Fuckers Destroy World; Friedman Laments

In what possible moral universe is it acceptable to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling?! Reducing dependence on foreign oil is good on the surface, but not only are dectractors saying that the oil, by simple geography, will benefit Asia primarily, but how about we reduce our dependce on oil, period? This shit makes steam come out of my ears. Bush can talk the talk all he wants about looking for alternative energy sources, but when this budget passes with language about drilling in ANWR, it just highlights what would have been different with a president whose name started with a K.

Also stunning, in a general sense, is the ease with which Republicans manage to cast their policies as good for Joe Worker:

"This project will keep our economy growing by creating jobs and ensuring that businesses can expand," Mr. Bush said, "and it will make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy."

Because we don't like them fer-ners.

What might create jobs, dear Bush, is not slashing the budget of the NSF -- as Friedman puts it in his column of today (linked above):

Finally, on competition policy, the Bush team and Congress cut the budget of the National Science Foundation for this fiscal year by $105 million. I could not put it better than Congressman Vern Ehlers, one of the few dissenting Republicans, who said: "This decision shows dangerous disregard for our nation's future ... at a time when other nations continue to surpass our students in math and science and consistently increase their funding of basic research. We cannot hope to fight jobs lost to international competition without a well-trained and educated work force."

I could just quote his whole column, but you should just go read it.

Too bad I'm a pacifist ...

I remember hearing somewhere that opera used to be used as a punishment -- maybe in the military? I could be making that up. But certainly, as this article mentions, Kitchen Police ("K.P."), was "a dreaded punishment."

Now, the Army's offering culinary classes for its chefs, who sculpt lobsters out of sugar, and live in exotic locales?

Sgt. Karen Glanzer, leader of Team Hawaii's field cooking squad, said she had planned to become a chef from the age of 13, and free culinary training was one of the main reasons she joined the military. "They wanted me, so I asked for two things: cooking and Hawaii," she said.

...

The resources the Army is willing to expend on culinary education were evident in the well-equipped classrooms and in the piles of fresh chanterelles, baby beets, pickled tarragon leaves, lemon grass stalks and other exotic ingredients available for competitors' use.

Sweet; sign me up! (Uhh ... too bad I'm a pacifist, eh?)

Then again, it might not be the best option for a vegan who loves her kitchen:

The program's leaders are advocates - among the last in America - for the rigors of classical French culinary training. Little of that repertory is seen by soldiers in mess tents, but the training is intended to set a standard of quality for all military cooks.

"These are not established chefs with a base of knowledge to draw on," Professor Jones said. "So we try to give them that base." Curiously, few American chefs are as proficient in the French culinary canon as are these top-level [military cooks], who can produce roast pheasant, ice sculptures and rote-perfect pâtisseries like éclairs and financiers. "We are always evaluating the program, but no one yet has come to replace Escoffier," Professor Jones said, referring to the French chef who delineated the modern culinary canon in his Guide Culinaire, last revised in 1921. In one event of the competition, the chef is simply assigned a number from Escoffier's book and required to research and reproduce the recipe.

Also, the quarters are cramped:

In the field cooking event, all teams start with the same ingredients and tools, and spend three hours in a kitchen trailer with about 15 square feet of floor space, cooking dinner for 50 soldiers.

I'd guess I'd just prefer to cook for myself and a lover.

Vegan options!

Nigella [Lawson] (we're like this) may be silly and overly florid and British in her colums, but recently she's been offering something for me to do more than just read about -- I can eat it, too.

Her column about colorful foods two weeks ago was welcome in grey Berkeley, and entirely vegan -- she even offered a de-dairyizing of the raita to go along with the already-vegan dal and, that day's winner, the bright rice.

While I can't yet vouch for the recipes in today's, and I disagree with her views on the necessity of meat ("As far as I'm concerned, the first spring meal has to be lamb. To me it is the natural order of things."), she does provide an accompanying garbanzo stew. Yum.

Do it on your own dime

I was totally on this kid's side, agreeing that he should be able to play as much Texas Hold'em as he wants, until I read this (near the bottom of the article):

Mr. Sandberg said that he failed a midterm exam this fall because of his commitment to poker, and that he ranked in the bottom fifth of his class.

But, he says, "I'm not too concerned with what my G.P.A. is. You don't have to hand your résumé to the casino when you walk in or anything."

Wow, that's definitely something to do on your own dime, and not while you're wasting either your parents' money (or, giving you the benefit of the doubt, a scholarship) at Princeton.

What century do I live in, again?

It's stuff like this that makes me want to learn how to projectile vomit:

The Borgata [Casino] ... recently put all of its bartenders and waitresses, called Borgata Babes, on a scale, and warned them that if they gained more than 10 percent of their weight, they would be suspended without pay for 90 days while they tried to lose it.

Absent a valid medical reason, if they had not lost the extra pounds after the suspension, they would be fired.

A "vaild medical reason"?! How about psychological trauma, or anorexia?

I'm not sure I can say anything coherent about this, except for reiterating that it makes me want to puke. This is exactly the kind of shit a certain unnamed Midwestern Lutheran university pulled when they trumped up charges to fire a gay secretary my mother had hired, apparently not thinking that the "do-unto-others" dictum of their religion might actually apply. The Borgata is claiming immunity from discrimination suits, as did C----- University, on the grounds that they're hiring performers (c.f. C's claim that they're an independent religious institution, and therefore exempt). At least they're being sued (but note that the lawsuit said unnamed secretary brought against above unnamed institution failed).

What makes me sicker is that it's generating positive publicity for this place:

"When you measure the benefit that results from this enormous amount of publicity you can't quantify it, because frankly, it can't be bought," said Michael Pollock, head of the Pollock Gaming Resource Group, industry consultants. "Because the person who is going to be attracted to the upscale, sexy image that a Borgata is trying to create is going to look at this controversy in a very different light than someone who is offended by it."

So it's win-win for them, even if they lose.

Puke.

Yet more defeatist gendering

Another frustrating example of taking for granted that women are inherently different than men in causal ways comes in today's Modern Love column, Sleeping With the Guitar Player by Jean Hanff Korelitz.

In this, she describes and generalizes her husband's "Guitar-in-the-Basement phase" -- that in which her spouse of eighteen years purchases first one guitar, and then a whole band's worth, and aggressively pursuing his newfound hobby with the zeal and abandon of a never-been-burned amateur. She attributes this naïveté not to something in his character -- call it optimism, maybe? Or devil-may-care-itude? -- but to his gender:

... I'm a woman, which means that, in my heart of hearts, I have long understood that certain things are never going to happen in my life. I won't, by way of example, be modeling swimsuits for Sports Illustrated, representing my country as an Olympic gymnast or dancing Coppélia for the New York City Ballet.

I have dealt with these disappointments and, in the idiom of our age, moved on. But my husband - my wonderful, endearing husband, who is extremely successful at writing and teaching poetry - believed, at the age of 53, that it was utterly possible for him to become a rock guitarist. On a stage. In front of an audience.

...

Unlike women, for whom menopause serves as an unignorable transition, a line dividing one part of life from another, men have no midlife marker to brake before, or even to steer around, in the hinterland from their youth to their age; there is only a great, elastic middle. Is it any wonder they lose track of where they are, and think they can do anything? And evidence being what it is, I'm forced to concur.

I usually like Modern Love, this relatively new addition to the Sunday Styles section (admittedly, the first section I pick up on an indolent weekend morning, in which I shamefully skim the ages of the women getting married, and which schools they went to). In addition to being well-written (which is why I read the Times to begin with), it's often poignant without being soapy, a nice quasi-fictional addition to the paper, à la The New Yorker. And while this article didn't go too far towards tarnishing my fondness for the column, nor did it do anything to bolster it.

I mean, really -- "I'm a woman, which means that ... [I have a] midlife marker to brake before, ... steer around, in the hinterland from [my] youth to [my] age"?! Taken out of context, that statement is relatively benign: menopause as a divider in a woman's life, a biological change that will probably provoke self-scrutiny. But to chalk up the putative ambitiousness of an entire gender to the lack of such a division? Overstepping the bounds of biology, I believe, and doing women a disservice in the process.

Korelitz singles out what she knows of the Guitar-in-the-Basement Dudes, isolates a cultural phenomenon, and attributes it to their gender. I'm fine with the belletristic portrayal of the first two; her conclusion, I bristle at. Goddamn it, stop siding with Maureen Dowd and playing the help-help-I'm-just-a-little-woman card!

Stop whining, Maureen!

Maureen Dowd has been pissing me off recently. I think I've just noticed this -- I used to accept everything on the Times's Op-Ed page as gospel liberal truth, until reading enough of David Brooks's column critically opened my eyes; to Krugman, on the other hand, I've always been an adherent.

Dowd is the latest to fall in my affections. I have an enumerated list of gripes about her, most of which I'll save for another post (her seeming inability to write a coherent column about one theme, for example; how she harps on the wrong themes for a liberal columnsit, further problematizing an issue that Republicans demonized to begin with, for another). But the latest, and currently highest on my list, is her whininess about the differences between women and men.

Let me begin by stating that I'm as much of a feminist as the next woman of my generation -- that is, brought up with a sense of entitlement about my gender's rights, and dismissive of any claim that there are more than skin-deep differences between boys and girls (fuck you, Larry Summers). I'll spare you the history of how these views have deepened (CS major; yadda yadda), but it boils down to this: Women and men are equal intellectually, and therefore need to stop carping about differences that aren't going to get them anywhere.

Take, for example, Dowd's statement in paragraph 4 of today's column:

Men enjoy verbal dueling. As a woman, I told Howell, I wanted to be liked - not attacked.

Dude. Man. Saying that is not going to help your case.

The rest of the article goes on to enumerate the other reasons why there aren't more prominent female opinion writers (the harpy perception; the fact that we're so easily undermined by kitchen-paraphernalia metaphors ("'Does she,' The L.A. Times's Patt Morrison wondered, 'write on a computer or a Ronco Slicer and Dicer?'"). While it's true that women't aren't yet always perceived on an equal footing with men in many intellectual domains -- opinion writing not the least of them, I'm sure -- taking as a premise that women are loath to engage in verbal dueling is defeatist, Summerian, and is going to piss off as many opinionated women as you're hoping to encourage.

Another example of the same kind of whining:

Gail Collins, the first woman to run The Times's editorial page and the author of a history of American women, told The Post's Howard Kurtz: "There are probably fewer women, in the great cosmic scheme of things, who feel comfortable writing very straight opinion stuff, and they're less comfortable hearing something on the news and batting something out."

(Emphasis added.)

Yes, the world is not yet an equal place. Yes, more women need to step up to the plate / be hired by major news publications. But averring that this imparity is due to innate diffences is counterproductive.

As an addendum, the following is a list of minor gripes about today's column:

• 'kerfuffle' -- Come on, Maureen. WordNet thinks it's a word, so I suppose I have to give it to you, but this is exactly the type of ten-dollar word you throw out all the time as garnish. It just distracts, I promise.


• The haridan/haridelle etymology -- Did it really add anything to give the French there? It's a cognate, and therefore by itself tells us nothing about the origins of the word. Sheesh.