Stop quoting and start writing well!

Dowd, again, pisses me off. Today's column refers to the recent study reported yesterday that ugly children may get less attention than pretty ones from parents. Instead of playing off this and offering extra facts, as someone like Krugman (note to self: stop deifying him soon; is probably bad for health) would, she offers a few anecdotes, and then to fill in the blanks, an Eliot allusion and a Shakespeare quotation that smacks of forced intellectualism.

Useful, illuminating anecdote:

I went out once with a guy who didn't care for his mother, partly because he felt she was not attractive enough. My brother Martin, on the other hand, tells our mom how proud he was when she picked him up from grade school because he thought she was the prettiest mother.

(What does that say? That she's shallow, for dating this guy; or that she's normal, for dating someone who's shallow; or that she's normal for dating someone who's normal, in light of this study? (Same with her brother, but with fewer dependent clauses.))

Unhelpful Shakespeare quote:

But the world can be harsh. Surface matters more and more, and the world ignores Shakespeare's lesson from "The Merchant of Venice": "Gilded tombs do worms infold."

(Is what you're trying to say that these pretty children are going to be wormy on the inside, Maureen? Because that's what this quote is saying, and not the point of the rest of the article. Maybe you missed the lesson in high school where they taught that quotations are only supposed to be used to illuminate something you're saying, not just to be thrown in to give you extra scholar points.)

Grating, totally egregious Eliot allusion:

A beauty bias against children seems so startling because you grow up thinking parents are the only ones who will give you unconditional love, not measure it out in coffee spoons based on your genetic luck.

Woah! This was used in the original to illustrate a life of experience, loneliness -- NOT of meting out affection, or of anything else, for that matter. It was not transitive. This is exactly the sort of thing I love in the Times when done well (e.g., a caption from a picture of a fashion show sometime this last year: "I shall wear my trousers rolled." Ha.), but do not expect to see abused within its pages, and deplore when I do! AAArrrgh!

Really, there is no point to her column. She talk about rotisserie chicken ovens, and restates the facts of the study and its article. Just what is she paid to write, again?