My internet friend Tracy wrote a post about Deadspin that kind of blew up. Here’s the lede:

The thing about sports is that it, well, tends to be an old-boys’ club. The sports world is full of sexist shit that pisses me off if I think about it too much (and, honestly, I’m not often prone to do that, because I don’t always want to be addressing Big Issues in the context of something I enjoy just for the hell of it, which I suppose is lazy of me). Commercials aired during sporting events or programs often are sexist. There are sexist athletes and sexist columnists, and I hate it all, but I try not to hold it against sports as a whole. That would be like being a Cubs fan, but hating the Cubs because of Cubs fans.

That said, there’s one place where the sports assholes come out in droves and it drives me batshit insane every freaking time I see it. It’s a land where you’ll see Asshole Stupidus in its natural environment, taking a gigantic dump on women and human decency.

It’s the land of the Deadspin commenters.

I was going to leave a comment there but figured I might as well put it here instead, since it’s important that many people in the world know how I feel about this issue.

Hey, Common Sense Dancing did it again. EW has another list up, of “the New Classics”–movies of the last 25 years. The ones I’ve seen are in bold, the ones I’ve seen and loathed are in bold/italics (spoiler alert: the movies I hated are Hoop Dreams, Drugstore Cowboy, and Napoleon Dynamite). Enjoy this fascinatingself-indulgent look into my likes and dislikes. (The last 90 movies, and my thoughts on the list, after the jump.)

1. Pulp Fiction (1994)
2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-03)
3. Titanic (1997)
4. Blue Velvet (1986)
5. Toy Story (1995)
6. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
7. Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
8. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
9. Die Hard (1988)
10. Moulin Rouge (2001)

Continue reading »

From the NY Times’ Talking Business column^*:

What is it with Steven P. Jobs and batteries? On Friday, Apple’s new iPhone went on sale (for a mere $199; how does that make you early adopters feel who stood in line last year for the privilege of plunking down three times that amount? Just wondering.) In their reviews of the new device this week, both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal pointed out that the iPhone’s battery problem had gotten worse in the new iteration.

The original iPhone, you may recall, got “8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback and more than 10 days of standby time,” to quote Apple’s public relations mantra. There were two catches, however. To get that long battery life, Apple had to forgo high speed wireless 3G, which chews up batteries. Second, if the battery did run down during the day, you couldn’t just swap it out for your backup battery, as you can with just about every other smartphone. The iPhone case was sealed tight. Looked cooler that way.

The new iPhone, of course, has wireless 3G — indeed, that appears to be the biggest improvement in the new model. And sure enough, it’s a battery-killer; according to The Journal reviewer, Walter S. Mossberg, the new iPhone battery lasts only about four and a half hours before it needs a new charge. Yet Apple still insists on sealing the case, thus preventing customers from using a spare battery when it runs down. For heavy cellphone users—and who isn’t these days?—the battery is going to need a charge by lunchtime. Good luck with that. Unless Apple does something about its battery problem, the iPhone will always be more a toy than a tool.

Or maybe people will just charge their phones more often. THE HORROR!!!!! At any rate, the 3G iPhone’s horrific battery life isn’t, in fact, any worse than the other 3G phones on the market (in most cases, I believe, it’s actually better). So the issue here isn’t Apple, it’s the industry as a whole. Better battery life is a worthy goal, but singling out Apple for what is really a industry-wide chipset problem is kind of silly.

Also, the lack of a replaceable battery isn’t just an “it looks cooler” choice. It allows Apple to use non-standard batteries, custom-fitted to whatever space the iPhone’s internal design allows. Designing for replaceable batteries requires a designer to make other concessions (size, weight, durability, cost, etc.) that might be more irritating.

To be honest, this is a reviewer’s problem more than a real life problem. Battery life is something easy to measure and easy to criticize (critics did the same thing with the iPod’s features for a long time–how’d that work out?), while user interface and hardware design are difficult to quantify (more on this from Daring Fireball). So everything that Apple excels at gets lost in the shuffle of a simple (and deceptive) feature checklist. Would you rather have an ugly, awkward, pain-in-the-ass phone that gets eight hours of battery life, or a really useful, intuitive, powerful handheld that gets four hours? I get the impression that most reviewers would recommend the former, but it’s safe to say that most consumers want the latter–and are happy to pay a premium for it.

All of that isn’t to say that the iPhone’s battery life isn’t annoying, but for 90% of people it really won’t be an issue. Those who really need more battery life will, no doubt, be able to buy external battery pack gizmos, just like they have been doing for the iPod for many years. And if battery life is more important than data speed, consumers can facilitate it: they can just turn off the 3G radio, which allows the device to use the EDGE network instead, with slower data but better battery life.

What this “problem” comes down to is that the iPhone is so much more useful than just about every other phone on the market that people will be glued to it all day long. Of course that uses more battery, but it’s really a symptom of Apple’s success. If your product’s biggest problem is that people like using it too much, I’d say you’re in the catbird seat.

^* Incidentally, the column starts out, “If I were a blogger, these are some of the posts I would have written this week.” Which is kind of an odd start, but is actually much odder when you look at the bottom of the page and see: “Joe Nocera’s new blog, Executive Suite, can be found at nytimes.com/executivesuite.” Huh?

^*But not really.

Michael Gerson is very worried about vulgarity in politics:

In 2006, after a long monologue about a dog and its vomit, Franken impersonated the deceased Sen. Strom Thurmond as saying: “Yeah, I screwed a woman who was vomiting once.” He once proposed a television sketch about a female CBS reporter being drugged and raped. He has suggested that his next book title might be “I F — – — Hate Those Right-Wing Motherf — – — !” At an event hosted by the Feminist Majority Foundation in 1999, Franken offered this thigh-slapper: “Why don’t we focus on what Afghan women can do? They can cook, bear children and pray. As I recall, that was fine for our grandmothers.”

Our popular culture, of course, violates even these expansive boundaries of tastelessness with regularity. We laugh at comedies featuring the C-word and at cartoons of foul-mouthed third-graders. In the cause of relevance and realism, our common life is already decorated with excrement. Why should political discourse be any different?

For at least one reason: Because vulgarity is often the opposite of civility.

Incidentally, I think “I F — – — Hate Those Right-Wing Motherf — – — !” would make for a great title. It makes its point quite artfully, and is much better than the title of Bill O’Reilly’s upcoming tome.

My favorite part is where he explains that when his friend is vulgar, it’s okay, but when RAPPERS do it, it’s loathsome. Not sure I understand why that is… maybe because his friend has a terminal degree? But a lot of rappers, apparently, have doctorates, so that can’t be it. Hmmm… what could it be?

Also, remember when Dick Cheney told a senator, on the floor of the Senate, to “fuck yourself“? Or when George Bush called a reporter “a major league asshole“? Weird how Gerson, former Bush speechwriter and policy advisor, doesn’t mention those incidents in his condemnation of Al Franken (who has, as of yet, never even been elected to any office that I know of).

What a load of (to pick a civil word) manure.

But let’s get back to Franken for a minute. Gerson takes great offense to Franken’s description of his work as “satire.” Because it uses naughty language, and stereotypes, and even sexual imagery. Well, yes, I think we can all agree that it does those things. But, last I checked, in pursuit of satire we aren’t limited to the scrabble dictionary and the Comics Code. Sometimes, offensive content and objectionable imagery is the most effective way of making a point. Let’s look at an example from Gerson’s op-ed:

At an event hosted by the Feminist Majority Foundation in 1999, Franken offered this thigh-slapper: “Why don’t we focus on what Afghan women can do? They can cook, bear children and pray. As I recall, that was fine for our grandmothers.”

Okay. So does anyone out there think that Franken, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal who loves taxes, abortions, and homosexuals, said those words sincerely? AT A FEMINIST MAJORITY FOUNDATION EVENT??? Of course not. This is, what’s the word, sarcasm. Franken is making a point–to limit women to these traditional roles is horrible, stupid, and maybe even terrorism! Okay, probably not really terrorism, but you can’t deny the Afghanistan connection. Better send in some troops, just to be safe.

Okay, where was I. Oh, right. Gerson is just being disingenuous. He knows Franken doesn’t seriously believe women should only cook, bear children, and pray. He knows Franken was joking. And, more generally, he knows that there’s nothing seriously objectionable about Franken’s humor–except that he is a liberal and is running for the Senate. This piece is deeply cynical, condescending, and just plain wrong.

For the record: I like Al Franken and think he would make a very good representative. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a few more politicians who are funny on purpose?

This column is hilarious. First, the Washington Post’s business columnist reveals that he’s never bought a smartphone. Then he holds out the WIRELESS PHONE SERVICE INDUSTRY–a highly regulated field dominated by a handful of companies rapidly consolidating into a duopoly–as a bastion of competition in the free market! This is especially funny because the industry had been characterized by stagnancy until an outside (Apple) essentially strong-armed it into the slightest hint of innovation. And what’s the result? Windows Mobile still sucks. Blackberry and Palm are paying lip service to handset improvement, but haven’t demonstrated any in the last year.

C’mon, Pearlstein. Get real. The cell phone industry is big business at its most conservative. If Apple hadn’t exposed them as anti-innovation charlatans, they’d still be foisting brick-sized, unusable smartphones on us all. The big innovation in mobile media is that every company involved is trying to figure out a way to charge consumers even more for access. Things are getting more, not less expensive (yes, even the iPhone, when you account for the extra $10/month you will have to pay for data). And until Google forced the issue, all cell phone service providers were THRILLED to regulate, bottleneck, and charge users through the nose for access to their networks (and, in fact, it remains to be seen whether Google’s intervention will make any meaningful difference at all).

Now it’s possible that change, in the guise of improved hardware and cheaper/better service, is coming to the industry. But one handset that’s sold fewer than 10 million units (worldwide) is not nearly enough to convince me that things have changed for the better.

After these enlightening observations, Pearlstein goes on, in a transition that can only be described as “forced,” to compare the high-paced competitive cell phone industry with intellectual property law reform in Congress. Apparently, reforming a cornerstone legal doctrine from top to bottom isn’t a speedy process. I, for one, am shocked and scandalized that the legislature isn’t acting as quickly as private companies (most of whom are well on their way to bankruptcy, incidentally)!

If this were an isolated case, you might write it off as a bit of bad luck or a testament to the political clout of drug companies with too much money to spread around. Unfortunately, however, it is the norm. Immigration reform, a major energy bill, global warming legislation, the housing bill, overhaul of the aviation system and fixes for the alternative minimum tax have all been bottled up in the Senate, thanks to those quaint rules that effectively require 60 votes even to take up legislation, let alone pass it. As long as this arrangement persists, it will be impossible for the country to simplify the tax code, reform the health-care system, restructure financial regulation, fix the tort system, rebuild the nation’s infrastructure or put a brake on runaway entitlements.

Hmmm. It’s almost as if the legislative system were intended to be conservative, to prevent overreaching by self-serving political bodies who don’t have the perspective to make good long-term decisions!

Patent law is kind of a mess, but it’s a lot easier to cry out for reform than it is to actually put together a proposal that will improve matters. And it’s a lot easier to complain about the speed with which the legislature moves than it is than it is to actually think about why it might work that way.

I just read a really good piece in Slate: Is This Tantrum on the Record? The ground rules for writing about your kids. Emily Bazelon describes her qualms about writing about her son:

What are the ground rules for writing about your kids, especially on the Internet, with its freewheeling meanness and permanent archive? Will my kids be embarrassed by these pieces at a certain point? Will a bully or (perhaps less plausibly) a college admissions office one day use the foibles I’ve revealed against them? Or will the kids just decide they’d have preferred to speak for themselves? Is there a point at which any good parent should stop?

When I write about my kids, I’m not only thinking as their mother. I’m also thinking as a professional writer. Those two identities don’t always align—they just don’t. I like to think that when there’s tension, I err on the side of protecting my kids’ interests, steering clear of any material that’s too embarrassing or private.

The article/column explores these issues adroitly, and touches on a lot of points worth discussing. Can kids even understand this stuff well enough to make an informed decision? Is it exploitative to use your children’s lives as source material?

But I’m going to digress a bit from the topic of writing about one’s children and talk instead about Facebook and the First Amendment.

CNN.com has this weird new thing where you can take a headline and put it on a t-shirt. This is silly enough, but thanks to someone who wasn’t super careful you can easily hack the HTML to make your own. So I guess my point is, please buy me this. Thanks.

In case CNN wises up and yanks this feature:

So, a guy on the internet got his hands on an old cache of files from the company (now defunct) that released a bunch of great text-based computer games, including the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a huge hit game (based on Douglas Adams’s masterpiece) that made a lot of money. They also worked on a sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, but the project and company self-destructed. The story is fascinating. Especially in the comments, where a guy who comes off looking bad in the history chimes in to make himself look even worse. He complains that the material Biao uses paints an unbalanced picture, and that Baio made no effort to contact him in advance of publishing it, and generally that it’s bad journalism.

The irony is that I think he’s probably right–this isn’t very good journalism. Baio should have tried to get in touch with the relevant persons (just about all of whom seem to be quite available) before publishing. No question, it’s a thorny issue–the material he’s citing was company property, so he doesn’t need permission from the employees to post it–and who knows what happened behind the scenes.

At any rate, there’s a lot to enjoy here, if you’re patient enough to wade through it all.