mythago performs a blog dance for your amusement

If I never see 2009 again, it’ll be too soon.

He writes some pretty good mysteries, sure, but the man is the Ernest Hemingway of Westerns.

I’m really too tired to go around punching people in the mouth today. So: if you find yourself tempted to post one of the following things to the Internet, or God forbid saying one of them sincerely in conversation, would you kindly punch yourself in the mouth? Thanks.

• “IANAL, but….”
• Anything describing how when you were a kid, [commonly accepted safety requirement] either didn’t exist or wasn’t used, and WE all turned out fine.
• Pretty much any sentence ending in “….and WE all turned out fine.”
• Support of tort-reform measures, unless you are a defense attorney or in some capacity employed by the Chamber of Commerce, PHRMA or the Republican Party, because at least then you’re getting paid for it.
• Any argument suggesting that matters of taste are actually matters of absolute truth. (“How can you not like strawberry ice cream? Strawberry ice cream is yummy!”)
• Statements about “religion” which make clear that you think “religion” is a synonym for “those annoying fundamentalist Christians who I had to deal with in the small town I grew up in”.
• A belief that any sexually explicit material, behavior or conversation is perfectly reasonable to have, display or wave around anywhere, anytime, because The Human Body Is Beautiful And Sex Is Natural. If you apply this standard to behavior that normal people would agree is sexual harassment, punch yourself in the mouth twice.
• Huffily stomping out of a discussion with a promise never to return. Yeah, that ever happens on the Internet.

I’m sure there’s more but your knuckles are probably split and bleeding as it is. We can pick up where we left off tomorrow.

Because Obama is going to indoctrinate America’s schoolchildren with the socialist, Marx-hugging message that they should stay in school, work hard and take responsibility for their learning!

And I absolutely want people who are stupid enough to believe that to keep their kids out of school that day. For every Wingnut, Jr. who doesn’t have the “work hard and do well” message reinforced, and who’s taught that education is a Commie plot, my kids have that much more of an edge. Rock on, wingnuts!

We’ve been thinking about replacing the 15-year-old Lesbaru wagon with a more commuting-friendly car and, as it’s about time for me to have my midlife crisis, I have decided that what we need is something more like the car our neighbors are selling:

1957 Chevrolet 210

Samwise is baffled, probably because he grew up in the wrong part of Michigan and thinks we should get, I don’t know, a modern newish car with good gas mileage and crumple zones and that. He’s being a total dick about this. I mean, I’d settle for an Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight or for a classic Cadillac!

Wondermark will have been prescient.

In which Reality factors

I cannot describe the horror of this flashmob video that the Queen sent me, and yet I must — IÄ! IÄ!

Amanda already said quite a bit of what I was thinking about the stupidity of Michael Pollan’s recent article in the New York Times Magazine, though her main point is that if you’re writing for the NYT, you need to be fashionably ‘postfeminist’. That’s the nice version. Myself, I throw in a dash of cynicism that, having written a couple of books and needing a follow-up quick, Pollan has fallen back on the old back-in-my-day, world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket that is just so much more salable when it’s about the loss of June Cleaver’s home cooking.

Pollan’s column is a sad example of a very unpleasant strain of Slow Food thinking; the ideal cook is a boho Trustafarian with unlimited money and time for meal preparation, and to the extent that the average woman cooking for her family doesn’t fit that mold, it’s a personal failing on her part.

Mollie Katzen pointed out some of the dangers of this thinking in a comment about her original Moosewood Cookbook: everybody she knew was an artsy slacker or a grad student, who could easily adjust their schedules to drift in and out of the kitchen all day long if they had too.  The Slow Food movement is notorious for this kind of thinking, which you can understand in a grad student but is pathetic in a grown adult who can afford to buy hand-nurtured organic locally-grown zucchini blossoms.

And Pollan’s column combines this with a gobsmacking, unbelievably stupid paen to the fantasy that our grandmothers were the original Slow Food pioneers.  Yes, my grandmother raised, killed and butchered chickens. That’s because she was poor, and it was cheaper to feed them on scraps and garden bugs rather than buy them at the butcher’s, not because she cherished the flavor of organic, hand-reared poultry. She certainly used pre-prepared foods and canned things whenever she could, as this was the era of the Modern Kitchen and manufacturers who printed tons of recipes using their products. As grolby pointed out in the comments at Pandagon:

From-scratch cooking had long since been seriously encroached upon by the processed food industry by the time Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique. Which is to say that, by his definition, many people were already not cooking, and so laying any responsibility at the feet of feminism is historically incorrect and irresponsible.

I’m being a little unfair, in that there really is a segment of the Slow Food movement that wants healthy, delicious, sustainable food to be available to everyone, not just those who can afford to spend $10 on a tomato or who can spend six hours making dinner because the nanny and housekeeper are taking care of everything else. Pollan doesn’t appear to be part of that crowd. But then, they’re not the ones getting checks from the NYT.

Scalzi’s thread about what you need to give up to write (spoiler: screwing around watching TV and stuff all the time) got invaded by someone who is either a total emokid or a troll indistinguishable from one, blathering about how one must Suffer in order to create Art.

Naturally we all made like he was a piñata, but in retrospect, perhaps I was too hasty.  I woke up at about 2 a.m. today to discover that I have totally jacked my neck and my left arm from the shoulder to the elbow*, so with the help of a lot of ibuprofen I can manage to do things that don’t require me to raise my arms or carry anything over a couple of pounds in my left hand. In other words, I’m in fine shape to sit propped up in bed with a laptop and type. This means I am actually getting a little writing done, when the painkillers are working.

So, suffering = Art. When do I get my six-figure advance?

*No, I have no idea how I did this. No, it didn’t keep the kitten from purring directly into my ear like a buzzsaw and demanding to be petted. At two in the morning.

I would have read it eventually since it’s by China Miéville, but since Bryan recommended it I moved it up the stack – even though I was a little concerned it would be even more baroque than The Iron Council.

Miéville, darn him and his talent, has written a police procedural, set in a city that lies alongside another city. Beszel and Ul Qoma are interlinked in places, sometimes even overlap, but they are separate nations – calls between them are mentioned as “international calls” – and the separation is enforced by Breach. Crossing over, or even perceiving, the “topolganger” city next door invites terrible punishment, and the citizens of both cities have developed an entire, almost subconscious culture of mannerisms, dress, colors and styles to tip the other off to “unsee” or “unhear” what is going on next door.

And he does this while hitting on many of the familiar tropes of police procedurals: a body found in a park, a police inspector pushing an investigation past mysterious and sudden bureacratic resistance, traveling to another country to team up with his foreign counterpart, and even a (rather pulse-pounding, actually) chase scene – which are all different, and fresh, because of the way they intersect with the separate doppelcities.

Highly recommended.