bow downDame Helen Mirren, as Queen Elizabeth II
after a performance of Peter Morgan's The Audience
with tea guest, cancer patient Oliver BurtonHelen Mirren is Queen of Every Fucking Thing.
And don't you fucking forget it.

So people who are really in to the whole slut-shaming thing seem to be drawn to something about me.  I have difficulty reconciling their active slut-shaming of other people with my seeming to get a pass.

And I’m not talking about random people I meet on the street, I mean people who’ve known me long enough to “know better.”  I realize that I don’t ( Read more... )

I’m never 100% certain how to feel about Stanley Crouch’s positions, but this situation definitely bugs.

From The Daily Beast:
A College, a Gun - and a Big Injustice
Stanley Crouch
After a Morehouse College student shot a classmate three times, he was sentenced to… graduation. Inside an outrageous case that shows that the old boys’ network is color- ( Read more... )

It makes an interesting case for families of choice, it does…

That, or it makes Fundamentalist Mormons seem almost normal by comparison.

Bima.  Arjuna.  Yudistira.  Nakula.  Sahadeva.  The five brothers Pandava.

Except that none are the biological sons of Pandu.  See, Pandu - who was himself not the biological son of his acknowledged father, but that’ ( Read more... )

I’ve been giving the Style section of the Times a pass for the last several months, because it seemed that they’d cleaned up their act.  But to put this trend out there on Gay Pride weekend and only a few weeks after the wide release of Sex and the City seemed way too crass to let slide, so it’s back-at-’em time.

From the geniuses who bring you ( Read more... )

Dear Mr. Maher:

Sometimes it is possible to take things a bit too far when making light of a situation.

If we want teachers to stop molesting students, we have to give them a reason to take the job besides the dating pool; I don't know, maybe we could pay them.

The Associated Press just concluded a seven-month investigation of America's teachers and ( Read more... )

Rudy needs to be slapped, but that’s not the point right now.

From HuffPo:

U.S. Candidates Not Ready For French-Style Marital Nonchalance
Paul Jenkins
French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s politically inconsequential quickie divorce, and the preposterous thought of the same thing happening to George and Laura, should simply point to lingering ( Read more... )

Christopher Shea, one of those dudes at the Boston Globe, got into this e-mail correspondence with Lawrence Weschler, one of those dudes at NYU's Institute for the Humanities.  They were discussing the underlying subtext in the art of Norman Rockwell, which Shea had written about in 2006.  Shea blogged one of Weschler’s responses, which I, among ( Read more... )

This September 11th is the sixth anniversary of… well, September 11th.  Now we could ignore it, we could wallow in it, or we could make it a day that actually makes sense and honors our fallen countrymen by doing something.

That's why I propose making September 11th National Life's Too Short Day.  Life is too short; you never know when nineteen ( Read more... )

The only times I ever feel okay with the “practical” elements of forced sterilization in China are whenever the Duggans are back in the news.

I readily admit that if my father’s maternal grandparents had stopped at four, I probably wouldn’t be here.  I’m a little disappointed (not to mention presumptive in my thinking) that the number of Robinsons ( Read more... )