As you might have heard, much has been made about Barack Obama's smoking habit. I don't know who decided to make a public fuss about it, but I'll make a wild and completely unfounded accusation that it was a Republican who wanted to cast doubt on his moral character. All Obama needs is a goatee and we'll finally understand just how evil he is.
This popped up in the New York Times today. If ever there was much ado about nothing, Obama's supposed smoking habit is it.
Mr. Obama’s heaviest smoking was seven or eight cigarettes a day, but three was more typical, according to an interview published in the November issue of Men’s Health magazine.
Three cigarettes a day? That barely qualifies as recreational. Has he ever sat in a bar and smoked an entire pack in four hours? Has he ever walked to the corner store in the pouring rain to buy a pack? Is walking to the corner store for a pack of cigarettes in the pouring rain the only exercise he gets?
I can smoke three cigarettes in the first 45 minutes I'm awake. I've been up for just over three hours, and I'm on my sixth cigarette of the day. I have a smoking habit. Obama's smoking is an occasional stress reliever. I doubt he sits in the family room and smokes while watching a movie with his kids.
Any stress he has experienced before is nothing compared to what he's headed for. Let him have his three smokes a day.
Two things before I get to my point:
1) I don't usually condemn a movie without seeing it first. Like anyone, I have my rules: any movie based on a character from Saturday Night Live is most likely going to suck; ditto any Rob Schneider movies; and I'm going to hate all Tom Cruise movies, even if they don't suck. He ruins good stories in order to feed his enormous ego. (Given the chance to play Jesus, he'd be at The Last Supper by himself. Because he always works alone.) But previews can be misleading. What seems like a silly comedy turns out to be a movie about death, love and family dysfunction, e.g., Little Miss Sunshine; a movie marketed as a chick flick is actually a guy's movie - Beautiful Girls; a movie that should be awesome is really a piece of crap - Wonder Boys.
2) I say seriously and with no shame that I love good chick flicks. What qualifies as good is subjective, certainly. Movies about lost love just kill me. I've cried my eyes out at every viewing of The Way We Were and Splendor in the Grass. Edward Scissorhands upset me so much I don't think I can ever watch it again. But I still loved it. I'm also a sucker for love triumphing over class differences - Dirty Dancing is a favorite. It has everything a girl could want in a movie - Patrick Swayze. Jennifer Grey before the nose job. Creepy frat boy getting his comeuppance. Kelly Bishop. Sex. An illegal abortion. Dancing! And, my God, Jerry Orbach!
There are a ton of sub-genres within "chick flick", and "girls being shitty to each other" is one of them. I know girls can treat each other like crap sometimes. But the very premise of Bride Wars offends me to no end.
I've been seeing previews for the movie lately, and "you have to be kidding me" was my first reaction. But I thought that the girls were strangers fighting over wedding dresses and who gets the best caterer in town. Then I saw this preview, and got the full story. They're lifelong best friends. They're each others maids of honor. Then a mix-up occurs! And hijinks ensue! Kate Hudson tells Anne Hathaway her "wedding can suck it." Anne retaliates by attacking Kate while she's walking down the aisle.
The hilarity must be endless, I'm telling you right now. Look, I've been divided about weddings for a long time. I love them, but they bring out the worst in people. The only brides-to-be who don't want to lock their mothers in a closet are the ones who don't have a mother. I was ready to lock up both my mother and my future mother-in-law, and not let them out until after the wedding. The stress of planning a wedding can make anyone lose perspective.
But there's something that seems so completely distasteful about Bride Wars. It feeds on the idea that women are desperate to get married; that a wedding is the most important day of a woman's life; that all women have been planning their weddings since they were six years old; that women are, at heart, enemies of one another; that the wedding is more important than the marriage - so important, in fact, that no expense is too much. Even the expense of a lifelong friendship.
I know. It's just a movie, and a piece of fluff comedy at that. Comedy, after all, is often about the weaknesses and general dopiness of humans. Beneath all the funny is the truth of how people reconcile their idiocy with their desire to be good and loving to the people who matter to them. It's possible that Bride Wars is actually funny, because anything is possible. But, having seen only the preview, I can't get rid of the bad feeling I have about this movie being made in 2008, more than 40 years after the beginning of the second wave of feminism. I assume that Hudson's and Hathaway's characters are supposed to smart, talented, educated young women, maybe even professionally successful and ambitious. So why are they behaving like jealous, mean spirited harpies?
I have no doubt that Bride Wars will have an absolutely shocking ending, in which Anne and Kate realize the errors of their ways, and tearfully make up, swearing to never let anything come between them again. But you know what? Once you've told your best friend that she has a big ass, you can't ever take that back. I'll never know for sure if Bride Wars is as bad as I think it is, because I won't be spending either the time or the money to see it.
JP and I were trying to remember which county Hanover, PA is in. (It's York County, by the way.) I did some googling (and by some I mean a half hour's worth) to find a map of PA's counties. I came across this, which gave me a big laugh.
1. There is no North Amberland County in PA. It's Northumberland.
2. Lake Erie is not the only body of water in the Commonwealth. There's that little river called the Susquehanna, which starts in New York State and flows into the Chesapeake Bay. And there's a reason for the name Three Rivers Stadium. It's where the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers come together.
3. Unless there's been a double-secret probation, major geographic shift lately, PA's neighbor (or "neighbour", as they spell it) states are not Washington, Idaho, Nevada and California.
Check out your state map. Post the stupidity here.
I can't say I blame the Iraqi reporter who did this. I guess Bush thought he was on sort of victory tour. Yeah. Not so much.
At least all that working out paid off. He ducks with the best of them.
Joe the Plumber speaks for you. And he'll speak to you for just $19.95.
I'm so mad right now I could spit. Michael Ruhlman put up this post about a new documentary called Food Fight. He encourages everyone to pay more for their food, which is, of course, a great idea. But, honestly, how in hell can his readers think it's just a matter of changing priorities? A lot of the comments pissed me off, but this is one of the worst:
The "buy staples at the lowest price so we can splurge on the trinkets" is an epidemic of modern society. Over the next year or so we will begin paying the real cost of that folly as federal bailouts start hitting our pocketbooks. It's time for all of us to refocus on what's really important and that's the real quality of our lives.
WTF? Splurging on trinkets? Does he mean stuff like heating bills? Are those trinkets? Going out for a beer is a big deal for us these days.
If I could, I would gladly pay $5/lb for organic chicken at the farmer's market. But I can't. It's all we can do right now to pay our mortgage. Our health insurance premiums are $2500/month, and they're killing us. We have one car and it's 8 years old. Thank God we finally paid it off.
I have a savant-like ability to stretch both our grocery money and the food I buy. I do everything I can to eat healthily and locally (despite my addiction to Oreos and potato chips). We do a good part of our food shopping at a locally owned food store and at the farmer's market. I haven't stepped inside a chain grocery store in months. Oops. Does Costco count? Yeah, well, if it's a food crime to buy some of my food at Costco, it's a bigger one to shop at Whole Foods and pat your self-important ass on your self-important back about it. Whole Foods is a chain too.
I truly believe that we can only do better by being conscientious about where we buy our food and what its origins are. But too many people in this movement apparently have no idea that there are Americans who are in such dire straits that paying higher prices for everything isn't a possibility. Local farmers deserve every penny they charge at the markets, but I can't afford it. Neither can a lot of other people.
Maybe I have no place in this movement, but if there's no place for me, then it's just a whole bunch of assholes congratulating each other for how enlightened they are. Instead of it being about The People, it becomes a classist movement with no connection to the lives of millions (number pulled out of my ass in order to make a point). This movement should be about doing what you can, not judging those who can't.
(Also posted on my food blog, The Wooden Spoon)
Downtown Durham, NC celebrates the Obama win.
For any Mad Men fans who don't read Alan Sepinwall's blog, here's an interview with Matt Weiner about the show. There's a list of highlights and a transcript of the entire conversation.
I love Weiner's response to this question:
People lied this year about a lot of things.
I think they did last year, I don't think people were attuned to it. There were a lot of comments last year, "Why did she say that? We saw that she did something else." It's because she was lying!
I find it incredible that any fans of Mad Men, of all shows, don't get this. People lie every day. Anyone who watches MM and doesn't understand that, and can't accept that from the characters, should be watching reruns of Matlock.
Of all the comments Weiner makes, this is my favorite:
I can say one thing in advance: the Kennedy assassination is very well-trod territory, and I just don't see myself adding new to that. But I might start the day before it. Or I might do what I did with a lot of historical events, which is to put it in the background and show people's personal events overtaking it. That's one of the things I love about the finale. Here's the Cuban Missile Crisis, which other than the assassination was the defining moment of the '60s. It really changed people's lives. There is not one account, not one news report that says it was anything but completely catastrophic to people's personal lives and their perception of the world. I tried to get that feeling in there, but to show that, like any crisis, it's an excuse to tell the truth.
Writing is all about telling the truth, and Weiner does it better than most.
You know how every year the retailers start whining some time in October that Christmas sales will be down this year? There's panic everywhere, lamenting about the amount of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and how people won't have time to do their shopping, and OMG what will we do, we're already in trouble because of job losses/gas prices/the elves are striking/ Santa hates Americans, [insert dumbass crisis here] and for the love of all that is good and lovely about Christmas, please STFU. Do they really think that one less day between Thanksgiving and Christmas will keep shoppers from buying presents? If they're planning to go shopping, they go. If retailers gave their sales people and their drivers and their warehouse workers big fat raises during good years, I might care about sales being "down". They only panic because they're worried about executive bonuses and stock prices.
But I seriously digress, because I had to get that little rant out of my system. Right now, I'm just as irritated with the Democrats. They're so close to winning this one, and one week before the election day, they've created a problem that doesn't exist.
I love Rachel Maddow. She's smart and funny and, as a bonus, she's not a mean-spirited lunatic who makes ugly remarks and then tries to pass them off as jokes. But what in hell does she need to "talked down" from?
Come on, Rachel and Governor Dean. My inference is they're worried about undecided voters, but there are plenty of reasons that more people haven't already voted. Work schedules, family lives, procrastination. They could even like the ritual of having one day set aside for everyone to vote.
The Dems' fecklessness has been the subject of jokes for years now. They couldn't organize a car wash for fear that a volunteer might refuse to wash an SUV. Are they such doomsayers that they can't even be cautiously optimistic? And for the record, this refutes their claims. So for the love of all that is good and exciting about the 2008 election, stop whining and STFU.
More insanity in PA. This time it's Pottsville, another thriving metropolis in the Keystone State.
Is it possible that Obama supporters are behaving the same way but we're not hearing about it? Anything is possible, right? But I doubt the Repubs would let it go unnoticed.
In his October 25 column, Frank Rich defends the White American. My objective side agrees with him that white people are not screaming racists who would shoot Obama if they were given the chance and the gun. But this campaign season has me questioning my belief that things have gotten better over the last 40+ years. Maybe these virulent racists are like deadheads. You'll find the same people at every event. Perhaps the crazies in Ohio are literally the same crazies in PA are literally the same crazies in NC are literally.... You get the idea. The difference between deadheads and right wing zealots? Deadheads take acid. The zealots are trippin' all on their own. Also, deadheads don't want to kill everyone who looks different.
I found the Pottsville video on Artzy Carmen's Vox blog. Go check her out.
