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  • The Demise of “Cathy”
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Nytpicker pointed out a phenomenon I could never have imagined: Gender disparity in the obituaries published by the New York Times. The nytpicks quote obituaries editor Bill McDonald’s 2006 statement that because of the equality gap of the 40s, 50s, and 60s, the prominent people dying today are mostly white men. So they checked back 20 years to see if the disparity was even greater then:

Of 691 NYT obituaries published in 1990, only 92 of them were of women — almost exactly replicating the 2010 numbers.

So what’s going on? Are the world’s prominent women — the ones deserving of NYT obituaries — simply living forever? In the last two decades, has there been zero growth in the number of notable women who’ve died?

I can see both sides of this, but the numbers warrant some examination. Would it be morbid to admit I look forward to a more equal obituaries section in the future?

It’s news because it isn’t really news!

Roger Clemens was indicted for perjury last week, and I wish there were a more vibrant term for just how perjurious his perjury really was. Clemens has been accused of cheating and doping a lot of times and has denied it, fervently, in colorful terms and in a vaguely threatening way. Like if you said it to him, he’d tell you to F off, and did you wanna take it outside? Did you?

Well, no, Roger, I don’t, because I know you’re doped up and already one of the stupider public figures. On All Things Considered they re-aired some old tape of Clemens’ ridiculous denials and didn’t even have to write editorial material around it — like classic George W. Bush statements, they speak for themselves and require no embellishment. Clemens’ former teammate Andy Pettitte, who has long been a favorite player of mine for no real reason EVEN THOUGH he’s a Yankee, confessed his own drug use and made comments about Clemens’ as well. To this Clemens responded with the following soundbyte re-aired during All Things. I’d read it aloud for full effect:

CLEMENS: I think he misremembers the conversation that we had. Andy and I’s relationship was close enough to know that if I would have known that he had done HGH, which I now know, that he was knowingly knowing that I had taken HGH, we would’ve talked about the subject.

[NPR's Tom] GOLDMAN: Now, Robert, we should add that the indictment does not include charges against Roger Clemens for assaulting the English language.

[NPR's Robert] SIEGEL: Yeah, they could sentence someone to parsing that sentence.

Knowingly knowing that Clemens denied his doping for so long, I’m happy he’s in a heap of trouble.

Organizational psychologist Dr. J. Richard Hackman discusses conflict in PBS’s outstanding miniseries This Emotional Life. He laments that people wonder too often what life would be like if we could neutralize all conflicts:

Number one, not possible. Number two, it’d be a bad idea even if it were possible, because it is in the conflict that we really capture the difference of perspective that is the reason for having a group in the first place.

I find it strange and sad that society moves toward regularizing everyone — rather than valuing and helping people with strange, interesting tendencies or abilities, we cram them into a more standard form. The obvious downside is the collapsing of individuality. Beyond that, though, are the consequences of trying to be or simply seem normal and conventional.

A more extreme example of this is hoarding, which is experiencing a strange media heyday at the intersection of disaster-porn and home makeover shows. Salon recently ran an interview with hoarding expert and Smith professor Randy Frost. He put the problem in a way I’d never thought of:

When most of us look at an object like a bottle cap, we think, “This is useless,” but a hoarder sees the shape and the color and the texture and the form. All these details give it value. Hoarding may not be a deficiency at all — it may be a special gift or a special ability. The problem is being able to control it.

People often wonder aloud what may have happened to some of the great artists in history if their esoteric habits and sometimes destructive personalities were chemically regulated. More than that, who knows how many of our most productive mathematicians and scientists experienced mild forms of autism, how many philosophers experienced enlightenment through bouts of depression, and so forth.

There is no reason for people to suffer when we have ways to ease their pain, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. But I do think we can understand and help in moderation, while not unnecessarily squashing anyone’s “special gifts.”

The one-size-fits-all problem shows up in more benign ways that are arguably as offensive. On a new Style Network show called Tacky House, people nominate their loved ones for a makeover of a room the nominator simply can’t stand because of its poor design.

In the episode I watched, a husband nominated his wife of several years who had designed a room in their home around the Martha’s Vineyard locale where they met and fell in love. She filled the room with arrangements of silk roses, flower-upholstered furniture, and all manner of pastel pinks. “I thought you loved this room,” she mumbled sadly. “How am I supposed to watch football in here?” he said.

Yes, the room was overkill, but there was so much love coming from the wife and so little appreciation coming from the husband that it was uncomfortable to watch. The show’s host corrected the woman’s memory in hindsight (“Martha’s Vineyard is a beach, it’s not full of roses,” he’d say. “But I loved the gardens there,” she’d answer) and wedged a new image into the room.

It’s that time again. Time for the same old tired, nonsensical debate over swearing in the public eye . . .

OMG, SWEARING SHOWS NO VOCABULARY! SMART PEOPLE TOTALLY DON’T SWEAR! LANGUAGE IS DUMBER BECAUSE OF SWEARS!

. . . Brought out again by the New York Times in an article I desperately hope has an ironic title: Why Do Educated People Use Bad Words?

This debate is stupid, illogicked to say the least, and full of dweebs. Try to find an issue where there’s more overlap between conservative religious people and well-to-do liberals. At least people who object to swearing because it offends them religiously have some argumentative ground to stand on — they believe that poor language offends the deity or takes the deity’s name in vain. But to suggest that swearing is some shameful cesspool of the idiocracy is short-sighted and elitist.

Yes, I went there: Elitist. It is a word I use sparely because as a college-educated avid reader, student of language, and allaround nerd, I am vulnerable to it myself. But read the comments on the post, especially those with a high number of reader recommendations — they’re absurd. Of particular note are the comments stating explicitly that smart people do not swear. I’m sorry, internet stranger, have you met any of the smartest people I know? Because almost all of them swear regularly and, more importantly, that has nothing to do with anything. Equating intelligence with lack of swearing opens up a giant logical gap.

Don’t mistake my message here: To not swear is fine also. In the last six months or so I made a decision to clean up my language, if only to increase the impact when I do pull out a swear to make a point. There’s no way anyone who drives in the city of Chicago could ever fall out of practice in the art of fine profanity.

Yesterday Pajiba ran a column on Elijah Wood by contributor Michael Murray. He tries to put a finger on what’s so fascinating about Wood, and describes what I agree is the most memorable scene in Deep Impact:

As a tsunami is about to wash over the world, Wood — mobile and courageous on a zippy dirt bike — dekes in and out of the doomed motorists jammed on the highway.

My dad hates Elijah Wood and has since Wood starred as the kid in the updated Flipper movie. But I loved that movie (and still do: the statute of limitations on childhood taste has not run out), and countless others he made in the ’90s starting with Radio Flyer.

Deep Impact continued a fundamental shift in my taste. 1997 had come and gone with Titanic, which my friends and I liked a lot . . . then some of those friends saw it twenty times, while others decided a month later that they hated it. The combination of schizo obsession and backlash seemed even more ridiculous after the release of Armageddon, one of the biggest waste-of-time pieces of tripe I’ve ever endured, but for some reason people LOVED it and hated Deep Impact. I began to think about how this quieter, box-office-failing movie was better regardless of its level of commercial success. That’s not to say I didn’t continue to see questionable things and often do now.* But I started to understand the relationship between good movies and entertaining movies and their overlap.

It’s hard to explain the place Wood holds in my pop-culture memory because you just had to be there. In a way, our whole generation grew up on the same trajectory, and I’d seen him in movies from childhood to adolescence and onward, playing various parts that felt really truthful even though they spanned different historical periods, different backgrounds. I flipped through the December/January issue of Teen People — a teen magazine so honestly good I asked to get a subscription — and saw this spread on Elijah Wood:

For some reason, this magazine spread is one of my strongest sense memories to this day: I remembered this exact photo (and spent a lot of mental energy finding it online), the colors of the title font, how the shirt he’s wearing is blue because you see it on the next page. I was listening to a CD I’d just received for my birthday — 1996′s Yourself or Someone Like You by Matchbox 20, one of my first favorite CDs and one I still love for its importance to me then — and one of those songs is embedded in the memory too. The CD rode a continuous wave of successful singles and sold millions and millions of copies. I can’t listen to this album without thinking of this story on Elijah Wood in this magazine, and I can’t think of Elijah Wood without thinking of this album.

There’s some mental coin flip where this particular moment on this particular day won the memory game: An actor I like but don’t love, in a fairly typical photo spread, for an embarrassing movie (The Faculty!), sitting in my room, looking out the window into town, listening to a fairly typical mid 90s pop rock group. I feel a connection to Elijah Wood because of it, and I still think he’s great even though I fell asleep during each installment of Lord of the Rings.

* Here’s a clause to strike fear in your heart: Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.

The latest This American Life details the seemingly nefarious dealings of one investment firm before and during the bursting housing bubble and subsequent recession. Most of the way in, the show guts you with a complex capitalist issue that does not bear out an easy answer.

I love moral gray areas as a general rule, which is almost a statement not worth making: Almost all moral issues are gray in our real everyday lives. (I also love air, whiling away the hours, weather, and waking up every morning.) In this case we are asked to decide: If you are in the business of making money for your investors, and you do that by exploiting a legal weakness of the accepted system, is it wrong?

Moreover: If exploiting that weakness breaks the bubble’s back and throws our country into turmoil that will last for years, is it any more or less wrong?

I realized what this episode reminded me of while texting with my dad about the Chicago Cubs. As a White Sox family, we dislike the Cubs; as a north sider dealing with Cubs traffic and the Cubs’ awful, awful fan base, I am not sympathetic. One night last year, drunken Cubs fans crowded around the Clark bus I was riding home, like shambling zombies in a Stephen King-ocalypse. They start drinking at 9 a.m. and finish at the end of the baseball season.

But fan base aside, because I’m not here to get all argumentum ad hominem.

According to Forbes, the Cubs are the fifth-most valuable franchise in Major League Baseball at $726m — about 45% of the formula-busting New York Yankees at $1.6b.

Yet the Cubs have the most expensive average ticket price in baseball, despite last year’s sub-.500 season. The Yankees are only the third-most expensive average even with their $1.6b franchise value.

As the experts on This American Life pointed out about the investment firm, can you fault an organization for making money for its investors? In the case of the Cubs, when people will lay down absurd money to attend the games, buy merchandise, and carouse at the local restaurants and bars, can anyone blame the higher-ups for charging as much as possible?

Baseball is a business like any other, and if the goal is to put butts in the seats, the Cubs are a succes fou regardless of the team they put out in any given season. Foolhardily signing long-term deals with players who self-destruct as soon as the cap is back on the pen is a symptom of really, really poor judgment in the management. It also shows that the Cubs don’t value return-on-investment for fans who pay more than any other fans nationwide do to see their team.

The NYT’s “The Caucus” blog ran a post on Sarah Palin’s discomfort-inspiring endorsement of John McCain in a state primary where he is being brutalized from the right. I hate John McCain for bringing Palin to anyone’s attention in the first place and can never forgive him, but the photo of him standing beside (yet several feet away from) Palin is painful. She is, of course, wearing her scary structured black leather jacket that seems to come from the Dominatrix Lair line of Chanel. He looks as though he has been holding his breath for the last hour, or year and a half.

Anyway, this doesn’t draw out more than the typical level of outrage for me, but one of the reader comments explained my thoughts better than I’ve managed to before now:

Maybe as Republicans keep moving further and further into the past we’ll finally return to a time when the currency of argument was reason rather than emotion and symbolism.

Yesterday on Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett hosted two Jesuit priests who are celebrated scientists: Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father George Coyne. They discussed extensively the gaps in our understanding of the universe, and how those gaps are something to celebrate, to pursue without ceasing.

They also quoted the Anne Lamott line that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. The certainty of today’s most abusive and relentless right-wingers is their most offensive trait among many.

Will at A Suitable Wardrobe wrote a wonderful little set of instructions for straight men to make their wardrobes friendlier to female borrowers:

I thought it might be useful for us to consider a couple of items that we should have in our closets to make our wardrobes attractive to the fairer sex. Note that it is not necessary that a man wear these things; indeed, they may exist principally to make time spent with him more attractive to the woman in his life. But that is justification in its own right.

Yes! He even includes the repeated washings necessary to soften up an oxford shirt.

For all the character’s bold missteps, one of the best fashion moments in Sarah Jessica Parker’s tenure as Carrie Bradshaw is so basic: A long, oversize dark sweater, paired with a low-maintenance hairstyle and little makeup. She walks around her apartment, moping after a fight with her severe Russian boyfriend, and actually looks comfortable in her clothes for once.

A.O. Scott’s movie reviews for the Times are entertaining even when I couldn’t care less about the movie:

Remember “His Girl Friday”? “Bringing Up Baby”? “Holiday”? (If not, it’s never too late.) “The Bounty Hunter,” with its whirligig plot and incessant squabbling, shows some genetic connection to those sparklingly silly battles of the sexes. But it is also the latest evidence that, when it comes to romantic combat, we live in a more coddled, a less insouciant and also a more thoughtlessly brutal age than our ancestors did.

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