“Canadian folk and roots music singer Kate McGarrigle, best known for her work with her sister, Anna, as the McGarrigle Sisters, has died at age 63.” McGarrigle, mother of musicians Rufus and Martha Wainwright, succumbed to a rare form of cancer. The clip above, an animated version of “The Log Driver’s Waltz,” is something like a second Canadian national anthem.

There are actually maybe sorta-good reasons for prenatal sex selection, apart from crazed first-world selfishness and a passing interest in eugenics. There are, in fact, reasons to avoid having a girl-child as wide-ranging as things like “Miley Cyrus” and “institutionalized sexism” (note to self: are those same thing? Do some research later!) but really the greatest reason is American Girl, the tween-oriented “historical” doll makers (and now movie creators), whose dolls have backstories ranging randomly from the American Revolution to the swingin’ 70 (this includes Addy Walker, fugitive slave girl in 1864!). Obviously, American Girl is designed to sneak into girls’ minds like a corporate tribble, compelling them to plead for ever-larger, increasingly expensive products. Hence the new “Lanie’s Camper,” which weighs 43 pounds, requires intense adult assembly, retails for $295 and is only suited for those giant houses in the suburbs which are big enough to contain a playroom and also are too expensive to heat, so that said tween will be playing with the dollhouse-camper whilst clad in sweaters and two pairs of leggings. Someday there’ll be a late-00s era historical doll about girls who played with historical dolls.

It’s Science, but it’s busy ironing right now: “A new study from the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender and Research at Stanford University has found that female scientists do 54 percent of their core household tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry-about twice as much as their male counterparts.” Larry Summers was unavailable for comment.

The FDA is warning that Alli-GlaxoSmithKline’s shit-yourself-thin weight loss drug-is being sold on the Internet in a counterfeit form, which contains “a different active ingredient that could react badly with other medications.” Signs that you might have the fake version of Alli include different cardboard packaging, slightly taller bottles, and the fact that you are shitting yourself less.

In the wake of the Golden Globes, the Internet has asked: “Explain to me the hotness of this guy in 6 sentences. I do not doubt his attractiveness. But the moisture ratio of lady flowers on the internet about this guy are reaching Draper proportions. THIS INTRIGUES me enough to ask the question but not enough to watch True Blood.” God, six sentences? Okay.

The sexual thing people have for Stephen Moyer (fiance of True Blood co-star Anna Paquin) is disturbing and two-fold. The lesser component of it has to do with himself (as opposed to his character): he is a grown-up, 40-year-old, sweary, craggy East End lad, with a checkered English theater past (RSC, National Theatre of Wales, etc.) and clearly the owner of a high tolerance for alcohol and late nights (as well, he has the allure of a man with children from a former relationship, which is a very particular and niche kind of sexual charisma to a certain kind of (needy) person). What’s more important to his current (read: on-the-Internet) allure is actually more disturbing: it’s that his character is continually smolderingly angry and resentful, constantly unavailable in times of crisis and yet also eternally courtly-Southern and dignified and retrograde, feeding the slightly sick late-antebellum South fantasies that for misshapen reasons give some other kinds of ladies the sex-frisson. He matches up, actually, to all sorts of sexual devotion fantasies: he brutally kills everyone that threatens his love interest, for one thing; he stands up to the insanely regimental vampire society that also threatens his love interest; he also retains an inherent aura of sexual threat as he could accidentally snap his love interest’s neck at any moment. And the Draper reference is, yes, quite apt: he is broody, secretive, just approaching the far side of appropriate age for young women, and as well he’s remote, not at all prone to oversharing-and these behaviors conspire to create a constant and juvenile hysteria of narrative relationship drama, the kind of drama that inflames the sort of diary-keeping young person who think that love is a Victorian battle of all-out devotion, suicidal ideation and hyperactive, engineered passion (as opposed to, you know, constancy, respect and lack of drama). In short, he would never use Twitter, which is all anyone wants in a man.

“I love New York, I love the smell of New York, I love the city of New York, I love the subway — I take the subway. But I am going to focus on things that voters in this restaurant and those across the city and state care about.”
-Attention-junkie Harold Ford continues his media blitz at the International House of Pancakes on W. 135th St. This interview with the Daily News was “granted under the condition that the questions be limited to his rationale for running, and not issues.” [Via]

1990 was twenty years ago! Talking Heads’ Remain in Light is thirty years old! Feel ancient yet? No? Try this.

“So far, violence has been scattered, with the security situation over all fairly calm,” reports the Times team from Haiti last night, noting also that people are fleeing to the countryside left and right. But never by boat! Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Christopher O’Neil tells the paper that “anyone caught leaving the island and heading toward Florida would be returned to Haiti.” But what if they are, you know, heading towards Jamaica, or Cuba? Or East Caicos! Or, even, you know, the other way-towards Puerto Rico? And: “Haiti’s ambassador in Washington, Raymond Joseph, recorded a message in Creole to his countrymen, urging them not to leave. ‘If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case.’” Sorry, everyone. It’s pretty much just you guys and Anderson Cooper now.

“The Democrats are a clapped out, gut-free lobbyist machine. The Republicans are insane. The system is therefore paralyzed beyond repair.” That’s Andrew Sullivan, who has been right more often than many pundits in the Obama era, and also more patient and optimistic-ending many of his posts with the sign-off, “Know hope.” So it’s hard not to feel despair when, in the face of the Democrats’ stupid looming loss in today’s special senatorial election in Massachusetts, a loss he believes will leave the health bill “dead,” he writes

If America cannot grapple with its deep and real problems after electing a new president with two majorities, then America’s problems are too great for Americans to tackle. And so one suspects that this is a profound moment in the now accelerating decline of this country.

Please let him be wrong. It’s already so hard to get up every morning. For a slightly brighter outlook, you can check out the essay about the prospects of America’s future written by Sullivan’s Atlantic colleague James Fallows. It’s good. But it’s very long and dry, so here’s pretty much how it ends: “Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair,” Fallows writes. But, “Our only sane choice is to muddle through.”

Sigh.

America has been strong because, despite its flawed system, people built toward the future in the 1840s, and the 1930s, and the 1950s. During just the time when Frederick Law Olmsted designed Central Park, when Theodore Roosevelt set aside land for the National Parks, when Dwight Eisenhower created the Pentagon research agency that ultimately gave rise to the Internet, the American system seemed broken too. They worked within its flaws and limits, which made all the difference. That is the bravest and best choice for us now.

Okay then. Hey, at least the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam is back! I mean, that’s gotta be something, right?

This is some bullshit right here: New York State is gonna slap another dollar of taxes on cigarettes, bringing the average price of a pack up to $217. What the FUCK? This is ALL I HAVE LEFT TO ME. If anything is gonna somehow turn me Republican, this might be it. You soda drinkers are gonna take a hit, too, but let’s focus on the important issue here: The state of New York is taking away all my fun. Good lord, it’s like they don’t want me to smoke or something. [Via]