Month: May 2013

A word of warning from the band named “!!!”:

When we started, we felt like we were doing a completely different type of music than everybody else, and we wanted a name that would set us apart. We didn’t know we’d still be answering questions about it 16 years later. The moral of the story is not to be too different, I guess. It seemed like we came before most of the triple-name bands, too. Once we were a couple of questions into an interview in Belgium, and then the journalist goes, “Where’s Karen?” She thought we were the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Awkward.

Previous Dish on band-naming here.

Curtis Brainard blames “balanced” coverage:

Between 1998 and 2006, 60 percent of vaccine-autism articles in British newspapers, and 49 percent in American papers, were “balanced,” in the sense that they either mentioned both pro-link and anti-link perspectives, or neither perspective, according to a 2008 study by Christopher Clarke at Cornell University. The remainder—40 percent in the British press and 51 percent in the American press—mentioned only one perspective or the other, but British journalists were more likely to focus on pro-link claims and the Americans were more likely to focus on anti-link claims.

While it’s somewhat reassuring that almost half the US stories (41 percent) tried, to varying degrees, to rebut the vaccine-autism connection, the study raises the problem of “objectivity” in stories for which a preponderance of evidence is on one side of a “debate.” In such cases, “balanced” coverage can be irresponsible, because it suggests a controversy where none really exists.

Everyone makes mistakes, and I’m not piling on. But it’s this video that’s the problem. Many gay men have dated women in the past, including yours truly. It bears no relevance to their sexual orientation. Howie knows that, I’m sure. But when you’re vlogging as compulsively as he was, you’re going to say something dumb sometimes.

A reader writes:

On your reader’s logic, we should also train our 8-year-olds to drive, to drink responsibly, and to vote.  Why wait until they’re 18, when they have all those emotions and hormones raging?

While I have no doubt that some adults take the opportunity to train their children in the safe use of firearms, I also have no doubt that the larger purpose of all of this is for the gun industry to groom a new generation of consumers who will both spend money on weapons and fight any effort to allow reasonable regulation of those weapons, such as background checks.

This article goes into the details of the gun industry’s campaign to cultivate a new generation of consumers by getting guns into the hands of children.

In the ad above, you’ll note, as Chris Hayes did on Twitter today, that at the 0:22 mark, the mother is actually pointing a gun at her son’s head. In the commercial.

Preliminary research looks promising:

The [cannabinoid type-2 receptor] in [white blood cell] macrophages is stimulated normally when THC enters the bloodstream, so nothing unusual there. However, it appears that macrophages that have their CB2 receptor stimulated are stronger when it comes to fighting and weakening the HIV-1 virus.

This was discovered when the research team from the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia infected macrophages with the HIV-1 virus, before then exposing cell cultures to one of three types of synthetic THC that specifically target the CB2 receptor. Comparing these cell cultures after seven days against a control group revealed a clear decrease in the rate of HIV-1 infection. Effectively, the macrophages had become stronger at keeping the HIV-1 virus out.

My viral load remains at zero as I approach the twentieth anniversary of my sero-conversion. For the record, I attribute this to anti-retroviral drugs.

Jonathan Rauch’s gorgeously written memoir about growing up gay, Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul was released a few days ago. From Rauch’s introductory blog post, explaining the book:

From a very young age, long before I understood I was gay or what “gay” or sex or sexuality might conceivably mean, I understood that I could not marry and have a family, the two things I wanted most. And so, in my teens, I set out on an ambitious course of denial. The more obvious and overwhelming my sexual attractions became, the harder I worked to to make the obvious seem impossible.

Not just for a year, not even even for a decade, but for 25 years, I lived in an inverted world where love was hate, attraction was envy, and childhood could never end. I thought I had been inexplicably stripped of the capability to love. And what is a soul without even the possibility of love? I felt soulless. In a way, I was soulless.

It all ended suddenly, seemingly miraculously, as if I had snapped awake from a dream, in April of 1985, 28 years ago. For a while afterward, I strived to forget the dream and make a right-side-up life for myself, but there came a time when I realized I was forgetting too well. So I wrote it down, every detail, an almost clinical record; the whole strange story of my implacable war on my own personality, and my unexpected escape into love.

In an excerpt from the book, Rauch describes his discovery of muscles in books and magazines:

When that happened, it was like water for the parched, and I would simply stand in the bookstore drinking it up. As time went on, I accumulated a stack of muscle magazines, which I kept in a cabinet next to my bed. By night, by day, whenever, I would open one and find a picture of an overwhelmingly muscular man and look very hard at him.

If I looked hard enough, which was easy to do, he would stir into motion. He would ever so slowly draw his fingers into a fist and then draw the fist inward toward the elbow and squeeze until the forearm was a veiny explosion of sinew, and then he bent his elbow until the biceps balled up and jammed against the iron forearm, and then, not finished yet, he let his arms fall to his sides and then stretched them out and up and behind his head and drew breath into his chest until it nearly burst, and he looked at me like a lion flashing his mane, daring me to imagine that any man so strong and indomitable might exist.

Then looking harder still I could see myself approach him there in my room, just near the bed, and he would let me try to encircle his arm with my hands, but it was no use, his arm was too big to encompass, the best I could do was to cup my hand over the biceps and feel how it pushed right through my palm, the hardness an eruption of marble. And then he would seize me and lift me and for him this was as easy as lifting a feather pillow, those piston arms as inexorable as a forklift. Up, up I went, helpless in his hands, spinning, spinning in their grasp, gasping at his strength, until I gained release. And then at last I would put him away.

(Photo: Students pay their respects on October 1, 2010 to first-year student Tyler Clementi, 18, who killed himself shortly after being filmed and broadcast over the Internet during a gay encounter at Rutgers Univeristy in New Brunswick, New Jersey. By Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.)

A reader’s response:

No, we should not kill cursive.  My children attend a Montessori school where it’s still taught and I see many benefits.  First of all, building the muscles and eye/hand coordination necessary to use a pen or pencil is important and takes practice.  For many it’s as close as we get to drawing.  You can’t just magically expect to be able to write when you need to without practice.  Second, there is still a need to write by hand quickly and legibly, regardless of any technical revolution.  I have taken many classes where anything other than a regular notebook would not have worked, and was glad to know how to write legibly and quickly.

And lastly, sometimes the medium is as important as the message.  My husband wrote me hundreds of emails from Iraq when he was deployed there, and two handwritten letters.  Can you guess which of those notes I still read?  To know he held that paper in his hands and wrote that he loved me while so far away meant more than an electronic message that looked like I could have written it to myself.  Why would we rob children of the chance to learn a skill that is both beautiful and practical?  I’m glad my kids can write in cursive.

Another reader:

I suppose that we should also kill signatures while we’re at it (though they are, albeit very slowly, suffering a collective death-by-technology in their own right). I would venture to guess that the majority of adult signatures evolve from a very basic, teen-aged cursive exercise.

Another:

My mother’s cursive writing was magnificent, and I spent years trying unsuccessfully to copy it.  I have never been able to master her “W.” My signature is the closest I ever came to emulating her writing:

I know why cursive is dying, but allow me to mourn.