mellow-drama

Kick their asses

This house protected by Smith & Wesson.

A new addition!

Welcome baby Xiao Mei, Yin and Yang's newest addition!

Settle for Mr. Okay

I've got a real problem with this article, and I'm not the only one! Two main points: One, the author approaches the world on the assumption that every single woman must have her exact wants and needs.  That's just plain stupid, or lazy writing. And two, her understanding of the available options is flawed due to her child-centric viewpoint.

Apologies

I completely dropped out of the world last week for no real reason, but I'm back now!

Ugh.

Ugh, ugh ugh. Ugly. Bleh.

On the other hand...I agree with Bill Whittle. Good thing I'm not in any particular party. I can spend the next nine months hating - and taking potshots at - everyone. And pull the lever for Sunny Lucas, when the time comes, if I want to, because I'm not beholden to any party.

It's good to be independent!

God, what a great football game!

I'm a big fan of watching the Super Bowl with friends and enjoying the last football game of the season, but usually the play isn't all that interesting.  Until now, there's really only been two Super Bowls I've remembered with any clarity: When the Rams won in 2001, and when they lost to the Patriots in 2002 by a field goal courtesy of Adam Vinatieri. Until now.

Sunday night's game was one the best football games I've ever seen.  I'm no Giants fan; I don't love Eli Manning like I love Peyton, and in fact went into the game rooting for Tom Brady and the Patriots.  But I could not resist the draw of the underdog Giants, calmly marching up and down the field, sacking Tom Brady – Tom Brady! Sacked! In the Super Bowl! More than once! – and generally demonstrating that they could play better football.  By that heart-stopping near-sack in the 4th quarter, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, fist clenched, rocking back and forth saying, "Come on, come on, come on!" to Manning and his Giants.  The New York Times describes it thus:

More than Eli’s 5-yard scoring pass early in the fourth quarter to Tyree, more than his 13-yard scoring pass to Plaxico Burress in the final minute, the play that will be replayed and discussed endlessly came when Manning scrambled on third-and-5 from the Giants’ 44-yard line with about a minute left. It seemed as if he was about to be sacked, and that would have been devastating. Would-be tacklers grabbed at him, clutching his shirt and tugging it. “You try to get small and see if you can squeak through,” Manning said. He kept moving to his left, ducked out of a scrum, found open space and launched a soaring pass toward Tyree at the Patriots’ 25-yard line. “The ball hung up there,” Manning said with great understatement. Tyree leaped in the air and brought it down with his hands, which pressed the ball against his helmet. The Giants had a first down with 59 seconds left. Four plays later they scored to beat a team that was 18-0.

When Manning shook free of that tackle, when Tyree caught that ball and hung onto it, bent over backwards and clutching it to his helmet, I stood up and whooped. Talk about some exciting football!  Now that's what I want to see at the Super Bowl.  What a play! And what defense! The Giants defense really won that game, because even down as they were, Tom Brady could have marched over just about any other team in the league and used that 35 seconds to roll from one end of the field and into the end zone.  Forget about The Greatest Show on Turf days – that was exciting football (if you're a Rams fan) but it was fairly one-sided. This was a knucklebiter right to the very end.  Who couldn't celebrate the Giants after that game?

There was a lot of schadenfreude in St. Louis yesterday morning from a city still bitter over a nasty loss.  Several of the morning talk shows mentioned the recent allegations that the Patriots videotaped the Rams practicing before beating them in the Super Bowl.  Plenty of other people around say that the Pats cheated during the game, grabbing jerseys and doing other illegal things that didn't get called by the refs.  (I won't say that – three turnovers and you can't expect to win the Super Bowl, that's what I say, even with Jeff Wilkins kicking.) St. Louisans are not willing to let go of that particular grudge, so even though the Rams had yet another terrible season this year, there was a lot of joy in the Gateway City last night and today.

As for me and my Patriots fan-dom? Well, I figure that this morning Tom Brady is still smart, gorgeous, and a helluva football player with three Super Bowl rings already (oh yeah, and dating a supermodel), so it's not like his life is all that bad.

Lookin' Out My Back Door

No tambourines or elephants, just lots and lots of snow.

(Tabasco added to show scale; we don't normally keep hot sauce on the floor!)

I have to say

This is one of the most gorgeous babies on the internet, and I'm lovin' the quilt she's sitting on, too.

Laugh, then Cry

I can't help but laugh at the slightly prissy-outraged-aunt tone of this Slate article decrying the tabloid headlines that get viewership on CNN, MSN, and Fox News websites.   I actually noticed this phenomenon not long ago, when I discovered the Fox News website's "most emailed" list – it is inevitably full of drama and tragedy relating to children, pets, and celebrities.  Go read the Slate article, I'll wait.

How many of those headlines were you tempted to click on? I clicked on three.  I shake my head because I wish people were more interested in "serious" news; but I suspect the alternative to people reading tabloid stories online is not people reading lengthy discussions of the subprime "crisis" so much as not looking at news websites at all.  If I remember to drop by the Fox News website, I'll usually read four or five of the most-emailed articles.  Why not? I'm into spectacle as much as the next person. That doesn't keep me from being a serious person who follows serious events, but if someone is writing about a Star Wars fanatic or overly-harsh punishments for high school students, I tend to click.  I happen to be into nerds, and I follow issues on teen rights and privacy issues as a hobby.  I, too, am fascinated (and saddened, and disgusted) by the downward (and downward and downward) spiral of our White Trash Queen, Britney Spears.  At the same time I wish the paparazzi would leave her alone, I keep clicking on the articles to read about her latest trip to Starbucks in lieu of making a court appearance in her child custody case.

  I know I'm contributing to the problem by clicking, and supporting the continued publication of the trash.*  But then I think, so if I boycott tabloid stories and columnists I hate, is it going to make one iota of difference? Nope.  So I click, and I read, and come away feeling slightly ashamed of myself.  To me, it's the modern equivalent of paperback romance novels.

* I actually feel the same guilty impulse when I click to read a Maureen Dowd column – I don't want the New York Times to interpret my click as support for her crazy, mean, sexist rantings, but I know that for the people who run the NY Times website, attention is attention, and it's all good for the "brand."

Feminism is out of style?

My first reaction was, "I never realized it was in style."  More importantly, though, the problem with "feminism" as many of my generation and younger experience it is that, like many orthodoxies of the Left, the establishment that espouses it has a rigid, one-size-fits-all small-tent approach.  If you're not burning bras and raising consciousness and sitting on hand mirrors, then you're not "really" a feminist.  That's not appealing to me, or to many other people of my generation, who actually do believe that women and men should be treated equally in the eyes of the law and by employers, educators, and other institutions, but who may not subscribe to the man-bashing, lipstick-foreswearing, fish-and-bicycle crowd. Jessica over at Feministing had a similar take. 

Just an FYI, I first noticed Feministing because of the infamous boob-gate squabble between the Feministing girls and the Divine Ms. Althouse, and I've been loosely following it ever since.  I'm not inclined to share most of the Feministing views, but the posts can be extremely interesting and sometimes even cause my hair to actually burst into flame. Which I like.

AND, by the way, since we're on Feministing: Wow, just wow. That beats the Hillary nutcracker by miles and miles.