Month: March 2011

Oaxaca, Mexico, 6 pm

Joseph Bernstein defends Northwestern professor J. Michael Bailey's class on human sexuality, which recently sparked controversy for featuring a live sex act. Bernstein remembers a panel of gay men talking to Bailey's class in 2005:

I simply didn’t know very many gay people when I was 20 years old, and I had a whole host of assumptions blasted by the commonsense, funny, sad answers provided by the men on the panel. There was a moment late in the demonstration when it became clear to the class that the removal of women from the sexual equation results in a lot more, well, sex. Someone asked the panel: “How many of you have had sex with each other?” The men, who ranged widely in age, looked at each other, and it was clear some major mental math was happening. All at once, the men on stage started just shaking with laughter, and the audience did too.

I didn’t leave the lecture hall changed in any fundamental way, except I knew a little bit more about the three or ten (depending on who you ask) percent of men who have sex with other men. I can say that no other professor’s class at Northwestern taught me that much about the way actual people live in the world.

Jonathan L. Fischer goes sailing on DC's punk-inspired Bruise Cruise. The group had "about six inches less meat on their waists and many liters more ink on their skin" than the average cruise ship crowd: 

Back on the first night, the mostly Indonesian wait staff provided between-course entertainment by dancing to Flo Rida’s “Low,” singing along in chopped English while the largely white Bruisers cheered. It felt like a minstrel show. There’s also a strange class dynamic on board. The vibe on the Carnival Imagination is lower-middle-class to middle-class. A lot of Cruisers have tattoos, the un-hip kind, and many of them paid far less than us to be here. So much for fucking up the mainstream: The Bruisers are the ship’s privileged crowd. 

(Photo by Flickr user the future of petes)

Oliver Miller indulges in some. On the joys of scrambled channels:

So today’s teenagers will never know the true, the soul-searing horror of thinking that you were jerking off to Playboy, and suddenly having the screen come into full focus, and realizing that you weren’t watching the right channel. Instead of watching some soft-core porn star, you were watching something else. And as the screen came into focus, you would realize that it was, say, a repeat of “The Golden Girls,” and you had been jerking off to the massive face of… Bea Arthur.

Look: someone somewhere found her hot. Leave Bea Alone! But yes, I do remember squinting sideways, and gleaning some jagged edge of boobage or, in my case, chestage with one eye constantly on the door in case my mom were to walk in. Good times.

In the end, it's hard to sustain the shock and outrage of the newly fiscally conscious GOP. Not the Tea Party types, especially, but, well Steve Benen gets it just right:

I'd be remiss if I neglected to mention how amusing it is to hear Mitch McConnell express concern about the debt. The Kentucky Republican voted for the Bush tax cuts, and added the costs to the national debt. McConnell then voted to finance the war in Afghanistan by adding the costs to the national debt. He then voted to put the costs of the war in Iraq onto the national debt. McConnell supported a massive expansion of the government's role in health care, Medicare Part D, and voted to pile all of its costs right onto the national debt, and then backed the financial industry bailout, and added the bill to the national debt. All the while, McConnell had no qualms about voting to raise the debt limit.

But now McConnell is willing to risk default unless Democrats agree to a plan to help clean up the mess McConnell helped create. Fascinating.

Fascinating perhaps. Disgusting is how I'd put it.

Ebert recalls Annette Goodheart's lessons:

Begin with a proper sketch book. Draw in ink. Finish each drawing you begin, and keep every drawing you finish. No erasing, no ripping out a page, no covering a page with angry scribbles. What you draw is an invaluable and unique representation of how you saw at that moment in that place according to your abilities. That's all we want. We already know what a dog really looks like. …

I found this was a benefit that rendered the quality of my drawings irrelevant. Whether they were good or bad had nothing to do with their most valuable asset: They were a means of experiencing a place or a moment more deeply.

"[Arianna Huffington] has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your website and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come. [Aggregation too often] amounts to taking words written by other people, packaging them on your own website and harvesting revenue that might otherwise be directed to the originators of the material. In Somalia this would be called piracy. In the mediasphere, it is a respected business model," – NYT executive editor Bill Keller.

Alex Goldmark reports on one designer's plans for a cell phone that could charge from any heat source, including your pocket:

[Designer Patrick Hyland]'s put a thermogenerator inside the phone that converts heat into electric potential energy. To better conduct the heat to that little power plant in your pocket, the E-Cu (E for energy, Cu for copper) is encased in copper backing with engraved heat sinks like those normally used to keep electronics from overheating.

"They literally think you can just balance it, you know, (by cutting) waste, fraud and abuse, foreign aid and NPR. And it doesn't work like that," – Paul Ryan on some of the more naive tea-partiers.

An Award glossary here.

The partisan enthusiasm gap in Wisconsin has disappeared.