Haiti Earthquake

If you’re looking for coverage of the earthquake that hit Haiti yesterday, this seems like fairly good source.

by Regina Small

At the end of her New Yorker piece on the Jersey Shore phenomenon, Nancy Franklin (basically) concludes: “this reality television show is kind of trashy!” Yes, Nancy Franklin, it is trashy. It is the latest in a long line of reality series designed to showcase some of the worst-and most entertaining-aspects of human nature. And Franklin is the latest in a long line of critics and viewers to notice that these Jersey Shore people are kind of weird with their questionable aesthetic choices and their odd vernacular and also, they drink and go out dancing and occasionally mack on each other!

Unfortunately, Franklin’s piece, though it epitomizes the collective horror Jersey Shore has provoked, fails to go beyond stating the obvious and, worse, fails to articulate why Jersey Shore is so much more of an assault on our senses than a show like The Hills or Rock of Love (which, in its third season, featured one contestant drinking a shot out of another woman’s vagina). I’ve begun to wonder how much of the lingering disgust cultural critics cough up on the page is not an objection to the violence-which has become a staple in a show that has so far aired only six episodes-but an aversion to this particular ethnic subculture.

I mean, sure, even I, as an Italian lady, have no interest in seeing the inside of a tanning bed or “battling” or dissertating endlessly on the correlation between my Italianness and my awesomeness, but once you’ve accepted the Jersey Shore reality, how long can you keep harping on how these people are so astonishing (and sometimes adorable!) with their “different” conception of the world?

The Jersey Shore cast members define themselves by their ethnicity, participating in a self-validating subculture; people who reject that subculture take pleasure, in Franklin’s (accurate) view, in recognizing how foreign that subculture is to them. Is one act of self-definition less annoyingly superior than the other? You don’t tan, have no interest in clubbing and working out and getting your nails (silk wraps or acrylics!) black-French manicured? You might not belong in the Jersey Shore world. You might, if you are a young New Yorker who keeps her nails short and thinks about Serious Things and blogs about New Yorker articles, be as much of a curiosity to these people as they are to you. We (I) laugh at bon mots like “You don’t even look Italian!” (the insult that Sammi “Sweetheart” flings at the blonde blue-eyed “grenade,” who must have a Ph.D in cockblocking) but, ridiculous as it is, that assessment betrays a value system: Skinny blonde pale WASP princesses are deemed not attractive when measured by the JS aesthetic. And this seems curious and laughable to us.

“You don’t even look Italian!” is crazy funny but is the underlying judgment (dark hair/olive skin/Italian-looking = pretty; the inverse = not pretty) any worse than any other standard of beauty? It’s an alternative perspective, one that I suspect is so funny partly because it is so unfamiliar.

Franklin herself calls Snooki “very peculiar” but: is she? Snooki is a 22-year-old who likes to drink, party and hook up. She is obviously deeply insecure (no surprise: she is a pudgy girl who is all of 4’9) and she copes with that insecurity by acting out, doing flips and cartwheels on the dancefloor-probably so people will say “who is that crazy girl?” instead of saying “who is that midget?” or “who’s the fat chick?” or ignoring her entirely. So, Nancy Franklin has never met a 22-year-old who drinks, gets sloppy, is down to fuck and wants to be the center of attention because she is plagued by insecurity. I question whether Nancy Franklin has met any 22-year-olds at all.

But of course Franklin means Snooki is peculiar because she is orange, she likes “Guido juiceheads” and has preferences that are hilariously invalid because they just aren’t acceptable to Franklin. MTV has succeeded, Franklin says, in making “us feel as though we were anthropologists secretly observing a new tribe through a break in the trees,” except “anthropological study” is just code for “watching unfamiliar practices, which are therefore Strange.” And the New Yorker illustration helpfully nails this point by featuring the cast behind zoo-exhibit glass. Which would be totally cool! If this were the 19th century. But right now, it feels kind of like an icky fetishization of difference to which a WASP-y Olympic-level douchetool like Spencer Pratt will never be subject.

But! Maybe Franklin will leave us with something more illuminating than “GROSS!” Here’s her final line, commenting on the skeezy Jacuzzi-as-seduction method:

As such, [the Jacuzzi] fits right in, being both of Italian-American descent and an embarrassing reality-show cliché.

This is fun and snappy, but is it noting correlation or establishing causation? Does it intend to do one and, in effect, do both? Let’s see: As such, [Nancy Franklin] fits right in [in intellectual circles], being both a reviewer for the New Yorker and possessing a very peculiar sense of cultural authority. Fair?

Regina Nigro is a writer and editor. She is Italian, embarrassing and clichéd.

Soon you will not even need to reach for the remote to change the channel on your TV! Which is great news except for that whole thing about how watching TV will KILL YOU DEAD.

SOMEONE ON THE TV WROTE AN OUTRAGED LETTER AND EVERYONE ON TWITTER IS TALKING ABOUT IT?

A team of researchers at Oxford University have declared that carrying extra fat around the hips, buttocks and thighs is healthy, protecting against heart and metabolic problems. As we know, fat around the stomach, producing the dreaded “apple shape” torso is bad. “It is shape that matters and where the fat gathers,” said lead researcher Dr. Konstantinos Manolopoulos, to the BBC. Hey, nice rhymes, bro.

Good advice from around the Internets: How to pitch to bloggers. What we could do to solve the MTA budget shortfall. Why you shouldn’t blame your employees in front of your other employees. Now you know!

You know how long it takes to make a pizza? Ten minutes, you lazy little thing. Plus two hours. Sort of.

1. Put a almost-a-tablespoon, or at least a teaspoon, of sugar and some honey and maybe a little molasses in a measuring cup with 3/4 cup of hot tap water. STIR.

2. Add two packets of dry yeast. Don’t stir. Let it get all foamy and gross, about 5 to 10 minutes.

3. Pour one cup of white flour and one cup of semolina flour onto the counter. WHICH YOU SHOULD HAVE WIPED DOWN before you did that, or else there’ll be garbage in your pizza.

4. It doesn’t have to be white and semolina. Just two cups of flour. Half wheat? Half white? All white? Whatever you like! You only have cake flour? Who gives a shit! Do you think in the middle ages when they made flour products they had time to care what kind of flour it was? No. They were just trying not to eat rats.

5. Add a bunch of salt to the flour. I use like slightly less salt than I do sugar. I use a lot of salt and sugar. This is what makes it taste good, and go fuck yourself, Mike Bloomberg.

6. Make your flour pile into a volcano-crater shape. Pour some of your yeasty mess into the CALDERA. That’s right. I said caldera. Mush it into the flour.

7. Continue until yeast-water is absorbed. Early on, add a couple tablespoons of olive oil too.

8. As with any dough? This should be pretty dry-firm. Not sticky. Not wet. You know. Doughy. ADD MORE FLOUR if you’re soggy.

9. Make it into a ball, cover it in olive oil and put it in a plastic or ceramic bowl. Put saran wrap over the top of the bowl and put it in either: A) The turned-off oven, if the house is cold, B) Somewhere toasty and not breezy or even C) in the sun. Particularly if you are in a hurry.

10. Let 90 minutes to 3 hours pass. When it is all puffy and blown up like a Nerf soccer ball, take the saran wrap off and punch it like it’s your ex’s face.

11. This will be enough dough for two medium-ish pizzas, or one huge one, or one really thick one, or whatever. (Heh.)

12. ONE STEP SAUCE: Chop some garlic, throw it in a saucepan with olive oil briefly, maybe an onion or something, then put in a can or so of whole peeled tomatoes or you know some REAL tomatoes from “outside,” mash those up as you stir for a while, put in some oregano and I usually put in a little red wine vinegar or something tart and some honey, and some salt, obvs, and sometimes a little lemon peel. Let this cook down to a smooth pasty sauce-like thing. Basically you can put ANYTHING in this. Just don’t let it be watery at the end.

13. MOST IMPORTANT PART. Turn your oven on to the CLEAN SETTING. If your oven is one of those that locks during this, find some way to psych it out. Self-cleaning ovens top out at around 900 degrees F, which is a little crazy. Try and get the oven to like, 600 degrees. As hot as you can get it.

13.5 This is my only concession to being a food bitch, because, honestly? A pizza stone really works. This should be in your oven getting hot. Don’t have one? That’s fine! You can use an upside-down cookie sheet, or any kind of tray-leave it in the oven, and you will throw the pizza on top of it when it’s time to cook. Worse comes to worse, you are going to want a tray at the bottom if you just have to throw your pizza on the rack, because, OMG, stuff will leak down. Just find something flat that you can put some flour on and let get hot.

14. Get out your trusty label-less wine bottle, or if you are very fancy, your rolling pin. Throw a TON of flour around. Plop down half the dough, or all the dough, or whatever. Roll it out to something like the size of a pizza. Square, round, misshapen, whatever.

15. Sauce it. Top it. Twerk it.

15.5. No seriously you can put anything on this.

16. Gather up your pizza and have someone open the blisteringly hot oven and then somehow you will throw it in there without losing all toppings. This can and may go horribly wrong! So what!

17. Cook for 6 to 10 minutes. IT WILL LOOK LIKE PIZZA WHEN IT IS DONE. IT COULD NOT BE MORE OBVIOUS, ARE YOU A MORON?

18. Removal is also very frightening. I do not have a “pizza peel” because I am not a total homo, NO OFFENSE, so I use like two spatulas and then toss the pizza from the oven to the nearby counter (burning myself slightly on the way) where it is devoured like a lost rabbit at a junkyard dog party.

“This year the amount of fish we have caught has been very good. We get about 150 kilograms to 200 and even 300 kilograms, depending on how much we fish. There were fish that had disappeared and have come back like the barracuda, oranda, red snapper and other types. We are very happy now that there are so many fish.”
-Kenyan fisherman Abdi Ali celebrates the ocean’s bounty. Fishermen in Kenya and Somalia are seeing record catches as illegal trawlers steer clear of the area out of fear of Somali pirates.

At the risk of inciting those whose antennae are always up for any perceived gender-based bias, I think we can pretty much all agree that chicks love them some crime stories. The continuing popularity of your “Law & Order: Extra Rape Edition” or pretty much any made-for-TV movie on Lifetime serves as testament to that fact, and if you’ve attempted to divert the attention of the fairer sex during one of these victim-porn orgies you’re MORE THAN AWARE of how involved these broads are with their shows, am I right, fellas? But why? Why are they so captivated by these terrifying depictions of events that are extremely unlikely to occur in their own lives when they could be doing something more productive or fulfilling, like ironing? Science has an answer!

According to researchers Amanda M. Vicary and R. Chris Fraley, the ladies are learning! Learning valuable life-saving information!

Our findings that women were drawn to stories that contained fitness-relevant information make sense in light of research that shows that women fear becoming the victim of a crime more so than do men (Allen, 2006; Mirrlees-Black et al., 1996). This sex difference in fear is intriguing because, in actuality, men are more likely than women to be the victim of a crime (Chilton & Jarvis, 1999). Many reasons have been suggested for why women experience more fear, including the fact that certain crimes, such as rape, do occur more frequently for women (Riger, Gordon, & LeBailly, 1978). Other researchers have suggested that the media are to blame in that unusual and rare crimes (which usually focus on female victims) are reported more often than other crimes (Ditton & Duffy, 1983). Regardless of the reasons behind women’s heightened fear of crime, the characteristics that make these books appealing to women are all highly relevant in terms of preventing or surviving a crime. For example, by understanding why an individual decides to kill, a woman can learn the warning signs to watch for in a jealous lover or stranger. By learning escape tips, women learn survival strategies they can use if actually kidnapped or held captive. In addition, the finding that women consider true crime books more appealing when the victims are female supports the notion that women may be attracted to these books because of the potential life-saving knowledge gained from reading them. If a woman, rather than a man, is killed, the motives and tactics are simply more relevant to women reading the story.

Despite the fact that women may enjoy reading these books because they learn survival tips and strategies, it is possible that reading these books may actually increase the very fear that drives women toward them in the first place. In other words, a vicious cycle may be occurring: A woman fears becoming the victim of a crime, so, consciously or unconsciously, she turns to true crime books in a possible effort to learn strategies and techniques to prevent becoming murdered. However, with each true crime book she reads, this woman learns about another murderer and his victims, thereby increasing her awareness and fear of crime. It is not possible to state with certainty from these studies whether or not this vicious cycle occurs, but we do know that women, compared to men, have a heightened fear of crime despite the fact that they are less likely to become a victim (Allen, 2006; Chilton & Jarvis, 1999) and that women are drawn to true crime books that contain information on how to prevent themselves from becoming the victim of such a crime.

See that, silly women? Learning IS dangerous! You are just scaring yourselves. Don’t you worry your pretty little head over it. So can I watch football now, please? Etc.

by Ian Retford

If you’re like most non-lawyers, you tend to ignore legal news unless it involves waterboarding, gays and/or fetuses. To be honest, I don’t blame you. The law is often boring, and the fact that all of your most socially numbing friends are lawyers isn’t helping things. But occasionally, something emanates from the crusty, jargon-filled world of old white people that, although not involving gays or proto-babies, kind of matters, and is worth knowing about. And that’s why we’re here. To take you around the legal globe, Len Berman style.

Our stop today? San Diego County, where 21-year-old Carl Bryan is driving, pantsless.

A somewhat insane Humbert Humbert-like driving tour has taken Bryan from his younger brother’s apartment in Ventura County, to his brother’s girlfriend’s place in Los Angeles, and finally, en route to his parents’ house in Coronado. Bryan’s first ticket of the morning, for speeding, is issued on Highway 405, between L.A. and San Diego.

Bryan’s second encounter with the police occurs a short time later, when Bryan is pulled over for driving without his seatbelt, which he apparently forgot to buckle after being pulled over the first time. Sad-sack Bryan more or less flips the fuck out, and while the officer is doing his thing, Bryan gets out of his car and begins, in varying combinations, crying, yelling, shouting nonsense, and, somewhat inexplicably, hitting his thighs.

This doesn’t sit well with the officer, who, from twenty or so feet away (and without warning), pulls the trigger on his taser gun, releasing a steel-barbed, aluminum-tipped dart that embeds itself into Bryan’s back and delivers a 1200 volt charge. Bryan falls face-forward and shatters four teeth. When his convulsions subside, Bryan is issued his second ticket of the day and arrested for resisting an officer.

So Bryan sues, claiming that it was not reasonable for the officer to deploy projectile voltage against a seemingly nutty-but ultimately harmless-pantsless dude who was pulled over for the most minor of traffic infractions. The trial court agreed, and the officer appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the court that hears federal appeals from most states west of the Rockies (i.e. everything but Utah).

You may know the Ninth Circuit as the kinda kooky court that gets reversed by the Supreme Court more or less constantly. Well, in this case, the Ninth Circuit got all reasonable [PDF link to the decision] and said, in this decision that came down while we were all on holiday between Christmas and New Year’s, that, no, you can’t shoot someone with a taser gun for failing to wear a seatbelt and acting a little schizo. (The court did not clear up the mystery of Bryan’s pantslessness, unfortunately.)

And why does this matter, apart from the fact that Mr. Bryan can now hand the officer the bill for his teeth-capping expenses?

Well, for one thing, the opinion sends a fairly unmistakable message to police officers: chill out with the tasers already! The new rule in the Ninth Circuit-which, as mentioned, covers basically the entire western United States-is that an officer cannot tase a suspect unless he or she is either a flight risk, a dangerous felon, or an immediate physical threat to the officer or bystanders. In other words, tasers are to be used only when reasonably needed, not when a suspect is simply acting a little weird, or getting a little mouthy.

More broadly, the court’s opinion is a relatively infrequent example of judicial willingness to hold a police officer personally responsible for wild overreaction. Typically, police officers face civil liability for truly malevolent conduct, but anything that can be apparently be characterized as simply boneheaded-say, brandishing a gun at a snowball fight, or arresting a professor in his own home for being surly, or shooting a guy 41 times because you mistake his wallet for a gun-is beyond the scope of judicial second-guessing.

In the Bryan case, though, the court never questioned the good faith of the officer, or his legitimate interest in calming Bryan the hell down and putting some pants on him-but nonetheless found that deference to the officer’s chosen method of law enforcement wasn’t warranted. Which is good news for those of us who have observed that an officer’s tactics may be less a product of cold, rational decision-making than the fact that he’s really pissed that you gave him the Heisman stiff-arm.

Ian Retford is the pseudonym of a lawyer in New York City.