So what’s the deal, the hydrogen bomb worked, as Juliet said from beyond the grave? Does that explain the dual narratives, one with the cast still on the island, the other at LAX? Are they not present and past, or present and future, but present and present? That is, have we moved on from time travel to the multiverse theory, in which different universes can coexist? To me, that’s the only explanation that makes sense. Curious as to what anyone else thinks.
Why the long faces? (Sorry John Kerry, know you can’t help it).
We just lost ONE election. It happens. We still have a HUGE majority. In fact, we have more of a majority than George Bush ever had. And what did he do while in office? Whatever the heck he wanted! So come on! Stop being such pansies already!
We still have the momentum, the lead, the majority, the ideas, the support. We can still pass health care, still close Gitmo, still pass environmental legislation and protection, and – hello!- maybe allow gays to marry one another like any decent society should.
So we lost one election. Sure, symbolically it was a big one, Ted Kennedy’s empty senate seat and all. But if it really was so important, maybe we should have chosen a better candidate, and not someone who openly admitted she hated campaigning. Not someone in BOSTON who described Red Sox legend Curt Schilling as “another Yankee fan.” You know?
Anyhow, we messed that one up. But it’s over now, and let’s not beat ourselves up about it. Let’s not spend ONE SECOND MORE listening to what the douchebags at FOX have to say about it. It’s time to put this in PERSPECTIVE. It’s time to get to WORK. It’s time to NUT UP OR SHUT UP (Thanks Zombieland!).
Got it? Good! Now get out there and kick some GOP ass.
…is really nice.
Went to a reading of The Believers tonight at the rather grandiosely named Powerhouse Arena in DUMBO. She was great, and the book (not to be confused with the 2002 Martin Sheen film), which I should have already read by now, is supposed to amazing, although it will be hard to top Notes on a Scandal (not to be confused with the 2008 documentary about Charlie Sheen). If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. Otherwise, there’s the film version, although they did a crap job with the casting (Cate Blanchett? Judi Dench? Come on).
In person, Ms. Heller is warm and charming and pretty, and even allowed me to talk about my own book, which I described as a “less retarded Twilight.” My usual pitch is “Juno meets Frankenstein,” but I’m thinking I’m gonna go with that from now on.
Anyhow, not a bad way to spend a Tuesday evening. Certainly better than sitting around watching Martin or Charlie Sheen movies.
Yeah, I know, I know…everyone’s talking about it, everyone loves it, everyone’s discussing The Situation’s dbag-ness and Snookie’s face-punch and Pauly’s gravity-defying hair, etc. et al, but I can’t help adding my own comments to the fray, especially because I actually know these people. See, I’m FROM there. Not Seaside Heights, but Jersey.
And sure, ok, I”m from Basking Ridge. Our girls had straight blonde hair, theirs had giant black poofs and orange skin. But still, I saw ‘those people’ all the time, in the mall, down the shore, driving around at night. The guidos. They frightened me and fascinated me equally. But see, I had forgotten. I had thought they disappeared. Part of me even wondered if I had invented them, because they were so…strange. So odd and weird and yet compelling. I mean, how could they be real? They were a myth, right?
WRONG.
Not only were they real, they are alive and well, and miraculously unchanged, looking and acting exactly the same, getting in fights, drinking shots, pumping their fists, tanning themselves to death. And now everyone can enjoy them. So thank you MTV. Thank you Ronnie and Vinnie and Snickers. Thanks Jersey Shore. I love you.
Cops detained Rodney Bradford from New York for 13 days after he was accused of breaking into a Brooklyn residence with a gun, while he was eight miles away at his father’s place in Manhattan.
Bradford won his freedom, thanks to his Facebook status update, which showed what he was doing at the time the crime was committed.
The Telegraph reports that Bradford’s comment where he is teasing his girlfriend for not having joined him to eat pancakes was accompanied by a time-stamp and “was probably instrumental in the district attorney’s decision to drop the charges,” his lawyer Robert Reuland said.
Jonah Bruno, a spokesman for the Kings County district attorney’s office, confirmed that the case had been dismissed.
Bradford could have been sentenced to 25 years in jail if he had been convicted in the case.
From the Huffington Post:
Jonathan Safran Foer’s book Eating Animals changed me from a twenty-year vegetarian to a vegan activist. I’ve always been shy about being critical of others’ choices because I hate when people do that to me. I’m often interrogated about being vegetarian (e.g., “What if you find out that carrots feel pain, too? Then what’ll you eat?”).
I’ve also been afraid to feel as if I know better than someone else — a historically dangerous stance (I’m often reminded that “Hitler was a vegetarian, too, you know”). But this book reminded me that some things are just wrong. Perhaps others disagree with me that animals have personalities, but the highly documented torture of animals is unacceptable, and the human cost Foer describes in his book, of which I was previously unaware, is universally compelling.
The human cost of factory farming — both the compromised welfare of slaughterhouse workers and, even more, the environmental effects of the mass production of animals — is staggering. Foer details the copious amounts of pig shit sprayed into the air that result in great spikes in human respiratory ailments, the development of new bacterial strains due to overuse of antibiotics on farmed animals, and the origins of the swine flu epidemic, whose story has gripped the nation, in factory farms.
I read the chapter on animal shit aloud to two friends — one is from Iowa and has asthma and the other is a North Carolinian who couldn’t eat fish from her local river because animal waste had been dumped in it as described in the book. They had never truly thought about the connection between their environmental conditions and their food. The story of the mass farming of animals had more impact on them when they realized it had ruined their own backyards.
But what Foer most bravely details is how eating animal pollutes not only our backyards, but also our beliefs. He reminds us that our food is symbolic of what we believe in, and that eating is how we demonstrate to ourselves and to others our beliefs: Catholics take communion — in which food and drink represent body and blood. Jews use salty water on Passover to remind them of the slaves’ bitter tears. And on Thanksgiving, Americans use succotash and slaughter to tell our own creation myth — how the Pilgrims learned from Native Americans to harvest this land and make it their own.
And as we use food to impart our beliefs to our children, the point from which Foer lifts off, what stories do we want to tell our children through their food?
I remember in college, a professor asked our class to consider what our grandchildren would look back on as being backward behavior or thinking in our generation, the way we are shocked by the kind of misogyny, racism, and sexism we know was commonplace in our grandparents’ world. He urged us to use this principle to examine the behaviors in our lives and our societies that we should be a part of changing. Factory farming of animals will be one of the things we look back on as a relic of a less-evolved age.
I say that Foer’s ethical charge against animal eating is brave because not only is it unpopular, it has also been characterized as unmanly, inconsiderate, and juvenile. But he reminds us that being a man, and a human, takes more thought than just “This is tasty, and that’s why I do it.” He posits that consideration, as promoted by Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which has more to do with being polite to your tablemates than sticking to your own ideals, would be absurd if applied to any other belief (e.g., I don’t believe in rape, but if it’s what it takes to please my dinner hosts, then so be it).
But Foer makes his most impactful gesture as a peacemaker, when he unites the two sides of the animal eating debate in their reasoning. Both sides argue: We are not them. Those who refrain from eating animals argue: We don’t have to go through what they go through — we are not them. We are capable of making distinctions between what to eat and what not to eat (Americans eat cow but not dog, Hindus eat chicken but not cow, etc.). We are capable of considering others’ minds and others’ pain. We are not them. Whereas those who justify eating animals say the same thing: We are not them. They do not merit the same value of being as us. They are not us.
And so Foer shows us, through Eating Animals, that we are all thinking along the same lines: We are not them. But, he urges, how will we define who we are?
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