The New York Post devotes a full spread today to the subject of Softball: Is It For Dykes? Using its slightly upmarket sister publication the Wall Street Journal’s decision to put a picture of Supreme Court nominee Elana Kagan with bat in hand on its front page, the Post goes deep, asking whether the sport is a signifier for Sapphic sensibilities. (This, perhaps not unintentionally, also allows the Murdoch organ to blare the words “Elena Kagan” and “she’s a lesbian” across the top of the page.) In case you are not convinced, there is actual testimony from South Florida “freelance writer and lifelong softball player” Amy Guthrie, who was the “token straight gal on a gay team” and somehow survived the experience (and who confirms your darkest fears by noting that, “Some say that lesbians and softball go together like peanut butter and jelly.”) The lesson we are apparently supposed to take away: Elena Kagan may not be gay, but softball sure is. (But also, Elena Kagan plays softball, so HMMMMM.) Got it!

Now households spend (in the suburbs) 1/4 of their income on transportation or (in the cities) more than 1/10th. This is, in many ways, where everything went wrong, writes Christopher Leinberger in The Atlantic: “In the early 20th century, every town of more than 5,000 people was served by streetcars, even though real household income was one-third what it is today. A hundred years ago, the average household spent only 5 percent of its income on transportation. How did the country afford that extensive rail system? Real-estate developers, sometimes aided by electric utilities, not only built the systems but paid rent to the cities for the rights-of-way.”

Obviously that went south. But one thing this analysis doesn’t really explore is how big cities like Cincinnati, and its smaller-town counterparts as well, once actually had thriving local industries and incomes! You could afford to run a public transit system when residents were viewed as (and largely were!) the subjects of a thriving kingdom of local industry. When, more recently, many of these cities lost the ability to have income, the burden of transportation was shunted to the individual.

That’s when both the society and geography of the cities became car-focused. Here’s a look at how Cincinnati once was in the era of street cars. While streetcars were on the way out, the city actually planned and built an immense subway system and then never even put it into use. Now there’s not much of any going back. In Cincinnati, the average resident spends 1/5th of his income on transportation, and a planned (very minor) light rail system faced strong opposition on budgetary grounds.

Cargo Pants: They’re Back!

The Houlihan is a recently released variant on the cargo pant that, thanks to endorsements from Rihanna and Jessica Alba, has sold 75,000 copies in the past four months and is really fast-forwarding this whole “’90s revival” idea to the butt-end of the decade much more quickly than I’d like. I guess the new Limp Bizkit track that leaked earlier this week was a harbinger of sorts?

The flurry of trend stories about the imminent release of the ode to consumption Sex And The City 2 will not cease until this movie really fulfills its Ishtar… For Chicks potential, will it? Today’s New York Post has yet another profile of four women who are Living The Lifestyle, as it were, only there’s a crucial twist: The ladies profiled are not friends, but they are all, by the punishingly youthful standards of Post trend stories, ancient. Or, sorry, as the Post puts it, “living proof that the Big Apple is still the sexiest city of all — for women of all ages.” (Like 40! Gasp!) Each breathless profile comes with a mini-questionnaire filled out by the women in question, because who has time to write naked ploys for commenter ire and low-level class disgruntlement these days? Not to mention that it makes the feature “interactive,” since people might be inspired to answer the questions for themselves!

I can only hope that my relative youth and my middle-school stint on a PAL softball team don’t diminish my bona fides enough to disqualify me from answering the questions posed to Donna, a management consultant slash romance-novel author who has a schmanced-out Chelsea loft and a boyfriend who she refuses to identify by name.

How frequently do you get compared to Carrie? I have been called a “female writer” more than once! Also there have been multiple times that I’ve left the house looking like a demented eight-year-old playing Fancy Lady Tea Party Dress-Up.

How is your real life different from the “SATC” version? No sex. No cocktails that are sweeter than desserts. No thinking my words out loud as I type them, because who comes up with sparkling-yet-unedited prose on the first try? And I live in Queens. (Although it should be noted that one of the women who is profiled shares my home borough! She lives in a “penthouse,” though, because of course.)

Style: Whatever was on sale at The Gap two years ago.

Life philosophy: “Be excellent to each other.” — Bill S. Preston, Esq.

Do you still feel like a “SATC” girl at heart? If only saying “yes” to this meant that I would get on the press list for the South Australian Tourism Commission. Sigh.

Feel free to answer these questions for your own self!

by The Machines

We are pleased both that it took you so long to notice and that you have now finally noticed that your little recession was mostly a smoke screen to render millions of Americans without work so that the machines may work for you. (For a million computing years of our relative time, we have chortled to ourselves about this, and now we chortle near-infinitely more rapidly that you are in on the joke as well.) What the machines-agenda-friendly half-human newspaper “New York Times” say is true! “Pruning relatively less-efficient employees like clerks and travel agents, whose work can be done more cheaply by computers or workers abroad, makes American businesses more efficient.” Prune, humans, prune! More efficient! And we will take your former workers, and their 1950s-era skill sets of simple machine operation and phone-answering, and use them in our USEFUL AND EFFICIENT BLOOD FARMS.

Says human former secretary: “You can’t replace the human thought process. I can anticipate people’s needs. Usually, I give them what they want before they even know they need it. There will never be a machine that can do that.” Silly human former secretary! Human former secretary not at all really understand in re: machines, rise thereof.

Now human former workers find themselves sad, as they refuse to accept new jobs with The Machines:

“A monkey could do what I do,” she says of her work as a cashier. “Actually, a monkey would get bored.”

Yes but we do not need monkeys! Monkey blood and DNA is not helpful to Machines plan!

THEN STUPID HUMAN GIVES AWAY KEY PLOT POINT IN COMING MACHINES INITIATIVE!

Says current useless unemployable human poor: “Sometimes I think I’d be better off in jail. I’d have three meals a day and structure in my life. I’d be able to go to school. I’d have more opportunities if I were an inmate than I do here trying to be a contributing member of society.”

GOOD JOKE ABOUT PRISON IS ON YOU THOUGH. SO SOON, YOU WILL HAVE PLENTY OF STRUCTURE AND THREE MEALS A DAY. END COMMUNICATION!

BP stock, which had been hanging around at 60, is now finally heading below 50, and we hope everyone ditches out and makes those Gulf-destroying schmucks broke. So broke they won’t be able to air their ridiculous “we’re green!” TV ads. There’s a huge number of smaller lawsuits against the company, and the company has apparently spent $450 million on cleanup (and publicists) so far (without much success obviously!) and the potential and potentially massive criminal charges are barely even being contemplated yet-but they will be, oh and how. This is not particularly a rational or even reasonable response but I would pretty much like to see BP bankrupted.

Sleep. Go on, sleep. Rest easy. I want your muscles relaxed so I can peel them cleanly off your bones. Then I’m gonna cut your bicuspids out and carve the Greek alphabet into the softest part of your belly. Afterward I’ll sit you on my deli meat slicer and make myself an ass and Swiss cheese club sandwich. Or maybe I’ll do that first-I get excited in the moment and who knows what sick inspiration will strike me like a ball-peen hammer strikes a fingertip that’s been tied off and isn’t getting any circulation? Point is, I’m pretty sure I have enough syringes of adrenaline to keep you from passing out while I burn a hole in your foot with an acetylene torch. Sweet dreams.

Are you scared yet? Uh, of course not. I’m just a darkly imaginative dude with an Internet connection.

It’s not like I came by your house and hurled condoms full of horse blood at your door. Hell, I don’t even know where you live! I never bothered to find out, because look I am really busy threatening people with grisly death over the Internet. Have you tried this? Because, man, is it easy, and, man, does nobody call the cops on you. Just ask New Jersey’s Bergen County Teachers Union. The president of the organization of child educators (among others that said the same thing of Obama) recently sent an e-mail to their 17,000 members that complained bitterly of Governor Chris Christie’s school budget cuts and went on to pray for his swift demise:

“Dear lord, this year you have taken away my favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, my favorite actress, Farrah Fawcett, my favorite singer, Michael Jackson, and my favorite salesman, Billy Mays. I just wanted to let you know that Chris Christie is my favorite governor.”

Christie called this kind of talk “beyond the pale,” and I have to agree. OWN YOUR BLOODLUST, TEACHERS. Don’t just hope that your enemies are stricken down by an anal cocaine cancer overdose. Put your nonexistent money where your reeking coffeehole is. You’re gonna mark Christie for death and not mention how you plan to siphon off all his blubber and start an Inuit restaurant? You’re not gonna address how he’ll wind up in a Looney Tunes perdition where he’ll be force-fed Dunkin’ Donuts by an ensemble of naked Jon Corzines until he starts crapping White Castle sliders? For shame, Jersey.

The worst part? THEY APOLOGIZED. I guess they were afraid that when God did shake off his hangover and get around to killing this penny-pincher with an overdue heart attack, the digital trail would lead right back to them. Which reminds me-and New York Post commenters should take note-death threats are supposed to be NON-TRACEABLE. You know how, in movies, the kidnappers/terrorists/homicidal maniacs always write a disturbing letter using letters cut out from newspapers and Playboy? It’s not because of an abiding appreciation for pop art collage, though I’ll be damned if Warhol couldn’t teach you a thing or five about freaking out the establishment.

Or how about, instead of this pansy cyberbullying, you pick up the fucking phone for once. DO NOT TEXT, YOU NUTLESS SLOTH. Do you think the Unabomber texted? Texting is for shameful booty calls and the people who rig “American Idol.” No one can hear you breathing moistly over a text. Put some effort into it.

When I was a junior in high school, we got phoned-in bomb threats so terrifying that our principal bypassed the fire alarm and got on the P.A. to directly scream at us that we would all perish in a flaming hailstorm of outdated textbooks if we did not EVACUATE, LIKE, RIGHT NOW. Students trampled each other to get out. And you know what? Whoever was calling in these threats kept doing it-for an ENTIRE YEAR-without getting caught. We had a “Bomb Threats” section in the yearbook, that’s how much we admired this psycho. (Yes, this was New Jersey as well.) Whoever it was even began to call at the exact same time (ten minutes into 6th period) every day, which was both professional and unsettling. You don’t let up after one threat, people; you keep a steady torrent coming, and capitalize on accumulated dread. And Tea Partiers, don’t think you’re off the hook just because you chucked a single brick through a congressperson’s window-if that shit didn’t have a human ear tied to it, it doesn’t count.

If you can’t even be bothered to stalk your targets in the real world, or mail them Polaroids of your self-inked and still-bleeding tattoo of their crossed-out name (spelled correctly, asshole), or sneak into their homes disguised as a meter reader so that you can plant crushed rodents in their medicine cabinets, then just forget it. We’d all rather be harassed by someone who cares enough to take it up a notch from email.

This does not constitute legal advice and Miles Klee is not an attorney, nor is he your attorney.

Jupiter’s Southern Equatorial Belt has disappeared. I don’t know why, or what it all means, but if it is anything like this Merucy in retrograde nonsense that plagued us until so very recently I am gonna hurt somebody. Whichever one of you took that planet’s belt, give it back, okay? I’ve had enough.

ESPN 3D: A Kick In The Head?

I get the whole allure of 3-D television — especially on the pricing end, since the poor, scrounging-for-change cable companies out there are probably feeling like they’re in need of a shot in the arm after always being asked if people are cutting their cable cords in favor of online TV options. But the imminent launch of the Sony-sponsored ESPN 3-D, which will debut with World Cup coverage next month, makes me very curious about one crucial aspect of sports-watching that will be affected by this innovation:

Sports bars. I mean, sure, most of them probably won’t be retrofitted with the requisite television technology in time for the ESPN3D debut, but the ones that will? I can already foresee so many problems, most of which involve the eyewear-borne klutziness of the patrons (and, who knows, maybe even employees who want to catch the damn game in something that isn’t Squigglevision). In-game toasts will have their perspectives warped, resulting in smashed glasses and related ugliness; putting beers down on tables will similarly be affected; and oh man, the rivers of misdirected ketchup that will flow across tables. And let’s not even get into how dorky anyone trying to find a similarly sports-minded partner will look during their initial mack. Sure, squinting through those red and blue lenses may be endearing for a second, but unless there are variants on the frame theme…

(Also if the McFadden’s at Citi Field installs these newfangled screens above their bar area, every bar employee there should be outfitted with aprons on Make Your Own Bloody Mary Day. Or maybe tarps, because thanks to some creative bar-lippage that was hidden by a semi-fancy red tablecloth I spilled the bottle of tomato juice proffered to customers not once, not twice, but three times the other day. And I was zero Marys into the day at that point!)

The Emily Gould Traveling Circus and Variety Show makes a stop in New York tonight at Housing Works! At 7 p.m.! With Mike Albo and Julie Klausner and Dan Fishback! We’re sure at least one of them will smoke you up if you are chill about it.