Ye Olde Slate Explainer Questions

In honor of Whitney Houston's sudden passing, I have opted to not post about '80s music for one day. Concerning the diva's untimely demise, I don't have much to say other than that she wasn't exactly in the prime of her career - but when she was big, she was big.

Enough! Instead, let's bask in the glory of Slate's annual Unanswered Explainer Questions column. Chew on these:

* Are the blind sleepy all the time? I was under the impression that your brain signals it's time to sleep when it gets dark. I, for one, can't stay awake when I close my eyes and meditate!

* Whatever happened to dandruff? That's my question, basically. As a kid, there were so many commercials about it, and I remember seeing people who had dandruff. Neither ever seems to happen anymore.

* Why don't roaches live in cars more often? There seems to be plenty of food in many cars to support them. Do they get motion-sickness?

* When I fry bologna (for a fried bologna sandwich, of course) it always forms a big greasy bologna dome. None of the other meats I fry do this. What's going on in bologna to make that weird dome shape?

* Odd to say the least, but why do so many of our states end with the letter a? Way too many to be happenstance—there must be a reason.

* I’m a tall guy. So when I pee, sometimes there’s a splash that exceeds the height of the bowl and lands on the floor. What is it that splashes? Is it water from the toilet or is it pee? I’m guessing it’s water from the toilet because the momentum of the pee takes it down and for it to splash out would defy the physics of liquids.

* I've got a mosquito bite on my tattoo. Did the mosquito get a little dose of ink along with my blood?

* You know how when you burp, you taste something that you ate recently, but it isn't always the thing you ate most recently? Or if you ate a bunch of things around the same time, your burp will taste like one of those things, but not all of them? What determines which food your burp will taste like?

* Why does it take 45 minutes for the pharmacy to get your prescription ready—even when no one else is waiting?

* We are taking my daughter to Disney World. I remember as a kid being a little scared and intimidated by the huge characters. Why are they so big? Is there a psychological study that finds this to be the appropriate size for fantasy characters; does it make them more fantastical? I think quite the opposite. It almost breaks the illusion and calls out the fakery.

* Why aren’t there any topless casinos in Las Vegas? There are plenty of casinos and plenty of strip clubs in Vegas but there aren’t any combinations of the two. It seems like someone would create a casino where the dealers were topless.

More Crappy Slate Over-Analysis!

Aaah Slate, how you constantly pull me in with your headlines promising some new bit of knowledge or insightful analysis only to leave me scratching my head in confusion.

Take the recent Slate attention grabber "How I learned to love Katy Perry". Katy Perry, for those who don't know, if a fame-grabbing attention-whore Zoey Deschanel look-alike 'singer' with such notable hits as ur so gay and California Gurls. Also, the A.V. Club has a thing they push where they say she sounds like a dying frog. Ok, so you get my general impression of her. Visiting friends down in Southern California this past weekend (including LE's older brother Big E) I noticed that many people had the same opinion of Katy Perry.

So when I saw this headline I was intrigued. What was it, anything, that could make someone appreciate Katy Perry? What new insight could they offer? Well, in typical Slate fashion I was met with: A -an article that wasn't actually about Katy Perry specifically, but part of the larger Music Club series in which the segment concerning Katy Perry is just a few paragraphs, and B - a bunch of over-analysis gobblety gook.

To the evidence! Ahem:

"You think I'm pretty without any makeup on," Perry whispers incredulously in the first line of "Teenage Dream," her voice leaning slightly stunned against a latticework-privacy-fence of kick drum. The plucked way Perry sings the lyric—as if what she's saying is just impossible—says so much about how far we all feel we've strayed from our genuine selves. That line is the most important one to make the Top 10 this year, I think: its tragic nostalgia, playing out the new version of the hard-soft dynamic that made 1990s alt-rock so shocking—yeah, that Nirvana sound—except now what this jarring contrast expresses is a woman finding her power, a woman not knowing if that power is going to cost her everything and certainly not whether it will be worth it, instead of a boy-man like Kurt Cobain getting in touch with his feminine side.

If someone can explain to me how one's voice leans against a latticework privacy fence of kick drum, please give me a call.

Nixon, Stutterers, Projectionists, Lion Allergies, and More

Ah, the Nixon tapes: the gift that keeps on giving. Just when you're about to re-evaluate the guy and finally say to yourself "You know, that Nixon guy wasn't so bad," another batch of tapes comes out and you're back to where you started. Some anti-Semetic highlights:

Bob, please get me the names of the Jews, you know, the big Jewish contributors of the Democrats. … All right. Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?

The Jews are born spies. You notice how many of them are? They're just in it up to their necks. … Also, an arrogance, an arrogance that says—that's what makes a spy. He puts himself above the law.

I didn't notice many Jewish names coming back from Vietnam on any of those lists; I don't know how the hell they avoid it.

And this winner from Kissinger:

The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.

I'm always a sucker for Slate's year-end "Most Ridiculous Explainer Questions" column. My favorites:

Do passive-aggressive people know they are passive-aggressive? Also, how can you tell if you are passive-aggressive?

If the entire U.S. was put up for sale, including privately- and publicly-owned land, homes, structures, et al., what would be the total asking price on the open market? I know it's not a boom time to sell, but there may be a buyer lurking somewhere!

Are all languages equally lip-readable?

Do real life experts of martial arts really have the capability of take on a dozen armed thugs and beat them black and blue—as seen in films?

Why is hearing about other people's dreams so boring?

Avatar came out in 3-D at a lot of theaters. I saw an ad about the giant cats on TV with my cat on my lap and was wondering, do 3-D glasses work on cats?

Re: Will I die. Hi my name is [redacted] and I was sucking some helium today and I'm really nervous I did it at about 5:00 today and it's 12:00 I just prayed to god to keep me safe I felt my pulse on my wrist and it was normal I just was wondering if it will hurt my older life I am about 10 to 14 years of age.

Could mankind actually blow up the moon? Blast it with nuclear missiles until it was just rubble? What would happen to the Earth?

If a person is allergic to cats (common housecat allergies) would he also be allergic to a lion?

Also, movie projectionists are apparently becoming extinct (although one of our loyal readers may have something to say about that). Indeed, I have fond memories of climbing up to the projection booth to see Yoggoth hard at work at the Holiday Cinema in Davis, pushing a couple of buttons. There was an undeniable vibe in that darkened room filled with spinning discs, but even at the time, I couldn't help but wonder, "Does a person really need to be up here doing this?"

Finally, a history of stuttering in the movies. Sadly, Porky Pig is not included.

Another Shitty Article From Slate

Call me juvenile, but any Slate article that contains the phrases "anal sphincter," "anorectal angle," and "streamlines defecation," no matter how scientifically valid the usage, gives me the giggles. I will say this: Slate is willing to write an article on just about anything. Here are some choice excerpts from "Don't Just Sit There! - How bathroom posture affects your health":

Other entrepreneurs peddle similar products, like the In-Lieu, the Lillipad, the Evaco toilet converter, and, for those who don't like explaining their squat platform to house guests, a $688 Japanese toilet that lets users switch among different squatting and sitting postures, from the "East Asian squat" to the "aft sit."

People can control their defecation, to some extent, by contracting or releasing the anal sphincter. But that muscle can't maintain continence on its own. The body also relies on a bend between the rectum—where feces builds up—and the anus—where feces comes out. When we're standing up, the extent of this bend, called the anorectal angle, is about 90 degrees, which puts upward pressure on the rectum and keeps feces inside. In a squatting posture, the bend straightens out, like a kink ringed out of a garden hose, and defecation becomes easier.

For a study published in the medical journal Lower Urinary Tract Symptoms, six subjects had their rectums filled with a contrast solution and then released the fluid from a squatting or a sitting position while being filmed with X-ray video. Image analysis showed that the anorectal angle increased from 100 degrees to 126 degrees as the subjects moved from a sit to a squat.

And for 28 years—from his junior year at Yale in 1970 to the moment when he completed the first Nature's Platform prototype in 1998—Jonathan Isbit "perched," as he put it, squatting on the rim of toilet seats. So I decided to try it—each morning for a week, following a bowl of corn flakes and a cup of coffee.

Thanks to my backpacking youth, I must confess that I have gone au naturel. One can develop an ease with this sort of method, although it is probably much easier to do so in the middle of the wilderness, where one has no other choice, than it is to do so in the toilet oasis we call civilization.

Hilarious Headlines Of Articles I Can't Quite Bring Myself To Read

1) American Girls Reaching Puberty Earlier Than Ever

2) Germs Gone Wild: How The Unchecked Development of Domestic Bio-Defense Threatens America

3) What Does Obesity Cost Your State?

4) Why Is David Lynch Pimping This Handbag?

5) This Doctor Does What To 6-Year-Old Girls' Clitorises?

6) When Did Testicles Become Courageous?

All right, I have to confess, I did read that last one, along with other Slate Explainer gems such as "How Many Americans Can't Swim?" and "Did Report Cards Ever Have a Grade of E?" I also succumbed to the allure of "Whatever Happened to the Box-Office Bomb?," "Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality" and "George Washington Racks Up Late Fees at Library." Apparently he owes $300,000, but the library "isn't seeking payment of the fines." Father of Our Country? How about Father of Our Late Fees?

Hello Slate My Old Friend

Time for an old-fashioned Slate article round-up:

Do You Believe In Miracles? - The wild, weird world of Insane Clown Posse - Jonah Weiner

Back around 2000, I accidentally stumbled across an ICP song called "Fuck The World." I was very ready to dismiss ICP entirely, but I thought, "You know, this is more clever than it probably needs to be," so I decided I sort of liked these guys. The song is like the archetype of male adolescent nihilism taken into the realm of absurdity. An excerpt:

Fuck Celine Dion, and fuck Dionne Warwick
You both make me sick, suck my dick
Fuck the Berlin wall, both sides of it
And fuck Lyle Lovett, whoever the fuck that is
Fuck everybody in the hemisphere
Fuck them across the world
And fuck them right here
You know the guy that operates the Rouge River draw bridge
In Del Ray on Jefferson?
Fuck him!
Fuck your idea
Fuck your gonorrhea
Fuck your diarrhea, Rocky Maivia

"Fuck my gonorrhea"? How's that supposed to work? I love the cheerfully energetic lowbrow enthusiasm of their audience:



"The massive family reunion that brings together the most misunderstood people of all time"? "Ninjas juggling fire"? "Wrestling midgets"? "Free camping?" I almost want to go to this! And let's hear it for the Saturday Night Live parody while we're at it.

The Goldman Casino: Do investment banks do anything that helps America anymore? - Eliot Spitzer

Why does it take Eliot Spitzer to ask this question?

In the traditional model, investment banks are thought to serve two critical functions. First, they are financial intermediaries: They are the conduits for transferring savings to those sectors of the economy that need capital. They fulfill the essential function, the economists tell us, of efficient allocation of capital. That is where their initial public offering and other capital-raising functions come into play. They enable productive companies to access the capital markets so they can grow their businesses. Second, they are supposed to be market makers that provide liquidity and stability in the markets to permit the free flow of capital on an ongoing basis.

The question that must now be asked is: Are investment banks doing that? Are they doing the things that merit public support at all? Or are they just running a casino with products that have no great social utility? The regulators, legislators, and investigators have not focused on the fact that the fundamental business of banking has changed from capital allocation to, essentially, gambling.

Oh come on Eliot. All that "capital allocation" stuff is so pre-1980s.

You're awesome, America: Why the U.S. recovery will be bigger, faster, and stronger than economists and politicians expect - Daniel Gross

According to Gross, economic grey skies are going to clear up, so put on a happy face:

But the long-term decline of the U.S. economy has been greatly exaggerated. America is coming back stronger, better, and faster than nearly anyone expected—and faster than most of its international rivals. The Dow Jones industrial average, hovering near 11,000, is up 70 percent in the past year, and auto sales in the first quarter were up 16 percent from 2009. The economy added 162,000 jobs in March, including 17,000 in manufacturing. The dollar has gained strength, and the United States is back to its familiar position of lapping Europe and Japan in growth. Among large economies, only China, India, and Brazil are growing more rapidly than the United States—and they're doing so off a much smaller base.

I guess so. I mean, I'm glad somebody's excited. This is all very well and good, but it kind of seems like small potatoes to me. I still stand by my skeptical conclusion from Crazy Rant #2: what's the end game here?

You've Come A Long Way, Buddha: With a little help from Tiger Woods and PBS, Buddhism may finally shake its counterculture image - Wen Stephenson

As if Tiger Woods didn't stand out enough as it is. Stephenson writes, "That Woods was raised Buddhist is nothing remarkable; what's striking is the down-to-earth, family-guy image of Buddhism projected in his comeback campaign." Wait, what do you mean, "not remarkable"? He's the world's greatest golfer, he's black, and now you're telling me he was raised Buddhist?

The Pope Is Not Above The Law: The crimes within the Catholic Church demand justice - Christopher Hitchens

Finally, Christopher Hitchens continues to write about the pope as if someone in the Catholic Church actually cares what Christopher Hitchens thinks. But I'm amused, particularly by headlines such as "The pope's entire career has the stench of evil about it," and his brief forays into fiction:

Here's a little thought experiment on practical ethics. Suppose that you are having a drink with a new acquaintance and the subject of law-breaking comes up. "Ever been in any trouble with the authorities?" You may perhaps mention your arrest at a demonstration, your smuggling of excess duty-free goods, that brush with the narcotics people, that unwise attempt at insider trading. Your counterpart may show a closer acquaintance with the criminal justice system. He once did a bit of time for forgery, or for robbery with a touch of violence, or for a domestic dispute that got a bit out of hand. You are still perhaps ready to have lunch next Friday. But what if he says: "Well, I once knew a couple who trusted me as their baby sitter. Two little boys they had—one of 12 and one of 10. A good bit of fun I had with those kids when nobody was looking. Told them it was our secret. I was sorry when it all ended." I hope I don't seem too judgmental if I say that at this point the lunch is canceled or indefinitely postponed. And would you feel any less or any more revulsion if the man went on to say, "Of course, I wasn't strictly speaking in any trouble with the law. I'm a Catholic priest, so we don't bother the police or the courts with that stuff. We take care of it ourselves, if you catch my meaning."

Good luck, Hitch.

That's our Slate!

Ahhh Slate, how you tease me with your headlines. Today John Hughes died. Checking Slate I see they already have an article with the intriguing headline "John Hughes, Closet Republican?". Hmm, this should be interesting, I naively think to myself. And in typical Slate fashion, the article doesn't address the headline at all, and in this case, there's not even an article! There's just a short paragraph announcing his death and a youtube montage clip of moments from the Breakfast Club. Thanks guys, keep up the great writing. Oh, how much do you get paid again?

A Masturbatory Article From Slate - Literally!

Finally, a Slate article on a worthy subject: animal masturbation. According to Daniel Engber:

Dogs, cats, lions, bears, and a number of other mammals self-stimulate with their front paws; randy walruses use their flippers. Horses and donkeys, whose masturbatory habits have been particularly well-studied, engage in "rhythmic bouncing, pressing, or sliding of the erect penis against the abdomen"; male deer do the same. The 19th-century physiologist Karl Friedrich Burdach has even described something like female ejaculation among solitary mares, which "rub themselves against whatever obstacles they find, often spurting a white, viscous mucus." A bull, meanwhile, stimulates itself by alternately protruding its penis from a genital sheath, while some moose can ejaculate simply by rubbing their antlers on bits of vegetation. According to observations made at the University of Buffalo in the 1940s, both male and female porcupines manipulate their genitals with inanimate objects—they're also known to "seize, straddle, and ride sticks about the cage."

Splendid, my dear, simply splendid! Of course, that's all very well and good, you're thinking, but what about apes, parrots, and turtles? Ah, but you spoke too soon:

Our fellow apes are among the most ardent and industrious masturbators: Female orangutans have been observed to fashion primitive dildos from sticks or pieces of liana, while males stimulate themselves with pieces of fruit, leaves, or other objects. Although it's sometimes said that only mammals masturbate, we have clear examples of autoeroticism among birds, which rub their cloacae on whatever's handy.

I've got to use that one sometime. "Hey baby, why don't you rub your cloacae on whatever's handy?" Nevertheless, animal masturbation remains something of a scientific enigma:

Still, neither the fresh-sperm hypothesis nor its discredited cousin, the kamikaze-sperm hypothesis, can account for more than a small subset of animal masturbation. Reloading might explain the behavior of bucks, bulls, and male primates, all of which tend to ejaculate at the end of an autoerotic episode. But many other animals never reach that point. Horses rarely climax, despite masturbating dozens of times per day—so what motivates the dalliance of a stallion or, for that matter, a mare? Can evolution account for female masturbation in the animal kingdom?

Answers! Dear God, we need answers!

Nice Try, Slate Guy

How about instead of trying to define "post-disco" and complaining about how VH1 rockumentaries misrepresent '80s underground rock, why don't you actually try to write about what all this music has meant to you in your own life and what it said to you about the nature of your own measly human existence when you were a young man? I would have much rather read that than declarations such as: "Pop music history is biased toward 'the right place and the right time.'" It is? I never knew. Or:

Just like its respectable elder relative, rock history, with its decisive battles and seismic elections, pop history fixates on origins and breakthroughs, magic years of transformation, cusp points when undergrounds go overground. It gives far less attention to those stretches of time between the upheavals—years of drift and diaspora, periods without an easily discernible "vibe," zeits devoid of geist.

I'll give him points for that last one. But what's the difference between "pop history" and "its respectable elder relative, rock history"? Are they not the same thing?

"It rankles a bit that the late '80s are now treated as a mere prequel to grunge." Well, as many of my loyal readers know, I don't think grunge was that big of a deal in the first place. You think you're being original, eh Simon? Try taking the viewpoint that grunge was merely a prequel to Britpop. Now that's original!

The recently aired Seven Ages of Rock on VH1 Classic was a marked improvement on earlier TV histories of rock, which tended to jump straight from Sex Pistols to Nirvana. But its episode on U.S. alternative rock nonetheless presented groups like the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr., and Sonic Youth as preparing the ground for Nirvana. That's not how it felt at the time: Sonic Youth and the rest seemed fully formed significances in their own right, creative forces of monstrous power, time-defining in their own way (albeit through their refusal of the mainstream). My Melody Maker comrade David Stubbs wrote an end-of-year oration proclaiming 1988—annum of Surfer Rosa, Daydream Nation, My Bloody Valentine's Isn't Anything—to be the greatest year for rock music. Ever!

If you're talking to Yoggoth, he might agree with you. I for one have always admired those '80s alternative rock bands more than I've actually liked them. My favorite album on SST Records is Meat Puppets II, so go figure. As good as the Pixies, Husker Du, The Replacements, etc. were, I still feel like they were a 4.2 on the Richter scale compared to the late '60s' 9.3. Nirvana were about a 4.6. Punk was at least a 6.8 perhaps. I'm kind of liking this Richter scale system; what do you guys think?

We actually believed this, and our fervor was infectious, striking an inspirational, Obama-like chord with young readers heartily sick of the idea that rock's capacity for renewal had been exhausted in the '60s or the punk mid-'70s. Yet that period will never truly be written into conventional history (despite efforts like Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life) because it doesn't have a name. It's too diverse, and it's not easily characterized. For instance, the groups were "underground," except that by 1988 most of them—Husker Du, Throwing Muses, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers—had already signed, or soon were to sign, to majors. Finally, it'll never get fairly written into history because, damn it, grunge did happen.

But by placing such importance on grunge you're buying into VH1's predictable view of rock history anyway! And that period truly has been written into conventional history. For example, by Michael Azerrad, in his book Our Band Could Be Your Life. You want a VH1 special to acknowledge a bunch of groups that were almost completely commercially unsuccessful? Good luck.

Reclaiming one such period of "fallout" was the polemical drive behind my post-punk history Rip It Up and Start Again and its new companion volume Totally Wired. It was an attempt to challenge the perennial fixation on punk as the Big Bang and the corresponding tendency to see what came next as a scattered diminuendo, an entropic dissipation of focus and energy. Instead, I wanted to recover my own lived sense of the period not as a dwindle into disparateness but as the true fruition of punk's ideals. The after-zones of rock history are hard to grasp precisely because they're so various. This rich muddle demands identifying labels that are umbrella-broad and open-ended. Hence post-punk, not a genre so much as a space of possibility, out of which new genres formed: Goth, industrial, synthpop, mutant disco, and many more.

Oh, come on. Just write about the music you like, and why. Your description of "post-disco" is also not selling me on the idea of this period as some kind of way to "usefully redraw the map of pop music history":

Instead, the genre mutated while the movement itself fragmented into a panoply of subscenes that appealed to specific tribes of the once-united disco nation, styles like hi-NRG (a tautly sequenced, butt-bumping sound big in the hard-core gay clubs), freestyle (beloved by Hispanic youth in New York and Miami), Italodisco (the bastard bambino of Giorgio Moroder), and electrofunk (a sound associated with New York labels like West End and Prelude, artists like Peech Boys, and producers like Arthur Baker).

Let me tell you something, I have heard Giorgio Moroder, and if Giorgio Moroder didn't cause me to "redraw the map of pop music history," then "the bastard bambino of Giorgio Moroder" is certainly not going to do it. Some of this music certainly does sound interesting. But don't overplay your hand.

The sharp critical view to take on Sgt. Pepper's has long been that it's a pretentious mess compared with its predecessor Revolver; sharper still is the claim that Rubber Soul is better than the already-getting-quite-psychedelic Revolver...But just as disco never died in a lot of hearts, there were plenty of people active at the end of the '60s and into the early '70s who kept faith with the visions of 1967. They kept on making music that, while not always blatantly trippy, nonetheless took its bearing from landmark psychedelic records like Pink Floyd's The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and A Saucerful of Secrets, the Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter, Traffic's Dear Mr. Fantasy, Donovan's A Gift From a Flower to a Garden, Soft Machine's self-titled debut.

But not Sgt. Pepper. Is that the point he's trying to make? Or is he saying that although it's trendy to bash Sgt. Pepper these days it was actually still quite influential? Or is he saying that these "post-psychedelic" bands didn't take their bearings from music that people actually heard, but rather from these critical cult favorites? My head is going to explode!

Even certain artists we normally file under "glam" were indelibly marked by psychedelia: Roxy Music's personnel included Brian Eno, a Syd Barrett admirer and believer in using the recording studio to create sonic phantasms, and the obviously Hendrix-damaged Phil Manzanera.

Oh come on. Were Roxy Music any more "psychedelic" than David Bowie or T.Rex? Were David Bowie and T.Rex even psychedelic? You know what? "We" don't "normally file" anything under anything, Mr. Reynolds.

Please Tell Me Cosmic American Blog Doesn't Come Off Like This

I know we made fun of Slate's Movie Club last year but...but...I can't help myself!

Problem Numero Uno: These people are all too glib, too guarded, too impersonal. They spend all their time inventing mildly interesting quasi-theories instead of actually sharing some thoughts that you might consider gutsy or embarrassing. But come on, what's the fun in saying you liked Rachel Getting Married because something that happened to the character reminded you of a certain painful event from your own life? Much more fun to say you liked Rachel Getting Married because "I loved the catlike prowl of Declan Quinn's camerawork, Rosemarie DeWitt's slow-burn infuriation, and Anne Hathaway's bottomless eyes and her watch-through-your-fingers toast to the squirming couple." Tell me about you, Jessica Winter! Tell me about you.

Still, it's fun to watch the writers try to outdo each other in obnoxiousness. Let's see who wins:

Dana Stevens: Is it possible that Anna Faris' itinerant centerfold in The House Bunny was the breakout performance of the year?

Even assuming that this is possible, assuming that this is the most amazing acting showcase in all of 2008 screen acting, just how great could this performance really be?

Dana Stevens: As for Jeanette's list of waterworks moments: The most unexpected one of the year for me came in Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress, when Asia Argento, in a thoroughly bizarre and unforgettable turn as a cigar-smoking Spanish courtesan, had wild sex with her lover as their child's funeral pyre burned beside them in the North African desert. It was so overwritten and lurid and absurd and yet … Niagara. All of Angelina's pious mourning for her lost boy in The Changeling couldn't touch the unhinged wildness of that scene of maternal grief. The Last Mistress was a whacked-out treatise on gender, power, and obsession disguised as a period costume drama, and I loved every perverse minute.

"Niagara"? Oh man, that scene was so "Niagara." Wink wink. I know what you're sayin' Dana.

Dana Stevens: Lisa, you're up next: What made you cry in spite of yourself this year? What made you laugh? And can I get anyone to join me on the Clint-Eastwood-is-overrated train?

Choo-choo! Chugga-chugga! All aboooooaaaaard! Clint-Eastwood-is-overrated train leaving the station! If you don't think he's that good, don't talk about his movies. Why do you need company?

Lisa Schwarzbaum: What else made me laugh this year: Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which also kinda touched me as it did Dana. And Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, an underrated little beauty that looked "regular" but was, I thought, amazingly radical in its seamless weaving of straight and gay lives.

Just because a movie is "amazingly radical in its seamless weaving of straight and gay lives" doesn't make it good.

Jessica Winter: Back to the year's comedies: I wasn't a fan of Forgetting Sarah Marshall. (Jason Segel's naked self-abnegation would have been more affecting if the rest of the movie hadn't surrounded him with nubile women eager to dress him up in their love and/or sex.) And somehow I doubt I have much company in advocating for the mostly maligned Step Brothers. Comedy is subjective, of course, but there's some feral pocket of my frontal lobes that wonders how it's possible to resist a movie in which the great Richard Jenkins (who gave one of the year's most tender performances in The Visitor) delivers a rousing speech about how he always wanted to be a dinosaur when he grew up. Or a comedy with a scrotum-on-the-drum-set fracas (marking the second time, after Boogie Nights, that John C. Reilly has appeared in a film featuring state-of-the-art prosthetic genitalia). Or that deploys "Ice Ice Baby" as a villain's ominous theme song. Or that contains a triumphant scene wherein grown men beat up children on a playground. Perhaps someone can talk me out of all this. Yet uneven as it is, Step Brothers strikes me not as the cynical nadir of the Judd Apatow-associated trend of manboy movies but as an imploded critique of said trend, and it thrums with anarchic, deranged energy. The same kind of energy, strange as it may sound, that Dana loved about The Last Mistress: I also adored that insane Eros-and-Thanatos desert sex tableau. And how about that gob-smacking moment when the incomparable Ms. Argento—who was just as memorable this year as the drug-running slut machine in Boarding Gate—sucks greedily at her lover's chest wound?

You're not selling me on Step Brothers guys. Or The Last Mistress. Yes, I know, you're sick of all the hype for the Oscar bait dramas. But just because you're fed up with Oscar bait dramas doesn't mean Step Brothers is suddenly "an imploded critique" of "manboy movies." Or maybe it is. I haven't seen it.

On another, more sexist, note, the Movie Club spends a great deal of time discussing how significant it is that this year all the members of the Movie Club happen to be female. Now, I'm not female, but this strikes me as the sort of thing that is significant and yet not that significant. They certainly don't help matters by spending at least one-third of the time analyzing the role of plastic surgery in cinema today. One navel-gazing highlight:

Lisa Schwarzbaum: Hi la … well, I was going to say "ladies," the kind of retro hello I would offer a group of girlfriends without a second thought. But here we are, movie critics who happen to be women as well as women who happen to movie critics, and perhaps I ought to be more formal, at least on the first go-round. Or at least until we get into the rich territory of how we-as-femme-critics see what we see on screen. So, hi all.

Oh just say hi God damn it.

Ur-Cruise and Fagen:

English majors undergoing mid-period academic calcification will often write about the lesser known works of famous figures. This sort of writing is usually crap. However, this Slate article extolling the virtues of Tom Cruise in Risky Business is worth a read. In Stephen Metcalf's words, "I can't name another American icon who has been so popular, and for so long, and yet so hard to like, and for so long." Personally, I've always enjoyed Tom Cruise as an actor, although I've never seen Top Gun. So he wants to give a big fuck you to the world by becoming a rabid Scientologist and marrying Katie Holmes just because he can. More power to him.

Donald Fagen now writes interesting, informative columns about forgotten media figures - in addition to being the lead singer from Steely Dan and having written some of the greatest songs of all time. I'm jealous and ashamed of myself, but happy to read this article.

Oh, and Christopher Hitchens makes fun of some religious guy. It's kind of like shooting fish in a barrel at this point, eh Hitch? Why did President-Elect Obama pick this religious guy to perform at his inauguration? I don't know, it probably sounded good at the time and it would look bad to switch now. If I were being inaugurated I'd choose to be sworn in on the Koran, just because I could. Right after I married Katie Holmes.

Return Of Ebenezer Hitchens!

Apparently I wasn't the only one to get a big kick out of the idea of Christopher Hitchens as a modern day Ebenezer Scrooge. So did Christopher Hitchens! In a piece entitled "'Tis the Season To Be Incredulous," he suggests the birthing of a possible new holiday tradition:

The late Art Buchwald made himself additionally famous by reprinting a spoof Thanksgiving column that ran unchanged for many decades after its first appearance in the Herald Tribune, setting a high threshold of reader tolerance. My own wish is more ambitious: to write an anti-Christmas column that becomes fiercer every year while remaining, in essence, the same.

A noble goal, Hitch, a noble goal. Perhaps there'll come a day when the bitchy Hitchens Christmas column is as essential a piece of Yuletide tradition as The Santa Clause starring Tim Allen. Highlights:

I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-bag paper of the kind suitable for latrine duty in an ill-run correctional facility. Duly unfurled, it carried a handwritten salutation reading as follows:

Money's scarce
Times are hard
Here's your f******
Xmas card

As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable. You go to a train station or an airport, and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor's office or a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard.

Suppose we put the question like this: Imagine that conclusive archaeological and textual evidence emerged to prove that the whole story of the birth, life, and death of Jesus of Nazareth was either a delusion or a fabrication? Suppose the mother had admitted shyly that, in fact, she had fallen pregnant for predictable reasons? Suppose we found the post-Calvary body? Serious Christians, of the sort I have been debating lately, would have no choice but to consider such news as absolutely calamitous. The light of the world would have gone out; the hope of humanity would have been extinguished. (The same obviously would apply to Muslims who couldn't bear the shock of finding that their prophet was fictional or fraudulent.) But I invite you to consider things more lucidly. If all the official stories of monotheism, from Moses to Mormonism, were to be utterly and finally discredited, we would be exactly where we are now. All the agonizing questions that we face, from the idea of the good life and our duties to each other to the concept of justice and the enigma of existence itself, would be just as difficult and also just as fascinating.

I feel a song coming on:

You're a vile one, Mr. Hitch
You have termites in your smile
You have all the tender sweetness of a seasick crocodile
Mr. Hitch
Given a choice between the two of you, I'd take...the seasick crocodile!

The Good Kind Of Trivial

Was the world waiting with bated breath for Slate articles on the twin topics of car horns and tied college football games? No. Did I enjoy such articles? Yes. Here, I think, are two perfect examples of the fluffy but satisfying Slate article. The keys are: 1) the authors don't treat the subject matter as something more important than it really is; 2) they supplement their fluff with some impressively thorough research, so the pieces are not actually completely devoid of informative value.

In all honesty, I've been enjoying Slate a little more than usual lately. Perhaps this is not completely unrelated to the fact that we have a new and intriguingly energetic president preparing to take office. It's like someone finally pouring super-strength Drano down a toilet that has been clogged for eight years. Here, then, are some other recent Slate favorites:

1) Why Is Obama Our First Black President?: Kids' questions about his victory, and their parents' attempts to answer - Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson

2) Don't get Depressed, It's Not 1929: Why All Those Great Depression Analogies Are Wrong - Daniel Gross

Well that's a relief!

3) Obama's Reagan Democrats: They weren't crazy about Obama, but they voted for him anyway. Now what do they want? - John Dickerson

Favorite part: "Mark Parowski, who described himself as a 'hard-core Republican,' didn't pick Obama until the moment he was in the election booth. His wife had been to Obama's last rally in Manassas, Va., the night before, along with 90,000 others, and said it sounded as if Obama was talking right to her in her living room. His disgust with Republicans was a big factor in his vote, Parowski said, but he also saw backing Obama as a chance to make a generational change."

I can just imagine this Mr. Parowski, muttering to himself only moments after leaving the election booth: "I reached over and began pulling the level for McCain...and I...I...just...couldn't...do it!"

4) Do You Want Gravy On Your Palin?: Ammunition for Your Holiday Political Spats - John Dickerson

I could see the validity in each side of these arguments. Some of the more tantalizing:

Hillary at State

Great idea: She knows the issues, won't be afraid to tell Obama what she thinks, and is the perfect embodiment of American ideals of opportunity and service.

Horrible idea: Drama! She'll put her interests above the president's. Bill's conflicts of interest will be impossible to overcome. Powerful women don't do well in the Middle East.

Will a Woman Ever Become President?

Sure: Hillary's campaign was a thorough mess, her husband was off message constantly, and yet she still almost beat Obama.

Not for a while: Geraldine Ferraro was right—in politics, it's harder to be a woman than a black man. It's still a sexist world. Just look how terribly everyone treated Sarah Palin.

Bush Is the Worst President of My Lifetime

Born before 1932: Son, let me tell you about a man named Herbert Hoover.

Born between 1932 and 1974: You think he was worse than that paranoid liar Nixon? There have been no attacks since 9/11. Iraq is turning around and may become a beacon for democracy in the Middle East. Bush is like Truman: unpopular now, but history will vindicate him.

Born after 1974: No need to elaborate. Use the time to get a second helping of pie.

Oh Come On Hitch Just Say It Already

In his own inimitable way, Christopher Hitchens comes out for Obama in Slate. But he certainly doesn't make it easy for himself. He starts out on this seemingly irrelevant note:

I used to nod wisely when people said: "Let's discuss issues rather than personalities." It seemed so obvious that in politics an issue was an issue and a personality was a personality, and that the more one could separate the two, the more serious one was. After all, in a debate on serious issues, any mention of the opponent's personality would be ad hominem at best and at worst would stoop as low as ad feminam.

Oh my! I for one wouldn't want to be caught dead stooping to ad feminam. In other words, Hitch is beating around the bush. He continues to beat some more:

At my old English boarding school, we had a sporting saying that one should "tackle the ball and not the man." I carried on echoing this sort of unexamined nonsense for quite some time—in fact, until the New Hampshire primary of 1992, when it hit me very forcibly that the "personality" of one of the candidates was itself an "issue." In later years, I had little cause to revise my view that Bill Clinton's abysmal character was such as to be a "game changer" in itself, at least as important as his claim to be a "new Democrat." To summarize what little I learned from all this: A candidate may well change his or her position on, say, universal health care or Bosnia. But he or she cannot change the fact—if it happens to be a fact—that he or she is a pathological liar, or a dimwit, or a proud ignoramus. And even in the short run, this must and will tell.

So basically Hitch, what you're trying to say is that you think McCain has too many character flaws to be a good fit for the presidency. Oh, but what's the fun in merely cutting to the chase? Better to quote old English boarding school sayings. I also continue to be amused by Hitch's misplaced disgust toward Bill Clinton. Why Bill Clinton and not George W. Bush? Is it because every other columnist has George W. Bush covered? I'm not saying that Clinton was the greatest president ever, but how was he more of a "pathological liar" than every other politician we've ever had in the history of Western civilization? I suspect that Hitch simply likes to relish in his flair for the dramatic. Witness the text below:

I suppose it could be said, as Michael Gerson has alleged, that the Obama campaign's choice of the word erratic to describe McCain is also an insinuation. But really, it's only a euphemism. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear had to feel sorry for the old lion on his last outing and wish that he could be taken somewhere soothing and restful before the night was out.

A low blow couched in highbrow discourse. At this point I think Hitch should just abandon the thin journalistic veneer and dive headlong into Hunter Thompson-esque absurdity. Near the end of the piece, he finally offers, in what amounts to high praise in the Hitchens world, a tepid endorsement of Obama:

Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience.

Well ring the bells and fire the cannons!

Join the team, Hitch. Join the team.

Extending The Pointless

Now here is why I left grad school. Somebody named Adam Kirsch has written an article in Slate called Nobel Gas: the Swedes have no clue about American literature. And I practically had to restrain myself with a dog leash in order to avoid hurdling myself at the computer and replying "So what, buddy?" The ultimate response is probably to cringe and ignore it, but allow me to vent nonetheless. He really hit my sore spot with this comment:

Just look at the kind of American writer the committee has chosen to honor. Pearl Buck, who won the prize in 1938, and John Steinbeck, who won in 1962, are almost folk writers, using a naively realist style to dramatize the struggles of the common man. Their most famous books, The Good Earth and The Grapes of Wrath, fit all too comfortably on junior-high-school reading lists.

Ooh, I hate those books that fit all too comfortably on junior-high-school reading lists - you know, the ones that people actually read and get something out of and build their life philosophies around. Yeah what a drag. Instead Kirsch feels like the Nobel prize should have gone to American writers like Philip Roth, John Updike, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. Yoggoth's a big Pynchon man; I've never read him. I once got a hundred pages into DeLillo's White Noise; didn't really seem Nobel Prize worthy if you ask me. As far as I'm concerned, if any American writer of the past forty years deserved a Nobel Prize it was Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Hell, Hunter S. Thompson deserved a Nobel Prize more than Don DeLillo does. But don't ask me, what do I know about literature, I only got halfway through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Honestly, buddy, who cares? You're just jealous you don't get to vote for the Nobel Prize yourself. Listen to this guy:

No one on either side of the Atlantic would quarrel with the awards to William Faulkner in 1949 or Ernest Hemingway in 1954. But in the 32 years since [Saul] Bellow won the Nobel, there has been exactly one American laureate, Toni Morrison, whose critical reputation in America is by no means secure.

Ooh, the author's critical reputation better be secure before you give him or her the prize. Oh my God, what a tragedy, can you imagine if the Nobel Prize went to an author whose critical reputation was not...secure? The earth would turn to ash!

I'll leave it to Fray user "upupandaway" to finish off the job:

Of course, maybe my opinion is just a little to under the corporate/political radar to be seen as anything but the heart songs of a naif. But hey, when my favorite writer or book doesn't get a Pulitzer or a Nobel, and my favorite movie doesn't get an Oscar and my favorite play doesn't get a Tony... Guess what? It doesn't affect my experience and appreciation of that art in the least. So, I win. All that said, Whatever-his-name-is jerking himself off at the Nobel playground sounds exactly like the kind of helium headed windbag that could ruin a filet dinner with the miasma seeping out of his mouth. Somebody should box up Harold Bloom and mail him to that guy. They can takes turns seeing who can shove their head farther up their own ass.

The World's Most Useless Equation?

I'd like to extend my congratulations to Slate's John Dickerson, who has finally outdone himself this time. Already known for his penchant to write, in Yoggoth's words, "political-writing because-I'm-paid-to stuff," Dickerson has established a mathematical formula designed to demonstrate exactly where McCain and Obama stand on Iraq. Are you ready? Are you seriously ready? Here we go:

Current troops in Iraq	-	troops withdrawn per mo.	*	no. of months	=	Residual Force
Obama:	140,000	-	(2,500-5,000)X	*	16	=	Y(x)
McCain:	140,000	-	X	*	16	=	Y(x)
					X

Ladies and gentlemen, there you have it, all the vagaries of political analysis have finally been squelched once and for all. No need for verbose pseudo-commentary. Just plug in the numbers and presto! It's possible that this is a joke, but I can't be sure.

In a slightly less groundbreaking piece, Dickerson ponders what McCain's best options might be concerning the inevitable George W. Bush appearance at the Republican National Convention:

When I asked GOP veterans whether there was any way to minimize the damage for McCain, their first reaction was to laugh. Since the convention starts on a Monday, one member of the McCain campaign joked that Bush could speak on Sunday night. Another veteran Republican suggested putting up an onstage dunking booth for the president. McCain could break tradition by arriving at the convention early in the week so he can take a few throws at the target.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Honestly, what can he do? Dickerson astutely notes that McCain "has no historical precedent to follow. Richard Nixon didn't speak at Ford's 1976 convention. The benefits of resignation." Ah, Nixon. At least the man knew how to make an exit, yes?

Hitchens + Hillary = Hilarity

Don't blame sexism for Hillary Clinton's defeat - By Christopher Hitchens, Slate

Favorite passages:

"But now Sen. Clinton's partisans are crying foul and saying that the Democratic primary voters, incited by the media, only rejected her for something known as sexism. This indistinct and vague offense, portentously invoked in many recent articles and 'news analyses,' is supposed to be revealed (as a New York Times report on its own reporting so masochistically phrased it) in such outrageous ways as the following: 'The New York Times wrote about Mrs. Clinton's "cackle." ' "

"Replay some of Sen. Clinton's less spontaneous moments of laughter during the Democratic debates. How would you describe them? To refer to them as merely mirthful would be to do violence to language. The word cackle, which is really an onomatopoeia, is easily the best, because it conveys what her awkward noise sounded like."

"Going as far as it dared on the point, the same sternly disapproving New York Times report found the courage to say that the Washington Post, in mentioning Sen. Clinton, had also alluded to 'her cleavage.' Living as we do in an age of the easily offended and the aggressively innocent, we were not regarded as sufficiently adult to be informed whether this cleavage was in the front or the back. (Something in me makes me hope very devoutly that it was not the latter.) But I think I see the emerging pattern. People who favor Sen. Clinton are allowed to stress her gender and sex at all times and to make a gigantic point of it for its own sake. They are even allowed to proclaim that she should be the president of the United States in time of war only because she would be the first vagina-possessing person to hold the job. But—and here's the catch—people who do not favor her are not even allowed to allude to the fact that she is female and has feminine characteristics."

I think I might start using that as a pick-up line: "Hey, vagina-possessing person..." Or, alternately, "How 'bout you and me...cackle a little cleavage, yeah?"

Gaffe Me With A Spoon

It takes quite the brouhaha to rile up a Little Earl, but I couldn't help but cringe in disbelief at some of the comments I saw floating around, particularly on Slate, regarding Obama's supposed "flap" toward working-class Pennsylvanians. Now call me crazy, but when I first read these words:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns, or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

I actually had to twist my neck and squint my eyes and hop up and down on one foot to find the "gaffe." To me, a serious gaffe would be a comment more along the lines of "You know, in a way, the United States deserved 9/11." That is the kind of comment that could actually kill a candidate's campaign. But this "bitter" comment is so ambigious and so nuanced that its gaffe potential seems murky at best. Which is why Hillary Clinton's attempt to milk the "flap" for all it's worth comes off as awkward, transparent, desperate, and unintentionally humorous. It's like she had to mold and shape the comment in order to turn it into a soundbite; as it is it's not very punchy.

But Hillary's feigned outrage is no surprise. Slate's apoplectic fatalism is. According to the pundits in The XX Factor, McCain might as well prepare his inauguration speech, because with his "bitter" comment, Obama has just rendered himself unelectable. Melinda Henneberger calls it "The worst thing I've heard Obama say." She writes: "Poor wording was not the problem; on the contrary, it was his precision that was so unfortunate, and his ability to pack half a dozen unintended insults into a single sentence uncanny. And in San Francisco, no less? Roger Ailes couldn't have planned it better, unless he'd maybe followed up the event with some impromptu windsurfing in the bay." Emily Bazelon seconds that emotion, calling the comments "bonbons for the GOP" and adding "Part of what's prompting the wincing and deep doubts, I think, is that Obama sounded like an anthropologist talking about objects of study to an audience that he assumed has the same disassociated point of view." Hannah Rosin piles on, noting that "This 'cling' flap just keeps getting worse," fretting, "He either recognizes that he insulted wide swaths of people and feels badly about it, or he doesn't even see it yet, in which case we're in real trouble," and finally concluding that it's a "bad moment to be a Democrat."

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Had I read the same quote? I mean, if this is the kind of comment that is going to convince a person who would otherwise vote for Obama to suddenly not vote for Obama, then I am more out of touch with the American public than I already thought I was. Melinda Henneberger writes:

Here's how a high-school teacher in Fairfield, Ill., put it: "I used to be a Democrat, and I'm still very much independent. I voted for Clinton [in '92 and '96]. I'm religious but not a fanatic; I see a lot of gray. My mother has Alzheimer's, so I'm for stem-cell research, and I'm not against people's right to an abortion.'' But Kerry "just struck me as arrogant,'' while Bush inspired "the feeling that this was a more open person who would not be "I'm important and you're not.' ''

I don't think this high school teacher and I are even on the same planet. If, for working-class whites, Bush v. Kerry boiled down to that, then I really don't know what to say. If Americans want to treat the presidential race as some kind of intuitive "relatability contest," then don't expect me to have much sympathy when the country goes down the shitter. I mean, I've got news for you, Working-class Joe: There are so many more issues at stake in the world than your own personal pride. Get over yourself. Please.

But now we have liberals on Slate scared stiff because Obama actually said something honest, which means he'll lose the election, right? Well I've got news for you too, Slate columnists: one presidential candidate will not a liberal America make. It's not like, "Oh, well if we can just fool working-class people into voting for a Democrat, by making the candidate come off as folksy or down-home or whatever the hell we need to do, then we'll be set." The American people need to commit, one by one, to serious change. Otherwise we'll simply have an empty figurehead who'll be replaced by a conservative every four to eight years, and no one will be much the wiser.

Not that I care too much about the fate of America anyway, of course. But it hurts to be witness to such confusion.

Satire Is Just As Good (Or Bad) As It's Always Been

In his Slate piece "The Satire Recession: How Political Satire Got So Flabby," Troy Patterson seems to suggest that at one point or another there existed a "golden age" of political satire. But I would wager that 90% of political humor over the course of the eons has largely been disposable, and only the cream of the crop lingers in the memory. So most political jokes "rarely transcend the level of pure ad hominem mockery"? Welcome to the story of the human race. That being said, I like the distinction he draws between the intellectually lazier late night humor of Leno, Letterman, and Conan and the sharper barbs of Stewart and Colbert:

"Senator John Kerry is in trouble for making a joke about soldiers being uneducated," said Conan. "As a result, Kerry promised to stop making jokes and stick to boring people." Peterson would class that harmless jape—John Kerry? Dull? No?!—as "pseudo-satire," which is cynical and shallow and treats politics "like an infection" and stands in contrast to the real satire that, for instance, Jon Stewart offered on the subject of the botched joke and the way it was spun: "After an election in which the GOP has been beaten up by, let's say, reality, the party has rediscovered a winning issue: the has-been's faux pas." Where O'Brien's pseudo-satrical joke trivializes the political process, Stewart's engages it by laughing at that very trivialization. The distinction isn't simply a matter of what's funny; well-constructed pseudo-satire often deserves more laughs than preachy satirical jokes. It's about the fact that comedy can perform a watchdog role and seems more ready to shirk it than Judith Miller. "By avoiding issues in favor of personalities," writes Peterson, "and by 'balancing' these shallow criticisms between conservatives and liberals, late-night comics are playing it safe but endangering democracy."

Also, Conan's joke is mostly just mean. It's like, "Wow, John Kerry is so boring. God, aren't you glad you're not as boring as John Kerry?" There's not really anything of value to take away from that. Stewart's joke is more valuable because when you hear it you laugh in mutual recognition along with Stewart on the timeless nature of political desperation. The joke is like a weapon against manipulation (and what's more valuable than that?).

Speaking of humor as a weapon used to alleviate emotional pain, Bruce Reed's rant on the nearly 15-year futility of the Pittsburgh Pirates fulfills that function admirably:

Seven years ago, in a desperate bid to revive the Pirates' fortunes, the city built PNC Park, a gorgeous field with the most spectacular view in baseball. From behind home plate, you can look out on the entire expanse of American economic history—from the Allegheny River to 1920s-era steel suspension bridges to gleaming glass skyscrapers. The result? As Pittsburgh writer Don Spagnolo noted last year in "79 Reasons Why It's Hard To Be a Pirates Fan," Pittsburgh now has "the best stadium in the country, soiled by the worst team." (The Onion once suggested, "PNC Park Threatens To Leave Pittsburgh Unless Better Team Is Built.") Spagnolo notes that the city already set some kind of record by hosting baseball's All-Star game in 1994 and 2006 without a single winning season in between.

Rock It To Me, Slate, Rock It To Me

William Saletan is at his sarcastic best in a new Human Nature column. The appeal of this column is Saletan's pithy bluntness. He may be mean, but hey, he's funny! Example:

A man grew his own jaw transplant in his abdomen. Scientists attached his stem cells to a scaffold and "put it inside the patient's abdomen to grow for nine months." The cells "turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels." Surgeons then transplanted the tissue to his head. Benefits: 1) No animal viruses, since doctors didn't use animal tissue. 2) No rejection problems, since the transplant matches the patient's DNA. 3) Fast recovery, since the new bone was grown instead of taken from his leg. Approved reaction: This brings "custom-made living spare parts for humans a step closer to reality." Unapproved reactions: 1) Congratulations—it's a bone! 2) Is that a bone in your abdomen, or are you just glad to see me?

Meanwhile, in the Sports section, Boston sports fanatic Charles P. Pierce still can't get over the Patriots' loss (he's the only one), Stephen Metcalf tries to turn the Roger Clemens steroid scandal into something more profound than it really is (but yields halfway interesting results), and Douglas McCollam spins some decent fluff and earns his paycheck.

Andres Martinez travels to Venezuela and marvels at the sincerity of the country's propaganda. Let's just say I'm not going any time soon.

Bruce Gottlieb and Cyrus Farivar discuss why and how art is so frequently stolen in Europe. Personally I'm tickled at the notion of art crooks: criminals with...taste! Surely Jagger in "Sympathy for The Devil" would approve.

Dear Prudence always makes me feel better about my life, since it's good to know that other people also have ridiculous social problems. You would think that people who need the assistance of an advice column would be stupid, but honestly, I can see exactly why these people feel the need to consult a completely neutral third party when faced with dilemmas such as otherwise-perfect boyfriends who posess that one terrible flaw, or awkward step-parents who tear families apart. What they really need, of course, is therapy.

Mia Farrow, of all people, has spent the entire year throwing a huge guilt trip on Steven Spielberg for deciding to participate in the 2008 Olympics, which apparently means he supports genocide. Spielberg finally agreed, and he bailed, which should make Mia happy. I wonder if it will really do anything though.

And now we come to Slate's bread and butter: politics. This week, unsurprisingly, it's Obama Obama Obama. John Dickerson wonders if and when the bubble will burst. Daliah Lithwick treats Slate as her own diary with mixed results in this piece. But Douglas Kmiec takes the cake in his dubious article "Barack Obama is a natural for the Catholic vote." A recent Romney aide, Kmiec's heavily religious slant sticks out like a sore thumb in Slate's snarky, non-commital universe. He writes that "if either Clinton or Obama would acknowledge the myriad problems associated with a declining population in the developed world and affirm the importance of both having and raising children (and not just punting these duties over to Hillary's "village"), Catholics could well contemplate a Democratic adoption." Is this really a problem? I mean I've heard about people in Italy and Japan not wanting to have kids but what percentage of voters is seriously going to find this a key election issue? I don't care who this guy votes for.