Country music legend Carl Smith, who had 58 consecutive Billboard Top 40 hits, has died at the age of 82. I’m particularly fond of “Let Old Mother Nature Have Her Way”-you can almost hear the leering-but the whole catalog is very solid.

Dear Proprietors of ThePublicApology.com,

I hope you’re not working too hard, and that the huge amount of money you’re undoubtedly making off your Google AdWords™ isn’t weighing down your pockets too much. I’d hate to think I’ve made the commute to your palatial offices in any way less pleasant. Perhaps your limousine is equipped with a treasure chest?

It was way back in October, 2009, when you secured your domain name and began offering users a cheap and easy way to absolve their guilt. As you say, “Everybody’s sorry about something. What do you need to apologize for?” So true!

It’s nice that you let your users post their apologies anonymously. In fact, I see that you insist upon it. I imagine that’s for legal reasons? That’s cool. Everything is always so much easier when we do it anonymously. And I’m sure this policy has no effect on the level of truthfulness to which the writers aspire. I’m confident that none of the more than 50 apologies available to read right now were written by the ThePublicApology.com staff in an effort to drum up more business.

For example, this one, from “The woman in the red top and black satin pants,” to:

The man in Rudin’s Restaurant at the back table to the left on October 24:
I was the woman whose son, on the way to the restroom, swung that toy in the air, accidentally caught your hairpiece with it, and knocked it into your soup. I am so sorry! I do hope the lady with you was your wife or at least a long-time friend and not a date you were trying to impress. (She certainly seemed to be having trouble stifling a serious case of the giggles.)

I’m sure that is a true story!

Or this beauty, from “N.G.” to:

Tawnelle:
I apologize for sending you the gift of cosmetics for black women. Not having met you (except by e-mail) until last night, I assumed from your name that you were African-American. You will admit your name sounds rather like those of many Black women. I tried to select a suitable and thoughtful gift. Boy, did I goof! But I hope you won’t hold it against me. Embarrassedly…

Boy, that would be embarrassing, wouldn’t it? Tawnelle must have been really mad! Who would want to be mistaken for being black?!

Well, it’s clear that you are providing a valuable service to the community. You are definitely to be commended. I sure hope your business endeavor hasn’t become a pain-in-the-neck job already, or earned you more money than you know what to do with.

Oh. I see you have an “I expect an apology” feature at your website, too. Maybe someone will use that.

Dave

Let me preface this by saying I don’t have any emotional attachments to Macy’s stores. I have never seen the parade and neither of my parents have ever taken me there for magical memory making, et cetera. All I know is that the department store is in a neighborhood of Manhattan that feels like punishment and their clothes aren’t worth the tourist viruses you have to wade through to get at them because Macy’s is also near that one SUPERWalMart Victoria’s Secret where there are many people who like to wear things from the Pink collection. In real life. Without dying laughing. You’ll identify them by their see-through bra straps.

Anyway, now Macy’s is doing something that I think is just a damn good idea. They’re holding a casting call for new designers. They’re letting n00bs swan into their doors, full-on PRETENDING that they didn’t think Macy’s was “played” and their swishy bottlejob Leigh Lezark/Olivier Theyskens hairdos TOTALLY love INC International Concepts and Lucky jeans and want to be down with them really bad.

I think it’s clever of Macy’s to spin this exactly this way (instead of OHGAWD FUGGOMAYDAY!) and if their buyers are on-point about the new vanguard I may get properly excited.

Sure, this open-source fashion jam has been done before. TopShop stays fishing for new ideas in a similar manner in highly cunning and successful (and FINE OK, sometimes weirdsies) ways but there is a Red Lobstery stodginess about Macy’s that I truly hope this effort will help mitigate.

I also hope really talented fashiony awesomes are as nimble of the mind as they are in outsourced sewing labor because the application is maybe totally scary.

If Martin Luther King Were Alive Today A Lot Of People Would Have To Ascribe Their Own Prejudices To Someone Else

Today the nation celebrates the birthday of one of its greatest spiritual leaders, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a time for somber reflection, a time to examine how far we’ve come and how much we still need to do, and it is a time, of course, to speculate on what a man who died at the tender age of 39 would support or disagree with some forty years later. Would he approve of President Obama’s leadership thus far? Would he be in favor of charter schools? It is obviously impossible to know, so we might as well suggest that we do without any degree of doubt. So let me just put it out there: If Dr. King were alive today we can be completely certain of one thing: He would ABSOLUTELY endorse the message behind “Pants On The Ground.” Also “Jersey Shore.” Of this we can be sure.

[Photo: Joe Duty]
“This is a weird little critter. This is not a coyote. This is not a dog.”
-Wise County, TX, resident Tony Potter discusses the animal carcass he discovered last week at a local golf course. Some suggest that this Metroplex Monster is a chupacabra, a legendary cryptid which stalks the American Southwest. Sure! I mean, why not? CHUPACABRA DISCOVERED, PEOPLE! MUST CREDIT THE AWL.COM, and then if you feel like it, credit the actual organization that discovered it in the first place. Whatever you’re into, you know? But we’ll be happy to take the link.

Matthew Gallaway: You have a very lovely and unusual green plant on your desk — can you tell me what kind it is?
Jessica Picone: It is a ZZ plant! Zamioculcas zamiifolia. [Also called ‘Zanzibar Gem.’]
Matthew: How long have you had it?
Jessica: Since July, I believe.
Matthew: It looks very healthy-does it get any natural light?
Jessica: No! This beauty has thrived in the complete absence of natural light. It lives in my cubicle.

Matthew: Excellent — and how often do you water it?
Jessica: A very little bit of water, just enough to moisten the soil, every other week.
Matthew: That sounds very sensible — I’ve found that overwatering is often a problem for indoor plant owners.
Jessica: I agree. I always begin with little water, within reason, and increase if the plant seems wilty and thirsty.

Matthew: I seem to remember you having a bit of a bug infestation a few months ago-is that cured? Or I should say, your plant?
Jessica: Ha, thanks for clearing that up! One day I was gazing at the ZZ and noticed that there was some movement going on. Many itty white bugs. I washed the leaves with soapy water every day for a few days, and the bugs disappeared.
Matthew: So it’s completely cured?
Jessica: Completely.

Matthew: Perfect. Speaking of gazing, I noticed that you keep a picture of a garden on your computer. Can you tell me about that?
Jessica: Ah yes. It is a little bit of inspiration. That garden is a dream. It is in Marin County, and has a view of the SF bay. There are stone paths, spots to read, and Japanese maples (one of my favorites). You can see the hills across the bay. The picture was taken in the Spring-I often wonder how it looks during the other seasons.
Matthew: Did you visit it in the spring as well?
Jessica: I have never visited! It is a private garden-I swiped the picture from a magazine and stuck in on my computer.
Matthew: Aha! So it’s purely inspiration!
Jessica: Yes, yes. It is a part of my little inspiration board.
Matthew: Tell me about the quotes?
Jessica: There are two right now. One is a reminder to be gracious, grateful, and generous with my spirit. I heard it somewhere and it stuck with me. The other is from Pema Chodron. She talks about the heart-and declares that an open heart has no limits. There is space.
Matthew: Would you say that your own philosophy about life is dictated in any way by your understanding of plants? I’m talking about more of a personal level than broadly ecological.
Jessica: Well-my plants have taught me be open to the unexpected. You just never know what they are going to do, and how they are going to react to things. One of my first herbs was a flowering lavender. It was in a small pot, and I moved it two times into vastly different light and temperature situations. The plant thrived! It grew and grew, I dried lots of lavender for tea and things. Then, I had to move again, and left it with a friend who is great with plants. And it died. She tried everything.
Matthew: Oh! That’s very sad…
Jessica: It was so sad. She even brought it to a few plant experts. I felt terrible, and she felt terrible. But she is the one who bought me the ZZ. And it is a real gift to have such a spunky plant in my windowless cubicle!
Matthew: Tell me this: how important is it for you that a potential relationship partner be good with plants?
Jessica: Hmm… it is important that my potential relationship partner appreciate plants, and accompany me on lots of walks through gardens while I exclaim things like, “Look at those amazing *insert name of plant*!”

Matthew: I like that! Let’s finish with the poinsettia, which I believe is a December addition to your space?
Jessica: Yes. The poinsettia was meant as a gift, but it never made it to its final destination….
Matthew: Meaning you were going to give it someone?
Jessica: Well, yes. But I just couldn’t part with it. That person got some tea and chocolate instead. I am going to try to keep the poinsettia alive all year. Wish me luck.
Matthew: Bonne chance! Do you have any experience with poinsettias? I think they are difficult?
Jessica: They are very difficult and delicate. When I was growing up, every year my grandmother would take me to buy a poinsettia. I would always choose the most scrawny one, because I was worried that it would not be bought for Christmas.
Matthew: A ‘Charlie Brown’ poinsettia!

Jessica: Exactly! Then, when I was in high school and college, I worked at a garden center that sold poinsettias. They were kept in a big greenhouse. My favorite job was to stay in the greenhouse and care for them. It was so warm and quiet and peaceful! People would come in on Christmas Eve and buy 20 and 30 at a time as gifts. I was always sad to see them go!
Matthew: They were your children, in a way? Or at least your charges?
Jessica: Haha! I guess you could say that. I do get very attached.
Matthew: Well, I think it’s a beautiful image.
Jessica: It was a really beautiful time! That was a great job.
Matthew: In conclusion, do you have any advice for cubicle dwellers who might be interested in having a plant?
Jessica: Yes. Go for it! Try a ZZ, or if you have a window a jade or something of the sort. Every cubicle/office should have a plant-they add so much good energy!

Jessica Picone is an assistant editor at ____. She loves plants and dreams of one day having her own garden. Matthew Gallaway is a writer who lives in Washington Heights. His first novel, ‘The Metropolis Case,’ will be published in 2010 by Crown.

Nations with Public, Non-Military Disaster Relief Personnel in Haiti, Roughly in Order of Distance from Earthquake Epicenter

by Jackson West

Dominican Republic
Cuba
Jamaica
Costa Rica
El Salvador
Honduras
Nicaragua
Ecuador
Paraguay
Uruguay
Peru
Portugal
Spain
France2
Italy
Belgium
Netherlands
United Kingdom
Iceland
Germany
Poland
Sweden
Qatar
Turkey
Israel
Jordan
Georgia
Russia
Estonia
Iran
Taiwan
Japan
China

Footnotes: 1, 2.

I’m starting to get both angry and dispirited by any number of groups who are opposed in varying degrees to Barack Obama’s performance thus far as president. I’m not sure who’s the worst: The ignorant idealists who thought that the sheer fact of his election would somehow undo the practical and political obstructions that are a product of both the Constitution and 200-plus years of legislative and institutional evolution; the impatient electorate who expected massive problems that were decades in the making to be fixed within the space of a year; the forgetful masses who now affix blame to this administration for the tough choices it was forced to make simply to prevent things from becoming far worse; the cynical forces who know quite well whose fault the crisis was in the first place but who aren’t going to let any sense of shame or feeling of responsibility stop them from pretending that it was like this when they got there so it must be Obama’s fault. That said, this, in regards to tomorrow’s Senate election in Massachusetts, made me laugh, and I guess at this point laughter is going to have to do, since the alternative is so depressing.

Why are SO CUTE animal pictures and funny animal stories so popular on the Internet? Maybe because they help us cope with the terror of existence:

Pets sit mid-way between a global civil society and a global horror show…. [H]uman beings can’t all partake in a single rational discourse about the nature of scientific progress, but they can all laugh at a cat that plays the clarinet. I saw the film of Disgrace at the weekend, and if there’s one way that the film actually supplements the book, its with the constant canine imagery. I suspect that this is Coetzee’s point, that between the sexual animal violence of the wild and the judicial order of the city lies the intermediary of the pet dog, representing both our connection to nature, and our miniscule distance from it. A cat or a dog turns out to be the most comforting thing to look at, for beings that can’t work out if they’re animals or not.

Also, they are frigging adorable. [Via]

“Looters,” reported the Wall Street Journal yesterday from Port-au-Prince, “were scaling a crumpled building, apparently a grocery store, and throwing items to the assembled throng below.” That “looting” is traditionally construed to mean illegally obtaining goods for one’s own benefit-not for the benefit of a waiting crowd of the recently homeless-seems to have entirely escaped these reporters. The Journal, while chronicling this “violence” against property, does, however, offer one dissenting viewpoint: “Standing at the edge of the mob, 18-year-old Reginald Elacen suggested the police should be allowing the badly damaged stores to be emptied, and helping keep order. ‘We really don’t have a choice,’ he said, referring to the desperate needs of Haitians who lost everything in the quake. ‘If the police would help, it could be done without violence.’” What a wild idea. And? “Still, just a few blocks away on the road, a store owner was calmly overseeing an orderly emptying of his broken shop. He was using a kind of bucket-brigade of some 30 young men stretching over the store’s shattered roof, handing out goods can by can.” This article, incidentally, is headlined “Haiti Authorities Battle Looters.”

We turned to the Sunday edition of our Paper of Record as well, for desperately needed context and clarity. Sorting through the chaos and ruins of post-earthquake Haiti, the New York Times fronted an impressionistic dispatch reassuring its privileged readership that, yes, at long last, looting was truly under way on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

Throughout the past week, of course, the U.S. media has seized upon any faint hearsay inkling of post-disaster mayhem in the Caribbean nation with the unseemly gusto that Sandy Dennis showcased as she hooted for “More violence!” in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And Times correspondents Simon Romero and Marc Lacey joined the chorus, after a rushed disclaimer to the effect that, what with the overarching “desperation, the lack of food and water as well as the absence of law and order” in the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, “it was all the more remarkable that a spirit of cooperation and fortitude prevailed nearly everywhere else” outside the capital city.

And with that out of the way-on to the bloodsport! Here, for instance, is a group of Haitian police officers dispersing a crowd of looters on the Boulevard Dessalines, many of whom “wore bandanas over their faces, shielding their identities from the policemen and their noses from the smell of rotting corpses.” Nearby, Romero and Lacey, or their stringers, happened upon a man outside a general store who “emerged wild-eyed with a pair of shoes still in their box,” who announced-”with a smile,” mind you-that “there is good pillaging here.” They also goose up the mood of general alarm by noting this footwear-themed fiendishness occurred “a few blocks away from the Civil Prison, which had collapsed in the quake, freeing all the inmates who were not killed.” “No one could answer,” they disclaim with near-palpable regret, whether a marauding group of machete-wielding looters “were among the dozens who escaped” the facility (because of course in any quake recovery effort, the first thing you do is issue machetes to newly liberated inmates).

But no matter; a digressive speculation is all that’s needed to plant the seed of social panic.

That, and quotes from understandably jumpy survivors and aid workers. One anonymous World Food official actually notes that “for the moment, the population is rather quiet,” but-wait for it-”we are seeing the first signs of violence and looting.” The dispatch alights, confusingly enough, on a vigilante mob besetting a looter detained by police, stripping and battering him and finally setting him on fire-a heinous outbreak of violence, to be sure, but one that doesn’t clearly bespeak an unruly contempt for property in the wake of a devastating natural disaster. And even the looting outbreaks the Times duo can confirm point up something shy of insatiable bling-lust; outside Port-au-Prince stores and warehouses, they note, crowds fought over “rolls of fabric, saucepans, and other items,” bespeaking either the widespread desperation of an already poor population looking to meet basic needs as international aid starts to trickle in, or else a cohort of street gangs and violent escaped prisoners with a most inapposite Martha Stewart fixation.

It is, of course, an article of faith in Timesland, and the mediasphere at large, that reckless disturbance of the social peace is the role scripted for poor people in the wake of a disaster-especially those who happen to be darker complexioned, and thereby conveniently saddled with all the coded insinuations that typically accompany “culture of poverty” arguments.

In an exceptionally cloddish column on Thursday, Times opinion hand David Brooks rushed to just such an argument. He maintained that regardless of any aid efforts, Haiti will remain mired in destructive want, thanks to “a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.”

There is also, of course, a couple of centuries worth of deliberate economic isolation, fomented chiefly by the diplomatic seers in these United States, who for all sorts of embarrassing reasons did not want the Western hemisphere’s second major republic to be founded and led by former slaves. There’s also a history of brutal recourse to political violence to shore up the rule of unpopular authoritarian regimes in the island nation-furnishing in the process additional rationales for US interventions that have rarely erred on the side of an expanded Haitian democracy. Those are just a couple among scores of reasons that the culture-first maunderings of the Brooks crowd-who at the end of the day are little more than less forthright and better credentialed Pat Robertsons-can’t withstand more than a moment’s critical scrutiny.

You’d like to think that the armada of American correspondents now on the ground in Port-au-Prince could be more mindful of such enormous Monroe-Doctrine blindspots as they file their breathless “Is-it-violent-yet?” dispatches. But that all looks like drearily wonky fare, I guess, next to the Mad-Lib style insinuation that a machete-swinging marauder might possibly be an escaped convict.

And the actual social conditions of Haiti over the last century or so can’t compare with the goggle-eyed observation-collected inside the Times’ A section by the same Lacy and Romero team-that the earthquake amazingly enough, afforded no special protection to the thin stratum of Haiti’s wealthy folk. “Earthquakes do not respect social customs,” they announced in the sort of reporterly dumbfoundment that has long been the Times’ calling card on matters of social class. “They do not coddle the rich.”

Digging deeper, they marvel that “the unsettling feeling of seeing one’s home collapse, no matter the size, affected Haitians of all social strata…. Destruction… was on display up and down exclusive residential areas like Pacot, near the old center, and Pétionville, in the hills above the city. Mansions were flattened and monied families slept in the street in front of their destroyed residences, clinging to their possessions.”

That’s right. The devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755 prompted a widespread spiritual crisis among the philosophes of Europe, causing them to question how such random devastation could be squared with the existence of a compassionate personal God; our own makers of respectable opinion are shaken to their existential core, evidently, by the reflection that there are some calamities that can even extend to mansions and monied families.

Curiously enough, Lacy and Romero are able to buttonhole one departing Haitian businessman named Harold Marzouka on the dread specter of popular looting. Marzouka, who owns a spaghetti factory in Port-au-Prince, was about to board a charter flight to Miami, so is clearly none too sanguine about short-term prospects for social peace. But unlike the ideal-type Times reader, he’s pretty unexcited about the prospect of damage to his own property. Telling our correspondents that he fully expects one of his food warehouses to be looted in the days ahead, he says, “I understand it and I don’t mind.”

It would be useful to know whether that outlook sprang from a weary fatalism about Haiti’s socioeconomic plight, or a simple recognition that people without any other resources tend to do what they need to in order to keep eating. We’ll never know, though-the guy, after all, was dealing with a media culture where responsibility is not often internalized.

Chris Lehmann is currently out of the house, looting some free Wifi.