Eme Kah

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:12:27 GMT

Stahl Lectures on Impact of Images in Media
By: Meredith Nicholson
Staff Writer
Posted: 11/2/01
Lesley Stahl, co-editor of the CBS News program "60 Minutes," told members of the University community Thursday that television has a "profound and insidious" effect on the nation's view of politics.

Stahl, winner of several Emmys and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence in Television, addressed a packed house at Memorial Hall as part of the Earl Wynn Distinguished Lecture Series.

Stahl said that often what Americans see on television about politicians is not real because the images are manufactured. "Pictures, and the way we watch them, can be very deceptive," she said.

Stahl said reporters must be careful when using pictures to illustrate a point.

Stahl used an exposé she conducted about then-President Ronald Reagan during the 1984 election as an example. She said the four-minute piece ran hard-hitting commentary over images of Reagan on the campaign trail.

Reagan advisers later thanked her for the publicity, saying, "Nobody heard what you said in that piece."

She later aired the piece for a focus group, and less than one-fourth of them heard what she said. Most believed the piece was a campaign ad for Reagan or a positive news story about him.

"When the pictures are powerful and they conflict with what you are saying, the pictures drown you out," she said.

Stahl also said television has changed journalism by making more news available faster. "We are now in a time ... where we have 24-hour news stations on one story all the time," Stahl said. "Reporters are hungry for any morsel of news, and the government complies."

There has been a renewed interest in hard news in broadcasting since the Sept. 11 attacks, she said. "For so many years we have been covering such silly little stories. ... This is what we came into the business to do," she said.

But with information being disseminated to the public as soon as it is received, Stahl said, there is less time for the media to be thoughtful about the news they are reporting. A quickened news pace also can lead to government officials feeding reporters incomplete or bad information. "It can't be healthy to have (a government official) coming before us when he's only had two hours himself to be brought up to speed," Stahl said.

Some students in the audience said it was exciting to see a television face in person. "I grew up with CBS, and I love `60 Minutes,'" said freshman Nidhi Thapar. "She was so honest -- about the presidents and about herself and her failures."

Senior Joe Disney, a journalism major, said listening to someone already established in his future career field gave him guidance. "The cool thing about these kinds of speeches is they show us how the media works, and she tells you how she feels," he said. "It's nice to see these people are excited, and they are not cold like some of the images of newspeople."

Positive Thoughts, Please

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:40:32 GMT

This is for my friends over at Basket of Kisses. A friend of theirs has a little girl who survived a horrific boating accident last year. Here are the details. And if you like Mad Men, stick around and read the rest of the blog. It's pretty nifty.

Huh

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 01:15:43 GMT

The thing that kinda amuses me about this whole work situation is how NAIVE I am. I really thought this woman was nice, actually, and as I talk to people, I find out that everyone pretty much had her number from the get-go and that she apparently resents me because I refuse to kowtow to her. Well, I really hadn't ever noticed that she was power-hungry. I really didn't. And I was equally dumb about my feistiness or rebelliousness, at least as to how she would interpret it. I just knew she sucked at her job. I mean, she IMs all day! She inadvertently downloaded a virus some months back and got the company blacklisted so that when we were emailing clients, our emails would bounce back because we'd be identified as Spam generators. That was a really serious mistake, right there. She would take off without providing adequate back-up when there were deadlines and reports to submit. And so forth. And even when she asked if I was an animal lover because she needed to get rid of her fiancee's feral cats who were destroying her home (oh, lovely, thank you, I thought), I still thought she was just dumb. My boyfriend remarked, Wow, that's a hostile gesture, she wanted to stick you with TWO violent cats?

Damn. This happens to me a lot. I just always think, Nah, s/he's LOVELY! And later on he/she will turn out to be a total asshole. I'm the dumb neighbor who lives next to the serial killer and later turns up on TV saying, Well, I always did wonder where he got such big pieces of meat for his barbecue.

It's really kinda funny, actually. I'm the Mr. Magoo of Human Psychology. What's even funnier, now that I think about it, is how at times I just interpreted her manipulativeness as inexperience and I even went so far as to think, Man, maybe I should talk to her and explain how her actions are dividing the whole department and turning people against her. I'm sure she doesn't know what she's doing.

Ah. I'm an idiot!! Stupid Pisces Moon, always ready to believe that everyone is all sweetness and light.

And at times I feel very vindictive but, here's the thing, I just don't have the follow-through to be that vengeful. Because the thing is: You need a lot of energy and, I don't know, DEDICATION to seek revenge. First off, you have to plan these things and usually revenge is intricate or at least psychologically astute. You have to put a lot of thought into it. And then there's waiting for the right moment and, frankly, I'm too distractible and impatient. Then you have to actually implement your revenge, which takes a lot of energy, let's face it. So, I mean, I just can't be bothered. It's too much fuckin' work. Which is not to say that I'm saintly, bc I definitely entertain all kinds of violent, dark fantasies, but I'm just not enterprising.

Sat, 17 May 2008 12:55:44 GMT

Wed, 07 May 2008 20:45:26 GMT

From an article on authenticity in Psychology Today:

In The Way of Man, philosopher Martin Buber relates a Hasidic parable about one Rabbi Zusya, a self-effacing scholar who has a deathbed revelation that he shares with the friends keeping vigil at his side. "In the next life, I shall not be asked: 'Why were you not more like Moses?'" he says. "I shall be asked: 'Why were you not more like Zusya?'"

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:25:11 GMT

April 10, 2008
Candy Wrappers Help Police Nab Suspects
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:01 a.m. ET

CINCINNATI (AP) -- Police in Cincinnati say a trail of candy and wrappers led them to suspects in a break-in at a downtown candy store.

Four people have been charged with breaking and entering. One of the four also has been charged with child endangering.

Police say 19-year-old Christine Ruther had her 7-week-old daughter with her when she and three others broke into Peter Minges (MIHNG'-guhs) & Son candy store Thursday. They are accused of taking about $400 in candy.

The group was arrested a few blocks away.

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:31:08 GMT

Oh, how I love serenades

Breaking News

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:35:07 GMT

This is what's got the office in an uproar this afternoon.

Bravo, Saulie!

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:41:03 GMT

My good friend Saul Robbins is a photographer and his current project is photographing therapists' chairs. His photos are in the NYT today, accompanying an excellent article about therapists' offices. I'm so proud of him. Check it out!

Open Question

Wed, 27 Feb 2008 15:43:21 GMT

What are your favorite TV shows of all time and why?

Romantic Comedy

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:52:40 GMT

On one of the blogs I read regularly, the author laments that the era of the romantic comedy is over. A lot of commenters agree with him and blame the fact that nowadays there are no sociological barriers to true love. Nothing stops two people from getting together if they're so inclined and, if anything, two people can fall into bed after the first date and they don't need to suffer any repercussions. Given the lack of barriers, there's no dramatic tension for the audience, hence the whole narrative trajectory collapses.

I've been thinking a lot about this theory. I used to like romantic comedies, the ones from the 30s and 40s, with stars like Katherine Hepburn and Claudette Colbert and, my favorite, Barbara Stanwyck. I'm not so much a fan of Nora Ephron's version, especially those that starred Meg Ryan (although I did like Ryan in Addicted to Love). Anyway, what I thought about is that is precisely in looking at external barriers only that screenwriters falter. What about psychological prisons or false cognitions as real vehicles to true love? Those exist too and are just as real and difficult to resolve as, say, class differences and other social conventions. I mean, this is my life, man, you all know that. I had certain wrong ideas about love and relationships and men hammered into my head to the point that I couldn't see what was hiding in plain view. To get away from my own example, just look at anyone who's struggling with eating disorders: there are millions of gorgeous women and attractive men who are convinced that they are not lovable enough bc their body shapes are wrong. And these people struggle with that for decades. There is no stronger prison than the one of your own making.

In fact, to look at some recent versions of romantic comedies, one that is a perfect example of these self-made prisons is The 40 Year Old Virgin. Here's a guy who has lived in psychological amber bc of his fears (in his case, both of adulthood and of women). And what's great about the movie is that the writer takes the guy seriously, albeit in a comical manner. I mean, there are scenes in that movie that really opened my eyes to some of the difficulties men have to face in romance. I felt for that guy. The genius of the movie is that never once do you as the audience think: Come on, dude, get the fuck over yourself, get some balls and land the chick already. We understand this particular prison and how it's holding him back in attaining a meaningful relationship. Because this guy doesn't just want to get laid. Even in this era of supposedly easy, no-strings-attached sex, men still want love with someone they genuinely like. It helps, too, that the Catherine Keener character is so nifty. At least I thought so. She's attractive, she's warm but she has her own fears that sometimes make her act in less than sterling ways (for instance, lying about being a Mom).

So, yes, there are less external barriers to true love but that doesn't change the fact that people still have fears, maybe even more than ever, if anything, and that those inner demons are every bit as powerful obstacles to fulfillment as religion, society, age, gender-constructs and war. People still have the same hopes and desires but maybe now more than ever they wonder if they're really worthy of them bc, on some level, our image-saturated culture has convinced people that true love and great sex are the exclusive property of the perpetually young and photogenic.

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:57:34 GMT

Dear Prudence,
My live-in boyfriend and I have been together for more than four years. We are both in our late 20s, very much in love, best friends, and have an amazing time together—so much so that even grocery shopping is hilarious. We share the same goals and interests, and have challenging, engaging conversations. However, he doesn't bathe on a regular basis. And by that, I mean, he bathes every three weeks to once a month. I've tried to talk with him about his poor personal hygiene, but have made little headway. I've been blunt and angry, encouraging and sensitive, but, lately, I've mostly given up. On his side of the bed, our headboard and sheets have become stained with his body oils (imagine a used bag of french fries). I don't want to leave him, but I'm tired of it. I don't want to live with a dirty person for the rest of my life, and I don't want my kids growing up unbathed because their daddy refuses to. Could this be a personal-growth issue? What can I do?

—I Know I'm Not Perfect, Either

Dear Not Perfect,
I don't know if it's a personal-growth issue, but I'm loath to imagine what kind of personal growths are on the body of a monthly bather. What do you laugh at in the grocery store? He points to the soaps and shampoos and says, "Some idiots actually use those!" Sure, you may not be perfect, but if you bathe more often than Queen Elizabeth I, you should feel pretty good about yourself in your household. The image of your boyfriend's side of the bed looking like a used french fry bag is vivid and repulsive. I have tried to bar from my mind the thought of what the sensory assault must be like when Mr. Greasy attempts to join you on your side of the bed. Perhaps he suffers from the wonderfully named ablutophobia, fear of bathing. If so, this article gives information on phobias and anxiety disorders and possible paths to treatment. Print it out, and tell him you think this might be his problem, and that there is help for it. If he refuses to consider it, I don't know how you can consider getting close enough to him to contemplate having kids.

—Prudie

More proof that it's never too late

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 14:56:46 GMT

The New York Times
January 31, 2008
Personal Best
Staying a Step Ahead of Aging
By GINA KOLATA

YOU know what is supposed to happen when you grow old. You will slow down, you will grow weak, your steps will become short and mincing, and you will lose your sense of balance. That’s what aging researchers consistently find, and it’s no surprise to most of us.

But it is worth remembering that the people in those studies were sedentary, said Dr. Vonda Wright, a professor of orthopedics at the University of Pittsburgh.

Dr. Wright, a 40-year-old runner, decided to study people who kept training as they got older or began competing in middle age. She wanted to know what happens to them and at what age does performance start to decline.

Their results are surprising, even to many of the researchers themselves. The investigators find that while you will slow down as you age, you may be able to stave off more of the deterioration than you thought. Researchers also report that people can start later in life — one man took up running at 62 and ran his first marathon, a year later, in 3 hours 25 minutes.

It’s a testament to how adaptable the human body is, researchers said, that people can start serious training at an older age and become highly competitive. It also is testament to their findings that some physiological factors needed for a good performance are not much affected by age.

Researchers say that you should be able to maintain your muscles as you age, including the muscle enzymes needed for good athletic performance, and you should be able to maintain your ability to exercise for long periods near your so-called lactic threshold, meaning you are near maximum effort.

But you have to know how to train, doing the right sort of exercise, and you must keep it up.

“Train hard and train often,” said Hirofumi Tanaka, a 41-year-old soccer player and exercise physiologist at the University of Texas.

Dr. Tanaka said he means doing things like regular interval training, repeatedly going all out, easing up, then going all out again. These workouts train your body to increase its oxygen consumption by allowing you to maintain an intense effort.

“One of the major determinants of endurance performance is oxygen consumption,” Dr. Tanaka said. “You have to make training as intense as you can.”

When you have to choose between hard and often, choose hard, said Steven Hawkins, an exercise physiologist at the University of Southern California.

“High performance is really determined more by intensity than volume,” he added. “Sometimes, when you’re older, something has to give. You can’t have both so you have to cut back on the volume. You need more rest days.”

Dr. Hawkins, who says he no longer runs competitively, adds that he tries to put his findings into practice. “I run a couple of times a week and I try to make it as fast as I can,” he said. “I’m not plodding along.”

He also has been amazed by some people who seem to defy the rules of aging, people he describes as “those rare birds who get faster.” Some subjects in Dr. Hawkins’s research study, which followed runners for nearly two decades, actually had better times when they were 60 than when they were 50.

“We really don’t know why,” Dr. Hawkins confessed. “Maybe they were training harder.”

Then there are people like the 62-year-old man who suddenly took up running and began running fast marathons. That man’s inspiration to become a runner, said James Hagberg, an exercise physiologist at the University of Maryland, was watching a lakefront marathon in Milwaukee. “He got all fired up,” Dr. Hagberg recalled.

And there are people like Imme Dyson, a 71-year-old runner who lives in Princeton, N.J. She took up running when she was 48 and loved it, she says, from the moment she put on a pair of running shoes. Her daughter, who had been a college triathlete, told her how to train.

“She said, ‘Mom, if your workout didn’t hurt, you didn’t work hard enough,’ ” Ms. Dyson said.

“Working consistently really is the recipe,” she said. And it has made a difference for her, allowing her to run races, from 5K to marathons, so fast that she is consistently among the best in the nation in her age group. She has run a 15K cross-country race in 1:19:08, a pace of 8:29 a mile. And she ran a 10K race in 51 minutes 50 seconds, a pace of 8:20 a mile.

Not every aging athlete does so well. But Dr. Hagberg found that studies of aging athletes sometimes were distorted because they included people who had cut back on or stopped training. That’s understandable; there is no reason, researchers say, to exhort everyone to maintain an intense effort decade after decade.

Athletes would tell Dr. Hagberg that they had just lost their motivation. “Some of them would say: ‘Competition just doesn’t motivate me as much at 75. I’ve been doing it for 50 years,’ ” he said. “Others would say, ‘I just can’t keep it up any more.’ ”

But for those who still have the drive, the news that muscle mass and lactic threshold can be maintained is encouraging.

The reason people become slower, though, is that oxygen consumption declines with age.

In large part that is because, as has long been known, the maximum heart rate steadily falls by about seven to eight beats per minute per decade. It happens with or without training, in sedentary and in active people, Dr. Tanaka said, and no one knows why. But as a result, the heart cannot pump as much blood at maximum effort.

Dr. Michael Joyner, a 49-year-old exercise researcher at the Mayo Clinic who also is a competitive swimmer and a runner, added another factor: the lungs of older athletes cannot take in quite as much air.

With a slower heart rate and less oxygen in the lungs, less oxygen-rich blood gets to the muscles. In one study, Dr. Joyner found that highly trained athletes age 55 to 68 had 10 to 20 percent less blood flow to their legs than athletes in their 20s.

The older athletes in his group, though, were edging toward an age that often is a transition time in athletic performances, researchers are finding. For example, Dr. Wright and her colleague Dr. Brett Perricelli found that the performances of track athletes declined almost imperceptibly from year to year until their mid-60s, when the rate of decline picked up. At age 75, though, the athletes’ times fell, on average, by 7 percent.

The study, the results of which will appear in the March issue of the American Journal of Sports Medicine, involved track and field athletes age 50 to 85 who were participants in the 2001 Senior Olympics and also examined the times for American record holders in track events.

But older athletes still can have spectacular performances, Dr. Tanaka notes.

For example, the world best marathon time for men 70 or older (2:54:05) was set by a 74-year-old. That is more than four minutes faster than the winning marathon time at the first modern Olympics, the 1896 Games in Athens.

Of course, such statistics are of little comfort to athletes who do not want to slow down at all. Dr. Hawkins said he and Robert A. Wiswell, the senior author on his nearly 20-year study of athletes, used to joke that they needed a sports psychologist rather than a sports physiologist on their study. The athletes, he explained, could not bear to think that they would stop setting personal records.

That’s an issue for Don Truex, a 70-year-old dentist in Santa Barbara, Calif, who can’t understand why he has slowed down in the last year. He just ran a 5K race in 23:45. It was an average pace of 7:38 a mile, 90 seconds slower than he wanted to run.

“I’ve consulted with my doctor and we think I may be overtraining,” Dr. Truex said. He’s going to continue running five days a week but cut back on his five days a week of cycling.

Slower times are even more of a concern for Dr. Truex’s friend Barry Erbsen, a 67-year-old dentist in Los Angeles.

Dr. Erbsen started running seriously around 40. His best time in a 10K race was 38 minutes, a pace of 6 minutes a mile. Next he started running marathons, going faster each time until he had completed several, including the Boston Marathon, in 3:07:00.

Then, Dr. Erbsen started to slow down. He ran a marathon a few years ago in 3:45:00. He completed his next one in 3:58:00.

That nearly four-hour marathon was his last, he said. Instead, Dr. Erbsen took up mountain biking. So far so good, he said. He’s having a lot of fun. And, he added, “I’m not getting too much slower.”

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:55:32 GMT

The New York Times

January 30, 2008
The Curious Cook
Dip Once or Dip Twice?
By HAROLD McGEE

OUR annual national snacking binge is almost here. It would take a very large bowl indeed to hold all the guacamole mashed from the more than 100 million avocados that are consumed on Super Bowl Sunday. (My rough calculation gives a hemisphere bowl 20 yards in diameter and 3 times the height of the goal post crossbars.) And guacamole is just one of many dips that will be shared around the TV.

Just in time, a scientific report has some new findings that may cause football fans to take a second look at that communal bowl of dip.

The study, to be published later this year in the Journal of Food Safety, is the only one I’ve ever seen to proclaim that it was inspired by an episode of “Seinfeld.” It was conducted as part of a Clemson University program designed to get undergraduate students involved in scientific research. Prof. Paul L. Dawson, a food microbiologist, proposed it after he saw a rerun of a 1993 “Seinfeld” show in which George Costanza is confronted at a funeral reception by Timmy, his girlfriend’s brother, after dipping the same chip twice.

“Did, did you just double dip that chip?” Timmy asks incredulously, later objecting, “That’s like putting your whole mouth right in the dip!” Finally George retorts, “You dip the way you want to dip, I’ll dip the way I want to dip,” and aims another used chip at the bowl. Timmy tries to take it away, and the scene ends as they wrestle for it.

Peter Mehlman, a veteran “Seinfeld” writer, wrote the episode. “At the time I was living in Los Angeles, in Venice,” he told me. “There was a party on one of the canals, and apparently someone dipped twice with the same chip. And a woman flipped out. ‘You just dipped twice! How could you do that? Now all your germs are in there!’ I thought, this is just too good not to use on the show.”

Timmy’s line appears to have been the first notable use of “double dip” to mean dipping a chip twice. George has to ask Timmy what it means. Mr. Mehlman said he thought that it was an obvious name for the offense.

At the party, he had sympathized with the double dipper. “We get exposed to germs in a thousand different ways,” he said. “Besides, I thought the dip was enough to kill anything. It was probably one of those ’60s-style dips with artificial dried onion soup.”

Professor Dawson told me that he had expected to find little or no microbial transfer from mouth to chip to dip, which would support George’s nonchalance. The results surprised him.

The team of nine students instructed volunteers to take a bite of a wheat cracker and dip the cracker for three seconds into about a tablespoon of a test dip. They then repeated the process with new crackers, for a total of either three or six double dips per dip sample. The team then analyzed the remaining dip and counted the number of aerobic bacteria in it. They didn’t determine whether any of the bacteria were harmful, and didn’t count anaerobic bacteria, which are harder to culture, or viruses.

There were six test dips: sterile water with three different degrees of acidity, a commercial salsa, a cheese dip and chocolate syrup.

On average, the students found that three to six double dips transferred about 10,000 bacteria from the eater’s mouth to the remaining dip.

Each cracker picked up between one and two grams of dip. That means that sporadic double dipping in a cup of dip would transfer at least 50 to 100 bacteria from one mouth to another with every bite.

The kind of dip made a difference in a couple of ways. The more acidic water samples had somewhat fewer bacteria, and the numbers of bacteria declined with time. But the acidic salsa picked up higher initial numbers of bacteria than the cheese or chocolate, because it was runny. The thicker the dip, the more stuck to the chip, and so the fewer bacteria were left behind in the bowl.

Professor Dawson said that Timmy was essentially correct. “The way I would put it is, before you have some dip at a party, look around and ask yourself, would I be willing to kiss everyone here? Because you don’t know who might be double dipping, and those who do are sharing their saliva with you.”

Professor Dawson encourages his undergraduate teams to test popular conceptions about food safety in the laboratory. Last year he published a paper on the five-second rule, which states that food dropped on the floor can be safely eaten if you pick it up before you can count to five. The rule turned out to be false.

I asked Mr. Mehlman what he thought of Professor Dawson’s study on double dipping. “It’s pretty gratifying to know that 15 years later the show continues to exist on the cultural landscape,” he said. “But it reminds me of Jerry’s joke about the scientists who developed the seedless watermelon.”

That stand-up joke opened a “Seinfeld” episode in 1994: “These guys are going, ‘No, I’m focusing on melon. Oh sure thousands of people are dying needlessly. But this,’ ” and here Mr. Seinfeld made a spitting noise, “ ‘that’s gotta stop. You ever try to pick a wet one up off the floor? It’s almost impossible. I’m devoting my life to that.’ ”

As Mr. Mehlman implied, double dipping appears unlikely to be a major public-health threat. Professor Dawson and his team write that the actual risks of double dipping are “debatable” and depend on many unknowable factors.

But it’s good to be aware that sharing a bowl of dip can mean sharing more than we’d like. And happily, the obvious preventive measure requires no deprivation, just a newly focused snack category: one-dip chips, too small for two.

My favorite ad from craisglist

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 15:53:16 GMT

Dear SEPTA Train Passengers
Date: 2007-09-07, 1:07PM EDT

Dear SEPTA Train Passengers,

Hi there. You may have seen me: I'm the chick with the sketchbook that sometimes sits next to you, or near you, on the train to and from work every day. You may notice me wrestling my sketchbook out of my backpack, earnestly trying to get some work done on the bumpy ride into or out of the city. You may have even politely craned your neck to see what it was I was drawing. How you doin'.

Because we live in a polite society populated by less than polite people, I'm going to share a few things with you, of which you may not already be aware. These items may or may not apply to other artists, under other circumstances, so I can't say for sure. You may find these insights helpful. Feel free to take notes, or print them out, but whatever course of action you decide to take, please do try to follow them from this point forward.

1. It's OK to talk to me.
I'm a nice person, but I'm also pretty quiet. You're more than welcome to say hello to me, ask me if I'm a professional artist or art student (I'm not, but thank you for thinking I might be!) or comment on my work. I can even take criticism, as long as you're not being a jerk. If I don't continue the conversation, it's probably because I'm really shy, or because I'm trying to draw.

2. It's not OK to talk to me TOO MUCH.
I have a 30 minute commute each way. In that we've already covered the "I'm not a professional artist or art student" portion of this post, you can assume that I do not spend the entirety of my day drawing. In fact, those precious 60 minutes of commute time are the only time that I have to actually get in some drawing, and improve my skills.

I am usually happy to answer your polite questions, and even joke with you in a friendly manner, but it becomes very frustrating to me when your "talking" time infringes upon my sketching time.

3. Don't be offended if I don't make eye contact
See #2. Sometimes, no matter how often I say, "I really only have enough time to draw on the train", people just can't take the hint, and launch into lengthy, detailed, often horrifyingly revealing conversations with me. As yet, I have not been able to find a polite way to excuse myself from these conversations, except to resume my drawing, and hope that they will not want to converse too much with the top of someone's head.

4. Do not ask too many questions about what I'm drawing.
This often becomes embarrassing for both of us, and tiring for me. You don't know how many times I've heard, "Is that a guy? Are you drawing a guy? Is that someone you know? Is that your boyfriend? What is he holding? Is that a golf club? Is he a golfer? Are you drawing Tiger Woods? This one time, my Dad met Tiger Woods..."

Please stop. If you want to know what I'm drawing, you can ask me once, and end it. If you want to know what I'm GOING to draw, just shut up and let me fucking finish it, or I will beat you with my sketchbook.

I am a decent artist, so if you try to guess TWICE what I'm drawing, and get it wrong both times, you're either being an asshole, trying to embarrass me, or are a complete fucking moron, and I'm really regretting having chosen the seat next to you.

5. I am not holding a turd
The lumpy gray thing that I have in one hand is called a Kneaded Eraser. When you buy it, it starts out like a 2" x 1" gray square, and you have to work it and knead it with your hands. It's much more gentle on paper than a hard rubber eraser, and when it gets dirty you just knead it until you get to a clean part.

It is not a piece of turd. When I take it out, you don't have to gasp in horror and inch away from me like I'm going to rub gray feces all over you.

6. Do not take my polite replies to your questions as an invitation to convert me to any given religion.
It's alarming how many conversations go like this:

"You're a very good artist."
"Thank you very much."
"It's really a talent."
"Thank you."
"It's really a blessing to have that kind of talent."
"Um. Yes."
"Have you welcomed Jesus Christ into your heart for blessing you with such talent?"

You know what religion I am? I'm the religion that doesn't discuss God with freaky people on the train who can't identify what conversations are inappropriate for complete strangers. I regularly attend the church of Please Leave Me The Fuck Alone Already, Lady.

7. I am not a babysitter
I don't always draw from "real life", sometimes I draw illustrations and cartoons. Just because you see a cute, fuzzy animal emerging from my pad, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not use it as a way to distract your child from climbing all over you, the seats, and other passengers, like a shrieking primate.

"Look Billy! Look what she's doing! Billy, get off that man's lap and come here -- see what she's doing? Isn't that pretty, Billy? Why don't you ask her what she's drawing? Maybe if you ask nicely she'll draw something for you. Just sit still and watch her for awhile so Mommy can sob quietly into her hands."

As uncomfortable as it is for me to have to talk to people while I'm drawing, it's DOUBLY SO to have to do it while your little hellion is bouncing up and down on the seat next to me or -- worse yet -- sticking his face three inches away from the paper while I'm drawing. I am not a babysitter. I don't even like children. Seriously -- go Google the world "Childfree", and I promise that you'll never want your child anywhere near me, ever again.

If you insist on using me as a ready-made distraction so you can get two minutes of not wanting to shoot yourself in the uterus, I'm going to turn the page and immediately start drawing the nastiest, most explicitly pornographic picture I can think of, all for your little snotmonkey's entertainment.

8. No, I'm not drawing Simba / Lady / Tramp / Nemo OR ANY OTHER CHARACTER.
I know who you are. You're the guy who takes his kids to the zoo, points at the lion, and goes, "Look, honey, it's SIMBA AND NALA."

This is going to come as a shock to you, but Disney is not the end-all be-all of all entertainment. Just because I'm drawing a lion does not mean that I'm drawing "The Lion King." Just because I'm drawing a dog does not mean it's "Lady and the Tramp."

I am by no means a great artist, but I am GOOD, and certainly good enough to draw easily recognizable animals and figures (my biggest problem is anatomical perspective, not drawing things that are easily identifiable. I got that down quite awhile ago.) If I'm drawing a collie, or a poodle, or a whippet, it looks like a collie, a poodle or a whippet, it does not look like a cocker spaniel. Just because I'm drawing ANY BREED OF DOG does not mean I must be drawing "Lady."

And if I tell you no, it's not "Lady", it's just a dog, it's not OK to pause for five seconds, and then ask, "...Is it Tramp?"

It is also not OK to wait an additional five seconds and ask, "Can you draw me a picture of Lady and the Tramp?"

I swear I will stab you in the face with my pencil.

9. I am neither a priest nor a psychiatrist.
If you start talking to me, and insist on dragging it out into an entire, excrutiating conversation, please try to keep it topical. Please do not start telling me about your last ObGyn appointment, body hair problems that you have, or the condition of your last bowel movement. Seriously. I'm talking to you because I'm really trying to be nice, not because the grotesque details of your life actually fascinate me.

I think that about covers it! I don't know if any of this will actually help any other artists out there, but it's certainly gone a long way towards help me not want to kill people anymore.

Thank you, Philadelphia!

From Craigslist, NY

Wed, 26 Dec 2007 14:36:43 GMT

To the person who broke into my car last night
Date: 2007-12-02, 4:34AM EST

You broke into my gray Hyundai Elantra parked on the corner of Wythe and 4th St. As I was parking it, I noticed broken glass on the sidewalk and thought "the lightning never strikes the same spot twice." Well, I was wrong.

I wanted to express how much I appreciate your effort to minimize my inconvenience. I understand that you probably come from a disadvantaged background, you may have an addiction or two, or maybe your mother is sick in the hospital. I quite understand your need to break into my car.

You only broke the rear passenger small window, so even in the cold weather there are no drifts reaching the front seats. I know it was hard to open the car through that small window, so I appreciate the effort.

You took my GPS system. I actually didn't like it because it doesn't allow me to update the maps and they are quite outdated by now. Thank you for giving me a reason to get a much better one.

You tool my work blackberry. They are actually upgrading us to the new Pearl model. I was due to get one in February. But thanks to you, I will get a new one on Monday. Thank you!

I do miss those $5 in spare change, but it's a small price to pay. Hope it goes a long way towards buying your next fix.

And thank you for not taking my garage key, EZ pass car, or NY map. I wouldn't be able to get home without them. I wish all car burglars were as decent as you are. You should start a car burglary etiquette classes.

Your biggest fan!

Help Me!

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:05:57 GMT

I'm looking for a cute laptop bag for my iBook. I don't want anything bulky, just something lightweight that will protect my iBook. And everything I've found online is either too big or too expensive or just plain hideous.

Poetry Stand

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:23:57 GMT

I loved this essay about poetry on demand. It sounds almost like a cutesy after-school special, I know, but what captivates me is how the kids learned about craft and open-mindedness in writing (if that makes any sense).

Pseudocide

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 15:26:09 GMT

I recently wrote about how I wish I could fake my own death and "start over" and, lo and behold, Slate writes an essay about this phenomenon.

And here are some tips on how to do it...

Mailer! Mailer! Mailer!

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:56:08 GMT

Courtesy of Reuters UK
Norman Mailer posthumously awarded Bad Sex prize
Tue Nov 27, 2007 7:10pm GMT

LONDON (Reuters) - Writer Norman Mailer, a giant of the American literary scene and twice a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, was posthumously given the Bad Sex in Fiction Award on Tuesday.

"We are sure that he would have taken the prize in good humour," the judges said of the award to Mailer, who died on Nov 10 of kidney failure at the age of 84.

They paid homage to Mailer as a great American man of letters and hailed his "innovative journalism, his combative spirit and his love of life".

However, they could not resist awarding him the prize for a graphic passage in his novel "The Castle in the Forest."

The award most dreaded by authors was established in 1993 by the late Auberon Waugh when he was editor-in-chief of The Literary Review. Previous winners have included U.S. writer Tom Wolfe and British author Sebastian Faulks.

Mailer, renowned for his biting prose, penchant for controversy and larger-than-life personality, had provoked and enraged readers with his acerbic views on U.S. politics and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.

The winning passage, which leaves little to the imagination, begins: "So Klara turned head to foot and put her most unmentionable part down on his hard-breathing nose and mouth and took his old battering ram into her lips."

(Reporting by Paul Majendie; editing by Andrew Dobbie)

Beauty is a Luxury

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:14:32 GMT

This is an absorbing article about mani-pedi and waxing salons. Tell me what you think. Personally, I've never thought about this stuff but then again, I hardly ever go to these salons... Only for the occasional mani-pedi and even that has become very rare.

"

At 67, Hochschild has noticed the way these treatments have gone from being “a luxury to a tentative necessity; it’s a redefinition of needs.” And she wonders aloud about what all this means. “Are we subtracting intimacy from other areas of life, in order to get it in this controlled and titrated, professionalized way?” asks Hochschild. “Is there a subtraction, as well as an addition? That would be the question I would ask. Are the women who go to salons just not getting it anywhere, in which case, they’re getting it here? I think we all need a kind of a connection, we need to be touched. But that we’re getting touched for money, in a medicalized, spiritualized way, seems to me something as a culture we could be thinking about. I don’t want to go the route of moralizing this; I think it’s good to be touched, to relax, to be stress free. But it does seem like a symptom that something’s amiss that people actually pay for this.”

Huh, courtesy of Freewill Astrology dot Com

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:14:01 GMT

"Virgo Horoscope for week of November 29, 2007

Virgo (August 23-September 22)
First let me make it clear that I'm not predicting you will face difficult events in the coming days. Not at all. Second, I'm not saying you will have to endure more pain than usual. Third, I believe your suffering will be about average -- similar to what normal people bear in normal times. Having said all that, though, I encourage you to be aggressively exploratory toward the pain you feel. Have long talks with your murky fears. Gaze bravely into the parts of your life that make you sad. Why? Because it's a favorable time to search for treasure that's buried in the shadows -- to enhance your psychological health by dealing with what's not so healthy. Recall Carl Jung's wise words: "The foundation of all mental illness is an unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering." "

WGA Strike

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 21:23:41 GMT

So the strike is still on, right? Support the writers by buying pencils that will be sent to the big machers at the studios. $1 a box.

Hmm...

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:17:45 GMT

Santas warned 'ho ho ho' offensive to women

Wed Nov 14, 11:04 PM ET

SYDNEY (AFP) - Santas in Australia's largest city have been told not to use Father Christmas's traditional "ho ho ho" greeting because it may be offensive to women, it was reported Thursday.

Sydney's Santa Clauses have instead been instructed to say "ha ha ha" instead, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Thanks, Claire Zulkey

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:04:38 GMT

For the postcard from Poland. I finally got it!