Month: May 2010

You're walking down the street, carrying your infant son on your chest, and an out-of-control car hurtles toward you. What would you do? He turned and took the impact himself.

David Sessions surveys the scene.

A reader writes:

Isn't it possible that the gay couple on Modern Family don't kiss because they're in a public space?  How many of us who are gay do the same – we're affectionate at home or at our friends' homes, but when we step outside our doors into the world where straight is the status quo, we hold back.  Sure, there are times and places we let lose, but generally speaking, many of us still feel uncomfortable being as open as our straight brothers and sisters.  This is a sad admission, but it is still true.

Another writes:

In the episode last night, everyone is vacationing in Hawaii. I noticed a great shot of one of the men in the same-sex partnership (Cameron) very reassuringly pat his partner on the bare leg right around his knee as they were both sunning themselves by the pool. Intimate and touching moments between loving adults don't always have to include smooches.

Another:

By contrast, the ABC melodrama “Brothers and Sisters” regularly shows the male couple kissing on the lips, in bed with only boxers on, and talking about their sex life.  Makes me wonder if that’s due to the fact that “Modern Family” is a comedy and they fear that such PDAs would interfere with the comedy, whereas they feel it enhances the drama on “Brothers and Sisters.”

A statement from MF's producers:

Cameron and Mitchell are a loving, grounded, committed, and demonstrably affectionate couple and have been from the beginning of the series. It happens that we have an episode in the works that addresses Mitchell's slight discomfort with public displays of affection. It will air in the fall and until then, as Phil Dunphy would say, everyone please chillax.

Jacob Sullum explains.

Kinsley on Kagan:

The Conservative Party in Britain now has eleven openly gay members of parliament and nine more in a glass closet. Compare that with zero for the Republicans and three for the Democrats, and no-one in the upper reaches of the Obama administration. One of the new Tories is an open lesbian. Two gay Tories are ministers – and both friends of mine. No one seems to be terrified of acknowledging this or reporting it – in fact, the party is deeply proud of this new diversity. I am too – as a Tory, a native Brit and a gay person. To see prejudice vanquished in such a way that the Tories now have more openly gay MPs than Labour is a real Cameron achievement – built on accepting the social changes that Thatcher unwittingly unleashed and Blair solidified.

The new chairman of the Tory party and cabinet member is a Muslim woman.

Joe Randazzo, editor of the Onion, hates Internet memes:

Instead of acting as an organic cultural touchstone, the modern meme — from LOL, which hasn't been used to signify physical laughter since 1997, to Lolcats — now sucks the joy out of our interconnectedness. It destroys uniqueness. Once an "enjoyable thing" becomes a "meme," we stop enjoying the thing for its own sake, but consume and regurgitate our enjoyment of it as a symbol of hipness, as if to say: "I am aware of this thing's popularity — therefore I, too, exist!"

Money example:

[I]f you've never had the unfortunate occasion to hear someone, forgetting that life is not a message board, yell "FAIL!" aloud, you are missing out on an exquisite kind of existential rage.

More meme talk here.

Is this a new face for conservatism in America?