On the land of T-bone steaks and unending tummy rubs

Okay, so UGA's beloved mascot, Uga VII, passed away Thursday morning from a heart attack.

As a Bulldog, I mourn the loss of our mascot, who was a big chunk of bulldog and a commanding presence on the sideline. As a dog owner, I feel awful for the Seiler family, who lost a family pet; those who have met him say he was a friendly, good-natured dog. The average lifespan for a bulldog is eight years, and the Seilers have seen the passing of six Ugas before, but I'm sure that doesn't make it any easier this time.

Georgia won't have a bulldog mascot on the sidelines this weekend against Kentucky, but there are plans to hang a wreath on his doghouse. The Seilers plan to have a dawg in place at next Saturday's game against Georgia Tech, although it won't necessarily be the next Uga.

Rest in peace, Uga VI's Loran's Best, and may you find mountains of kibble and bountiful bags of ice. You were a damn good dawg and a good boy.

On the stupidity inherent in the system

Okay, so it's no secret that I'm fairly exercised about the current health-care debate, particularly in re: the Stupak Amendment and reproductive rights. So when I got to a link from the Center for Reproductive Rights encouraging me to send an e-mail to my representative, urging him to sign Representatives Diana DeGette's and Louise Slaughter's letter of opposition to Nancy Pelosi, I was all for it. I sat down and penned an eloquent missive to my rep, Artur Davis. No form letter, this--I spoke of the plight of poor and middle-class women struggling for access to health care, the need for that health care to be comprehensive and address all of their needs as determined by that woman and her doctor, not as decided by a bunch of strangers in Congress or a bunch of fundamentalists behind a Web site. I implored him to be brave, to do what he knew was right instead of what would be expected of him from the Mountain Brook housewives in his district. God, it was a fine letter.

I shortly got an e-mail from Nancy Northrup with the CRR, thanking me for participating. "Thank you for taking action on this urgent issue," she said. "Every message sent will make a difference."

Maybe in a different district. Maybe in a different state. Maybe, certainly, with a different representative. But not with our buddy Artur Davis.

Artie writes:

Thank you for contacting me with your thoughts and concerns regarding abortion services within the health care reform package. I appreciate hearing from you on this important matter.

Well, y'know, it's what I do. I care.

As the health care reform legislation continues to take shape in both chambers of Congress over the next several weeks, I share your concerns about the use of federal funds to provide abortion services. I have joined other members of Congress in urging Speaker Pelosi to include language in any final healthcare reform bill that makes clear that no federal dollars can be used to finance coverage of an abortion-whether through a public option or through the direct use of federal subsidies to individuals. I believe this approach is consistent with the Hyde Amendment, a thirty year old federal prohibition on the use of Medicaid dollars to finance an abortion.

It's a big deal, y'know? Whether we like it or not, abortion services are an important part of comprehensive health care for women, so it's important to defend--wait, what?

I have joined other members of Congress in urging Speaker Pelosi to include language in any final healthcare reform bill that makes clear that no federal dollars can be used to finance coverage of an abortion...

Ah. Well, then, fuck you, Artur Davis.

He goes on to blah, blah, blah, and abortion is controversial and emotional, and tax dollars and an event that offends people's beliefs, and whatever, and I don't care, because fuck you, Artur Davis.

Please know that as this process moves forward I will continue to keep your thoughts in mind.

Why start now?

Again, thank you for contacting me, and I look forward to hearing from you in the future on matters that are important to you.

I'm pretty sure you won't. I'm not a fan of wasting my time. But I can think of a lot of people I can contact on matters that are important to me, and I've got plenty of time to do it between now and November 2010.

So to wrap up: Neither you nor any of your interns even bothered to read my e-mail, you don't share my concerns, you won't get my vote, and to sum up, FUCK YOU, Artur Davis.

Think you might have better luck with your rep? Check out the Center for Reproductive Rights.

On choices

Or, The Stupak, It Burns

Okay, so on Saturday night, the House of Representatives told the women of America to get comfortable under that bus, because universal health care is actually going to be defined as universal except for some women, because their ladyparts sometimes require procedures that we find icky. It may sound like I'm being dramatic, but I'll tell you, it feels pretty darn dramatic. It feels like our elected representatives are willing to screw over poor women and women who couldn't afford insurance without getting it through their employer and women who may get pregnant accidentally and women who may get pregnant intentionally--in other words, every women with a functioning uterus--in the name of affordable health care for the other 49.1 percent of U.S. citizens.

The Stupak Amendment to HR 3962 bans abortion coverage for any private or public health plan receiving federal subsidies--in essence every plan available on the Exchange. Not for any amount of money, not for any woman. Not even for a woman paying her entire premium herself. Not in a box, not with a fox. Thus women who depend on their employers for insurance or women who must pay for their insurance themselves will be left paying out of pocket for what can be a very expensive procedure. Exceptions will be made, of course, for rape, incest, and the life--life, not health--of the mother, so if you're lucky enough to have preeclampsia, you can just wait until the seizures start and then the government will take care of you.

For some reason, Bart Stupak and friends think it's perfectly reasonable that reproductive health services are the only ones that can be left completely out in the cold. They don't, for instance, try to explicitly remove heart disease from the bill, even though it costs taxpayers more annually than women's health services and usually arises from preventable lifestyle choices. Sorry, chubbo, you're paying for your angioplasty out of pocket! Next time you'll think twice before reaching for that rack of ribs. You should have coughed up for that extra heart-disease policy when you had the chance.

Three arguments that I will not entertain:

1. There are more important things to worry about right now! This bill would provide health insurance to 96 percent of Americans; can't you just compromise for their sake?

Well, no, I can't. Among those 96 percent are nearly 150 million women who may someday need reproductive health coverage. Congress would never try to pass a bill explicitly requiring insurers to deny coverage for obesity, and if they did, Americans would be up in arms. They would never try to pass a bill explicitly denying coverage for sickle-cell anemia. Yet when it's women getting the fuzzy end of the universal health-care lollipop, we're expected to sit back quietly, in the name of compromise, and hope that we'll someday get our chance to politely request the benefits that are offered to everyone else without thought or question. Hell, it's the sitting back quietly and politely that's gotten us into this situation.

2. The Hyde Amendment already says that federal dollars can't be used for abortions. It's not like women are any worse off.

First of all, let me note that even if women weren't any worse off, they'd be no worse off than a bad position. The Hyde Amendment was bad from the start, and women have been fighting against it from the start. It's like saying, "Oh, he's just trapped in the forest with a broken femur. It's not like it's raining or anything." No, it sure isn't raining, but that doesn't mean he's okay out there with his broken femur, and it doesn't mean someone doesn't need to go in there and help him.

That said, no, in fact, women are worse off. The Hyde Amendment, lousy as it is, only says that federal dollars can't be used for abortions. The Stupak Amendment extends that to all insurance sold through the Exchange, even to women who themselves pay their entire premiums without using federal dollars. Whereas before, it was only poor women on Medicaid who were left out in the cold, now it's any woman who can't afford to pay $1,500 for a D&E after her much-wanted baby is discovered to have hydrocephalus. Sure, she could have bought an abortion rider, but she probably didn't expect to ever need an abortion, any more than a person would buy a bus-hitting rider in anticipation of being hit by a bus.

3. I think that abortion is murder, and I don't want my tax dollars to fund murder.

Of course you don't. Neither does the pacifist who believes that war is murder--and yet still has to watch her tax dollars fund war. Neither does the person who believes that the death penalty is murder--and yet still has to watch his tax dollars fund executions. But in 1976, our government ruled that people who oppose abortion have the special privilege of dictating how their taxes are used. Since by current numbers, 57 percent of Americans oppose the Iraq war while only 45 percent oppose abortion, you'd think Congress would be rushing to shield tax dollars from the military rather than from reproductive health, but somehow that isn't the case.

The upshot echoes what President Obama said in an interview with ABC--"This is a health-care bill, not an abortion bill." On the surface, it sounds kind of dismissive, like we're discussing health care now and abortion will have to wait. But taken in context, it has meaning. It means that abortion isn't a separate issue. It means that health care isn't health care without care for every aspect of health, serving every citizen. Discussing abortion as a separate issue ignores the fact that, like diabetes and cancer, reproductive health is an integral aspect of health care crucial to keeping America healthy.

Okay, so I count myself lucky to have friends of a wide variety of personal conviction--Christian to Muslim to atheist, pro-choice to anti-choice and that nebulous in-between where you would never have an abortion yourself but you totally support other women's right to have abortions when please, if you're honest with yourself, you can't know how you would act were such a situation to arise but at least you're not one of those women who are totally anti-choice right up to the point where they find themselves pregnant but then they get to have an abortion because they have a good reason and everyone else just hates babies.

A friend of mine of the Christian, anti-choice variety (who is also generally a very nice and reasonable man, and he and his wife are currently housing a 20-week-old fetus in her abdomen, which they're very excited about, and thus so am I) posted a link on Facebook without comment: Why does Planned Parenthood need a restraining order against Abby Johnson? And my response to that is, well, because.

Let me disclose right away that I am not generally a fan of Double X (for all values of "generally" equal to "at all"). Their XXFactor blog claims to give voice to "what women really think," but its content seems liberally sprinkled with the kind of "just because I don't espouse any generally accepted feminist values doesn't mean I'm not a feminist" drivel that gives Sister F***ers something to link to approvingly in their blogs.

Another thing I'm not a fan of is intellectually incurious--to the point of suspicion--blog posts. Regardless of writer Rachael Larimore's stated intent to "kee[p] an eye on" the issue, she's gotten off to a weak start with a post that accurately parrots a local news story and goes into no further depth, accepting Johnson's accusations about Planned Parenthood's business model without question and speculating--entirely to PP's detriment--from then on.

I won't pretend to know anything more about the subject than Larimore does, and I hope that more information will be forthcoming, but if she's not going to ask questions, I will. If either of my readers has any informed, relevant knowledge on the subject, I invite you to fill in my blanks.

Three questions...

1. Larimore presents the news that Abby Johnson left her job as director of a Planned Parenthood health center (she doesn't say when, but it was October 6) after seeing the ultrasound of an abortion, which I'm sure would be rather a moment for anyone, regardless of value affiliation on the subject. But one has to wonder how Johnson managed to work for Planned Parenthood for eight years--two of those as director--and not know what was going on in those procedure rooms. Was she aware of how surgical abortions work? Did she never wonder what those bleepy machines with the little TV screens were for? What did she think they were doing back there?

Question 1: How did she go eight years without realizing how surgical abortions work?

2. Larimore also repeats without questioning a quote from Johnson:

Johnson says she became conflicted because “she was told to bring in more women who wanted abortions,” and that the organization was “changing it's business model from one that pushed prevention, to one that focused on abortion.”

Johnson has said that she never received any e-mails or letters instructing her how to raise profits but that "Every meeting that we had was, 'We don't have enough money, we don't have enough money — we've got to keep these abortions coming.'" (Larimore didn't provide that quote herself, but a quick Google search provided a Fox News interview with Johnson as its second result.)

So. In their 2008 annual report, Planned Parenthood claims that three percent of the services provided at their health centers are abortion-related, while 36 percent are related to contraception; they say that 82 percent of their clients received contraception services in 2007. And they say that less than 40 percent of their overall revenue comes from their health centers. And PP's health center in Bryan, Texas, is only one of 850 in the nation.

(If you have a minute, check out Johnson's KEOS interview six weeks ago where she repeated those statistics, talked about the importance of reproductive rights, and mentioned how dishonest and threatening the Coalition for Life were and how she considered the 40 Days of Life to be harassment. Funny, that)

Recognizing that one abortion would certainly provide more income than, say, one pregnancy test or one pack of birth-control pills (although less, potentially, than one IUD or one year of BCPs), how many more abortions would Johnson have to bring into her clinic to have a substantial impact on Planned Parenthood's business model? Would she be expected to go out and recruit new clients to come in and have abortions, or would it be more effective to convince current clients not to use contraception after all?

Question 2: How many more abortions would Johnson have to bring in to have an impact on Planned Parenthood's business model?

3. In that Fox News interview that Larimore never managed to come across in her research on the subject, Johnson says that a visiting doctor could perform "30 to 40 procedures on each day he was there," two days a month. How many could one doctor actually perform in a day? I have this image of a doctor scrubbing in, performing the procedure, scrubbing out, and scrubbing right back in for the next one, like a game of whack-a-mole that leaves him with no time for chart notes or lunch. Is this realistic, or might Johnson have been exaggerating and/or sensationalizing a bit to Fox News because Bill Hemmer is such a muffin?

Question 3: Does the Bryan PP health center force its visiting doctor to work through lunch, or is Bill Hemmer a muffin? (The judges will accept "both" as an answer)

Larimore does ask one question in her post. She asks, "Why does Planned Parenthood need a restraining order against Abby Johnson?" (and also, "Is Planned Parenthood going to such lengths to keep Johnson from discussing its 'business model?'" but that's kind of the same thing). She doesn't want to jump to conclusions. And neither do I.

... and an answer

I do have access to this mystical device called "the Google," though, and it reveals to me wondrous things. For instance, the Google tells me that Salon obtained a copy of Planned Parenthood's petition for the restraining order, which included allegations that the same day Johnson was put on a "performance improvement plan," she was seen copying files and "removing items" from the health center, and that Johnson herself told clinic employees that she'd passed information along to the Coalition for Life and that "something big" was coming up.

Now, Johnson denies the allegations, but considering the threatening nature of much anti-choice activism (which Johnson herself decries in the aforementioned KEOS interview) and the Coalition for Life's own tactics of, for instance, calling the homes of clinic patients to tell their families that they've had abortions, it may be a safer move to restrain now and ask questions later. Later, for instance, on November 10, when a court date has been set up so that both parties can ask questions, and if the allegations turn out to be unfounded, the temporary restraining order won't be extended. But I like to think that if I were a PP patient, my medical records would remain confidential and my family unharassed by anti-choicers even if the clinic director did have a "change of heart."

Anyway, that's one thing that might be an answer to the only question that Rachael Larimore bothered to ask. We'll see how this thing pans out. I'll be watching.

On fishnet Eskimos

Okay, so every reasonably sized non-Amish town will tonight be observing Halloween with that most holy of traditions: slutty costumes. I hit up B&A Warehouse last night for their annual party and found a veritable treasure-trove of slutty costumery--most identifiable, some not; some creative, most not. Some with pants, most--wait, no, none with pants. My bad.

Tonight, of course, women across the city will go all out, wearing clothes that would get them arrested on any other night of the year. Some will find couples costumes so that their significant others can play along--cop and slutty convict, convict and slutty cop, football player and slutty referee, referee and slutty football player. I've been trying to convince The Boy to go with me as doctor and slutty nurse, but he says he doesn't have the legs for fishnets.

Anyway, the most fun is always the people-watching, and people-watching is always more fun with a purpose. Tonight's purpose?

It's Slutty Halloween Bingo.

B	I	N	G	O
Slutty Pirate	Slutty Gladiator	Slutty Schoolgirl	Slutty Cop	Slutty Soldier
Slutty Farmgirl	Slutty Referee	Slutty Baseball Player	Slutty Native American	Slutty Construction Worker
Slutty Geisha	Slutty Rainbow Brite	SLUTTY FREE SPACE	Slutty Bunny	Slutty Angel
Slutty Little Bo Peep	Slutty Devil	Slutty Fairy	Slutty Nurse	Slutty Strawberry Shortcake
Slutty Witch	Slutty French Maid	Slutty Bavarian Barmaid	Slutty Sailor	Slutty Cat

All of these are, of course, actual costumes that I actually saw at B&A last night. Other costumes included Slutty Beach Volleyball Player, Slutty Eskimo, and Slutty Robin (a la Batman), but I didn't know how common those are in your area, so I left them off.

Print this bad boy out and get to checking things off! The first person to scan their winning card and e-mail it to me gets a Flying Spaghetti Monster t-shirt. I'll be posting my own updates on Twitter at #sluttyhalloweenbingo.

On overcoming fear

Okay, so I've got a couple of posts in the can right now (wow, sounds weird, but it stays) that I haven't gotten to because I've been on VACATION, BITCHES. I've been overcoming my fear of an entire week at a secluded beach in Florida with the boyfriend and the dog, far beyond any cell signal and out of reach of my bosses, with nothing to do but hang out on the beach and go for walks and chill out in the evenings with a couple of DVDs. I'm not afraid of you, delicious shrimp and crab cakes and both bay and sea scallops! I WILL EAT YOU!

Anyway, more to come. In the meantime, here's my intensely aquaphobic dog (no joke; he's terrified. Apparently it's fairly common among sled dogs) venturing happily into the surf in pursuit of a stick.



Still can't get him into the pool, though.

Laters.

On twits

Okay, so I have a Twitter account, and I've even used it--fairly consistently, in the beginning, up to the modest point of 100-ish posts and nearly that many followers. Recently, however, I've dropped off considerably, owing largely to the fact that I just don't have time to spend scanning Twitter to divine the meaning of life in 140 characters or less and to the concern that people, even those 89 people, probably don't care that much about what I say anyway. (It also doesn't help that, as a marketing/advertising person, I've been called upon repeatedly to trumpet the ineffable wonders of social media, and I'm just so sick of it. Social media is a tool, people. It only works as a component of a larger, coherent marketing plan. Simply having a Twitter feed is not going to drag in 10,000 new customers, nor is a Facebook page going to make you a millionaire. It's a tool, not an Easy Button, you lazy twits.)

Anyway.

There are people whose opinions on the meaning of life are closely followed. They are the ones we look to for 140-character strokes of brilliance. They are our modern-day philosophers, our reliable dispensaries of little wisdom-gelcaps. They are celebrities, and they always have something to say.

Tweets John Mayer:

You know who the most flamboyant crowd is? Straight, drunk girls. They're like a bunch of little Charles Nelson Reillys.

and Lindsay Lohan:

@samantharonson doesn't respond 2me b/c her family will cut her off if she contacts me...They control the one I love&im incapable of making

That damn character limit. Bring it home, Linds:

Any sort of difference. I'm in love with her, as she is in love with me....but her loved ones-hate her brilliance&resent her happiness

Convicted domestic abuser Chris Brown tells us:

IM SO TIRED OF LAME AZZ PEOPLE...UUGGGGGHHH>>lol

and then expounds with:

IM ALLERGIC TO LAMEZ..LOL...

One of the great questions of our time comes from Jessica Simpson:

Is "asks" even a word? If not, sorry 4 my layziness with grammar.

And one of the great answers of our time comes from P. Diddy:

BRAZIL!!!!! Ass! Ass! Ass! Phat round beautiful ASSES!!!!! Everywhere! Its a ASS suniami!!!!!!!! I think I like it here!!! Lol

But the problem with Twitter is that it's such a harsh, bland medium. The written word, pah--where is the nuance? Where is the emotion??!!? Where is TEH PASSION???!!//??!1!? Right here, says the Washington Post.



(Enjoy more dramatic tweetage hither and hither and hither and then keep going.)

None of this is to say that all celebrity tweets are incomprehensible Net-babble. Convicted domestic abuser Chris Brown, for instance, does have one nugget of true wisdom to offer:

IMA TALK ABOUT OTHER SH** FROM NOW ON.... ima fall back lol.. twitter will get u IN TROUBLE...lol

lol indeed.

(H/T Celebitchy)

On answering the call

Okay, so yesterday I ran into this guy I know. I wouldn't call him a friend; I'd call him a friend of a friend, an acquaintance, although Jesus would probably call him my brother (not to be confused with the guy my parents would call my brother). This Guy had just, he said, gotten rolled in Five Points and needed a ride to the hospital. And, in fact, he looked bad; he had a cut above his eye that would probably need stitches and one on his nose and one above his lip, his jacket was ripped, and he was wobbling around like a guy who'd had his head smacked against the pavement much in the way This Guy said his had been.

I lied and told him my car was broken.

Not that I'm trying to excuse it, but I've known This Guy for about three years, and I had my doubts that the real story was precisely as he told it. This Guy has been an alcoholic since before I met him, drinking away his wife and his two young children and his home and every job he's ever had. He's spent probably 85 percent of the last three years homeless, not counting the time he's spent in lockup. And the aforementioned Friend (of whom This Guy was a friend) had taken him in, through the goodness of his heart, to try to help him get his life back together. He'd tried to get This Guy cleaned up and sober, help him find a job, resolve legal issues, try to talk with his wife. My Friend had bailed him out of jail, helped him find a lawyer, driven him great distances, and even given him a place on his couch to sleep for a period of time as he tried to get things straightened out. And over and over, This Guy failed and came back--started drinking again, lost his job, and came back; got his girlfriend pregnant, lost the baby, came back; served time in jail on a couple of old warrants, came back; got another job, started drinking again, lost the job, came back.

Every time, My Friend took him back in. Good Christian and Democrat that he is, on matters like this, he tends toward a big heart and a small brain. Every time, he was convinced that This Guy was ready to get cleaned up and just needed to make the effort. Even when This Guy came back, even when he showed up drunk, even when he stole from My Friend, he was asked to leave and not come back--and when he came back, there was an open door and another chance.

All of this is by way of explaining, if not necessarily excusing, why my heart wasn't as big when This Guy approached me. His story was questionable, and the alcohol seeping from his pores made me wonder whether the wobbliness was due entirely to his head injury. And so when he asked for a ride, I lied and told him my car was broken. I called an ambulance and sat with him until they arrived. When they asked how I knew him, I said I was a friend of a Friend, and This Guy looked kind of stricken, like he expected me to identify him as my own friend. When the police officer who responded pulled me aside and asked me if This Guy had any "bad habits," I told him about his history, even knowing that it would probably have somewhat of a negative impact on the way he would be treated. When the paramedics asked if I would be riding along in the ambulance, I said no. And then I went home.

Last night, around 11:00, I got a call from the hospital. I recognized the number and let it go to voicemail; it was an ER nurse telling me that This Guy was ready to go and needed a ride. Half an hour later, another call, same number, and I let it go. No voicemail this time. At midnight, another call, and I denied him a third time. No more calls after that.

I could say that I had the best of intentions, that I was trying to teach him a lesson or trying to push him out of the nest or trying to give him a chance to sit in the ER and sober up, but I've done enough lying recently. I just didn't want him. He wasn't mine, he was My Friend's, and I didn't want him--not in my home, not in my car, not in a box, not with a fox. I didn't want him in my life, and so I left him in the ER, and I don't know what he did or where he is. And that doesn't feel good. It feels like I've abandoned a person in need, and while I know, intellectually, that there's nothing I could do or can do to change the way his life is going, my heart is telling me that I should have tried. And since I didn't, it's telling me I was wrong.

I'm not sure why I posted this. It might be that I'm begging people to line up in comments to assure me that I did the right thing. But I've already talked to two people about it, one of whom was the big heart with the small brain, both of whom assured me that I did the right thing. But conventional wisdom is that when you do the right thing, you know it because you feel good about it. Sitting there last night, watching the phone ring and not answering it, didn't feel like the right thing, and it doesn't feel any righter in the light of day.

On an open request for clarification

Okay, so I'm sincerely kind of embarrassed. I feel like there's something I've missed, like there's something I'm supposed to be automatically picking up on and that I'm just not seeing because I'm blinded by privilege. And if it turns out that I am, I sincerely ask to be set straight on the matter.

But I don't really understand why the Joe Wilson thing cracks of racism.

I'll be the first to point out how much racism has been ladled on President Obama and family since his presidential campaign really kicked up (okay, not the first, but I have said my piece). And the Deep South doesn't exactly have the best reputation for universal acceptance and colorblindness, with Wilson's own South Carolina taking a particular hit for classics like its Confederate state flag and the "McCain's illegitimate black baby" push-polling and the stupid use of Facebook by a So.Car. GOP activist.

But when Jimmy Carter says that Wilson's outburst was "based on racism" and fears of a black president, I just can't follow his logic. No matter how many times I review the video and the transcripts and the context of Obama's talk, I can't find anything in those two shouted words that can only be attributed to racism and nothing else.

There is truth to what Carter said. "There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president"; that's definitely true, as is his assertion in an interview with Brian Williams that a lot of animosity is directed at Obama because he's a black man. But I find myself unable to take the next step that bridges the gap between premise and conclusion, saying, "Not only are these things true, but they are the reason that Joe Wilson shouted the way he did." I'm looking, but I don't see the causality.

Similar is the assertion that all anti-Obama signs carried at "tea parties" and outside of townhall meetings are racist in nature. Sure, absolutely, many of them are--your "Home Don't Play Dat"s, your "White Slavery"s and "What You Talkin About Willis"es, your wandering white supremacists who neither side will claim. And many of the signs aren't racist. "Obama = Hitler" (or Stalin, or Che, or whoever) signs are both cheap and poorly thought out, but are they racist? Are they any more racist than the "Bush = Hitler" signs that went up during his presidential campaigns, just because Obama is a person of color?

My assertion is that sometimes an asshole is just an asshole. Sometimes, a tea partier or a townhall protester is just insulting and uncreative, with the underlying factor being stupidity rather than racism.

On "Hardball" today, Chris Matthews interviewed Senator Donna Edwards (D - MD) on the subject, unabashedly prompting her again and again to assign racism to Wilson's outburst. And again and again, the congresswoman, herself black, refuted it:

MATTHEWS: Do you think this is a race thing?

EDWARDS: I don't think it is at all. I mean I spent my time over the weekend in my district, you know, black folks, white folks, you know, across the stripes. Democrats and Republicans, who themselves expressed their disapproval and really their dismay. And so I don't think it's really about race. It's really about our institutions and the rules that govern us.

MATTHEWS: No. I think, I wasn't clear Congresswoman. I mean was it a racial thing on the part of Wilson? Was he expressing contempt for Barack Obama because of his heritage?

EDWARDS: I don't think that at all. I mean, I think there's been a vigorous debate about the policy and about health care. The problem is that, you know, while he offered a personal apology, it was actually a public offense to the institution. We just don't do that and we, we have to distinguish ourselves and, in fact, our rules are what distinguish us from other kinds of governments.

And so, unable to dig the response he wanted from Edwards, Matthews had to move on to Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post to find someone who'd agree that Wilson "smacks of the old days."

And then we have Maureen Dowd, who insists in her New York Times column that what we could have heard, had we been listening hard enough, was what Joe Wilson had meant to say--"You lie, boy." And once again, she brings up valid points--attempts to deligitimize Obama as president, the fact that some people will never accept a black man in the White House--and yet fails, such that I can see, to connect them causally to Joe Wilson's outburst.

Now, I think we can all agree that Joe Wilson is generally pretty racist. From there, the question becomes: Is a statement automatically racist if it comes out of the mouth of a racist person? Is racism like pernicious B.O., making everything around you stink even if you don't personally wear it? Or is it possible that a person who can easily come up with racism came up with, in this case, bad manners, a lack of propriety, and partisanship?

I'm not saying that his outburst couldn't have been rooted in racism; I'm just saying that once we come up with that possibility, we shouldn't shout "Eureka!" and decide we've found the answer. Maybe it was full-on racism. Maybe Wilson was simply overcome with passion and anger and couldn't control himself. Maybe he wasn't overcome at all and just didn't have the home training that would help him keep his mouth shut. Maybe he was trying to get attention and it didn't turn out as he'd hoped. Maybe he expected his fellow GOP representatives join him in a righteously outraged chorus and was embarrassed when they didn't. Maybe he was drunk. Maybe it's a combination of several of those things. But I don't see any signs that tell me I should stop digging when I hit "racist."

A lot of people, largely on the left, are saying right now that we as Americans need to have respect for the office of the president, and righties are cheering as patriotic and brazen all of the tea-partiers with their "Obama = Socialism" signs. This is in contrast to the Bush administration, when the lefties were protesting and holding the signs and the righties were calling them unAmerican and telling them to leave the country. Protesting, holding stupid signs, and having not nearly enough respect for the president are things that surpass time and race; that kind of assholishness is the great uniter.

Which is not to say there aren't some differences. While Bush was generally accused of stealing the 2000 election, Obama was accused of being Kenyan (and delegitimized for being a black man in what some saw as a white man's office)--there's racism behind that. When Bush was compared to a monkey, it was usually about his ears, and when Obama was, it was usually a slur on his ethnic heritage--there's racism there. It's not that it never happens. But it doesn't always happen, and when we automatically jump to that conclusion-to the exclusion of all others--whenever someone shows disrespect to Obama, we run the risk of dulling that message, and we miss a valuable opportunity to address a significant source of conflict that we might not otherwise see.

Unless I'm missing something, which is possible.

On the ultimate thrill

Okay, so I was going to hold off on this until we'd heard the final word, but it's looking like that could take longer than expected and I know my mom's been waiting for this video.

So here it is. Labor Day weekend, I got together with 902 near-complete strangers at DragonCon in Atlanta in a Guinness Book of World Records attempt. Our feat? To amass the greatest number of people ever in one place doing the "Thriller" dance at one time.

And it went a little something like this:



Alas, you can't actually see me in that video; I'd be all the way house right, about five rows back. Pity, really, because my moves were slick. Seriously. No, shut up, they were. But you can enjoy the dance stylings of the creepy Burger King king, the Joker, the Flying Spaghetti Monster (and Her attendant pirate), and a big silver Michael Jackson glove.

A few notes on the record attempt: Damn. The organizers had to go to ends to make this happen. Apparently, they had to submit video and still photography from several different angles, at least one of which showed all participants at the same time, and a log book signed by each participant as we came in. We all had to be dancing the whole time, and we had to be doing the 5:58 version. At some point, someone from Guinness will sit down with one of those pictures and literally count heads to make sure that every name in the logbook corresponds to a head on the dance floor. And what do we get? A certificate. Not even that--organizers Kimber, Lisa, and Lauren get a certificate, and the other 900 of us get the pleasure of knowing we solidly kicked the asses of 242 William & Mary students who did it back in April. Suck it, Tribe!

And a note on the Mexico City attempt: Nothin' doin'. Wrong version of the song (the two-minute one), and not everyone danced the whole time. But it still looked like a whole hell of a lot of fun, and I commend them for getting 13,000 people together for that fun. Maybe we'll get the City of Atlanta to shut down Peachtree Street for next year's attempt.

Further updates as events warrant.

On stimulus

Okay, so I've been a slackass, because I do that. And I might continue to be. No promises. But here are a few things to keep you busy until I get my stuff together again:

... of the economy
In times of hardship, people tend to return to... simpler pleasures, which is, I'm sure, why Newt Gingrich's American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF) gave their 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year award to Allison Vines, owner of pr0n DVD superstore Pink Visual. ASWF was quick to retract the honor when they found out Vines's line of work, saying they'd sent the fax "inadvertently" (says her marketing coordinator, "We’re not entirely clear on how one ‘inadvertently’ sends a fax to the right person at the correct fax number"), but I like the way that, just for a moment, Newt managed to "inadvertently" recognize a different kind of stimulus to a different kind of package.

... and also of the economy, I suppose
On Friday, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld a state ban on the sale of sex toys. I commented on this 'round about this time three years ago, and I still haven't figured out a bona-fide law enforcement purpose for an OhMiBod bluetooth bullet. Good to know that Love Stuff isn't going down without a fight, though. Fight the (battery) power!

On the only way to answer the crazazy (and also, Barack Obama causes the rain)

Okay, so conservative reactions at town hall meetings over the past couple of weeks have ranged from misled through disturbed to WTFOGMCNNBBQ?!!!1!!11! (occasionally sprinkled, like bursts of blue sky peeking through storm clouds or the last size-medium cashmere cardigan erroneously crammed among the maternity tops on the clearance rack, with reasonable and sincerely felt concerns). No surprise there. What is surprising, although not nearly surprising enough, is the number of speakers who actually respond to it, who take seriously inflammatory and/or misinformed and/or just plain crazy questions as if they aren't purely someone's opportunity to get on the teevee and spew some crazy.

Well, finally someone delivered the response that such questions should get, and that someone is Barney Frank.

For those of you who are audio-challenged and reading along at work:

Wackaloon: Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy, as Obama has expressly supported this policy? Why are you supporting it?
Frank: When you ask me that question, I am going to revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question. On what planet do you spend most of your time? ... Do you want me to answer the question? Yes. As you stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis, my answer to you is, as I said before, it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.

(Also note the shout of "Hitler didn't start with the Jews" somewhere in the background.)

Let future town hall speakers take that as a lesson: This is the way to deal with those people. Don't waste your time trying to reason with someone who's beyond reason. These people aren't trying to engage you in debate; they don't want their questions answered. They want to stand up and shout, be disruptive, propagate a myth, show off for their fellow wackaloons, maybe get on TV. And when you try to seriously address their questions, you only lend validity to an inflammatory statement that has none--and allow them to monopolize time that could go to someone with a realistic concern.

This is something that has pissed me off about the media for years now. In the interest of "fair and balanced" reporting, they think they're obliged to always give equal time to both sides of the story. Is this a good practice most of the time? Sure. But when one side is presenting a reasoned, reasonable argument and the other is coming from a place of fantasy and nonsense, giving time to that other side is a waste of time and makes something seem valid that clearly is not. If one side is saying, "We're 37th in the world for health care, nearly 47 million Americans are uninsured, and we see universal health care as the best way to address that problem for reasons A and B and C" and the other is saying, for instance, that Obama wants to send government agents into your home to brainwash your children, no. That other side does not deserve equal time. Nor does "Obama wants to kill your grandmother." Or "Obama is another Hitler."

By all means, if someone comes to you with a rational argument, talk with them. Engage in conversation. Give them a platform to make their point. Maybe you'll convince them. Hey, maybe they'll convince you. But when someone comes to you with "Obama is Hitler" or "Obama keeps an enemies list of anyone who logs on to a government Web site, and by the way, he's from Kenya," do not give them a sense of respectability by engaging. The only way to respond to them is the way Barney Frank did--that their baseless, inflammatory comment isn't worth your time or energy.

On rebranding (not the kind that involves actual fire, although sometimes it feels like it does)

Okay, so I am, of course, just a little bit of an advertising nut, and branding fascinates me. That's why I loved this link from @BirminghamWorks, where Fortune magazine looks back over a dozen old branding efforts and their updated looks. It follows Apple from its Isaac Newton logo through the rainbow-striped disco fruit to the current, sleek chrome apple and Starbucks from its naked siren to its more stylized, less-naked siren.

The piece also looks at questionable brand renovations. The new Kraft logo, note the writers, is kind of nebulous and devoid of real meaning and also resembles the Yoplait logo, which is a General Mills product. The new "smiley" Pepsi swoosh could be a loser, and the Tropicana glass of orange juice was such a loser that they changed everything back just two months after its debut. The biggest stinker, they seem to feel, is the new Blackwater logo--they say it looks kind of sinister and spy-ish. I guess I can see that a little, particularly if you know what Blackwater (now "Xe," pronounced "zee," which everyone's definitely going to figure out on the first try) does, but to me, it looks more like a computer company. My first instinct is to wonder if they offer netbooks. Blackwater has a lot of bad press to overcome, but I don't really know where they're trying to take the company now, and this logo certainly doesn't give any clue.

Mentioned not in that article but in one from the beginning of July is Sci Fi's rebranding effort into... ugh, "Syfy." When I first read the press release that announced the change, I thought it was a clever prank designed to horrify viewers and marketing professionals alike before coming clean and giving everyone a relieved chuckle (and maybe an affectionate, "Oh, you're so bad."). And yet no. Now known as "seefee" around my household, the network hasn't really changed its programming--just its name, really. It's still, for the most part, a mix of Science and Fiction. They've added shows like "Warehouse 13," which is "a human story--about relationships, about isolation" that is also about... a warehouse full of supernatural relics. And shows like "Caprica," which is... a futuristic other-planet prequel to space-wars show "Battlestar Galactica." "It isn't about abandoning our dedicated fanbase," says Chris Czarkowsi, ad and sales rep for Seefee. "It's about including all those people who don't realize Syfy has anything to offer them. The point at which we change identity is when people don't see us so narrowly."

And the answer is a new, weird-looking brand that still doesn't tell people what the network has to offer?

I'm not promising that the new brand won't work out; the article reports that Seefee has drawn 12 new advertisers in the first quarter and that the rebrand did well with focus groups. But the question remains: How well will the brand do at attracting the new viewers, the ones who don't self-identify as sci-fi fans, to their programming? My biggest concern is that "Syfy" doesn't mean anything. It doesn't tell me anything about the shows they offer, the fact that sci-fi has been going mainstream for quite some time (Transformers, The Matrix, etc.), the fact that many of its shows are just as character- and plot-driven as they are techy or fantastical. It's just... seefee.

My instinct would have been not to convince potential viewers that seefee is the kind of TV that they want to watch but to convince potential viewers that sci-fi is what they've been watching all along anyway. A marketing campaign could easily push the more human tilt of some of its more human-tilted shows (the kissy bits from "Battlestar Galactica," the teary bits from "Primeval," the bits from "Sanctuary" that--wait, no, best to leave out "Sanctuary") to demonstrate the more human tilt of the network without having to rebrand it entirely. But maybe my instinct is wrong. The answer will be borne out in future viewership and advertising figures. But I hate waiting.

In the meantime, I'm sticking to my guns: A good brand needs to give some indication of the nature of the product or service you're offering, because you won't always be around in person to decipher your new logo for confused customers. The UK's "Consignia" lasted all of 14 months before switching back to a far clearer "Royal Mail." Where did Cingular go? Back to AT&T Wireless. And what the hell is an Altria?

Hint: It may or may not be Phillip Morris's attempt to escape Congressional-hearing notoriety; it's almost certainly not a beaver-looking critter with the tail of a rat.

On contagious confidence and joie de vivre: still not enough to get you into magazines

Okay, so doesn't Kelly Clarkson look awesome? She's standing there, right over a headline about body confidence, and does she ever look confident. Of course, it's easy to be confident when you look a good as she does. And although she's been known for her curviness in the past, it looks like she's slimmed down a ton; maybe she used those tips for slimming down and losing eight pounds and being hot by Saturday. Whatever she did, she looks fantastic, and I'm sure her skinny-mininess has contributed to her looking so happy and--wait. Hold on.

Do what, now?



But I thought--



Who's that girl in the cover photo, then?

There's been a nasty rumor going around that Self magazine airbrushed the hell out of Clarkson to put her on the cover. Obviously, it's just that--a rumor--because what self-aware magazine would Photoshop off about 20 pounds before putting her next to a headline about "staying true to" herself? Thank goodness Self EIC Lucy Danzinger took to her blog to set things straight.

Last Friday, the Internet was abuzz with the fact that I answered the question, did you Photoshop the September issue cover photo of Kelly Clarkson? with the answer: Yes.

See? It was noth--wait a minute.

Kelly has this amazing spirit, the kind of joie de vivre that certain people possess that makes you want to stand closer to them, hoping that you can learn what they know. In this case, you get the feeling Kelly has not let fame spoil her, but also that she was just born confident, with a generosity of spirit that is all about others and rarely about herself. She is, like her music, giving and strong and confident and full of gusto. Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best.

Her personal best? But--but that's not even her. Kelly Clarkson's chin isn't that pointed. Her arms aren't that skinny. If you watch the behind-the-scenes video Danzinger includes in her post, you can see exactly how much Clarkson isn't that waifish figure on the magazine cover. Not that she's not pretty--I think she's pretty and cute and looks really energetic and happy, and while I wish her usual stylist would help her pick costumes for her performances that don't look unflattering and uncomfortable and pinchy, her body is good and she's got so much personality. So you'd think that her personal best would be the best shot of her person. Not... well, some other person.

Danzinger first dismisses the claims by bringing up her own proclivity for throwing out any candid photos that aren't completely flattering and having the art department slim her down a bit before her picture goes into the magazine at any point. Then she dilutes her argument by adding that, also, too, retouching is a common practice with magazines to remove "any awkward wrinkles in the blouse, flyaway hair and other things that might detract from the beauty of the shot." Like, apparently, that stray 20 pounds. It's not until the very end of her blog post that Danzinger finally lets slip, probably inadvertently, that unaltered fatty-fat-fatties like the real Kelly Clarkson just don't sell magazines.

A cover's job is to sell the magazine[...]

Which fat chicks apparently don't.

What gets me is that it's right there. It's right next to a quote about staying true to yourself and covering an article where Clarkson talks about accepting and loving herself exactly as she is. "When people talk about my weight, I'm like, 'You seem to have a problem with it; I don't. I'm fine!'," she says. Fine, and alone, probably, within the editorial staff of Self, because they definitely aren't fine with you.

"Did we alter her appearance? Only to make her look her personal best." Apparently, we're missing the personal from personal best, because, per the article, Clarkson already thinks she's at her best. Making her look her personal best would mean publishing a cover photo that was actually her. Danzinger & Co. made the choice to show her at their idea of her best, carving off 20 pounds of flyaway hairs and awkward wrinkles and covering her ass with a big yellow dot offering prizes-prizes-prizes.

And no, Luce, it's not the same as 'shopping out your own saddlebags or throwing away unflattering vacation pictures (although that seems like a great way to lose a lot of good vacation memories to me; sometimes the best memories also involve crappy hair or a sunburn). Those are things that you did voluntarily to emphasize your personal best. What you did was decide for Kelly what her personal best should look like, whether she's happy with her body as it is or not.

Danzinger closes:

Your job: Think about your photographs and what you want them to convey. And go ahead and be confident in every shot, in every moment.

But don't stop there, because confidence doesn't cover up the fact that you're an big old lardass who couldn't possibly sell a magazine as you are.

Because the truest beauty is the kind that comes from within.

And by "within," of course she means "but still close enough to the surface that it shows on the outside, too, because inner beauty doesn't make cover photos."

On good girls (talkin' bout the sad girls--wait, no, hold on)

Okay, so a friend hooked me up with a link to a recent Daily Beast article trumpeting the return of the "good girl." (Her comment: "I was a good girl before it was cool!" Being the Catholic daughter of an Italian-American cop in small-town Massachusetts will do that.) The article starts by mentioning some signs of the raunchification of modern society--cardio-striptease (ugh, so trendy), Heidi Pratt (ugh, so desperate), and Brazilian waxes (ugh--wait, no, ow, but I don't really see the harm with this one. Outside of the pain). And I will say that I've noticed an increase in raunchiness; very young girls are being exposed to blatant sexuality early on, and they're not getting the guidance they need to process it and understand it in the context of their own lives.

The much-welcomed antidote to the pole-spinning, nekkid-self-portrait-snapping Miley Cyruses of the world is, obviously, a young role model who is cool and fashionable and popular without acting sexual beyond her ken. And I'm all for that--not for keeping young girls young, but for allowing them to remain young. I think that Abigail Breslin is cool, Demi Lovato is cute as a two-week-old puppy, and Emma Watson is the kind of girl I'd like to hang out with myself, never mind handing them off to The Boy's nieces as a positive influence.

The thing is, these girls aren't just presented as good influences--they're presented as good girls, or, more specifically, "good girls." In practical terms, "good girls" are girls who live up to societal standards for "good"--they're virgins and they don't drink and they don't do drugs and they go to church. They don't smoke, they don't wear short skirts or a lot of makeup, they don't kiss with tongue--they don't do anything to rebel or threaten or even question the status quo. And maybe that makes them happy, and if it does, yay! It's good to be happy.

But what if that doesn't make them happy? I mean, there was a time in my life when I more or less did all of that, mostly for lack of opportunity more than anything else. I was miserable. It wasn't that any of the trappings of "good girl" directly made me unhappy; it was just that I wasn't happy doing it--none of it was really me. I was also unhappy being a 13-year-old; it's how it works. And now, as a drinking, makeup-wearing, tattooed, body-pierced, er... non-virgin (albeit still a churchgoing non-smoker), I'm ridiculously happy--correlation, sure, not causation, but it's there.

Goodness gracious

The question also arises as to whether one can be a good person without being a "good girl." If you spend your money on body art but make sure to save enough to pay your rent and your taxes? If you wear a lot of makeup but also read to your kids and help them with their homework and watch movies with them and explain the parts they don't understand? If you're a 16-year-old who sneaks cigarettes behind the gym and also gets good grades, acts in school plays, and volunteers at the animal shelter? Hell, if you spend your nights spinning around a pole and your days teaching illiterate adults how to read? The concept of a "good girl" creates a dichotomy where there might otherwise be a continuum.

I'm also kind of bothered by the fact that we tend to look at the "good girl" with an emphasis on girl. Of the 13 girls (women?) noted in the article's photo gallery, only one--Emma Watson--has followed the traditional transition to non-girlhood by going to college. And this is not to say that college is the only way to become an adult, but there has been a debate as to whether the professionally handled, fairly surreal life of a child star brings on adulthood early or actually prolongs childhood. Regardless, most of the others listed aren't old enough to vote, much less engage in any of the drinking and whoring around that generally characterizes a "bad girl"--they're still pretty much sheltered, parent-supervised, sometimes homeschooled, and it's easy to be a "good girl" when you're still a girl.

The article also presents to us Bella Swan, who is, above all, pretend, and it's easy to withstand the pressures of society when you're written that way. (That she's an example of a "good girl" who's also a "total asshole" goes unmentioned in the article.) But of course, we know how I feel about her.

Sweet Jesus

In writer Melissa Meltzer's favor, she acknowledges and even explores the effect "good girl" pressure can have on a girl who may be good but isn't, well, "good." She mentions Rachel Simmons, author of The Curse of the Good Girl, who points out that the archetypical "good girl" doesn't realistically exist in real life and that trying and failing to reach that particular star can drown a girl in a sense of failure and constant self-criticism. And then there's the legend that's graced many a t-shirt, bumper sticker, and embroidered throw pillow: "Well-behaved women seldom make history." As with many cliches, it carries a grain of truth; women who stick to the societally approved standard behavior and stifle any urge to step out and do what they feel needs doing generally reinforce, not challenge, the status quo.

The part of the article that really reached me, however, was the brief mention of Carlene Bauer's memoir Not That Kind of Girl. Bauer chronicles her journey from small-town fundamentalist evangelical Christian to New York pseudointellectual hipster to a self-possessed, self-aware, satisfied middle ground. The thing that complicates her journey--and makes it memoir-worthy--is that fact that, as a real person, she found it impossible to be comfortable shoehorned into any of the traditional archetypes. As a fundamentalist Christian, she still couldn't accept their vision of a touchy-feely Jesus over her own concept of a somewhat radical, shit-kicking Messiah. As a hipster Sylvia Plathodist, she felt the odd woman out trying to hang on to that relationship with God in that trendily agnostic environment. It was only when she became confident enough to break through the stereotypes and carve out her own personal niche--faithful if not religious, fun if not wild, rebellious within a reason of her own definition--that she found a comfortable place to land.

Of the book, Meltzer writes:

Her weekends as an undergrad might include hanging out at Tower Records (“Stone cold sober. Fully dressed”), attending a pro-choice march, and still making it to church on Sunday morning. Bauer was able to become the kind of girl who was both rebellious and pious, good and little bit bad. It’s the kind of life you can’t easily label, but hopefully one more girls will consider adopting.

Good.

Good grief.

Incidentally, the article defines modesty as the "antithesis of the thong." Not necessarily true. One can be perfectly modest on the outside whilst rocking lacy naughtiness underneath. The antithesis of the thong is bodily comfort in the buttular region.

On ACG, Devourer of Words

Okay, so I haven't posted in quite some time because a) work has been surprisingly worky, requiring me to do work during my valuable slacking-off time, and b) I've got another post in the chute that will rock. This. City. To its foundations. (Okay, not so much; as much effort as I've put into it, it'll probably end up being a royal disappointment. I've gotten used to such.)

But I didn't want to make the potentially okay the enemy of the mediocre, and Amanda at Pandagon (to whom I may start referring as "Amandagon," just to save space. And seeing it in print, it looks pretty cool) has a post up about her voracious reading habits as a tween and a new book, Shelf Discovery, that calls them to mind.

I’m sure that many of you out there reading shared my fate---nerdy, overimaginative children who read everything in sight, without the constraints of taste or discernment.

Cereal boxes. Yes.

The habit of devouring books is one that I’ve actually put to great use as an adult, and I owe YA authors a debt of gratitude for that. And while I opened this post with allusions to the trashiest of the milestone books of youth, Skurnick actually covers a diversity of books that mark up one’s preteen and early teen years as a undiscerning reader. And so it’s a real trip down nostalgia lane, and impossible to put down. Beverly Cleary, Madeleine L’engle, Judy Blume, Katherine Paterson, Paul Zindel---books that proliferated in the 50s through the 80s because of the popularity of cheap paperbacks. Some are genuinely great books, and others are unrepentant trash. Skurnick is determined to find redeeming values in all, though she’s hard-pressed to do so with the oeuvre of V.C. Andrews, she actually makes a case for Jean Auel. If you’ve read every single thing that Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote or had a habit of nicking books that had kserious-looking teenagers on the cover, you’ll love this. The only thing she missed was the Anne of Green Gables series, and so I’ll be forced to comb through the blog to see if she’s ever covered it.

It can sometimes be painful, or embarrassing, or painfully embarrassing to look back on those stories that occupied our time in those early-teen years of self-discovery (in the non-uberpersonal sense of the term). I've done it a couple of times here, revisiting the Sweet Valley High series in some detail and The Baby-sitters Club in more; I'd say I read those consistently up through about #54 and then sporadically up through #70. I also hit up the first seventy-some-odd Saddle Club books, up until I started riding more myself and discovering exactly how much Bonnie Bryant (and her ghostwriting crew) didn't know. Disappointing, that, too a 14-year-old. One of the commenters at Pandagon mentioned Lurleen McDaniel and her One Last Wish series, where tragic young girls find first love for just a moment before dying beautifully of cancer or diabetes or whatever, and I picked through a few of those before leaving off in search of something a little less depressing.

But my young-young-adult reading list wasn't entirely tween pulp. I mean, plenty of it was, but I read a lot. I was the only kid I knew whose parents had to tell her to stop reading. And it wasn't any attempt to censor my reading choices, just to guarantee my bedtime - my parents would have to do bed checks to make sure I wasn't reading under the covers with a flashlight until early hours. But I blame them completely; they were the ones who started reading to/with us every night. Favorites included The Berenstein Bears, which poor Mom was always begged to "read funny," requiring a nightly improv routine that would have made Eddie Izzard bow and step back. My first chapter book (that I remember) was Anne of Green Gables, followed by Anne of Avonlea and part of Anne of the Island before I started to really get kind of sick of Anne and her e and her neuroses. As soon as we were able to appreciate it (well, Doug was; I think I was a bit young yet), we had weekly reading nights where Dad would read to us aloud from books of Mark Twain and Sherlock Holmes. Books were pretty much the environment when I was growing up. Which is good, because I was kind of an obnoxious kid and needed distracting.

Other high points: all of Beverly Cleary's Ramona books, The Secret Garden, Little Women, a little bit of Judy Blume (there wasn't much she could teach me that my parents hadn't already given me the benefit of the doubt and discussed with me), Piers Anthony (I read about two books into his Mode series; yeah, the cover had a horse on it), The Black Stallion (and successors), a little bit of Nancy Drew, The Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia. Never really a fan of V.C Andrews (ew, creepy) or Christopher Pike (pretty much pr0n for teens + supernatural thrill). That was also the time I started stretching a bit, trying at 1,001 Arabian Nights and some Poe and not really understanding it at the time but doing better on later reads.

Amanda mentions being a re-reader as a kid, but not now. I hate to admit that I'm hardly a reader at all at the moment; by the time I get home from the office, I hardly make it a priority to read still more words, although it's something I intend to work at. But as a tween, I was definitely a re-reader. Some books I read and put down - some I even read and gave away (although I was almost as much of a book-hoarder as I was a book-reader, a habit I haven't been able to kick) - but some just called out for a second (and third, and seventh) visit. Among them:

- The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster. Fantastic escapist fun for a kid who was as frankly pedantic as I was. Puns! Grammar! Math! Oh, the geekish joy.
- A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle (and A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet, although Wrinkle was the one I hit up over and over). Again, lovely escapism, this time starring a brilliant, antisocial girl who saves the world through brainpower. No idea why that would appeal.
- From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by E.L. Konigsburg. A wonderful puzzle book.
- The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin. Another wonderful puzzle book. Never saw the movie; couldn't bear to.
- Matilda, by Roald Dahl. A clever, bookish girl is underappreciated by the world around her. Detecting a pattern? Incidentally, my mom loved this one, too. (I also loved The Witches and The BFG. The man knew his stuff.)

What I love about a lot of those books is how many of them I've re-read as an adult. The plots still hold up, the suspense is still suspenseful, and the mysteries still seem mysterious. And looking back, they tell me a little about me as a child. Namely, that I was a pitiful little geek who never felt that she fit in after someone dragged her away from all of her friends at a difficult age, Mom and Dad. But I had Milo, and Meg, and Claudia, and Turtle, and Matilda. And that was... not nearly enough to grow as a well-rounded and balanced young adult. But that came later.

What books kept you up with a flashlight all night as a kid? Any I should look for now?

On understanding true love: second of two - spoileriffic

Okay, so yesterday, I started my commentary on the terrible awfulness of Twilight. My objections, vis a vis that post, were largely to the crappy writing style and the wading-pool depth of character in the protagonist. Today I'll look somewhat beyond that, to the people with whom Bella Swan (ack. Still ack when I type that) surrounds herself - and to the scary things we learn as a result.

There are, in fact, other characters than Bella (to the extent that she can really be described as a "character"). There's Jessica, who prattles; we know this because all of her dialogue is tagged, "she prattled." She doesn't have a lot of dialogue, because whenever she starts prattling, her good friend Bella tunes her out to think about Edward. We do get to hear her prattling whenever it pertains to... Edward. There's also Angela, who, in contrast to Jessica, is sweet and shy; we know this because all of her dialogue is tagged, "she murmured shyly." There's also Lauren, who is blonde and a bitch and says bitchy things.

Then there are the guys. Mike is spiky-haired and has a crush on Bella, much to the consternation of Jessica, who has a prattling crush on him. Eric has a crush on Bella and sees Mike as a rival. Tyler has a crush on Bella, much to the consternation of Lauren, who has a crush on him. Jacob has a crush on Bella and is Native American. That's it. That's what we know about Bella's only friends in this podunk town, because she cuts out on them completely as soon as she makes contact with...

... Edward Cullen, local hottie and vampire babe. Edward has a crush on Bella and is a vampire. In the interest of character depth and future plot conflict, Stephenie Meyer has made him perfect. He's gorgeous - "like a Greek god" - perfect face, alabaster skin, rock-solid body, eyes that are black when he's mad and gold when he's happy, "unusual" reddish hair. He's smart - the only student, perhaps the only person in town, as smart as Bella. He's super-strong and super-fast and drives a reliable Swedish-made sex machine. Though a vampire, he doesn't even eat people; he's so ridiculously virtuous that he's a "vegetarian," which means he eats meat that isn't people. He doesn't have fangs, sleep in a coffin, or burst into flames when he comes out in the daytime, all of which would be major turnoffs. He maintains excellent dental hygiene. And he sparkles - literally fucking sparkles in the sun "like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface" of his skin. But he has flaws! He's very flawed! He wants desperately to drink Bella's blood, but he can't stay away. And he drives too fast.

Oh, he also stalks her and has been coming into her house and watching her sleep every night since she moved to Forks, which would seem like a flaw, but it's actually romantic, because... something. It's romantic. Don't question, accept.

I do not like it. I do not like it, Sam I Am. I don't like the idea that impressionable teenagers are internalizing this deeply creepy concept of stalking-and-possessiveness as love. Because it isn't, and there aren't enough Lifetime movies in the world to deprogram a girl once she's decided that he only hits her because he loves her so much.

That danger is inherent to the nature of the supernatural love story - the danger of the beast and the fantasy that my love, my love can be the one to tame it. And with that concept of true love as a shield, the scarier he gets, the more appealing he becomes - in that scene in the meadow, where he demonstrates precisely how he could lure her and chase her and trap her and beat the crap out of her, Bella exposits that he has become even more beautiful when he's vicious and potentially life-threatening. We all know that girl.

And after said display, it was all, "I'm sorry I scared you. I just love you so much, sometimes I can't control myself." We all know that guy, too.

And that's where the scary comes in. The scary in these books isn't the day-walking, "vegetarian" virtuous vampires - it's the real-life men these girls are going to someday encounter and the real-life women these girls are going to someday be.

Let me tell you a little love story. It's about a girl - depressingly servile but still fairly competent, self-sacrificing but still fairly sharp and clever - who moves to a small town and meets a boy. He's dark, broody, and mysterious, showing affection but always with an undertone of danger. He warns her that he has a violent streak that comes out whenever she's near - but he won't leave her alone. He loves her so much that he can barely control himself when she's around, so she'll have to do it instead.

Over time, she begins to isolate herself from her friends and family because they wouldn't understand. She lies to them about where she'll be. She skips school and school events if he won't be there. She folds to his will at the merest dazzling glance. He watches her constantly, all around school, at her house in the middle of the night. She tries her hardest to learn what sets him off - she learns not to move when he kisses her so as not to provoke him. And still, he constantly warns her that she isn't safe around him - that she'd do well to be afraid of him, that she should avoid him for her own safety, that she is putting herself in danger by being around him. And in the end, she's begging him to kill her to remove the temptation.

"I love you - now stay away from me, I'm dangerous." "Look at the way I hurt you. I love you so much, I can't help it - you should stay away from me." Putting all of the onus on her to stay away from him for her own safety, absolving him of the need to exert self-control. Making her change her behavior so as not to provoke him. Take away the supernatural vampirity of it all, and it becomes pretty clear - "Every time I'm near you, I want to beat you beyond recognition, I love you so much. You should stay away from me, despite the fact that I'm constantly following you around." But fill in the blanks with a venomous monster and a lemon-fresh circulatory system, and suddenly it's a romance for the ages.

I feel like these books need to come with a big, red sticker on the title page - "Disclaimer: Obsession isn't love. Possession isn't love. Wanting to hurt someone isn't love." If you're lying to your friends about where you're going just in case he happens to kill you while you're there, that's a bad sign. If you aren't allowed to move when a guy kisses you because he might snap and kill you, that's a bad sign. If you find yourself begging him to kill you so you'll never have to be apart, that's a bad sign.

And what's really scary about it is the responses from fans - "It's just a story. Vampires aren't real. We don't think it's real; we just read it for the love story." That misses the point that it's not a love story. It's a story of dominance, submission, control, and manipulation. And if that's what teenage girls are reading as a love story, if that's the Edward they're holding their hearts for, we're failing them. And if that's the romance that grown women are idealizing, we've done a lot of failing already.

On understanding true love: first of two - spoileriffic

Okay, so some of you who read my recent rant about crappy writing may have figured out precisely to which author I was referring and down which book I planned on taking. And I did; I read it. It took me probably six hours over the course of three days, but I read all the way through Twilight and can say, without reservation, that I will never get those six hours back.

Why did I subject myself to this? Many reasons. For one, I wanted to know what all the fuss was about. For another, I'd read so many deliciously brutal takedowns that I just had to, in my masochistic way, sit through it and share in their glorious pain.

The main reason, though, was a comment The Boy got from one of "the girls" at his dance school. (These "girls" were his fellow instructors, which puts them all in the late-thirties-to-early-forties range.) They had been going on and on and on and on about how wonderful the books were and how wonderful the movie was and how they were just going to have to read the books all over again after watching the movie to remind themselves of the wonderful. And then The Boy had to step in and wonder, in his Boy fashion, precisely what was so romantic about dating a guy who is constantly on the very cusp of murdering you and drinking your blood.

That's when he was informed that he just doesn't understand true love.

I tried not to take offense when I heard that. In fact, I took it to heart: If he didn't understand true love, that must mean that our love isn't true, in which case the obvious solution is to read the book and try to true things up a bit. So I did. And now I have. And if I now really do understand it, may I die lonely and unloved.

It's not just that the books are poorly written - and oh, they are. I mentioned Stephenie Meyer's addiction to fancy adverbs and dialogue tags and her allergy to the word "said." I could add to that the fact that everything we know about Meyer's entire universe can be - and trust me, has been - exposited by our protagonist, whose name is - wait for it - Isabella Swan. (I spent ten minutes trying to come up with something worse than Isabella Swan to put down as a snarky alternative, and I could find none. Well played, Meyer.) Bella (as she keeps insisting that people call her, because they just won't learn) saves readers the trouble of inferring context and backstory from the plot by just telling us flat-out in the first person.

What else do we know about Bella? We know that she's clumsy. Sooo clumsy. Clummy-clum-clumsy. You can hear "Yakety Sax" faintly in the background throughout the book. She falls down in the woods. She trips over her own feet at the beach. She trips over her own feet in class. She drops her books. She thwacks her classmates in the head with a volleyball. She thwacks herself in the head with a badminton racquet. She gets paper cuts. At one point, Meyer specifically describes her eating a bowl of cereal, "chewing each bite with care," as if a Lucky Charms-Mama Cass moment is an ever-looming threat. And in case you weren't able to pick up on it yourself, Bella is kind enough to tell you herself.

I'm absolutely ordinary - well, except for bad things like all the near-death experiences and being so clumsy that I'm almost disabled.

Oh, are you clumsy? I totes hadn't noticed.

Our love interest Edward also is unafraid of reminding Bella (and, by extension, us) of exactly how close she is to unintentionally self-inflicted death all the time, which is why he bodily carries her practically everywhere she goes (unless his brother, mother, or little sister is taking care of it). I have actually seen that once in real life. The kid was eight, and it got him an extreme home makeover from Ty Pennington. If there's one thing that Meyer will not let us forget about Bella, it's that she's fucking clumsy.

We also know that she's very plain - pale and brunette - but that, having gone from her fancy-pants big-city school in bustling metropolitan Phoenix to a podunk one-horser in Washington, she's somehow become the hot fish in the ugly pond (outside of the reigning hot blonde who is, conveniently, a bitch). We also know that she's super-duper smart - everything they're doing now she's already done back at her school in bustling metropolitan Phoenix, so she's deigning to do it all again just to have something to do. And she reads Jane Austen novels and Wuthering Heights for fun, but the Forks library is so shitty she has to travel all the way to Seattle for decent reading material. And she listens to Chopin and Debussy and nearly pisses herself in shock when someone else listens to it too. She's kind enough to correct the stupidity and unworldliness of the local doofi somehow without coming across as a total snatch. To them, I mean.

We also know that she hate-hate-hates rainy weather, because she won't fucking shut up about it.

We also know that her earlobes taste like Doritos and she lactates beer. Or something like that, because she is a scrawny, clumsy, whiny, pseudointellectual Gisele Bundchen to the boys at Forks High School for the Petulant and Stupid. They are all over her shit. She is beating them off with a stick, actually arranging relationships for them with other girls in school to turn them away from her honey-scented awesomeness. The only boy in the whole region - including the Indian reservation - who is actively hostile to her is Edward Cullen, but we later learn that his hostility is just a shield to hide the fact that, yeah, he's hot for that, because she smells like truffle oil and a child's happy tears, and not just a natural side-effect of her being completely obnoxious.

Now, some might speculate that this Bella Swan is merely a Mary Sue, that Meyer is living out her own bizarre vampire-love-story teenage fantasies through this girl. But, see, that can't possibly be, because traditionally, a Mary Sue is without flaws, and Bella Swan has flaws like whoa. Did you catch that? She's introverted! And plain! And what else... ooh, clumsy! And whatever, but she's totally not a cipher for Meyer's vampire romance fantasy fulfilment or, ultimately, a victim of a significantly twisted concept of drama and romance.

And yet dear Bella, despite all her flaws, still manages to be horny-teenager Spanish fly, the normal girl who, for no other apparent reason than that he's pretty and she smells like warm toffee and the meadow after a rain, finds true love with the beautiful creature of the night who must constantly refrain from killing her whenever she's around.

One sympathizes.

Think I'm done? I'm just getting warmed up. Tune in tomorrow (or whenever I get around to posting again) to hear more about Stephenie Meyer's "characters" and learn why I think this book is not only flat mediocre but a potentially dangerous read for 14-year-old girls and grown women disinclined to read critically.

On what not to say

Or, That's What She Proclaimed
Or, That's Easy for You to Announce

Okay, so I know I haven't been too terribly shy in voicing my opinions on some of my pet peeves. (It helps, in all of the cases, that I'm unarguably right.) But I'm gonna have to out with another one, and this one's for any of my reader who has fantasies of and/or aspirations to a career in fiction.

I'm in the process of reading a book that I won't name right now, as I'm saving it for a brutal critique - er, a firm but gentle review - in a future post. And I've been trying to read it objectively. But one thing that keeps bugging the crap out of me - and pulling me entirely out of the story over and over again - is the fact that none of the characters ever says anything.

Which isn't to say there isn't dialogue. There's plenty. Characters lie, they insist, they urge, they announce, and prompt, and admit, and mumble, and that's just in the first chapter. But they don't say anything. The S section of the author's thesaurus must be dog-eared, pencil-marked, highlighted, and crinkled all to hell, because the one word she apparently can't bring herself to use is "said." And even when she does, it's always done gruffly, gently, formally, harshly, tenderly, or slowly.

Just say "said" already.

Seriously. Just go ahead and write "said." You know it's already there in your head; you've spent the past seven or eight minutes trying to come up with a word to say other than "said." Stop. Writing isn't supposed to be that hard, and your writing is going to be a hell of a lot better if you relax a little, let it flow, and stop anguishing over whether your character just murmured or muttered.

We have been subject to bad, bad advice in our creative writing classes. To make our writing more colorful, we're supposed to use more vividly descriptive words - we don't need to walk when we can stomp or stride or lope - and plenty of adjectives and adverbs. Especially adverbs. Especially adverbs modifying adjectives modifying nouns. And in some cases, it makes sense; whether a character walks or lumbers or whether the sun is shining dimly or brightly can really set the mood of a scene.

But when it comes to dialogue, you need to come to a full stop and examine your motives before your characters start affirming and opining and pronouncing and asserting and responding and reporting and, Jesus, God, disclosing. Is it really so important that we know she's confessing something rather than just saying it? Or is there any way you could show through context clues - her body language, her facial expression, maybe someone else's reaction to what she says and how she says it - that whatever she's saying is tearing her up just a bit? Is there any chance at all that you're uncertain about your own writing talents and feel the need to compensate with a thesaurusful of fancy words so people won't think you're dumb?

Put the Hummer in the garage, Ms. McCompensatey. Swallow your pride and work to improve your writing instead of your vocabulary. Work to thoroughly and vividly develop your characters, establish setting and context, and write realistic dialogue. Hell, maybe take a leap and leave out dialogue tags entirely (ooooh...). Be a better writer and your readers will be so engaged in what your characters are saying that they won't even care if maybe one of them should have just "quipped" instead. And if, after due consideration, you decide that maybe a character did actually sigh or laugh or cough a line of dialogue, it'll make your writing more colorful rather than more cumbersome. Remember that writing is about the story, not the words, and it's hard to get through a story if the writer keeps pimp-slapping you with a thesaurus.

Charles Dickens's characters say things. Elmore Leonard's characters say things. Alexandre Dumas's characters say things in French. In 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Harry Potter, the characters all say things. If "said" was good enough for them, it takes some balls to think it's not good enough for you, Steph - er, writer who shall remain nameless.

On headache and heartache - spoileriffic

Okay, so "heartache" might be a bit dramatic. But disappointment is definitely there. I saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen Thursday at the McWane Center in staggering IMAX. And I suppose I should see it again in standard theatreview before I make a judgment, since I only really caught the center third of the movie and had to crane my neck to see any action to the sides. But a few things, a few chunks of plot - or lack thereof - still came through, and... ugh.

Ten reasons the best part of "Beer, Barbecue, and Autobots" was the beer and barbecue:

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

1. The lurrrv. Did anyone particularly care about the romantic subplot? I sure didn't. It seemed kind of shoehorned in there, almost as a salute to the first movie but without any purpose of its own in the sequel. The relationship itself was one of those that seemed to be based on shared dramatic circumstances with no other real foundation than a mutual love of cars. So when they're worrying about maintaining a cross-continent relationship in the beginning, I didn't particularly care if it was going to work out; I was more affected by Sam's tender breakup scene with Bumblebee. And then he's getting the eye from the blonde chick at the party, which didn't, to me, represent any kind of legitimate threat to his existing relationship because obviously a chick like that would have no interest in a guy like him without some kind of ulterior motive. And then Mikaela flies over - announced - and wigs out when she finds him getting sexually assaulted by an alien robot in his dorm room, completely ignoring the glaring facts that a) knowing that his girlfriend is going to show up any second, he's probably not going to choose that moment to initiate a makeout session with some other girl, and b) as mentioned above, a chick like that is almost certainly not into him for the smoothness with which he dramatically flipped out in astronomy class. And then, even after the true circumstances behind the assault are made strikingly clear, she continues to bitch at him about it.

And then, of course, we come to the scene where as he lies at or near death in the sands of Egypt, she finally realizes what she's lost and utters those three words she's been holding back for so long. Because without him, something would be missing from her life, and that something is... something. It's left to our imagination. Twoo wuv. Four years of Web chats. Long-distance jealousy and mistrust. I commended the first film for its avoidance of the hackneyed pause-to-kiss-in-the-midst-of-battle, but Michael Bay made up for it in this one with the hackneyed dead-guy-revived-by-the-power-of-love (and, to some extent, the power of ancient alien robots).

Verdict? An aside stapled into the movie to entertain the girlfriends while their guys ooh over the explosions and oogle a sweaty and dirty Mikaela. Thanks, Michael Bay.

2. The family subplot. Again, it felt like something shoehorned in to add depth to the movie but ultimately just added... stuff. Sam's mom spends the first half-hour of the movie hysterically weepy (when she isn't stoned) about him leaving, while his dad has a single not-quite teary quasi-moving moment in the front yard of their house. We don't see them again until they're kidnapped halfway through the movie, and then Bumblebee rescues them, and then Sam is comforting his dad and telling him he has to let go, and his mom is the voice of reason, like Pop is the one who's been clinging and peeing himself over Sam's departure all this time. Plot continuity, thy name is someone else.

3. The characters. Was anyone able to find any? You'd think that, having had to lay down a lot of groundwork in the first movie, the filmmakers would have capitalized on that, made the most of familiar characters, and explored a little bit of backstory and motivation. Yeah, I know, I'm an idealist. Instead, we get the standard introduction of tons of new characters in the interest of tons of new merchandise. Optimus Prime and Bumblebee had to return, of course, but O.P. gets whacked early on and Bumblebee hardly makes an appearance - especially in robot mode - after getting dumped at the beginning. Jazz was, of course, whacked in the first movie, so he wasn't coming back, but Ratchet returns to deliver, what, all of one line? And apparently, Ironhide is in it, but I had no idea. I don't remember seeing him at all.

Instead, we get a cast of underdeveloped, unknown Autobots who apparently only show up for battle scenes and dramatic establishing group shots. We get Sideswipe, who rollerblades, and Jolt, who does something with whips. We also get Jetfire, a geriatric, crotchety, British-accented SR-71 Blackbird who grew on me and actually brings a lot of the funny before it becomes apparent that he was brought in purely to die and provide spare parts for Optimus Prime's dramatic resurrection.

Who do we get a lot of? Mudflap and Skids, two characters that start out as a single pink and white multiple-personality ice cream truck and turn into two cars to deliver a dose of the funny as the Black Gay Stereotype Comic Duo. For all values of "funny" equal to "Jar-Jar Binks." These two bumbling boobs are, inexplicably, given the responsibility of protecting Sam and his horndog college roommate, for lots of excruciating screen time. Lots. A lot.

4. The shard. Why does Sam get whammied by the shard of the Allspark? He carried the entire mysteriously lightweight cube through the second half of the first movie and bodily shoved it into Megatron's chest without going nuts, but suddenly a little-ittle sliver of it is enough to stuff him with alien brilliance and send him into Einsteinian micro-machine mode in the middle of class.

5. The chick robot. Pardon me for my obligatory feminist rant, but the character of Arcee confuses me. When I was little, of course, an awesome (albeit pink) sports car-spaceship thing that transformed into a chick robot with mad skillz was the coolest thing. But as I got older, I started to wonder - if we can assume that robots don't reproduce sexually, why would they have different genders? And why pink? And, for that matter, why was Hot Rod the only robot who got a girlfriend? That's why I was kind of impressed that the first movie (2007, not 1986) didn't include her as an attempted bone tossed to the feminists. But they dragged her out for the sequel, giving her about seven seconds of screen time and one line, which I don't remember, before she goes the way of that silver car and that other one.

And not that the audience has time to notice, but now Arcee conveniently transforms into three motorcycles, for three times the shelf space at Toys R Us.

6. Devastator's nuts. I know, I know, it was the funny, and it got a chuckle, but the single reason for their inclusion was for John Turturro to look up and comment on them. Cheap.

7. Magic. I know it sounds silly to start talking about realism in a movie about invading alien robots, but the cool thing about the first movie is that it managed to justify just about every sci-fi move made, to the point where suspending disbelief wasn't really a challenge. The sequel brought that, and then it brought in visions of ancient robots that bring Sam back from the dead and a mystical "Matrix of Leadership" (gag) that, through the magic of Sam's theretofore undisplayed greatness, reforms from charcoal dust to form a Klingon K-bar capable of bringing Optimus Prime back from the scrap heap. Come on. Y'all took the time to design robots that, when transforming, managed to account for every single panel and gear of the original form, but when it came to reviving Prime, you resorted to robot pixie dust? Give me a Peterbilt-sized break.

8. The headache. This is one gripe that may be mitigated by a viewing in a standard movie theatre, but by the end of the IMAX version, girlfriend needed a Motrin and a liedown. There was the constant on-screen chaos - "Michael Bay has never met an explosion he didn't like," Doug said - and the robot carnage and the noise-noise-noise-noise. It became so tedious and uninterrupted - not to mention lengthy - that I actually started drifting off during some of the action scenes.

9. The length. They could have cut it by 45 minutes and I still would have been... pretty bored.

10. The beefcake. Couldn't we have stood a little more contribution from Josh Duhamel and Tyrese Gibson? Preferably sweaty and dirty. Okay, so yeah, I'd appreciate a little something for the ladies. Hey, I have a heart. And loins.

So dinner was great. And hanging out at the McWane Center is always really cool, because there are all these exhibits that you can play with, like physics stuff and one of those frozen-image walls and this cool video game that's the size of a dance floor and you play it with your feet. And when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen comes to your local second-run dollar theatre, I fully recommend that you see it and get a big bag of popcorn. And if you decide to shell out ten bucks and two and a half hours to see it right now... well, that's your call.