Category: Uncategorized

I thought I’d taken care of this already, but Fred Reed bitchslaps Maureen Dowd again, just for good measure:

In a recent column, headed “Men Just Want Mommy,” Maureen tells us, “A few years ago at a White House Correspondents’ dinner, I met a very beautiful actress. Within moments, she blurted out: ‘I can’t believe I’m 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or PR women.’”

The bastards.

Here we have the eternal cry (at least it’s beginning to feel eternal) of the unhappy feminist: “The whole world can’t stand me. What’s wrong with the whole world?” If men don’t want to marry a self-absorbed menopausing ocelot, there is something wrong with men. I listen to this stuff and I want to marry someone’s personal assistant, just to be sure I don’t get drunk and marry a very beautiful actress.

But more of Maureen and the personal assistants. She continues observantly, “I’d been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with the young women whose job it was to tend to them and care for them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.” Men want to marry Mommy, she implies, with forty-weight passive-aggressiveness you could lube a diesel with.

Actually, what men very much do not want is to marry Mommy. The problem for Maureen is that she is Mommy: censorious, moralizing, self-pitying, endlessly instructive, and so achingly tedious that men find themselves thinking of moldy bath sponges.

There is a reason, after all, why most young men leave home with such alacrity that one might be excused for thinking that it is on fire. Marrying a nanny doesn’t mean that you want someone to nanny you, it means you want someone who will do an excellent job of raising your children. And I daresay I know rather better than MS Dowd whereof I speak, since I married a nanny myself.

I’ve said this before and I’m sure I’ll have to say it again, but here it is anyhow: if someone – anyone – doesn’t want to be around you, the problem is not with them. The problem is with you.

An interview with Neal Stephenson:

If you met the novelist Neal Stephenson a decade ago, you would have encountered a slight, unassuming grad-student type whose soft-spoken demeanor gave no obvious indication that he had written the manic apotheosis of cyberpunk science fiction (1992’s Snow Crash, in which computer viruses start invading hacker minds). It wasn’t his debut—he’d published two earlier novels in the 1980s—but the book was such a hit that it put his name on the science fiction map in a way the earlier efforts had not.

Meet Stephenson today, and you’ll meet a well-muscled, shaven-headed, bearded fellow who’s just published a highly acclaimed, massively popular trilogy of 900-page novels set mostly in the 17th century. Talk to him, though, and you still hear the rigorously humble guy of 10 years ago. Read that trilogy—Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, collectively called The Baroque Cycle—and you’ll have the uncanny sense that you’re reading some new kind of science fiction. Actually, with every Stephenson book since Snow Crash, you feel that you’re reading some new kind of science fiction, regardless of the nominal set and settings of the story.

The three parts of The Baroque Cycle were published at six-month intervals in 2003 and 2004; they feature historical figures ranging from Newton and Leibniz to Louis XIV and a very young Benjamin Franklin, bound up in a narrative with the fictional ancestors of the characters in Stephenson’s similarly huge, cryptology-centered 1999 novel Cryptonomicon. Like Cryptonomicon, the trilogy has attracted praise from mainstream critics as well as Stephenson’s science fiction fan base. The Village Voice calls the series “a work of idiosyncratic beauty whose plots boast tangled, borderless roots.” The Independent says it is “a far more impressive literary endeavour than most so-called ‘serious’ fiction.” Even a mixed review of Quicksilver in The Washington Post describes it as “often brilliant and occasionally astonishing.”

Stephenson has a substantial libertarian following as well, and not merely because the decentralized, post-statist social systems he describes in Snow Crash and The Diamond Age (1995) are so radically different from modern government. The Baroque Cycle is, among other things, a close look at the rise of science, the market, and the nation-state, themes close to any classical liberal’s heart. Reading it means reading three long, encyclopedic books and maybe spending half a year in an earlier century. It’s not the kind of thing the average reader takes on lightly. But once you find you have a taste for Stephenson’s broad range of obsessive interests, his fine ear for period and modern English prose and speech, and his gift for making the improbably comic seem eminently human, the question no longer is whether you’ll read his books—it’s when.

I particularly liked how Stephenson answered the question about whether The Baroque Cycle is science fiction or not. “It’s in the tradition.”

Exactly.

I’m working on another piece for a second Smart Pop book, this one on CS Lewis. The piece is entitled CS Lewis and the Problem of Religion in Science Fiction and Fantasy and it should be interesting and more than a little provocative.

What I need is for people to throw out the name of every fantasy book and series which:

A) uses a religious scheme based on some notion of Balance

or

B) features a medieval setting with no universal church

I can kick things off with David Eddings Belgariad in category (A) and Terry Brook’s Shannara series in category (B).

Thanks in advance….

From the UK Sun:

United are trying to ward off violent threats from radical fans by opting for a cloak-and-dagger approach to [Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ owner] Glazer’s latest takeover bid. The United board are on standby to meet in secret at just a few hours’ notice to discuss the American tycoon’s £800million offer. They abandoned plans to assemble at United’s ground after around 500 fans gathered there in a hate-filled protest this week. The board are now likely to discuss Glazer’s bid at a hush-hush London location. No one is prepared to say when — but it looks set to happen today.

I would love to be there for the first ManU game at Arsenal and seeing the look on the United supporters’ faces when the crowd sings “Yankee Doodle Dandy” or whatever song will end up being chosen to mock the soon-to-be American-owned team. About the only thing that would upset them more is if a German bought the team.

And so the bill for all that title-buying finally comes due….

UPDATE: Or maybe not. A combination of boardroom opposition to any bid, plus an indication Cubic, the investment vehicle of Irish racehorse owners John Magnier and JP McManus, are not intending to sell their 28.9% stake leaves Glazer floundering on both pre-conditions laid out in the ‘proposals’ he presented to United last weekend.

Bankers JP Morgan have told Glazer they will only provide £300million funding for a takeover approach if the bid is recommended by the United board and he is also successful in securing 75% of the company – both of which appear unlikely.

From the New York Times:

Asked if Mr. Jordan had been under any pressure from the network to resign, Ms. Robinson said the decision had been his. She said Mr. Walton, the CNN president, was unavailable for further comment. Mr. Jordan did not return a message left on his cellphone seeking comment….

When reports of Mr. Jordan’s more recent remarks began reaching the United States via the Internet, some of his colleagues, citing the previous controversy, responded with palpable irritation and mystification, though not with comments they would permit to be attributed to them by name, given the sensitivity of the situation.

Isn’t it interesting how the very same people who scream like infants about the public’s right to know when someone doesn’t want to talk to them clam up immediately whenever they find themselves on the wrong side of the microphone.

Journalists, by and large, are poorly educated pond scum. And yet, some people still ask me why I go out of my way to make it clear that I am not one.

Eco sees no point in it:

Odio il Carnevale…. Che senso ha celebrare il Carnevale in un mondo in cui il Carnevale viene proposto per trecento e sessantacinque giorni all’anno?

“I hate Carnival…. What sense does it make to celebrate Carnival in a world in which Carnival comes 365 days a year?”

I do so love a solid curmudgeonly aspersion cast by the elders. Especially one backed with all the majesterial authority and contemptuous certitude of a medieval Pope. It doesn’t get much better than my two favorite doctors, Eco and Z.

Kyle Williams brings an excellent GQ article to our attention:

They were crazy, and they loved God—and I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that love, which I never was capable of. Because knowing it isn’t true doesn’t mean you would be strong enough to believe if it were.

That last sentence rather beautifully describes the disbeliever’s dichotomy. It also shows how there’s usually no need for fear or loathing despite the mutual incomprehension between belief and disbelief.

Did you know that single men, aged 18-34, are among the strongest supporters of a woman’s right to choose? I have no doubt this is the exact same demographic that supports the legalization of prostitution in Germany and yes, are among the most common patrons of prostitution in America.

See any connection?

Guys, age 18-34, who are frequently lampooned for their inability to commit and lionized for the excessive exercise of their raging hormones, want women to be free to exercise their sexuality as well. Why? The obvious answer is to indulge men under the clever marketing ploy of unencumbered sexual freedom for women. Let’s face it. From Madonna to Britney Spears and Cat Woman, the most popular women in America, and around the world, are still celebrated for how well they satiate the sexual fantasies of men….

Truth is girls, almost every guy wants to date a bad girl and marry a good one.

Hey Kelly. Kelly! Shhhhhh!

A nine-months’ pregnant woman fought off and killed a knife-wielding woman who may have been trying to steal the baby, police said Friday. Police said 26-year-old Sarah Brady acted in self-defense in killing Katherine Smith on Thursday. No charges were filed.

Smith, 22, had been falsely telling neighbors for weeks that she was pregnant, and a search of her apartment after her death revealed a full baby nursery, investigators said. “She had everything in place that you’d expect to have in place with a newborn coming,” said Steve Hensley, police chief in this Cincinnati suburb.

Nowhere in this story is it reported how a heavily pregnant woman could have fought off a woman with a knife, let alone killed her. Did she have a gun? I’ll bet she did. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the news media will not report the details when private individuals use guns to defend themselves.