Pizza comes full circle

After an extended period of being out of commission, typing-wise, from my arm injury (I re-injured it playing D&D and had to take another week or so on light duty), I am back. Falling out of the rhythm of blogging, though, makes reentry difficult. We shall see how things progress.

This weekend has been my first serious attempt at cooking since the curious case of the leaping knife. It is somehow appropriate that the go-to dish today was pizza, just as when I last cooked. (After returning from the ER, the pizza was reheated and eaten, as I could not bear the thought of wasting farmers' market mozzarella.) May I recommend a lemon zucchini goat cheese pizza?

Official Lila Garrity Slam Page

Just started watching Friday Night Lights.

This show is dangerous.

It makes my accent come back.

You're doing it wrong.

Sunscreen, that is.

"War is the use of force – Yes, Otter?"

Friends of PTN with impressionable young minds at home: buy this when it comes out.

Ow.

So how's your holiday weekend coming along? Mine would have been terrific were it not for the trip to the ER to sew my arm back together (minor kitchen accident with flying knife). It appears that nothing important was damaged, but I have to go back for checks and suture removal. Boo. And it was of course my right hand.

Against Whimsy

GQ comes out against whimsical wooing:

I'd like to suggest a litmus test for whether or not you are being whimsical. Would Danny Trejo shake his head at you? For example: Let's say you have named your bike Sharon. Is it a customized Super Glide? Invite your date to ride Sharon! Is it a turquoise beach cruiser? No va, hombre.

Burning bright

On dieting and the pursuit of incandescence:

The self-acceptance people remind me too much of the dreadful middle school workshops on body image where we had to stand around and recite affirmations like "I love the body the way I am." It sounded craven, ridiculous, and redolent of fundamentalist religious cults that sensible adults were generally urging me not to join. No, what I want for young girls like my high school friend is something like the ability to shut off the repeated voice saying "You ought to be burning calories!" in favor of a voice saying "Yes, but one has to do work now." By the grace of work, by the knowledge that work is important, the burning calories voice then yields to the work voice. And only in doing so does one ever attain the kind of incandescence that Woolf prized. There's no self-acceptance in her vision of incandescence; one becomes a vessel of something else in Woolf's vision, and the self sort of fades away entirely. Modern feminists would do better to cast their arguments about body image anxieties in terms of "These worries are a distraction from the pursuit of incandescence," rather than to focus on the goofy cult rituals about "self-acceptance."

I also found appealing Isabel's idea that PUAs demand that women focus on radical change through dieting rather than marginal improvements through other means because it's really about 24/7 mental subservience to male desires.

New frontiers of nerddom breached

Any hints for a first-time D&D player?

ETA: The best thing I've seen in MONTHS. Much love to the shippers, and gingerhaze in particular.


Sample:

I kind of want to see an alternate version where Magneto works for the Mossad.

Further ETA that this is canon?

Nobody in the US ever asks "what about the rapists?"

The Economist reviews a new book by a Michigan law professor on the Japanese judiciary's treatment of love and sex.

Mr West presents a judiciary that is sometimes out of step with the “sense of society” on which it regularly bases its rulings. In divorce proceedings judges make it a virtue for wives to forgive adultery or overlook domestic violence.

Judges may also go far beyond their brief to comment on social mores, In one instance, in 1991, a judge decided that modern appliances are partly responsible for failed marriages because they “give women time to contemplate”. In that particular case the judge rejected a wife’s request for divorce after years of physical abuse, living separately and even a suicide attempt because her husband did not cheat or gamble, and looked so forlorn in court. “They should search together for the bluebird they were unable to find before,” the judge ruled. The reference to a “bluebird” is as jarring in Japanese as it is in English.

Judges use a multi-part test, that does not include love, to approve a contested divorce. Yet love plays a part in cases where it is perhaps less relevant. For instance, sexual relations with a minor is sometimes excused if the court rules there is love. Judges set out to decide whether the defendant is “earnest”, which means either in love or contemplating marriage.

In the case of rape, Japanese courts consider factors that American and European ones would not. Being drunk is a valid defence. One 1992 ruling suspended the sentences of two men out of compassion for what they “must have faced when the victim told them no”.

The judge who wrote that last opinion might be interested in some alternative arguments for his position. What's the Japanese policy on use of international law in deciding cases?

Wash your hands. Or don't.

Via Matt Yglesias, an argument for washing your hands after peeing.

When you start to perspire, even a little, sweat from the perianal area starts dripping around in your underwear, eventually getting into the fabric and moving onto your genitals.

"The point is that simply touching the penis in an effort to direct your urine flow can be more than enough to transfer harmful microbes to your hands, and then on to the pretzels sitting in bowl on the bar," says [biology professor] Fidopiastis.

Fidopiastis adds that there may be instances when we needn't wash our hands after peeing. "If you can urinate in a hands-free urinal and pee without touching your penis, can you not wash?" he says. "I guess my answer there would be a half-hearted, 'Sure, why not?'"

Does the argument for washing even apply to women? And yet I bet more women than men wash their hands.

I'll take unsympathetic plaintiffs for $800, Alex.

Should it be against the law for this billboard to be posted?

Does your answer change if the individual in the photograph is not a model but a man whose former girlfriend terminated an unwanted pregnancy?

Does your answer change if the billboard ad was purchased by the ex-boyfriend and erected in their hometown?

Some notes:

- Neither the man nor the woman are identified in the ad, although they may be identifiable.
- The woman's friends assert that the pregnancy ended via miscarriage, not an elective abortion.

Someone with Westlaw access and some free time can answer whether alleging someone had an abortion when she didn't has previously been found defamatory under New Mexico law, as Kash Hill suggests. I suppose in this context it does constitute an allegation of unchastity.

Although the individual on the billboard is clearly a jerk, it's very common for people to be moved to political activism by events in their lives. It seems obvious that this was not just an event in the woman's life, but in his as well. Do we want to create a rule for broad protection of privacy rights that will also apply to more sympathetic cases? 

Reader, I promised to marry him.

So! I'm back from my magical mystery vacation, which included lots of lovely sights:

Maria Theresa, explaining it all;

the good kind of Secession;

Melk abbey, of Adso-of fame;

the not so blue Danube;

... and the most romantic tree stump in all of the world.

For Isabel, with a golden retriever

This is cute, but I keep imagining Bran's direwolf from the HBO Game of Thrones series telling these dogs, "That's not how you fight crime. THIS * rips out assassin's throat * is how you fight crime."



Nymeria's real sin was allowing Joffrey to live. If she'd just killed him and Arya bullied Sansa into saying he "fell in the river," how much Westerosi blood might have been spared?

Total request, not-live

I'd say blogging would be sporadic for the near future, but blogging is already sporadic. I don't even have a good excuse, like "I'm getting my own totally awesome blog and living the dream of getting paid to blog about cool pop culture stuff." But if you suggest a cool topic in the comments, I promise to post about it once things get back to normal around here.

In which I am deemed a supporter of "a tyranny by tabloid and by internet"

I must be doing something right if British speech chillers are describing me thus. Further:

Ms Taylor’s ideal – of a transparent world in which we will all live without the burden of secrecy, hypocrisy and lies – is more likely to be a dystopia of some against all, as the powerful and ruthless in society comb what had been secret for personal gain or the pleasures of cruelty.

When our right to discuss the conduct of our fellow humans is minimized as "the poor's right to broadcast gossip," it is clear that a tyranny of one sort has already been erected.

It ain't no Grizzly Man

Anyone else see Cave of Forgotten Dreams? I was disappointed by the failure to maintain a sense of awe, and by the inexplicable absence of any sort of focus on the depicted species of animals. But it was worthwhile just to be able to see the interiors of the cave. 

ETA that hi-res images or reproductions of the cave art are surprisingly hard to find.

You know it when you see it - NSFW if you work at Barnes & Noble

Apparently Barnes and Noble got in a tizzy over the cover of this month's Dossier magazine (yep, I'd never heard of it before either). There's a guy on the cover with no shirt. Usually this would be no big deal. But the guy in question is a famously androgynous model, and he's wearing makeup and a feminine hairstyle. Eek! The bookstore chain offered the magazine a choice between an opaque plastic wrapping, a la porno mags, or the pulping of all their copies of this month's issue. The controversial cover photo is below.

I've got to ask: At what point did this cover tip for Barnes and Noble? Are they okay with shirtless skinny men with bombshell curls and no makeup? Shirtless skinny men with makeup and masculine hair? Men with Marilyn hair and tons of makeup, but clothed? Women with buzz cuts and double mastectomies?

Peaking early

Apropos of recent discussions:

The fall from childhood greatness to a middling state of “simply okay” is, Gladwell suggested, a recurring theme when the cherished notion of precocity is subjected to real scrutiny.

“I think we take it as an article of faith in our society that great ability in any given field is invariably manifested early on, that to be precocious at something is important because it’s a predictor of future success,” Gladwell said. “But is that really true? And what is the evidence for it? And what exactly is the meaning and value of mastering a particular skill very early on in your life?”
...
We think of precociousness as an early form of adult achievement, and, according to Gladwell, that concept is much of the problem. “What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.”
...
When we call a child “precocious,” Gladwell said, “we have a very sloppy definition of what we mean. Generally what we mean is that a person has an unusual level of intellectual ability for their age.” But adult success has to do with a lot more than that. “In our obsession with precociousness we are overstating the importance of being smart.” In this regard, Gladwell noted research by Carol Dweck and Martin Seligman indicating that different dimensions such as explanatory styles and attitudes and approaches to learning may have as much to do with learning ability as does innate intelligence. And when it comes to musicians, the strongest predictor of ability is the same mundane thing that gets you to Carnegie Hall: “Really what we mean … when we say that someone is ‘naturally gifted’ is that they practice a lot, that they want to practice a lot, that they like to practice a lot.” (emphasis added)

Are we confusing correlation with causation when we interpret results like the association of practice hours with ability? Isn't the liking significant?

Too, the sorts of skills and subject for which we label precocity as significant are often not those for which mere repetition and practice suffices to make one a "gifted doer."

On tittle-tattle and privacy laws

From the "legality is not synonymous with morality" files:

Such stories constitute little more than idle gossip and are often embarrassing, even distressing, to their subjects. But so long as such gossip has not been acquired through illegal means, through invasion of privacy in the first sense, and so long as it is not untrue, it should not be a matter for the law. This is not to say that such journalism should be deemed acceptable. It should not. Passing off gossip as news has helped lead, as Polly Toynbee pointed out almost a decade ago, to ‘everyone’s loss of civility’, to the undermining of ‘everyone’s sense of a discreet private space which should stay beyond the brazen megaphone of public exposure’. There is, however, a big difference between that which should be unacceptable and that which should be illegal. Just because something is legal does not make it morally or socially acceptable. Conversely, just because something is morally or socially unacceptable should not make it illegal.

A question answered

Why Europeans would read someone like Franzen:

For the American reader there is the pleasure of recognizing the interiors Franzen so meticulously describes. Not so for the Italian, or German, or Frenchman, who simply struggles through lists of alien bric-a-brac. We might say that if the Swiss Stamm, to attract an international public, has been obliged to write about everyman for everyone everywhere, Franzen, thanks to the size of America’s internal market, but also to the huge pull the country exercises on the world’s imagination, can write about Americans for Americans (which is no doubt as it should be) and nevertheless expect to be read worldwide.
...

Freedom has this characteristic: Franzen appears to get all his energy, all his identity, from simultaneously evoking and disdaining America, explaining it (its gaucheness mostly) and rejecting it; his stories invariably offer characters engaging in the American world, finding themselves tainted and debased by it, then at last coming to their Franzenesque “corrected” senses and withdrawing from it. Blinded by this or that ambition, they come to grief because they lack knowledge, they lack awareness. Thus the importance of so much information. Unlike his characters, Franzen knows everything, is aware of everything, and aware above all that redemption lies in withdrawal from the American public scene. What message could be more welcome to Europeans? The more you know about America, which we need to do, the more you turn away from it, which we enjoy.