How are American states, the laboratories of democracy, currently handling the issue of firearms? Let’s look at two of them. First up, California:

Responding to a movement that promotes the brash public display of firearms, state lawmakers on Tuesday moved forward legislation that would outlaw the open carrying of unloaded handguns in public places. Four previous attempts in the Legislature to prohibit the practice have failed over the last seven years, but the proposal has taken on a heightened profile this year in the wake of organized efforts to encourage others to show up at rallies and meet up at restaurants while carrying guns in visible holsters.

Next, Kansas:

Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt says he will not challenge a new law that allows the blind and disabled to carry concealed guns…. The new law also drops the requirement that applicants for license renewal hit at least 18 of 25 targets while shooting from three to 10 yards. The test remains for first-time applicants, although a legislator said that is the next gun curb to be dropped.

But is there any middle ground? Maybe in Texas, where blind residents are forced to carry unloaded weaponry in public under penalty of law. Anyway, wow. Guns.

Photo by kcdsTM, from Flickr.

“After dinner Larry said, ‘Come into my study, Terry, you’re going to need some money for the weekend.’ We went into his office and he said, “There’s a briefcase by the couch where you’re sitting. Put it on your lap and open it.” So I did. It was full of packs of hundred-dollar bills. Larry said, ‘It’s a million dollars. I have this on hand to give validity to the offer.’ And he showed me this circular: A standing offer from Larry Flynt to the following women who are prepared to show gyno-pink. One million cash to Barbara Bach, Cathy Bach, Barbi Benton, Cheryl Tiegs…. They were mostly kind of obscure, but there were one or two that were totally out of place, like Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda.”
 — How the other half lives. (The male half.)

“Patrick Leigh Fermor, who has died aged 96, was an intrepid traveller, a heroic soldier and a writer with a unique prose style. His books, most of which were autobiographical, made surprisingly scant mention of his military exploits, drawing instead on remarkable geographical and scholarly explorations. To Paddy, as he was universally known, an acre of land in almost any corner of Europe was fertile ground for the study of language, history, song, dress, heraldry, military custom — anything to stimulate his momentous urge to speculate and extrapolate. If there is ever room for a patron saint of autodidacts, it has to be Paddy Leigh Fermor.”

“For my email I built in a canary: a tempting looking email that’s sitting in my inbox that’s entirely fake and designed to tempt an attacker into clicking on it,” writes John Graham-Cumming. “That starred email from ‘Barclays Private Banking’ is entirely fake. And in clicking on it you’ve activated the canary. The company logo at the bottom is being loaded externally from a private server that I own. On that server a script logs the complete information about the machine that loaded the picture and sends a text message to my phone.” Who wouldn’t pay $10 a month for this? And there’s lots of ways to soup it up. (via)

Vegetables bad: “After days of confusion, German authorities finally concluded on Friday that an E. coli infection, which has claimed at least 29 lives, unsettled the nation and thrown European agriculture into disarray, had been caused by contaminated bean sprouts and not, as first was feared, by other produce. But, at a news conference here, Reinhard Burger, the head of the Robert Koch Institute — the country’s disease control agency — said the outbreak was ‘not yet over’ because ‘there will be new cases coming up.’”

This explains pretty much everything today! Let’s break down this “why there are no jobs” article, nearly every paragraph of which is either depressing or a bit fury-inducing. Here’s a one-two punch that deserves to have its dots connected:

1. “We just can’t afford to compete with countries like China on labor costs, especially when workers are getting even more expensive,” says manager of company.

2. “Indeed, equipment and software prices have dipped 2.4 percent since the recovery began, thanks largely to foreign manufacturing.”

Oh, I see. A supply-demand shame spiral! You can see where this is going. Anyway, then the poor manager is besieged by resumes when he posts a job — awww! — and then? He must “spend $150 for each drug test.” (Which: stop doing that?) Mercy. It’s hard to find a reason why anyone in America even wants to work!

(Bonus bit, from the chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business: “We don’t have 11 million unemployed farmers today because over time farmers and their children transitioned into different sectors.” True! We have 2 million farmers who live in a completely bizarre hybrid socialist-corporatist country of their own.)

No Matter What, America Hearts Paris

by Emma Garman

Now that the party’s over for the monsieurs of France’s Parliament, as hushed-up pedophilia, routine sexual assault and general misogyny are suddenly no longer federally protected perks of the job, a vital question emerges: Will the exposure of all this Gallic turpitude make the merest difference to American society’s perpetually raging, and mostly unrequited, crush on Paris? All signs point to non.

Exhibit A: So far, the box office figures for Woody Allen’s shamelessly adoring paean to the City of Lights, Midnight in Paris, look set to make the movie Allen’s most successful yet, and critics are talking about a Best Picture Oscar nomination. Who cares that Midnight in Paris is frothier than air, a collection of clichés and worn-out ideas which only becomes slightly more than the sum of its parts, when it makes such sweet cinematic love to the French capital’s narrow winding streets, its hallowed landmarks, its sun-dappled bridges and charming markets?

Allen’s hero, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), is a Hollywood screenwriter vacationing in Paris with his shrewish fiancée and her materialistic Republican parents. His avowed dream is to chuck in his philistine Los Angeles existence and live in Paris permanently, “walking along the Left Bank” and “writing novels at the Café de Flore.” Admittedly, the movie is all about nostalgia — Gil manages to slip back via time-travel to his romantic ideal of Paris, the 1920s, where Hemingway, Fitzgerald et al welcome him. Still, while it’s unclear whether Allen is mocking or celebrating Gil’s spectacularly generic fantasy of Parisian life, the final scenes imply the latter. (Although it doesn’t help that regardless of the role he’s playing, Wilson is congenitally incapable of speaking in a sincere tone of voice.)

Either way, it’s precisely this trapped-in-amber image of romantic, bohemian Paris for which Americans have such a collective boner, willfully oblivious to the tawdry reality that the Flore is now solely populated by middle-aged tourists drinking $10 coffees, and that the nexus of creativity and avant-garde moved to edgier Right Bank neighborhoods decades ago — or, even more accurately, to other more vibrant and progressive cities.

Yet the same old tropes persist, not least because authors who write about Paris are seldom inclined, or permitted, to diverge from the accepted script, which goes something like this: Paris equals the three neighborhoods on the Left Bank that contain Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Latin Quarter, and the Eiffel Tower. Within this nirvana — held in suspended animation ever since Sartre decided that man is condemned to be free — artistic endeavor is prized, hard work is disdained, cigarettes don’t give you cancer, booze doesn’t rot your liver and women don’t get fat. No, not even after consuming beaucoup de chocolat to distract themselves from their husbands’ constitutionally enshrined philandering.

Travel writer Elisabeth Eaves, whose fabulously addictive new memoir, Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents, recalls her adventures in many different countries, ended up in Paris when her then-boyfriend was assigned his first diplomatic posting. As her book describes, the couple moves into a lavish government-provided apartment on the Avenue Montaigne, a street replete with flower-decked balconies, a branch of Chanel, and regular Karl Lagerfeld sightings, like some “absurd American fantasy of Paris come to life.” Eaves does her best to enjoy her Paris sojourn but eventually she succinctly sums up, the first time any writer has done so, exactly what I so disliked during my own time living there: “the dullness of the city, the Sunday closures, the insufferable correctness.”

Eaves’ authentic depiction notwithstanding, the most cursory survey of innumerable recent books set in Paris, inspired by Parisians, illustrated by photos of them, drawing on their potent sexual juju, revealing their never-before-revealed, foolproof and delicious diet secrets, exploiting their timeless wisdom, worshipping their devastating chic or some mélange of the above, proves that the trifling issue of reality is of zero importance to publishers. And who can blame them when, in a tough market, there’s a subject other than teen vampires and Swedish sex crimes that’s almost guaranteed to sell: Gay Paree!

The best part? Every section of the reading public can be targeted. The NPR-listening, New Yorker reader who wouldn’t be seen dead with a copy of French Women Don’t Sleep Alone will proudly read French sabbatical-porn like Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, or John Baxter’s latest The Most Beautiful Walk in the World: A Pedestrian In Paris (which, writes LA Times’ Susan Salter Reynolds, is “as close as a reader can get to the feel of a languid spring walk along Baron Haussmann’s boulevards without actually being there.” She obviously means, but is too polite to say, that all that’s missing from the experience is sidestepping dog shit). For serious foodies, or aspiring ones, there’s The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World’s Most Glorious — and Perplexing — City, a “memoir with recipes” by pastry chef David Lebovitz. (Yes, sorry if I’m the first one to break it to you, but “memoir with recipes” is officially A Thing.) Book clubs with ambitions a modicum beyond the new Anita Shreve are no doubt reading The Paris Wife, a novel from the point of view of Hemingway’s first wife that was originally named The Great Good Place, before being acquired by Random House for over half a million dollars and judiciously re-titled. And so it goes without saying that this summer, as long as your vacation reading requirements somehow involve berets, vin rouge, and rolled Rs, you’re covered with new titles a-plenty.

La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life, by New York Times Paris Bureau Chief Elaine Sciolino, promises to explain “how crucial the game of seduction is to understanding France, identifying seduction as a key ideology that shapes how the French conduct business, politics and relationships.” I’ll say! For those who prefer their Paris-teachings a touch more ironic, next month sees the publication of Olivier Magny’s Stuff Parisians Like: Discovering the Quoi in the Je Ne Sais Quoi, pitched as “a tongue in cheek homage to Parisians.” Naturally, Magny, a sommelier and the founder of a company that offers wine-tasting trips and classes, maintains a blog of the same name. Out just in time for beach season is Marie Claire beauty editor Lisa Spellman’s The Parisian Prescription: Getting Svelte the French Girl’s Way. Finally, in Left Bank Logic: How French-Style Rebellion Can Halt the Rise of the Superrich, Jordan Rowntree, an economic historian and founder of D.C. think tank Global Policy Solutions, “traces a line from 18th Century revolutionaries to the 1968 Sorbonne uprising to contemporary rioters in Bastille Square, showing how France’s unique brand of militancy can be replicated to smash world poverty and bring down the new plutocratic class.”

Okay, confession: only two of the four books in the previous paragraph are real, but can you tell which ones? I thought not. Thus, if French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, the favorite to become the new IMF head, doesn’t get the job — and I hope she does — she should know that Secrets of a Paris Politicienne: How I Prospered in a Disgustingly Sexist World, and You Can Too will be snapped up for seven figures, en un éclair.

Briefly a reluctant Parisienne, Emma Garman now lives in New York, where she’s a writer.

“The state Education Department is poised to award a $27 million no-bid contract to a company former city Schools Chancellor Joel Klein oversees.”
 — Good. Grief.

I think the Mainstream Media, whatever that is, has been doing a very good job reporting on the New York 9th District Congressman Anthony Weiner and his naughties. I’m kinda sick of hearing about it, but that’s my fault, because I consume lots of super-obvious Lowest Common Denominator News and Infotainments, where I have heard a kabillion-jillion things about Anthony Weiner from my teevee in the morning when I put the stupid TODAY show on and then in the bathroom, where I perform my morning ablutions in the manner of Pontius Pilate (one of History’s notable Public Servants), and I hear more about Anthony Weiner on the news programs on my radio. One of the programs I listen to while I am cleaning my teeth is a middle-of-the-road Traffic-and-Weather-Together kinda show and the other one is an hilarious Right-Wing syndicated thing that runs on a local Sports Radio channel, and they throw down on that show, man, when they talk about stuff like Mr. Weiner’s been doing, they call it “Perverted,” which I find it to be Highly Entertaining, when people get Judgmental about stuff, so I am hooked on that radio program, for reals, and I believe I am similar to zillions of people then, out here in the streets of Lowest Common Denominator, where I get my Info Feed, and where the info almost immediately gets processed by the American Jokes Industry and Entertainment Tonight and stuff.

Like Dave Letterman, my Teevee Pal, who musta done some jokes in his “monologue” about this guy and then I saw him talking about Weiner with Rachel Maddow (and the producers basically, I Theorize, in my Opinion, totally cloned her show on Keith Olbermann’s so effing hard she made him feel Not Special, I think, which is a big part of why he left the MSNBC or CNBC — I can never remember which is which — but yeah, support for Rachel Maddow coming on after Keith Olbermann forced Olbermann into doing this live cross-over-handoff chitchat with Rachel Maddow, which totally messed up his gag of throwing a wadded-up ball of paper at the teevee screen to end his show, and he obviously started to hate her guts. I’m serious, man, I bet that really hacked him off, that guy is a Major League Prima Donna, I think, and I’ll totally watch his show on Al Gore’s teevee channel when that happens), but anyway, that time Dave did that bit on his show about messing around with one of his employees, and dude went and put the whole thing into big fucking air-quotes and did bullet points and made it all sound like he was doing the Top Ten where people are supposed to laugh, and he was basically doing the equivalent of those I’m-sorry-if-you-think-you-were-offended deals, only people were kinda laughing because he wasn’t being real, he was being my Teevee Pal Dave Letterman, because that’s the only way he could preserve his show (and American jobs) by telling The Nation he had participated in sexual activity with an employee who was not his wife. Which brings me to another thing about this Weiner guy which is: You don’t know what the deal is with him and his wife. That shit is private, man, his wife didn’t lose her right to be a private person because he hit Enter insteada the DM thing, and if he had Tweetdeck insteada regular Twitter, chances are that shit would not have happened in the first place. I don’t know what people want here, you know?

And then how do you say this Breitbart guy’s name? This is the guy who got some pictures off the Twits? And then the shock-jocks got the picture of the picture? That looks like some shenanigans right there man, to get that shit Out There, eh? Man, does he have people just hunched over screens all day watching errbody’s Tweeters for shit that pops up or did somebody hand it to him? He has that Web site newser dot com, but I don’t look at it because a lot of it is just links to shit from other places. Anyway, I always thought his name was like “bright-bart,” but the snippy announcers on that Right-Wing radio channel I swear were going kinda like “brey-bear,” is that how you say it? I haven’t been listening to them and their Right-Wingedness long enough to determine if maybe they were just being wacky morning personalities and going all Frenchie with his name for funsies. Unless maybe I was hardcore on my toothbrushing at that point and developed Slurred Hearing? There is one of those International Phonetic Alphabet things on the Wikipedia for this guy, and that one makes it look like “brate-bart,” I think, but mostly that IPA always makes me think of beer and then I lose interest in stuff, you know? I knew this one guy who had a name that people had a hard time figuring out and he put a little audio file on his dot com, but I forget where that is.

Meanwhile, I ain’t gonna lie, I think it’s funny when the word WEINER is in like 3,000-point type on the front page of the New York Post, and the Daily News has been getting its ass kicked in the WOOD WAR on this one going with various turns on PUTZ and SCHMUCK. C’mon Daily News, let’s get some WEINER WAR going here while there’s time, huh?

I don’t think I need to say anything about Anthony Weiner and the Bad Things he has done because errbody else is all over that shit, you know? So it’s like unless you got Real News or Jokes for the front page of the New York Post, you should just keep on Twitter where it started.

Previously: This New Food Pyramid is a Plate! And Also a Scam

Mr. Wrong can converse with you via many medias.

“Each day, out-of-work computer programmer Luke Allen self-medicates by watching animated ponies have magical adventures. The 32-year-old, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, loves his daily fix of My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, and he’s not alone. He’s part of a growing group of ‘bronies’ (‘bro ponies’) — men who are fans of a TV show largely intended for a much younger audience. ‘First we can’t believe this show is so good, then we can’t believe we’ve become fans for life, then we can’t believe we’re walking down the pink aisle at Toys R Us or asking for the girl’s toy in our Happy Meal,’ Allen said in an e-mail to Wired.com. ‘Then we can’t believe our friends haven’t seen it yet, then we can’t believe they’re becoming bronies too.’”