Month: April 2012

Emily Shire semi-defends pageant moms on "Toddlers and Tiaras":

The mothers on Toddlers and Tiaras are chastised for ignoring their children’s feelings, forcing their own desires upon them, and spending exorbitant amounts of money to do so. If the mothers on Toddlers and Tiaras expended their funds and parental pressure on SAT tutoring, squash instruction, or foreign language immersion, they likely would not be dismissed as broad caricatures that are all too easy to hate. Because in reality, the main difference between a pageant mom and a tiger mother is just a matter of accessories.

Roxie, a commenter, counters:

Neither 'pageant moms' or 'tiger moms' are saints, but calling them the same is outrageous. Teaching a child to persevere through pain and suffering to attain skills that will serve them for the rest of their lives is one thing, teaching a child to suffer to attain a standard of beauty that will slip through their fingers before they're 30 is quite another.

Lynn Vavreck wades into the debate:

[C]ampaigns matter. Maybe not in the wholesale manner that most pundits want candidates to believe  (campaigns are not swaying 30 percent of the vote, for example), but they do matter — and they are critical in many cases (precisely because they sway 3 percent of the vote!) Who among us doesn’t think Al Gore would have won the 2000 election at the Electoral College level if he had connected himself to Bill Clinton’s growing economy?

 The forecasts for 2000 all predict a Gore victory and because he didn’t win the election, critics say the forecasting models are “wrong.”  I say Gore was wrong!  He didn’t talk about the economy, he didn’t take credit for the goods the Clinton administration brought to Americans — and because he didn’t link himself to that growth, he narrowly lost the Electoral College.  That is not a failure of the model – that is a failure of the candidate. 

Penitents walk up Calle Balborraz during the Holy Week procession of the Cofradia de la Virgen de la Esperanza on April 5, 2012 in Zamora, Spain. Easter week is traditionally celebrated with processions in most Spanish towns. By Jasper Juinen/Getty Images.

Jean Kazez is appalled by the disclosure of some rather personal details about Whitney Houston in the recently released coroner's report:

Once you are a dead body, you have no secrets.  Not only can the state take your clothes off and dissect your body–that part's understandable–but your personal secrets are no longer your secrets. They can broadcast anything they discover to the entire world, without having to justify specific disclosures in terms of the public's rights to know about them.  Everything's out in the open, if you have the misfortune of being dead. Surely laws could be written to protect the privacy of the dead.  How about it?

In pursuit of the answer, Ingrid Robeyns underwent an exercise involving TV screens within a "gigantic iron head" that approximates the reality of autism. What she learned:

[W]e realized much better that we had to look for strategies to protect him from begin bombarded by sounds, and that we had to intensify our efforts at communicating as clearly as possible. So we now regularly allow/encourage our son to use a headset (to block out outside noises), also in settings where this is considered ‘socially inappropriate’; or we physically take him out of a situation that is exhausting him (family gatherings is a good example – way too much noise and voices and lines of conversations).

A reader writes:

I thought I’d share what I do with my mom’s ashes. My two sisters and I each took a portion, and I have taken "Mom" quite a few places. She always wanted to see Jersey Boys on Broadway, but didn’t quite make it. We went in her stead, and sprinkled a tiny bit of her in the theater during "Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You." She loved to travel, so I take her with me on trips – "Mom" has been to Amsterdam, Germany, and Ireland, where the lovely boat operator in the Lakes of Killarney at the Gap of Dunloe encouraged us to sprinkle a bit of her in the lake: "No better resting place, if you ask me." I’m not sure I believe in heaven, but I do believe that our spirits live on – and I like thinking that Mom can continue to share experiences with me and my family.

Another shares a different perspective:

As an atheist, I used to look down on traditional interment as a religious ritual that was both impractical and unnecessary. I made a lot of the same points Beato made in his article and went further, insisting that headstones weren’t really even for the dead, but for the people they left behind.

I began to rethink those positions when I started doing my family’s history a couple of years ago. I visited many graves with my mother and sister, often painstakingly searching through cemeteries with ill-defined sections and plot number. Some graves were of people we knew personally. Some weren’t. It didn’t matter. We always felt moved to come to areas where a relative was laid to rest.

I found it caused me to appreciate my family and this time I’ve got to live. It also strengthened my sense of identity and place. I felt these are my people and here is where they are. I just don’t think you can get that with ashes scattered in the wind.

Not usually:

One of the persistent ideas regarding vice presidential selection holds that presidential nominees seek running mates from large, competitive states. Guided by that assumption, the Great Mentioners invariably include many politicians from such states on the lists of prospective vice presidential candidates that they compose every four years. The premise seems to be that a running mate can minimally, at best, affect the national election returns but that a popular favorite son or daughter may help swing an important electoral block. This conventional wisdom regarding vice presidential selection practice encounters one significant problem: It’s wrong.

It simply does not reflect the behavior of recent presidential candidates. Presidential nominees presumably know something about electoral politics and are strongly motivated to make politically rewarding choices. Yet in modern times they almost never choose a running mate based on the assumption that he or she can swing a state with a lot of electoral votes. The running mate often comes from a state with few electoral votes and/or a safe state and, when he or she has recently come from a state rich in electoral votes, that fact has played little, if any, role in the selection.

A reader with close ties to Hollywood writes:

Here is the real line of inquiry that is rarely discussed in regards to the MPAA and I don't think people have fully thought thru. The MPAA consists of the 7 or 8 major studios.  It changes as Hollywood changes hands but the biggies are there: Viacom, WB, Sony, Universal, etc.  They have agreements with NATO (National Association of Theater Owners, which controls the lion share of American screens) and these two acronymic organizations control the flow of what makes it to American screens and with what rating.  If you are given an R, it means a huge drop in audience.  An NC-17 is death.  Most theatres in America have clauses in their rental agreements with the mall they are in that they aren't allowed to show NC-17 movies.  So the NC-17 becomes the ultimate veto if the film is out-of-bounds. But if you are an indie movie or distributor you STILL have to play by the big guys' rules. There is no choice if you want to be seen in theaters.

Bully was given an R-rating and damned commercially because why?  A law?  A government agency?  An economic reality? It was given an R by the cartel of the studios.

All the writers writing about this subject focus on the rating and the use of "fuck" like the ruling came down from Mt Sinai.  It didn't.  It's not a law.  It's a bunch of anonymous parents in the Valley.  We didn't vote for them.  We can't vote them out.  There is no recourse.  Classic case of the big guys in an industry making the rules that the little guys have to follow.

We don't have this shit for music, videogames, cable TV, books … only movies in theaters.  At least with the FCC we can exert political pressure if we don't like it.  The MPAA rating's board is ANONYMOUS!!!  How crazy is that?

Until someone takes the MPAA to court for anti-trust violation, we are stuck with the anachronistic bullshit.  Stop trying to argue the rating.  Ratings as guidelines are fine but the ratings have consequences. That's the point.  It is absolutely crazily in violation of the anti-trust laws.  A cartel of powerful content makers control the distribution system for theatrical films in such a way that the little moviemakers are at a distinct disadvantage both economically and creatively.  It is anti-artist and anti-free speech and it comes from liberal Hollywood.

I was hoping Harvey would be the guy.  But he is too inside Hollywood.

Previous discussion here and here.