Thursday, August 16, 2012
Can This Wedding Be Saved?
No aspect of our 21st-century lives is more parched of gayness than weddings. They are desperate for a fairy makeover. We heteros should be begging gays to come and give the best day of our lives a dressing-down by joining in. Weddings are a kitsch style crash of appalling taste, snotty tissues, blisters, lip gloss, dads dancing, and hypoglycemia. A wedding is like porn in that it promises far more than it’s ever going to deliver; unlike porn, we witness this scene with our grandparents and our kids.
“The Wedding” is supposed to be a peak moment in our lives. Small children are encouraged to look forward to theirs with a fairy-tale longing. Little girls plan theirs before they’ve ever said a civil word to a boy, let alone kissed one. Then some tongue-tied, giddy swain slumps to one knee and tugs a velveteen box from his pocket, and his sweetheart, who up to this very moment has quite liked him, is more acutely embarrassed than she ever thought humanly possible. She stares at the pitiful diamond. The engagement ring is the ugliest, gaudiest piece of jewelry most women will ever wear. It sets in motion the most stressful and tearful year of their lives, one that will culminate in a day only heterosexuals could come up with. (...)
Viewed from the pews, weddings are theater produced by straight amateurs using their own money. The resulting spectacle is what a dog show would be like if it were organized by the dogs. When gays remake weddings, the lighting will be the first thing to improve. Secondly, no one’s going to think that a fatless steak fryer is a suitable present, and the flowers won’t look ordered for a clown’s funeral. The music will also be classier; you won’t have to walk down the aisle to Meatloaf singing, “I would do anything for love / But I won’t do that.”
The history of queer culture shows us that gay men are the trailblazers. Where they go, heterosexual women follow, dragging reluctant straight men behind them, who in turn bring Texans. That’s how civilization and musical theater evolve. Not to mention catering. The cake has got to go. The original wedding cake was a biscuit broken over the bride’s head to represent what was about to happen to her hymen. But that’s vulgar. Today the happy couple jointly hold a very phallic knife and together force it through the virginal white icing into the soft, moist sweetness, and in America, for those who are slow at symbolism, they then push cake into each other’s face as a sort of cakealingus.
I understand that the bureaucratic holdup in allowing gays to have weddings like the rest of us is a problem with the exclusivity rules of the club. I thought that marriage was supposed to be a basic building block of society, that marriages come together to give the nation-state its tensile strength. Marriages make families, and families marry one another, creating a web of security and morality. Surely the right thing, the conservative thing, would be to get as many people into marriages as possible. The really radical-right, hair-shirt-and-burning-torches thing would be to insist that gays get married because, without wanting to be indelicate, all the stuff that gets the religiously intense so book-thumpingly incandescent about homosexuality is all the stuff that goes on before you’re married. If you want to stop them having fun up against walls and behind sofas, just let them get married. They’ll soon learn there’s precious little cake in the face after the wedding.
by A.A. Gill, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Photo: Classicstock/Alamy; Digital Colorization by Lorna Clark
“A Right Fit”: Navigating the World of Literary Agents
How do you choose? Do you sit down at the first shelf and read each book all the way through? No way; you’d starve, if you didn’t kill yourself from boredom first. Do you glance at the descriptions of the book and author on the back cover, and then read a page or two of the ones that sound more interesting? That’s better, but we’re talking a huge room here – thousands and thousands of books – and what can you really tell from a couple of paragraphs, anyway?
So you begin to look for shortcuts. You decide to only consider the kinds of books you already know you like – mysteries, say, and literary novels with strong female protagonists. Still, there are a lot of mysteries and novels with strong female protagonists in this bookstore. So you look for other shortcuts. If you recognize the name of the author as someone who has already written something else good, you read that one. You might also look for other people in the bookstore so you could ask them what good books they had read lately and start looking for those. You might even take some of them out for lunch – it’s okay, you can expense it – to pick their brains.
For several hundred people, most of them living in New York City, this dream is their daily reality. They are called literary agents, and if you are a writer with one or more unpublished books on your hard drive you have probably received a terse note from several dozen of them telling you that your novel is “not a right fit” for their agency at this time. In that moment you tore open that thin self-addressed envelope or read the two-line return email, you probably hated them. Not just that one agent, but all literary agents, as a class. How could they not see the brilliance in your manuscript? How could they possibly guess at the quality of your manuscript based on a one-page letter and a synopsis? And what the hell does “not a right fit” mean, anyway? Is that even grammatical English?
This is a perfectly natural and human response. It hurts to be rejected, and it hurts even more when you walk into a real bookstore, one with chirpy sales clerks and splashy book covers, and see truly godawful books by authors represented by some of these very same agents. But as natural as that rage might be, as satisfying as it is to rant to your friends or online about the idiocy of the people in mainstream publishing, this anger is misplaced. There are good literary agents and bad ones – the gap between the two is huge – but literary agents are only middlemen navigating the rough seas between the swarms of unpublished writers and an ever-diminishing readership for literary fiction.
If your book isn’t selling, literary agents are not to blame. It may be that your book doesn’t really belong in mainstream commercial publishing, in which case you should consider self-publication or send your book to an indie publisher like Ig, Two Dollar Radio or Small Beer Press. Or it may be that your book would appeal to a mainstream publisher, but you haven’t done the groundwork you need to do to get out of the slush pile and onto a literary agent’s radar. Or perhaps your book just isn’t ready yet. Whatever the case, you would be wise to pay attention to what literary agents are trying to tell you, even if all they’re saying is “no”.
I should know because I recently finished a novel and have spent the last six months hearing polite, carefully hedged versions of “no.” This can be an enormously confusing, even maddening process. One agent will say she found my book too commercial, and then a few weeks later another will say she thought the plot “too quiet” and wished it had been more overtly commercial. Well, which is it? Commercial-minded pap, or wannabe Henry James?
One of the nice things about being a journalist is that when you want to know how something works, you can call up people who know and they will sit down and explain it for you. So earlier this year, on assignment from Poets & Writers magazine, I spent a day at the offices of Folio Literary Management in Midtown Manhattan to see for myself what literary agents do all day.
by Michael Bourne, The Millions | Read more:
Image via CompletelyNovel.com/Flickr
The New Totalitarianism of Surveillance Technology
[ed. Another week, another litany of constitutional and privacy abuses. Heard about Trapwire? The super-secret surveillance program outed by Wikileaks last week? You can read about it here and here. Also, in case you missed it, be sure to read about Target's surveillance system and how they can even predict if someone is pregnant.]
Yes, I know: it sounds like a paranoid rant.
Except that it turned out to be true. News21, supported by the Carnegie and Knight foundations, reports that Disney sites are indeed controlled by face-recognition technology, that the military is interested in the technology, and that the face-recognition contractor, Identix, has contracts with the US government – for technology that identifies individuals in a crowd. (...)
According to Homeland Security Newswire, billions of dollars are being invested in the development and manufacture of various biometric technologies capable of detecting and identifying anyone, anywhere in the world – via iris-scanning systems, already in use; foot-scanning technology (really); voice pattern ID software, and so on.
What is very obvious is that this technology will not be applied merely to people under arrest, or to people under surveillance in accordance with the fourth amendment (suspects in possible terrorist plots or other potential crimes, after law enforcement agents have already obtained a warrant from a magistrate). No, the "targets" here are me and you: everyone, all of the time. In the name of "national security", the capacity is being built to identify, track and document any citizen constantly and continuously.
by Naomi Wolf, The Guardian | Read more:
No Criminal Case Is Likely in Loss at MF Global
[ed. Words fail. wtf...invited to be interviewed?]
After 10 months of stitching together evidence on the firm’s demise, criminal investigators are concluding that chaos and porous risk controls at the firm, rather than fraud, allowed the money to disappear, according to people involved in the case.
The hurdles to building a criminal case were always high with MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy in October after a huge bet on European debt unnerved the market. But a lack of charges in the largest Wall Street blowup since 2008 is likely to fuel frustration with the government’s struggle to charge financial executives. Just a few individuals — none of them top Wall Street players — have been prosecuted for the risky acts that led to recent failures and billions of dollars in losses.
In the most telling indication yet that the MF Global investigation is winding down, federal authorities are seeking to interview the former chief of the firm, Jon S. Corzine, next month, according to the people involved in the case. Authorities hope that Mr. Corzine, who is expected to accept the invitation, will shed light on the actions of other employees at MF Global.
Those developments indicate that federal prosecutors do not expect to file criminal charges against the former New Jersey governor. Mr. Corzine has not yet received assurances that he is free from scrutiny, but two rounds of interviews with former employees and a review of thousands of documents have left prosecutors without a case against him, say the people involved in the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
by Azam Ahmed and Ben Protess, Dealbook | Read more:
Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
A Novel Asks Seattle to Laugh at Itself
Maria Semple made an instant, jarring discovery when she moved with her boyfriend and daughter from Los Angeles to Seattle, a city whose Patagonia-clad inhabitants like to talk about bicycling, the environment and the eternally dull question (in her opinion) of whether it might rain.
“It’s just not a funny place,” said Ms. Semple, a novelist and veteran comedy writer who worked on the television shows “Arrested Development” and “Mad About You.” “I was in a miserable mind frame, and I found that I was driving around and all I was thinking about were funny things about how awful Seattle was. I would do these riffs in my head and I would polish them in my head. It was poisonous and self-pitying.”
But from those silently brooding riffs came an idea for her next heroine: Bernadette Fox, a difficult, creatively frustrated misanthrope who, like Ms. Semple, had relocated to Seattle from Los Angeles and loathed her new city.
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” published this week by Little, Brown & Company, has emerged as one of the most absorbing novels of the summer. It tells the story of Bernadette, a former architect who won a MacArthur “genius” grant and then disappeared from public view; her tech-guru husband, Elgin Branch, who is nerd-famous for an especially rousing TED talk; and their precocious teenage daughter, Bee, who has convinced her parents to go on a family trip to Antarctica before she heads off to boarding school.
In Bernadette’s eyes Seattle is an earnest, unfashionable, bewildering place where five-way intersections clog traffic, Microsoft is Big Brother, invasive blackberry bushes are a mysterious citywide plague and Craftsman houses are annoyingly ubiquitous — “turn-of-the-century Craftsman, beautifully restored Craftsman, reinterpretation of Craftsman, needs-some-love Craftsman, modern take on Craftsman,” Bernadette rants. “It’s like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle in a collective trance. You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won’t matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.” (...)
Last week at the Elliott Bay Book Company, an independent shop in Seattle, a buyer, Rick Simonson, listened in as two browsing women were chatting about Ms. Semple’s book. One of them said she wanted to read it; another huffily pointed out a Bernadette zinger that has been repeated in reviews, mocking Seattle residents for having only two hairstyles: “short gray hair and long gray hair.”
“She was pretty miffed by that line,” Mr. Simonson said, adding that he compared the response to Ms. Semple’s book to the attention brought to Portland, Ore., by the satirical television series “Portlandia.” “I think the reaction will be communal and social that way, and I think it’s a book that people will talk about. In a way, Seattle hasn’t had anyone really do anything that makes it look at itself and laugh.”
by Julie Bosman, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Matthew Ryan Williams
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
National Night Out
[ed. I'll admit I'd never heard of this initiative until today (and I read a fair amount, which tells me it might have a bit of a marketing problem). But what a great idea. Almost like Halloween for homeowners.]
Up to 30 million people take to the streets and parks, with no one calling the cops. Indeed, local police departments helped organize this evening of block parties, neighborhood festivals, and music performances. The idea is that when people step out of their homes to meet the neighbors, communities are safer. People who know one another are more likely to work together to prevent crime in their community.
For most people, neighborhoods are a form of the commons that is most familiar. Nearly every one of us lives in one, and they are important to our lives whether we realize it or not. If your home is burglarized while you’re away, it’s your neighbor who calls the police. Even more likely, your neighbor’s presence strolling down the sidewalk or keeping on her porch light discourages hoods from breaking in at all.
That’s why police want to mobilize the power of the commons to fight crime. Spending many years out on the streets, they have come to understand that government and the private sector can only do so much to assure public safety. A lot depends on people themselves, working together in informal but powerful ways to protect their community from violence, theft, and vandalism.
by Jay Walljasper, Guernica | Read more:
Who Picks Assisted Suicide?
Under Washington State’s Death With Dignity Act, his physician has given him a prescription for a lethal dose of barbiturates. He would prefer to die naturally, but if dying becomes protracted and difficult, he plans to take the drugs and die peacefully within minutes.
“It’s like the definition of pornography,” Dr. Wesley, 67, said at his home here in Seattle, with Mount Rainier in the distance. “I’ll know it’s time to go when I see it.”
Washington followed Oregon in allowing terminally ill patients to get a prescription for drugs that will hasten death. Critics of such laws feared that poor people would be pressured to kill themselves because they or their families could not afford end-of-life care. But the demographics of patients who have gotten the prescriptions are surprisingly different than expected, according to data collected by Oregon and Washington through 2011. (...)
Oregon put its Death With Dignity Act in place in 1997, and Washington’s law went into effect in 2009. Some officials worried that thousands of people would migrate to both states for the drugs.
“There was a lot of fear that the elderly would be lined up in their R.V.’s at the Oregon border,” said Barbara Glidewell, an assistant professor at Oregon Health and Science University.
That has not happened, although the number of people who have taken advantage of the law has risen over time. In the first years, Oregon residents who died using drugs they received under the law accounted for one in 1,000 deaths. The number is now roughly one in 500 deaths. At least 596 Oregonians have died that way since 1997. In Washington, 157 such deaths have been reported, roughly one in 1,000.
In Oregon, the number of men and women who have died that way is roughly equal, and their median age is 71. Eighty-one percent have had cancer, and 7 percent A.L.S., which is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The rest have had a variety of illnesses, including lung and heart disease. The statistics are similar in Washington.
There were fears of a “slippery slope” — that the law would gradually expand to include those with nonterminal illnesses or that it would permit physicians to take a more active role in the dying process itself. But those worries have not been borne out, experts say.
Dr. Wesley, a pulmonologist and critical care physician, voted for the initiative when it was on the ballot in 2008, two years after he retired. “All my career, I believed that whatever makes people comfortable at the end of their lives is their own choice to make,” he said.
But Dr. Wesley had no idea that his vote would soon become intensely personal. (...)
In both Oregon and Washington, the law is rigorous in determining who is eligible to receive the drugs. Two physicians must confirm that a patient has six months or less to live. And the request for the drugs must be made twice, 15 days apart, before they are handed out. They must be self-administered, which creates a special challenge for people with A.L.S.
Dr. Wesley said he would find a way to meet that requirement, perhaps by tipping a cup into his feeding tube.
The reasons people have given for requesting physician-assisted dying have also defied expectations.
Dr. Linda Ganzini, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, published a study in 2009 of 56 Oregonians who were in the process of requesting physician-aided dying.
“Everybody thought this was going to be about pain,” Dr. Ganzini said. “It turns out pain is kind of irrelevant.”
At the time of each of the 56 patients’ requests, almost none of them rated pain as a primary motivation. By far the most common reasons, Dr. Ganzini’s study found, were the desire to be in control, to remain autonomous and to die at home. “It turns out that for this group of people, dying is less about physical symptoms than personal values,” she said.
by Katie Hafner, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Leah Nash
Wondering How Far Magazines Must Fall
Making a weekly newsmagazine has always been a tough racket. It takes a big staff working on punishing deadlines to aggregate the flurry of news, put some learned topspin on it and package it for readers. But that job now belongs to the Web and takes place in real time, not a week later.
Tina Brown may have understood the digital insurgency that was disrupting the publishing business, but that didn’t stop her from stepping into the maw at the end of 2010, after Sidney Harman bought Newsweek. She married her Web site, The Daily Beast, with Newsweek in an attempt to put the paddles to a franchise gone cold, but Mr. Harman is now gone and his family has withdrawn its financial support. With losses continuing to pile up, that leaves IAC/InterActiveCorp, which also owns The Daily Beast, holding the bag.
As the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Ms. Brown was an odd choice to be Newsweek’s savior. Even in its diminished state — Mr. Harman bought it for a dollar in addition to assuming some $40 million in liabilities — the magazine is aimed at a mass audience in the kind of Middle America places where Ms. Brown, a hothouse flower of Manhattan media, rarely visits. Still, she has been able to maneuver The Daily Beast into the middle of the conversation and she has never lost her touch for getting people talking. But a newsweekly is a brutal, perhaps unwinnable, challenge.
Because of changes to the informational ecosystem, weeklies have been forced to leave behind the news and become magazines of ideas. Ms. Brown understood that; it’s just that some of her ideas weren’t always very good. Sometimes she tried too hard — Barack Obama was depicted as the first gay president — and sometimes not hard enough, as with last week’s cover about fancy dining around the world.
People who predicted that her effort would come to tears might be tempted to do an end zone dance now. But that would be dumb. The problem is not Tina Brown or her conceptual obsessions, or even the calcified formula of the weekly magazine.
The problem is more existential than that: magazines, all kinds of them, don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore.
Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work.
I talked to an executive at one of the big Manhattan publishers about the recent collapse at the newsstand and he said, “When the airplane suddenly drops 10,000 feet and it doesn’t crash, you still end up with your heart in your stomach. Those are very, very bad numbers.”
Tina Brown may have understood the digital insurgency that was disrupting the publishing business, but that didn’t stop her from stepping into the maw at the end of 2010, after Sidney Harman bought Newsweek. She married her Web site, The Daily Beast, with Newsweek in an attempt to put the paddles to a franchise gone cold, but Mr. Harman is now gone and his family has withdrawn its financial support. With losses continuing to pile up, that leaves IAC/InterActiveCorp, which also owns The Daily Beast, holding the bag.As the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, Ms. Brown was an odd choice to be Newsweek’s savior. Even in its diminished state — Mr. Harman bought it for a dollar in addition to assuming some $40 million in liabilities — the magazine is aimed at a mass audience in the kind of Middle America places where Ms. Brown, a hothouse flower of Manhattan media, rarely visits. Still, she has been able to maneuver The Daily Beast into the middle of the conversation and she has never lost her touch for getting people talking. But a newsweekly is a brutal, perhaps unwinnable, challenge.
Because of changes to the informational ecosystem, weeklies have been forced to leave behind the news and become magazines of ideas. Ms. Brown understood that; it’s just that some of her ideas weren’t always very good. Sometimes she tried too hard — Barack Obama was depicted as the first gay president — and sometimes not hard enough, as with last week’s cover about fancy dining around the world.
People who predicted that her effort would come to tears might be tempted to do an end zone dance now. But that would be dumb. The problem is not Tina Brown or her conceptual obsessions, or even the calcified formula of the weekly magazine.
The problem is more existential than that: magazines, all kinds of them, don’t work very well in the marketplace anymore.
Like newspapers, magazines have been in a steady slide, but now, like newspapers, they seem to have reached the edge of the cliff. Last week, the Audit Bureau of Circulations reported that newsstand circulation in the first half of the year was down almost 10 percent. When 10 percent of your retail buyers depart over the course of a year, something fundamental is at work.
I talked to an executive at one of the big Manhattan publishers about the recent collapse at the newsstand and he said, “When the airplane suddenly drops 10,000 feet and it doesn’t crash, you still end up with your heart in your stomach. Those are very, very bad numbers.”
by David Carr, NY Times | Read more:
Need an Expert? Try the Crowd
Lots of people gave it a try. One of them, a self-educated carpenter named John Harrison, invented the marine chronometer — a rugged and highly precise clock — that did the trick. For the first time, sailors could accurately determine their location at sea.
A centuries-old problem was solved. And, arguably, crowdsourcing was born.
Crowdsourcing is basically what it sounds like: posing a question or asking for help from a large group of people. Coined as a term in 2006, crowdsourcing has taken off in the internet era. Think of Wikipedia, and its thousands of unpaid contributors, now vastly larger than the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Crowdsourcing has allowed many problems to be solved that would be impossible for experts alone. Astronomers rely on an army of volunteers to scan for new galaxies. At climateprediction.net, citizens have linked their home computers to yield more than a hundred million hours of climate modeling; it’s the world’s largest forecasting experiment.
But what if experts didn’t simply ask the crowd to donate time or answer questions? What if the crowd was asked to decide what questions to ask in the first place?
Could the crowd itself be the expert?
That’s what a team at the University of Vermont decided to explore — and the answer seems to be yes.
by Joshua E. Brown, University of Vermont | Read more:
Photo: James Cridland
Casinos as the Bleak New Senior Citizen Center
As a hospice professional and pastor, I realize the importance of communities encouraging active lifestyles among the elderly. By 2030, over 20% of our US population will be over 65. Caregivers, churches, and governments will be looking for recreational outlets that offer community and fun while honoring the independence and dignity of older Americans. Half of all adult visitors to casinos last year aged 50 and older, so I decided to observe the American Gaming Association's (AGA) "Responsible Gaming Education Week" -- which is held annually since 1998 in the first week of August -- by asking: do casinos do justice to our seniors? What does it mean for anyone, much less vulnerable aging people, to gamble "responsibly"?
In an oft-quoted AGA survey from 2002 , the Peter D. Hart Research Associates, Inc., and The Luntz Research Companies report that 62 percent of seniors see casinos as merely an inexpensive day out for someone on a fixed income. They argue that "90% of seniors don't want someone telling them how to spend their time or money" and that "senior citizens believe gambling is a question of personal freedom...[that] they should be able to go into a casino, have their own budget, and spend their disposable income the way they want." The AGA uses their annual "Responsible Gambling Education Week" to suggest that pathological gambling is rare. But reading between the lines of the "educational" factoids and pop quizzes they offer it is easy to see the real message: there is NO such thing as luck. The longer and faster you play any "game," the more money the house guarantees you will lose.
My adventure begins with a leisurely, summer weekday morning drive down River Road in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The casino boat parking lot is nearly full at 11:30 a.m. Valets are using casino-logoed scooters to assist disabled drivers from their cars and through the sliding glass doors. They shout "Good luck to you!" as nurse's aides, clad in scrubs, unload other seniors from nursing home and assisted living facility vans, pushing their wheelchairs into the brightly lit facility.
Inside, an elderly man sleeps with his walker at his side. I am looking for the buffet ($2.99 senior day) but am soon lost, and I end up wandering down the descending ramp that leads to the gambling boat. When I pass through a turnstile three blazer-clad security men offer a jovial, "Good luck to you! Good luck to you!" A silver-haired man, tripping on the high pile of the carpet, redirects me to the buffet.
by Amy Ziettlow, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Reuters
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Just a Friendly Robocall
Hello. This is Maxine Landis, and I want to talk to you about something very valuable to me. Loyalty. Through the years, I have enjoyed the friendship of just so many honest, hard-working people. People like Walter and Marie Pollard, who have welcomed me into their wonderful monthly canasta nights. People like Lester and Susan Fenner, who, in 2006, helped me organize a block-wide sidewalk sale, only to see it blossom into an annual and much cherished tradition in our development. I believe that these bonds were forged and strengthened thanks to one simple thing: loyalty. This November, stay loyal. Stay friends with Maxine. Paid for by Maxine Landis.
Hello, friend. This is Arnold Landis calling. Maxine Landis has been speaking a lot about loyalty of late. I’ve seen firsthand how easily such “loyalty” can be tested. I’ve seen Maxine Landis coldly cut off friends over something as minor as an unreturned serving dish. I’ve seen names get crossed off Maxine’s invite list as retribution for a perceived snub at the supermarket. I’ve seen Maxine Landis refuse to attend holiday parties in protest against what she considered a garish Christmas-light display. If loyalty comes easily to Maxine Landis, disloyalty comes even easier. Don’t get stuck with a backstabber. Choose Arnold Landis as the friend you keep this November.
This is Maxine Landis. I wasn’t alarmed by Arnold Landis’s recent turn toward name-calling, since I’ve heard Arnold Landis call his so-called friends much, much worse. People like Martin Powter, whom he once referred to as Captain Baldspot. People like Elisabeth Tandy, whom Arnold nicknamed The One With the Alcoholic’s Nose. People like the Blitsteins, whom Arnold called The Shitsteins. Do you want to remain constantly on guard, wondering what horrible names you’ll soon be called behind your back? Of course not. Go with Maxine.
Monday, August 13, 2012
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