Ōoku takes place in an alternate-history Japan where a plague that affects only men has wiped out a large chunk of the male population, so that the ratio of females to males is something like 4:1. Partly out of sheer numbers and partly to protect men (for example, from injury or accidental death) most jobs are done by women, including holding political position. The actual Ōoku of the title is the shogun’s harem, the shogun, of course, being a woman; and in a world where most women will never marry and have children by paying men to impregnate them, a harem is perhaps the ultimate “conspicuous consumption” and expression of the shogun’s power.

Really one of the most interesting things I’ve read in a while.

• “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.

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!

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!

In which Reality factors

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.

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.