Month: April 2011

Bruce Handy gathered an oral history from Hugh Hefner's original Playboy Clubs, which, after opening in 1960 offered men "swinging-bachelor-pad décor, the carefully garnished cocktails, and, above all, the cantilevered, cottontailed Bunnies." Former Bunny Kathryn Leigh Scott recounts a signal of the clubs' decline, when membership fees were lowered and the allure of exclusivity evaporated:

I’ll tell you a story that a Chicago Bunny told me. She saw these guys on a garbage truck one morning and as she passed them, one of the guys yelled out, “Bunny Quinn!” She turned around, wondering how this guy knew she was a Bunny, and he said, “I saw you at the club Saturday night.” It suddenly dawned on her: of course, anybody can be a keyholder. Nothing wrong with that, but it was an indication of how things had changed from the early 60s.

(Image: From the full Playboy Bunny Club Manual)

Scientists have trained a computer program, called DEviaNT, to identify good "That's what she said" jokes:

Automating this process means identifying sentences that contain potential euphemisms and follow a particular structure – a "hard natural language understanding problem", say the researchers. … They then evaluated nouns, adjectives and verbs with a "sexiness" function to determine whether a sentence is a potential TWSS. Examples of nouns with a high sexiness function are "rod" and "meat", while raunchy adjectives are "hot" and "wet".

Future work could also see DEviaNT extended to identify other kinds of jokes, say the researchers, writing "The technique of metaphorical mapping may be generalised to identify other types of double entendres and other forms of humor".

"Ode to a Composting Toilet" by Sharon Olds:

In this drying cabinet, shit happens,
and then, over time, it alters its nature,
its little busy toxins die,
it turns to arable waste—waste
no longer, waste not want not. As in
a blood bank, but dirtier,
soilier, the effluvium of the offspring
of the earth mingles: fertilizer of
New Hampshire, Kenya, New York, Boston—
Yankees shit, Red Sox shit,
in excremental harmony;
vegan shit, kosher shit,
slow food, fast, vegetarian,
fruititarian, even the sorrowful
wisps of anorexic shit,
and Calvinist shit, and Kabbala shit,
Halliburton employee shit,
Orthodox shit, Puritan shit,
lesbian shit, nympho virgin
poet chick shit. …

The full poem is here.

(Video: The new glamour toilet by Kohler, via Virginia Postrel)

Josh Rothman reviews Bill James' new book, Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence:

Popular crime stories (think, in our modern era, of O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, or JonBenet Ramsey) are often, James laments, beneath the notice of "the best people" ("if you go to a party populated by the NPR crowd and you start talking about JonBenet Ramsey, people will look at you as if you've forgotten your pants"). But in fact, James argues, popular crimes matter, even if discussing them seems "vulgar." They crystallize national issues, reveal structural facts about society, and often lead, very directly, to changes in laws and institutions.

Georgetown, Guyana, 6.37 pm

Jonah Lehrer takes pleasure in the fact that we can't taste the difference between a cheap wine and an expensive one:

Instead of bemoaning this subjectivity, we should embrace it. We should realize that we can make our wines much more delicious, if only we take the time to learn about them. … The reason I harass my dinner guests is that our stories have consequences, that our beliefs often matter more than the grapes. The question is what those stories are. If the only story we can tell about wine is its price, then our pleasure will always linked to cost, even though this link doesn’t exist in most taste tests. And that’s why it’s important to find some other narratives, to focus on aspects of wine that don’t require a big expense account. Knowledge is free.

That might assuage some guilt considering "American wine consumers are 40 percent more likely to buy a wine with a cute animal on the label when compared to a straightforward label that gives the standard information."

Obama and Holder are on the same page as the Dish, when it comes to respecting the rule of law, and the crude bullying tactics of HRC and Richard Socarides remain, to my mind, noxious. HRC ties itself in knots here:

Although [Executive Director Joe] Solmonese identified both King & Spalding and Clement in his statement, Fred Sainz, HRC’s vice president of communications, asserted that Holder’s comments defending Clement are inaccurate because the LGBT rights group went after the firm and not the private attorney.

“We have a great deal of respect for Attorney General Holder,” Sainz said. “His comments on the particulars of our involvement are inaccurate. We never criticized Paul Clement. Our issue has been with King & Spalding, the firm that employed him. K&S espouses LGBT inclusion on their website. This engagement is completely antithetical to those values and thus our central claim has been hypocrisy. You simply can’t square espousing LGBT inclusion and defending discrimination.”

This strikes me as the right thing to say:

“To condemn a lawyer for representing a client is a problematic attack on the general responsibility of lawyers. Third parties shouldn’t be in the business of excoriating lawyers for representing unpopular clients.”

Bachna Ae Haseeno (BollyBrook Remix) from Anne Marsen on Vimeo.

A reader writes:

Having lived through my share of Indian boys brainwashed by popular cinema into thinking that stalking a girl is sweet and funny, and all it takes to turn a NO! NEVER! into a YES! GIVES ME BABY! is a bit of will power and creepy persistence, my only complaint is that the girl didn't celebrate that well-earned slap and happily dance away. My inner persecuted Indian woman would have been delighted to see that interpretation of "Yeah yeah, you better run for cover! Yeah yeah, when you see me coming!"

Original Indian version here.

Cedar Burnett comes clean:

“Inflammatory bowel disease” has got to be the least sexy malady out there, trumped only by elephantiasis of the nuts or scabies. Most people have never heard of it, which necessitates at least a brief explanation involving the words “anus and rectum.” “But what does it do?” concerned friends ask, to which I usually reply, “It makes me poop my pants.” Talk about a conversation killer. No one has ever followed that one with “Please tell me more.”

How about maggots in your scrotum? Or an inguinal hernia? Or then there’s the more conventional, highly painful, entirely unmentionable blights: the angry hemorrhoid, the boil on the butt, a pilonidal cyst, ass herpes. It goes on. I met someone a while back who was utterly liberated from these constraints. He spent the entire evening going on and on about his hemorrhoid, trying one seat after another, writhing in pain, occasionally sitting so far back in a chair that his butt rested free and clear in the air. I never had the chance to say “Please tell me more” before he did.

The visuals were a little much but, nonetheless, I came away with real respect. Why should he be more inhibited in speaking about obvious acute butt pain when he wouldn’t be about a back molar? Montaigne loved few things more:

No matter that we may mount on stilts, we still must walk on our own legs. And on the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.

Not easy; but possible:

Griffith wrote: "I've talked with so many LGBT people here in our mountains, and their stories are powerful. Experiences of abandonment, exclusion, attempted conversion and worthlessness make up a few of the themes from such stories. Also, self-respect, unexpected acceptance and powerful love complete their pictures. … It is heartbreakingly inspirational, and yet it isn't wished for anyone."