What about guys? What about when guys are harassed? Would you feel the same way if it were a guy?" The answer, for any decent person anyway, is yes.

David Brooks, conservative columnist for the New York Times, gave an interview last week in which he mentioned that a Senator had groped him at a party. " I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here." The interviewer asked, "Sorry, who was that?" and Brooks replied, "I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you."

Just like many women who deal with sexual harassment, he didn't make a fuss at the time -- he was no doubt aware that if he complained the Senator could retaliate against him professionally and might well convince others to do the same. Just like many women in the same situation, he refused to name his harasser in public for fear of further retaliation.

And just like many women in that situation, the seriousness of the assault was immediately downplayed. Ann Althouse: " Why would he just think I was like, ehh, get me out of here. What stopped him from leaving? Or are we seriously to think some Senator had Brooks in an intimate grip all night and Brooks did nothing but think about how he didn't like it?"

The liberals aren't behaving any better, by the way. Thersites at Whiskey Fire: "Is anyone genuinely startled that Brooks would have submitted to sexual abuse on the part of an abuser in a position of power...? I sure ain't. I'd have hit the guy, and if it had been her, my wife would have hit the guy, and neither of us would have done squat to protect a sexual predator:" Crooks and Liars says "Perhaps a little too much TMI, David." and calls Brooks creepy. And please, to save your eyes, don't read any of the commenters.

So. What if it were a guy? He'd get mocked, and minimized, and second-guessed... just like a woman. I guess we have equality after all.

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Date: 11 Jul 2009 10:32 Subject: Want a Dreamwidth account? Security: Public

 I have codes.   I'm screening responses.  Leave me an E-mail address.

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Date: 11 Jul 2009 09:57 Subject: It's good to have friends Security: Public Mood: relieved

It has been a busy, busy week chez Jonquil and I had downloaded and transcoded Children of Earth but not yet watched.  Thanks to the unanimous opinion of my friendslist, that's five hours of my life I can spend elsewhere. 

P.S.   I'm retreating into comfort TV, the perfect examples being Poirot and Midsomer Murders, which are 90% about the decor and the dialogue; nobody you care about dies and everything turns out well-ish in the end.   This week's Torchwood, I am told, fails to qualify.

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Date: 11 Jul 2009 09:18 Subject: "How I Lost My Health Insurance at the Hairdresser's" Security: Public

 Via the Angry Black Woman.  Go, read about what could happen to any American.

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Date: 10 Jul 2009 08:45 Subject: I saw her standing there Security: Public

 On Caltrain and the shuttle my eyes are fixed downward on a book, either physical or net; I barely acknowledge the humans.   I popped bolt upright yesterday when a pair of feet walked by.  They were gorgeous deep-brown feet, long and slender in tiny strappy white sandals, with a perfect red pedicure.  It is quite possible that they are the  ISO standard foot.  Startled out of my reverie, I looked up to see that they were attached to an equally gorgeous deep-brown woman.

It happened again today.  Damn, that woman has pretty feet.  

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Date: 10 Jul 2009 07:18 Subject: Smith & Hawken goes boom Security: Public Mood: thoughty Music: eheu fugaces Tags: garden

 My husband just turned the page on the Business section of the Mercury News and said oops.   Smith & Hawken is being closed down for good.   I tried to feel sad, but the truth is, I haven't bought a thing from S&H in at least ten years; I haven't even bothered to leaf through the catalog in five.    Back before that, I'd go into S&H as a treat -- they were full of expensive, high-quality tools to make my life as a gardener easier.    I still have and love a "poacher's spade" I splurged on at S&H in the '90s; it's a straight-sided small spade that is perfect for planting one plant without disturbing everything next to it.   Lately, however, S&H has been nothing but tat -- home-decor stuff for your outdoor rooms.  Whatever.  I admit that I used to covet the elaborate teak furniture, but when I moved to a house that would support it, I never considered a Lutyens bench; the money I spent went into the garden itself.   When S&H stopped being about high-end garden tools and supplies, I lost interest.

Turns out the time span isn't a coincidence.  Smith and Hawken sold the business in 1993; in 1999, when the original buyer went bankrupt, ownership passed to an investment company, after which  it was sold to Scotts MiracleGro in 2004.  As Smith said in the Mercury News article, "When ... Smith & Hawken was owned by the largest pesticide seller in the U.S. I suggested people boycott it."

Megacorps don't tend to get what makes specialty stores compelling -- see Hershey's purchase of Joseph Schmidt, a very high-end truffle maker in the Bay Area.  Joseph Schmidt was closed earlier this year.  It's possible that a high-end chocolatier was simply not sustainable in a down market under any circumstances; it seems likelier to me that Schmidt could have ridden out the downturn at a low profit margin, but that this was not compatible with the overall profitability standards of Hershey.    The cooks I know are nervous about the continued health of Scharffen Berger, also owned by Hershey.

I hope Stonemountain & Daughter never get exhausted and sell the business.  Folkwear Patterns had a near miss -- they were owned by Taunton Press, then Lark Books, then Sterling Publishing,  were on the verge of being closed, and then went private.

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Date: 09 Jul 2009 09:16 Subject: Breaking news: People still suck Security: Public

Pool Boots Kids Who Might "Change the Complexion"

The Creative Steps Day Camp paid more than $1900 to The Valley Swim Club. The Valley Swim Club is a private club that advertises open membership. But the campers' first visit to the pool suggested otherwise.

"When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool," Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. "The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately."

The next day the club told the camp director that the camp's membership was being suspended and their money would be refunded.

...

"There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club," John Duesler, President of The Valley Swim Club said in a statement.


Postscript: Girard College stepped up and the kids once again have access to a pool.

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Date: 08 Jul 2009 19:15 Subject: I had an essay in mind, but my dog ate it Security: Public

Where for "dog" read "migraine drugs".

Anyway, the Sunday New York Times Magazine ran a pretty photoessay about construction projects that had been begun in the boom, abandoned in the bust. The introduction proclaimed that the photographer "creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation." Somebody who used Photoshop a lot thought the pictures looked ... odd. Then people who did construction said the framing looked ... odd. They talked back and forth; the initial poster, unixrat, did an A/B that proved that the photographs had been mirror-duplicated, creating perfect symmetry and an uncanny-valley effect. The Times did two cascading apologies and have now pulled down the slide show.

The Metafilter thread I link to above is a fascinating artifact -- you watch see the one person with the educated eye slowly teach other people to see what he sees, and then other people with different educated eyes add parallax.  

This year, right now, a few people can glance at that picture and think it looks off. After unixrat's detailed dissection, (almost) everybody can think it looks off. In five years, it will have been obvious, just as obvious as the crude newspaper retouching of the 1920s looks today. The technology of deception moves onward; as the fakes get better, last year's fakes look less and less convincing. Green-screen filming was an amazing advance; soon we all learned to spot the green halos around the moving characters. The magicians invent new tricks, as the audience slowly learns to recognize the tricks that fooled them completely last year.

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Date: 08 Jul 2009 14:13 Subject: How Not To Apologize, Part 67.593 (and counting) Security: Public Music: That old devil Moon

Senator John Ensign (remember? Two Republican sex scandals ago, and I know it's tricky keeping count) had an affair with a staffer's wife while the staffer and wife were living under Ensign's roof. The staffer found out and wasn't amused. Senator Ensign paid the family $25K to shut up and go away.

Well, they went away, anyway. But now the letter Ensign wrote to break off the affair has leaked, and it's really a piece of work. In handy non-PDF outline form:

1. Our affair was wrong.
   1. I am/was a terrible person.
   2. I should have been thinking about my wife and kids when I was in bed with you. (Really! I am not making this part up!)
   3. I sure am a jerk.
2. Your husband was my friend and I threw that away.
3. It was all my fault.
   
   1. Not God's. God doesn't like this sort of thing.
   2. God hopes he and I can patch things up.
   3. God wants you to get back with your husband.
4. God wants you and me to get back together with God. Separately, I mean.

Notice the important step that is missing here? "I'm sorry. I did the wrong thing, and I know that hurt you, too. I am sorry for the harm I did you." Instead, he's sorry that he's messed up his relationship with God, and with her husband.

Gimme a P -- P! Gimme an A -- A! Gimme a T -- T! Gimme an R --

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Date: 08 Jul 2009 08:52 Subject: Fascinating turn of phrase Security: Public Mood: quizzical Music: you say tomato, I say tomato

I just fired up OpenOffice and it told me there was an upgrade available.

The upgrade message began, "Please allow us to make you aware that Sun Microsystems is glad to participate as a major contributor in the OpenOffice.org project and provide you with this update notification."


That construction, "Please allow us to make you aware", strikes me as  idiomatically French -- Veuillez [foo] -- and quite unusual in English.  Have y'all seen it elsewhere?

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Date: 07 Jul 2009 15:07 Subject: Great moments in marketing Security: Public

I was idly considering upgrading my netbook to Windows 7 (I got better! really!) so I looked at the Amazon page.

Under upgrade instructions:

Yes.  Well.  I recommend that you experience chocolate cake while reclining on a chaise longue next to the Caribbean and being fed sips of rose tea by gauzily-costumed minions.   (Note that there are many quite recent PCs out there that were bought with NT installed because of the --ahem -- dubious quality of Vista.)

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Date: 07 Jul 2009 10:24 Subject: Black-helicopter theorists in 3... 2... Security: Public

The Pope has just issued an encyclical, Caritas in veritate ("Charity In Truth"), calling for "a world political authority" to manage the global economy and for more government regulation of national economies to pull the world out of the current crisis and avoid a repeat.  (He's quoting John XXIII here, so it's not a new idea.)

(Boldface original in the Vatican text.)

The conspiracy theorists are going to go absolutely around the bend.   My own reaction is that the Pope is a wild optimist completely unfamiliar with the history of global political organizations.

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Date: 07 Jul 2009 07:01 Subject: I should have stood at home Security: Public Mood: contemptuous

Cory ("I have one idea") Doctorow has put the first chapter of his new book up at Tor. The prose style would make Ayn Rand proud. Worse yet, so would the content. This, is in theory at least, a novel; yet in the first chapter of eighty-one, nine screens are given up to a speech by an heroic CEO explaining the organizational structure of the future. From literary mouthpiece Valhalla John Galt says, "Excellent start, young Jedi."

What then, is the heroic CEO saying? Here's the nut graf.

Anybody who has ever lived through a reorg in a dying high-tech company is now moaning in PTSD. How often, how painfully often have I heard that speech. It has always led -- too late -- to the realization, by the workers if not the management, that in a company of any size somebody has to know what the Sam Hill the company is doing. Human beings are not actually very good at self-organizing at scale. A company composed entirely of startups is a company 90%, at least, of whose projects will fail, many of which will spend their painfully protracted lifetimes trying to undercut their competitors for resources and for the CEO's attention. (Cv .  General Motors)  Doing a million things at once tends to lend to doing none of them well. The reason entrepeneurial capitalism works is that lots of companies die. When you try to replicate this model in a large company, nobody is ever gutsy enough to cut the rope and let the project fall to its death.

But what about the novel, Mrs. Lincoln? Our heroine -- or at least Mr. Doctorow's -- is a certain Suzanne Church. Here's the first paragraph of the novel.

Questions for the reader:

1. Has Mr. Doctorow ever met a reporter, at least one who wasn't interviewing him? Blazer, shirt, and khakis in Silicon Valley? During a period that is implicitly -- see splashy press conference -- booming? Fricking CEOs hardly ever wear that uniform. See, for instance, Steve Jobs.
2. The San Jose Mercury News still exists? Boy, that's prescient world-building, right up there with novels based on the continuing hegemony of the Soviet Union.
3. A business reporter who works entirely at home unless she's going to her yoga class? See question 1.
4. Is Mr. Doctorow familiar with the useful concept of a hook?
5. Does any reader give a damn about this woman? If so, why?

As we maunder on, Suzanne does nothing at all. She attends the interminable press conference, as part of which, as movingfinger pointed out to me, our imaginary entrepeneur gives away his prototype. At the end of the chapter, the imaginary entrepeneur -- okay, I'll give you a guess here.

1. Turns out, in a conversation with his VP, to be a swindler who plans to take his investors' money and run.
2. Returns to his office to referee a fight between six of his entrepeneurs, at least one of whom is threatening to quit.
3. Offers to hire our intrepid importer because he admires her so much.

100%. Give yourselves all gold stars, the kind that taste minty on the back.  She accepts, in what are no doubt meant to be meet-cute E-mails, and that's the end of the chapter.

By the way, in passing, Mr. Doctorow's \mouthpiece\ -- excuse me, heroine -- makes a nasty dig that makes it clear that she, and Doctorow, are completely ignorant of the Bay Area.

Leaving aside the belief in the squeaky-clean Peninsula -- has he ever walked through Palo Alto on a Saturday, five homeless people to a block?  And two children in my daughter's high-school class were shot in decidedly downscale drug deals -- that's a nasty bit of racism and classism.  For those who don't know, East Palo Alto is one of the few majority-poor regions of the San Francisco Peninsula; it is also one of the few regions in which you'll see many black faces. This is not an accident, it is the result of deliberate choices.   EPA suffers from quite a few of the social problems of poverty.  It is full of tiny houses that are, many of them, desperately well-kept.  Many of the houses are quite pretty, with lovely front gardens and iron grates on the doors and windows.  It is the illusion of the well-fed and well-paid suburbanites that East Palo Alto, and Redwood City, and the other places working-class people can still afford on the peninsula, are uniformly dirty and slovenly.   

This book is, of course, given away free.  It's still too expensive -- after all, those are hours you could have spent tearing the hairs in your head out, one by one.

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Date: 06 Jul 2009 07:21 Subject: There's nothing like literary viciousness Security: Public Mood: voyeuristic Music: Anything you can do, I can do better

 From 2001, Will Self rips Richard Littlejohn's novel into bleeding gobbets.  

One of my favorite bits:

SELF: It is a 400 page... I've read 200 pages of it and that is a 200 page recruiting leaflet for the BNP.

LITTLEJOHN: Well, you can't comment until you have read the other 200.

SELF: Why? Does it suddenly turn into Tolstoy?

LITTLEJOHN: You'll have to read it and find out, won't you.

SELF: Well it won't take me long.

A little later we expand on the theme:

LITTLEJOHN: I am absolutely delighted. The main villains of the piece actually are two white middle-class lawyers and policemen.

SELF: Wait a minute, the solicitor is dubbed as being part of an entry-ist plan by left-wing Islingtonians who kind of submerge themselves - one of them becomes a policeman who incidentally is graphically depicted masturbating with a truncheon - and the other one is a gay lawyer who runs a left-wing - a kind of firm that actually is vaguely impossible - that operates out of the Gray's Inn Road. I have read your book Richard, I do wish you would stop saying that I haven't. I have read 200 pages, I read them quite closely.

LITTLEJOHN: But you haven't read the book in its totality and you have to read the book in its totality.

SELF: Why?

LITTLEJOHN: In order to understand it.

SELF: Does it turn into Tolstoy at page 205?

LITTLEJOHN: No it doesn't turn into Tolstoy. I don't set out to be Tolstoy. It is a much more complex book than that.

SELF:Than Tolstoy?

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Date: 04 Jul 2009 13:00 Subject: There needs to be a craftwrecks Security: Public

To go with cakewrecks.

I give you...

the Diaper Cake! 

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Date: 04 Jul 2009 11:09 Subject: The New York Times finally gets it! Security: Public Mood: disgusted Tags: nyt why can't i quit you

Today, in a historic event, the Times used the previously-banned word "torture".  The previous official policy was to describe treatment as "brutal", but not "torture", except on the editorial pages.

Oh, wait. It's in Iran. Never mind.

P.S.  If you should feel inclined to write a Strong Letter to the Times, the address is public@nytimes.com.  

If I could only write, I would write the Mayor, if he could only read.

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Date: 04 Jul 2009 10:06 Subject: Oh, God, stop me, please Security: Public Mood: appalled Music: I Enjoy Being A Girl

 I am seriously contemplating buying a half doll and making it a froufrou dress and sticking it on my dresser.  I fear the retro-femininity has invaded my brain.  Soon it will take over the motor neurons and I shall be crossing my legs at the ankles when I sit.

(Do not miss the "Half Doll Glove".  Scroll down.  You'll thank/curse me for it.  Oh, what the H-E-double-toothpicks-, here's a link; why should I suffer alone?)

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Date: 02 Jul 2009 10:39 Subject: Cover FAIL Security: Public

I'm reading Nalini Singh's Angels' Blood, which (I think) rachelmanija says belongs on the Laurell K. Hamilton/Anne Bishop shelf of "Slipshod, but engrossing in that all-id all-the-time way". She's so right. A few paragraphs in I got to the obligatory character self-description.

"a too tall female with pale, almost white hair and silver eyes." Three paragraphs later: "It was a good thing she'd inherited dark gold skin from her Moroccan grandmother or she'd have resembled a ghost."

( image )

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Date: 02 Jul 2009 08:58 Subject: Quis custodiet... Security: Public Mood: disgusted

Via Politico: "For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors."

We know this because a lobbyist who got the leaflet turned it over to the Politico, considering it a conflict of interest on the paper's part. As Politico says, when a lobbyist doesn't like your ethics, you know you've really messed up.

The Post has hastily backed off the promise of reporters' attending, but not the event itself.

"We've already settled what you are, Madam.  Now we're just quibbling over the price."

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Date: 01 Jul 2009 08:42 Subject: Get thee behind me, Sleeping Beauty! Security: Public Mood: pensive Music: Irving Berlin, "Always" Tags: monoga-me? monoga-both of us.

 The more Governor Sanford explains himself, the more often he says what he's thinking, in his case a terrible mistake.  (The papers say his chief political adviser was his wife, which would explain why nobody's been able to make him shut the Sam Hill up.)

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