Suzi Parker's Thin Skin

There is a 'Sarah Palin joining al Jazeera' spoof story which is making the rounds. The story originated in Onion manqué The Daily Currant. It's just truthy enough to pass a first glance. It did take in Suzi Parker, a freelance writer who contributes to WaPo's 'She The People' blog (and the patronizing sexism of that catchall is a rant for a different day). She wrote a whole article on Palin on that premise only to have to retract it. The defanged story with the embarrassing correction is still live but Parker has not contributed any new articles to the blog since that one.

This was back on February 12th, so I went to find out what and where she has been writing since. A google search for her is just flooded with results mocking her error so I went to her twitter feed which is at the bottom of her articles only to find out that I've been blocked by her. Now I understand her anger at some like Michelle Malkin who took this gaffe and ran with it with a hashtag game called #SuziParkerScoops. Even Sarah Palin got in on the mocking and that has got to hurt. As tempting as that was, here was the totality of all my tweeting on the issue:

@suziparker falls for a parody news story about Sarah Palin. washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-… In her defense, all stories about Palin read like satire.
— Yellojkt (@yellojkt) February 12, 2013

I set up the item, give a link, and then make a joke at Palin's expense. So why am I being blocked? Is Suzi Parker really that thin-skinned? I'm a nice guy. Honest. But when someone makes a gaffe that big they need to own up to and shake it off. And not block everybody who calls attention to it. That is no way to build a following.

Perhaps she needs to talk to Gene Weingarten about what a sweetheart I am in real life. I called him an 'asshat' and we buried the hatchet.

Gene Weingarten and his bête noire.

So what gives, Suzi? Give me another chance.

Incivil Order

As a Psuedonym-American I get nervous anytime that people start calling for Real Names as the catch-all answer for online incivility. For some reason people think that if people had to sign their names to online comments all will be sunlight and rainbows. Now as anyone who has waded into a Facebook political discussion, this is risible. And this assumes that people think that everybody on Facebook is a real person. Facebook has one billion users. And I'm three of them.

The latest person to wade into this morass in a attempt to drain the swamp only to find himself up to his ass in alligators is Patrick Pexton, the outgoing and final ombudsman for the Washington Post. In his valedictory he says this:

I think The Post should move, as the Miami Herald did recently, away from anonymous responses to a system that requires commenters to use their real names and to sign in via Facebook. It would reduce the volume of comments but raise the level of discussion and help preserve The Post’s brand.

This caught the attention of Hardball guest host Michael Smerconish who used that as a jumping off point for this piece:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

If you didn't blink you may have caught a pithy comment by yours truly. Here is the full unedited tirade of mine: 

 It's not the anonymity that creates the bile. It's the inadequate and ineffective moderation. Where standards are fairly and uniformly enforced people behave themselves.

Requiring 'real' identities (and many of us have long traceable histories under our online identities) of people only enables cyberstalkers and other malicious elements. 

 And since I just got quoted on MSNBC, I'm a little glad I do use an online alias. I have been a member of several online communities over the years and the key is engagement and reinforcement. When people genuinely talk to each other rather than at each other, hostility tends to evaporate. And it works whether people use their 'real' name or not.

As for how to eliminate the rancor on WaPo, there is little a massive purge wouldn't solve. I'm talking Biblical deluge. The system is broken and I am actually looking forward to the cleansing effect a paywall might have even though I am likely to lose a lot of good imaginary friends in the flood.

I am reminded of a saying that goes: 

If you take a barrel of sewage and add a teaspoon of wine, you get a barrel of sewage; if you take a barrel of wine and add a teaspoon of sewage, you get a barrel of sewage. 

And there is no shortage of sewage in the series of pipes that form the internet. It takes a lot of work to keep the wine unsullied. But it can be done without infringing on people's privacy and anonymity.

Golden Globes 2013: A New Hope

The Golden Globes is my favorite awards show. By mixing movie and television stars with lots of alcohol all sorts of good natured fun can be had. One tradition I have is to give out my annual Miss Golden Globes award. But this year was a bad year for that high and tight look with the more daring celebrities, hostess with the mostest Amy Poehler included, going for necklines plunging down to about the knee.

  

In the case of J.Lo, her dress seems to be composed entirely of a fungal infection. She should have a botanist take a look at it.

In another runner-up award, Lucy Liu sewed up the It's Curtains, Scarlett Award with her upholstery inspired get-up.

Michelle Lea, whose bezoms I have seen in person back when she was being sexually assaulted nightly (and twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays) in Spring Awakening, must have misunderstood the point (or lack therof) of my award and emphasized the 'golden' part of the phrase. She had such an auric glow that she made Selma Hayek look like Jessica Chastain. Close but no cigar (and no, that wasn't a backstage with Bill Clinton joke).

But in the end, the starlet most willing to raise her exposure level was Modern Family Girl-Gone-Wild Sarah Hyland who decided to steal some attention back from her much younger (and much more demurely dressed) sister costar. So without further ado, we say adieu to Ms Hyland's sense of modesty as we crown her with this year's double-orbed trophy.

But the real highlight of the night was Jodie Foster's stream of consciousness (or lack thereof) Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award speech. While many seemed baffled by what she either trying to say or not trying to say, two items were clear to me:

•    At age 50, she's just two years older than me.
•   She is back on the market.

My possibly unseemly obsession with the Yale grad is well documented, but this puts a new light on matters. And just to cement my hope, take a look at her red carpet dress:

Yes, she made it out of duct tape and chain mail. That can only mean one thing. She's a nerd just like me. And while there are perhaps a million nerds out there, she still might cast her eye on me. So what if the odds are only a million to one. As Jim Carey says in Dumb and Dumber, "So a million-to-one? That means I have a chance."

Photos From The Past

The Library of Congress has a Flickr page where they posted several hundred amazing color photographs from the 1930s and 1940s. Not only were they rare full color pictures, but they were deep insights into how this country lived seventy years ago. As i looked through the over 1600 photos I began to have a sense of deja vu as I had been to many of these places or seen things like them. Here are some of the more jarring juxtapositions with one photographer in particular:

 

This photo by Jack Delano shows a woman painting the scenery along the Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah mountains. 

 

Seventy years later the place is just as popular for the scenic artisl.

 

 The Chicago lakefront was once a bustling railyard with skyscrapers overlooking them as shown in this photo, also by Jack Delano..

Now this area is the site of Millennium Plaza and the Art Institute of Chicago even though the train tracks still run through. Can you find Metropolitan Tower in both photos?

 

 Many of the photos in the archive are of industrial settings or trains like this one by Jack Delano taken in Chicago as well.

 

Now these trains just sit in museums and train graveyards like this one in New Mexico.

 

I found it odd that I kept being drawn to the photos of Jack Delano. Delano eventually moved to Puerto Rico where he took this street view.

 

 When I went to San Juan, the streets were the same only with fresher paint and newer cars.

I seem to have found a kindred spirit in Jack Delano who worked for the Farm Security Administration Photography program during the Great Depression taking photographs of simple working folk all over the country. He died in Puerto Rico in 1997 but somehow I feel as if his soul still lives on.

BooksFirst May-December 2012

Books Bought
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
American Gods 10th Anniversary Edition by Neil Gaiman (Kindle edition)
The Old Man And The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
The Picture of Dorain Gray by Oscar Wilde

Books Read
J Is For Judgment by Sue Grafton
Blackout by Connie Willis
All Clear by Connie Willis

Books Heard
Man Made by Joel Stein
Girl In A Bar by Rachel Dratz
You're Not Doing It Right by Michael Ian Black
 
Comments

Riding out my NaJuReMoNoMo resolution to catch up on my Kinsey Millhone novels, I read the (counting on my fingers) tenth installment J Is For Judgment. In this one, Kinsey is sent to investigate a man who has possibly faked his own death to run off with the proceeds from his rapidly failing real estate investments. This results in a very funny scene with her hopping from balcony to balcony in a Mexican resort hotel. complicating the investigation is the putatively dead man's new mistress and the legal troubles of one of his abandoned sons.

The more interesting story arc in this book is learning of Millhone's long-lost relatives in the area. This gets into some backstory of how she came to be raised by her aunt but never told of the rest of her family. 


Blackout/All Clear is a massive two-part novel which takes part in the award-winning time travel series written by Connie Willis. It is World War II and historians have been sent to Blitz in London, the Dunkirk evacuation, and the D-Day preparations. But then things go Horribly Wrong as they tend to do in time travel stories, particularly when told by Willis.

At over 1400 pages, the combined novel is just an enormous doorstop and basically brought my reading to a standstill for several months. The various narrative threads are very hard to keep track of despite the time stamp at the start of each chapter. Since the historians adopt aliases while working undercover, they go by their real names and their cover names adding even more confusion.

The books are clearly the result of meticulous research border on an almost Michneresque level of detail only without the broad scope. The centerpiece of the story involves an air raid which nearly burns down St. Paul's cathedral but this happens about halfway through the story. It is not until the last 200 hundred pages or so that the various subplots start to tie together. And they do all tie together very well but there are still way too many. This book could and should have been cut by at least a third.

Joel Stein is writer whose journalism, if it can be called that, is something I have laughed at for years. He often self-deprecatingly ridicules his geekiness and lack of masculinity as well as his penchant for pornography. He has rolled all of this up into his book Man Made. In this book-length bit of stunt-journalism he resolves to man-up to be the man he needs to be to father his forthcoming son. To this end, he undergoes basic training, goes hunting, and becomes an ultimate fighter. The book is in parts hilarious but the schtick starts to wear thin soon. There are only so many macho yet sensitive men he can feel inferior to.

And as a piece of stunt-journalism, a genre which has come increasingly popular, it is particularly unfocused. There seems to be no real deadline or goal. The narrative goes on well past the birth of his son and just devolves into random events. Sometimes extremely funny writers have a hard time keeping the laughs going over long pieces and this is one such case.

Rachel Dratch was one of the more overlooked and typecast Saturday Night Live regulars. The most notable point on her post-SNL career is being cut from 30 Rock early in the first season. She dispatches her version of the story very early in Girl Walks Into A Bar... and she seems genuinely unbitter over it. The first half of the book is typical comedian biography (I am becoming a little too familiar with this genre) but then the story picks-up. As a 40-something single woman she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant. How she copes with this extremely life changing event is both funny and touching.

I've mentioned before that I prefer comedians read their own books and this one is a great example of why. The way she makes the word "Universe" ring every time she goes into Oprah-esque mysticism adds just the right touch. If you've loved Tina Fey's Bossypants reviewed here), this is the near-perfect companion book.

Another entry in the very crowded field of audiobooks written and read by comedians is You're Not Doing It Right by Michael Ian Black. Like Bill Engvall (reviewed here), the major event in his life seems to be meeting and marrying his wife. Unlike Engvall, this book is a little more idiosyncratic and the self-deprecation (an important common element in all books by comedians) is more honest and revealing. He really is a dick a lot of times.

Some of the stories are just hilarious. He and his wife getting stoned in a Amsterdam coffee shop is pants-splittingly funny. Unfortunately, a lot of his stories follow a fairly defined formula. He says "I would never do {blank}." And then a few sentences later he says "I did {blank}." It's funny the first several times but then it gets tiresome. And like the memoir by Mindy Kaling (reviewed here), he never seems to have encountered any real career setbacks to speak of.

There is a very serious section about how he deals with depression which is just raw. He gets a lot of credit for honesty but the execution is just a little weak.

BooksFirst February-April 2012

Books Bought  
Hammerhead Ranch by Tim Dorsey
Orange Crush by Tim Dorsey

Books Read 
 Hammerhead Ranch Motel by Tim Dorsey
Too Close To Miss by John Perich
Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck
 
Books Heard 
Just A Guy by Bob Engvall

Comments 

 Tim Dorsey continues his satirical look at the dark underbelly of Florida in Hammerhead Ranch Motel, the second book of his series without a real title. And by 'satirical', I mean 'totally realistic'. The scary part about such a rambling over-the-top mess is how little is really fictional. Sure, Dorsey changes the name of Bubba The Lovesponge to Boris the Hateful Piece Of Shit ( a not very subtle dig), but it's enough of the same person to be libelous if not true. In this installment, the macguffin from Florida Roadkill is now in the greater Tampa area and a oddball assortment of sociopaths, drug dealers, gangsters, and other Florida fauna are chasing after it.

I read this book while on vacation at Rocky Point and the geography of the Pinellas County and greater Tampa is stunning accurate. Most of the action in the book takes place in and around the titular motel which is haven to a scam artist drug dealer and several itinerant parties involved in what loosely could be described as a plot. Coherent narratives do not seem to be the strong suit of Dorsey but the characters are fresh and memorable.

John Perich is a contributing editor to the Overthinking It website and podcast. In addition to his duties on that site, he has written Too Close To Miss, a thriller novel set in his adopted town of Boston. Now Boston is no stranger to mystery writers with both Robert Parker and Dennis Lehane walking that side of the street already. To compete in a crowded thinking space, Perich has attempted to subvert a few cliches of the genre. For one, the heroine is the mistress. When a prominent politician's wife is brutally murdered, newspaper photographer Mara Cunningham becomes the prime suspect and she has to clear her name.

I'm fond of mysteries with a little intellectual heft behind them, the books by John D. MacDonald and Sue Grafton come to mind, and this book fits well in that niche. It's not too spoilery to say that there are suspicious land deals involved, a staple of the Travis McGee series. Like all thriller heroes, Mara is just perhaps a little too hyper-competent. For one, she teaches martial arts on the side, a skill that comes in handy when the baddies start stalking her.

What is perhaps notable about this book is that Perich has decided to self-publish in as a Kindle-only format. And despite the sketchiness of the self-published novel, this book stands as a peer with anything published by a major house.

I first read anything by John Steinbeck when my son read The Pearl in high school. To close this major blindspot I decided to give Travels With Charley a try. This an atypical book from Steinbeck in that it is a travelogue rather than a novel with the titular co-travel being his aging poodle. The two take off in a pick-up truck and do a lap of the United States. It does seem to take them an inordinate amount of time to get out of New England.

It surprised me that the book was written in the early 1960s as I tend to associate Steinbeck with the Great Depression. This becomes a factor when he makes his way to segregation era Texas and the Deep South. At that point the story becomes a little more reportorial as he spends a good time discussing the opposition to school integration in a small town. As with the rest of the book, he lets the people he meets talk without a lot of authorial editorial, but the people encounters here don't always show their best side.

I greatly appreciated the nuance and charm that Steinbeck brought to the book. It's nostalgic without being maudlin, introspective without being navel-gazing.

My go-to choice for audio books to listen to on road trips has become books written and read by comedians. There is something about having it read in their own voice that brings an immediacy to the story. Bob Engvall is one of the Blue Collar Comics, not as funny as John Foxworthy, but not nearly as cringingly bad as Larry The Cable Guy.

Presumably the book title Just A Guy is one of his catch phrases which he repeats a few times in the book but not to the point of annoyance. Mostly the book is about his early days as a stand-up comedian and the wooing of his wife Gail. Based on his self-deprecating stories, she is a saint for putting up with him, a judgment I could concur with. Towards the end of the book the schmaltz gets amped up to ten but that is a minor annoyance.

Much like Engvall himself, this book is good middle-of-the-road entertainment with few major revelations but a couple of clever insights.

BooksFirst - January 2012 (NaJuReMoNoMo)

Books Bought
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (Kindle)

Books Read
F is For Fugitive by Sue Grafton  
H Is For Homocide by Sue Grafton
I Is For Innocent by Sue Grafton  
Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Comments

I'm a collector of Sue Grafton's Kinsey Milhone novels. Sadly, I buy many more than I read, so as part of National Just Read More Novels Month, I resolved to careen through the backlog. As you can see by the Books Read list, I fell woefully short. This does nor reflect poorly on Ms. Grafton, quite the contrary. Her books are well-crafted and require a fair amount of attention to be paid. I know for a fact that I have read the first four of her novels but my memory on the fifth was a bit hazy so I decided to jump to the sixth, F is For Fugitive, just for safe measure. The titular fugitive is a guy who was convicted of a murder and then escapes from prison only to go on the lam again. His relatives hire Kinsey to clear his name but things go awry when new crimes go haywire. For this book, Milhone decamps from her native Santa Teresa to Floral Beach, a small beach town with a lot of dark secrets. Within this Peyton Place-ish enclave there is a lot of history some people would just prefer stayed hidden. Part of the strength of this book and Grafton's novels in general is that all the characters are interesting and complex. They all interact in ways that tie the history of the town together but still make finding the final culprit a challenge and a surprise.

 More linear is H Is For Homocide where Kinsey goes undercover to get the goods on the sociopathic ringleader of an insurance fraud ring. She spends most of the novel just trying to keep from being discovered as she walks a narrow path between keeping her cover and protecting her life. More action oriented than some of the other mysteries, it also seems more prone to random set-ups. Kinsey gets involved when a meeting with a fraud suspect also involves an old school friend and the evening ends in a shoot-out. For there things go even further off the rails. There is also at least one unjustified final twist. I don't know whether it was meant to set up future storylines, but it just seems random.

 For a writer, a series character can be quite restrictive so a little playing with the form is good, but in this case it doesn't really pay-off. In I Is For Innocent, Kinsey is back on her home turf of Santa Teresa investigating an acquitted murder suspect trying to get his dead wife's money. As usually happens there is more than meets the eye and the private investigator Milhone is following up on died under mysterious circumstances as well. The word 'innocent' is used rather ironically because the cast of characters is a little more blue-blooded than usual but still rather despicable. Normally I find the scenes about Kinsey's neighbors and her home life to be boring filler, but this one had a good subplot. Her friend and octogenarian landlord's brother shows up only to start carrying on with the Hungarian diner owner. It's funny and endearing.

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is the latest phenomenon. I've been seeing it and its sequels in bookstores for years and have been dismissing it as some sort of cousin to the sexy vampire genre. Needing a quick read on my Kindle for a plane trip, I bit and bought it. It turned out to be many things that were not tropes in the Twilight-ish world I dreaded. It was fast paced. The romance was underplayed, indeed subverted. And the heroine was genuinely an agent of her own destiny.

It was far from flawless though. There are huge plot holes and tons of inconsistencies. The one item which just nagged at me was a nitpick I have with a lot of dystopian fiction and science fiction in general aimed at teenage readers and even older readers. That is that the economics of the post-apocalyptic world make no sense whatsoever. The Capital is this huge post-modern marvel with mind-boggling technology. But its all based on what seems to be a very small base of the outer districts. District 12 doesn't seem like it would support a decent suburb's energy needs let alone an entire country. And what are they doing still mining coal anyways?

There is also way too much lead-up to the Games themselves. It's well over half the book before kids start killing each other. Oddly, the premise of teenagers battling each other to the death is one of the least of my problems. As a plot device and a metaphor I think it works very well. I am totally unfamiliar with the sources people claim it resembles such as The Running Man and Battle Royale, but this sort of set-up goes at least as far back as The Biggest Game and Lord Of The Flies, so there is plenty of prior art to lean on.

I understand that the sequels delve deeper into the politics of the world and I'm a little hesitant to continue on since this was what I found least satisfying.

An Open Letter To Gene Weingarten

Gene,

I am highly flattered that in your latest column you still find the four-year-old post from my lightly-read now-dormant blog such a supreme irritant, although you seem to have missed my retraction of your ass-hatted-ness. I do find the claim that I am obsessed with you a bit overwrought. In 877 posts I managed to mention you perhaps a dozen times, in about half of them just parenthetically. They can all be found here.

Despite your delusion that harassing customer service representatives is in the least bit humorous, you were one of the most talented writers at the Washington Post. While I don't begrudge you either of your Pulitzers, I found your article about the Alaskan fishing village one of the most poignant and moving stories I have ever read and far more award worthy than a buskering stunt or a profile of a birthday party performer with a (SPOILER ALERT) gambling problem. I'm sorry you no longer write those excellent long form pieces and choose instead to spend your dodderage writing doggerel.

Frankly, I rarely get around to the Sunday WaPoMag now that it is thinner than the accompanying Parade insert unless I remember to read Dilbert. In my time as a boodler at the Achenblog I have declared that there is no level of celebrity too low to not have a cult of personality and with your newfound rivalry with FishbowlDC, you exemplify that principle (Not that I take their side. Taking weekly potshots at a Pulitzer-winning columnist past their prime is pretty low hanging fruit.).

While I don't throw virtual panties like the rest of your now defunct Yahoo fan group, I don't begrudge you your fame. Just learn to take the downside a little more graciously. Not everyone will always lavish praise just as some blogs will start a rap star beef with your Shalitesque face. But I am honored to remain your bête noire and I wish you many more oddly colored bowel movements to tweet about.

P.S.
Your father-son bonding experience of a comic strip is occasionally funny. Just don't let that smart-mouthed moppet grow up too fast. You would hate to break the rules of comic strip temporal dynamics.