“Last night was the climax of weeks and months of debate on a health-care bill that my constituents fear and do not support. In the heat and emotion of the debate, I exclaimed the phrase ‘it’s a baby killer’ in reference to the agreement reached by the Democratic leadership. While I remain heartbroken over the passage of this bill and the tragic consequences it will have for the unborn, I deeply regret that my actions were mistakenly interpreted as a direct reference to Congressman Stupak himself.”
-Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) explains that whole unfortunate “shouting ‘baby killer thing” during yesterday’s health care debate. It’s understandable. When you’re in The Party of Shouting Terrible Things, the intent of the terrible things you shout will occasionally be misinterpreted.

Caroline Cartwright, the 49-year-old Briton who was “jailed last year after she broke a four-year ban preventing her from having noisy sex anywhere in England and Wales” has been arrested for having noisy sex. Or, as it has been described elsewhere, “Asbo moaner romp woman Caroline Cartwright nicked again,” “Cuffed again for raucous rumpy-pumpy,” and “Sex Hungry Wife Arrested For Noisey-Sex.”

The Breville Die-Cast 2-Slice Smart Toaster™ is a profoundly heavy toaster. It never skids when one is retrieving a piece of toast or inserting a piece of bread that is to become toast. And the toast! What it does to white bread, when the “toastiness” slider is set to somewhere between 3 and 4 on its 5-point infinite scale, is create a toast product that should be painted in oils to be rendered for posterity. The bread; it glows, the vertical striping is subtle but gives one that cozy, toasty feeling. What it does to Pepperidge Farm’s “Jewish RYE Bread Seeded” (as it is called on the package) is exquisite; the little Jewish seeds want to pop open in the heat but do not.

If you are prone to watching your toast with some anxiety, the toaster provides a countdown on the front; its cooling little lights shrink down, from right to left, as if it were saying, “I’m toasting speedily… and the toasting is nearly complete by all my mathematical equations!”

But say that, for some reason, you have not set the slider appropriately? And your toast is somehow undertoasted? Then I refer you to the button up top that says, simply, “a bit more.” YES, it will toast it just a bit more for you.

Are you not sure if it does need a bit more? Then you simply depress the “lift and look” button, and your toast emerges, with its intentionally dramatic mechanized slowness (sort of like the helicopter in Miss Saigon?), for your investigation.

The bagel setting, I needn’t say, is perfection. (Although I also use it for English muffins, which I hope is allowed.)

I have never yet used it to defrost but I will report back to you in short order!

Just recently I was in the other room from the toaster, and I recalled that I had inserted some bread in the toaster. I wonder if my toast is done yet?, I thought. And then the toaster issued its just-loud-enough, not particularly harmonious, but absolutely intelligible “your toast is done!” beep. I could hear it perfectly, yet it was not loud enough to upset the jumpy.

My toast consumption has increased three-fold since the Breville Die-Cast 2-Slice Smart Toaster™ has come into my life. My only regret is that I do not have the 4-Slice Smart Toaster™, and can only toast two slices at once.

“There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year. They have poisoned the well in what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.”
-Senator John McCain (R-AZ) indicates that his party will no longer show the kind of willingness to compromise and find common ground with Democrats that they have demonstrated up until this point.

“The protest happened yesterday. Chase is one of the biggest investors in mountain top removal mining. The protesters said they would leave a mountaintop in every Chase. They did. I think it was pretty baller. Also didn’t hurt that the bulk of the protesters were part of a church choir that was singing lovely inspiration tunes. “

It’s undeniably a historic moment-America stands on the verge of a drastically altered health care regime. Spiraling costs have driven many patients out of the market entirely, and the sluggish economy has forced clients to scale back their expectations for quality care. No, it’s not that health-care reckoning; it is, rather, something that strikes much more directly at the national creed of tireless monied self-improvement-a pronounced downturn in the plastic-surgery sector.

Writing in the Observer (UK), Paul Harris notes that demand for cosmetic surgery has dropped 18% in the U.S. over the past year. The most immediate culprit, he writes, is the Great Recession, since “purely cosmetic operations, such as nose-shaping and breast enlargements, often cost thousands of dollars and are not covered by health insurance.”

But there are subtler cultural shifts involved, too, Harris notes: the public is no longer so readily titillated, if you’ll pardon the expression, with the subculture of superficial snippery. The hit cable franchise Nip/Tuck has been retired. Reality TV glyph Heidi Montag became a tabloid laughing stock after it was reported she’d had ten face and body procedures performed over the past year, evidently mistaking the name of her reputation-making franchise The Hills as a de facto mission statement for her décolletage. Even my former employer, New York magazine, which has made plastic surgery a centerpiece of its business model, has lately taken to wondering out loud whether a permanently frozen countenance is really such an unalloyed good, especially for the nation’s moody celebrity class.

As correspondent Amanda Fortini notes, there’s a curious, self-devouring paradox in the acting profession’s romance with cosmetic surgery: the pursuit of optimally manipulated facial features can damage one’s marketability as a performer. Stephen Pincus, a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon tells her he makes a point of asking clients, “what expressions, what emotions, are you concerned about losing?’ I say, ‘I can paralyze your forehead from this point up, but you’re not going to be able to wrinkle a good part of the forehead. Is that an issue for you? If it is, we shouldn’t do it.’ ” Still, he observes, many determined souls plunge fearlessly on. “They’re more concerned about wrinkles than about the five seconds of emotion people might not notice anyway.”

Thus, it seems, the CW is guaranteed a talent stable into perpetuity.

Meanwhile, in a still crueler turn of the screw, getting work done also creates its own additional demands on the thespian craft, since publicly admitting to the practice is stigmatized in a way that, say, a tour in the Betty Ford clinic isn’t. “I don’t think you’ll find an actress saying they’ve had it,” acting coach Shelia Gray says, “so you won’t come across anybody saying it’s changed their technique.” Indeed, the oddly austere rounds of the lifted and cantilevered life have so flustered an ingénue like Montag that she seems to have provisionally abandoned her hard right political profile to shill for financial regulatory reform. She even threw over her blond lummox of a husband/business manager, Spencer Pratt-the kind of figure who makes Tom Arnold look in retrospect like a member of the Bloomsbury group-for a short-lived dalliance with a psychic manager.

All of Montag’s whirl-a-gigging cries for help since she came out of the surgery closet point up a far deeper distemper lurking within the souls of the surgery-addled. Just because they may be scaling back the overall volume and frequency of their appearance upgrades, that does not by any measure entail a corresponding downgrade in the quest to reinvent their ever-protean selves. Hence, in his dispatch, Baker notes that even amid an overall decline in demand for “full-on surgical operations,” the number of less-invasive procedures, and nonsurgical treatments like Botox, “is steady or rising.” And even when they go under the knife, the Washington-based surgeon Richard Baxter notes, members of the new cosmetic client base are experimenting with more modest alterations. Formerly, he had about one-third of his clients opt for B-cup sized breast augmentations; now he estimates that share of the market is up to a half.

Baker chalks this stalwart-if expressively chastened — demand to the ongoing persistence of human vanity, but it seems to be more a byproduct of a distinctly American, and transcendentalist, faith. “All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle,” Emerson wrote. “We wake from one dream into another dream. The toys, to be sure, are various, and are graduated in refinement to the quality of the dupe.”

Chris Lehmann is considering having some work done.

“Recently he has begun to put on a strange voice during sex — for example ‘Arr, matey’. The other one is ‘Arr, the ship’s a-dockin’’ and ‘My lighthouse is tingling’. He is not a sailor by the way, and has no connection to seafaring folk.”
-An example of the kind of frank and pornographic discussion that threatens to tarnish the wholesome image of Mumsnet, a discussion board for British mommies.

Picture it! March, 1990. Twenty years ago. Public Enemy’s third album, “Fear of a Black Planet,” was coming out in April-and then-popular music rag Spin put them on the cover. Sort of. They got the big type, but the B-52s got the picture. (“Love Shack” had just been a big hit!) And then there was another of Spin’s long series of interesting if often insanely misguided articles on AIDS-this one by B. D. Colen was totally sensible!

It was about how society was classist and racist and how white straight college kids should use condoms on spring break and not worry very much!

And then there is an article about secretive computer hackers on the Internet! Much of the story is devoted to trying to get the hackers to talk.

Yeah, I dunno. (LOL THE FONT!)

Pretty much the entire rest of the magazine is cigarette ads.

And that, young people, is what we used to do back then. Hang out on some BBS, smoke and have sex.

What a weekend! Universal health care reform! Extremely nice weather in New York! And the fall of Pete’s Jayhawks from the top of the Official Awl Tournament Bracket Competition! These three things are all of equal value and importance! In case you were outside all weekend and not paying attention to basketball, here’s what you missed.

• You know what sucks? The Big East. With eight entries in the tournament, a lot of people thought the Big East had a chance to really solidify themselves as THE dominant college basketball conference. But what ended up happening instead? A lot of their pretty good teams (Villanova, Georgetown and Pittsburgh) lost much, much earlier than expected, and now they’re holding on to the hope that Syracuse can win it all to help the conference save face. In case that previous sentence didn’t make any sense to you, it’s like Avatar having lost all of the technical categories, like Sound Editing and whatever, and now it’s halfway through the Oscars and they’re hoping to pull out Best Picture. Who will be this tournament’s super hot Kathryn Bigelow to dash James Cameron’s dreams? (Remember, James Cameron is the Big East here.) I guess that’s what we’ll find out over the next two weeks! Great analogy, right? Swish!

• You know what also sucks? Kansas. After being picked by more than 42% of brackets done on ESPN to win the whole thing, Kansas was ushered out of the tournament by a team from Northern Iowa. I had no idea there even was a northern Iowa. Are there even enough significant parts of Iowa to break it up into geographical regions like that? Sorry, I’m being excessively bitter because Kansas’ loss completely devastated my bracket. My apologies to Iowa.

• Look out School of Hotel Administration, Cornell is known for basketball now! That’s right, after shocking the world and much of northern New York state on Friday to win their first tournament game ever, the Big Red beat Wisconsin to become the first Ivy League school since 1979 to make it to the Sweet 16. That’s right, Cornell! The secret Ivy! The Ivy the other Ivies will only grudgingly admit to as a fellow Ivy under extreme duress! More importantly though, have you guys seen how White all of these guys are? They look like the pre-Bryan Russell Utah Jazz/current Indiana Pacers out there. Look at these great White Guy celebration pictures!

Here’s where things are now, standings-wise: Friday’s early leaders, Detective Goose (I still don’t know what that means) and Peter’s Jayhawks, fell from grace and into the dregs of rankings pages 2–7 and, while Peter’s Jayhawks still remain remotely in the chase, considering he picked Kansas to win the whole thing I’m not sure how long that will last.

The new Peter’s Jayhawks is someone named Seth Freedland who, by way of a lack of me mentioning previously that we were only looking for one entry per person, is now occupying three of the top six positions. Otherwise, the only Awl contributor left on the front page is Dan Shanoff. Dan also picked Kansas to take it home, so eventually he’s gonna get screwed too.

Some of the particularly underperforming Awl contributors include Seth Colter Walls and Mary HK Choi, currently both on page six of seven, which seems more reasonable to expect from one than the other. (Mary actually asked, “What sport is this for again?” while filling out her bracket, although Seth Colter Walls has gone to the opera four times in the last six days, so I guess that one actually could be considered a push.) Speaking of Page Six, gossip “reporter” Neel Shah finds himself on the page three of rankings. Neel has Syracuse winning it all, so there’s a possibility he might make a late surge, but realistically, probably not.

As far as Awl staff goes, I’m on the second page, Balk is on the fourth, and Choire is on the sixth. Since we’ve all got Kansas as the champion, expect for that distribution to remain mostly same and for none of us to win. Which is probably how it should be.

Oh, You’re Traveling To New Zealand To Apologize To A School Of Salmon? Perhaps I Could Be Of Some Assistance.

Did you read the article in the Times this weekend about the Winneman Wintu, the native American tribe from northern California who are traveling to New Zealand to apologize to salmon? If not, do. Here’s this:

“As the Winnemem see it, the tribe’s troubles began in early 1940s, with the completion of the Shasta Dam, which blocked the Sacramento River and cut off the lower McCloud River, obstructing seasonal salmon runs, and according to the tribe, breaking a covenant with the fish.

‘We’re going to atone for allowing them to build that dam,’ said Mark Franco, the tribe’s headman. ‘We should have fought harder.’”

So a batch of eggs from the McCloud were shipped to New Zealand years ago, and the fish have thrived there. So Franco, his wife, Caleen Sisk-Franco, who is the chief, and the rest of the Winneman Wintu are hoping to meet up with indigenous Maoris on the banks of South Island’s Rakaai River later this week and perform a ceremonial dance-the “nur chonas winyupus,” or “middle water salmon dance”-that has not been performed in 60 years. They also hope to get permission to take some chinook eggs home with them to restock the lower McCloud.

Now, while I won’t win any awards for ceremonial dancing, I do have some experience with public displays of atonement, and so can offer the Winneman Wintu a few suggestions.

1) Get right to the point. Say what you’re apologizing for right off the bat: “Dear chinook salmon, we’re sorry for allowing the construction of the Shasta Dam. We know how much that sucked for you.”

2) Take responsibility: “Sure, we’re a small, and dwindling tribe. And far from wealthy-we would have shipped this huge-ass drum we’re carrying, but FedEx wanted $600 bucks for it. And the U.S. government’s been screwing us over since 1852, when they refused to give us a measly 35-acre reservation along the McCloud. But, really, it’s our fault the dam was built. We should have fought as hard as we did in 2004, when we stopped the expansion of the dam with a four-day war dance.”

3) Admit to maybe drinking and drugging too much back at the time of the infraction. It doesn’t have to be some heavy, ninth-step type deal. But, you know, everyone’s worn a lampshade on their head at some point. I know how you guys do in California.

4) Employ a wistful, gauzy tone and lean heavily on easy-to-relate-to nostalgia. And be open with your emotions to the point of sappiness. Cheap tricks, sure. But everybody goes for that Wonder Years crap, even salmon.

5) Work in as many cultural references as you can. Rock songs, sitcoms, era-specific fashion trends. For the same reason.

6) Don’t be too proud to beg: “Please come home, our darling chinook. We miss you. We need you.” Also-and don’t get me wrong, the traditional garb is fine, with the beads and the tassels and the eagle feathers-but remember, you’re putting on a show! Don’t be too proud to wear a shiny pink tuxedo jacket and a polka-dot scarf. And a little eye-shadow never hurt.