Aardvarchaeology. Blag Hag. Hundreds of people showed up to my mother’s funeral.
We were lucky the room adjacent to ours wasn’t also booked for a funeral, because we filled the seats in that room in addition to ours. In addition to that, about 40 people had to stand, and that doesn’t count the 50 or so people who came to visitation but didn’t stay for the memorial. My mother was much loved, and we lost her too soon. I wanted to share the eulogy I gave for my mother yesterday. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write and definitely not the most eloquent, and it was extra intimidating giving it in front of all my former English teachers (her colleagues), but it still means a lot to me. “My mother was the kindest, most self-sacrificing person I knew. My mother was also one of the most creative people I knew. Related to her creativity, I always loved her willingness to be a little silly and dance to the beat of her own drummer.
Greta Christina's Blog. “At last, something beautiful you can truly own.”
This is the fictional tagline that Sterling Cooper Draper Price comes up with for the Jaguar ad campaign in “Mad Men.” (It’s in the episode The Other Woman — warning, synopsis has spoilers. Yes, I’m re-watching old episodes, it’s getting me caught up on where we are in the new season.) And it’s gotten me thinking: What does beauty mean? So the idea behind this tagline, and the ad campaign, and indeed this entire episode, is that the Jaguar XKE is like a mistress: beautiful, sexy, desirable, impractical, temperamental, unpredictable. But the thing is, as Michael Ginsberg himself says (the copywriter who comes up with the campaign and the tagline): It isn’t just people who you can’t own and keep.
It’s a false promise, of course. Beauty is, literally, in the eye of the beholder. I mean that the experience of beauty is literally in the eye, or the brain, of the beholder. I mean that beauty is an experience. We can certainly load the dice. Pharyngula. Probably not.
But the New York Times reports: A review of studies has found that the health benefits of infant male circumcision vastly outweigh the risks involved in the procedure. Actually, it doesn’t. Not at all. The paper is all about the frequency of circumcision in the US; this is the only real data in the paper, and notice that a good chunk of it is speculation. Prevalence of adult circumcision in the United States during the past 6 decades (1948-2010). It does toss in a table purporting to show the tremendous risks of not circumcising baby boys, but this is not new — these are the same sloppy data that the author has been peddling for over a decade. The author is Brian Morris, better known as the Man Who Hates Foreskins. Take that first condition, the likelihood of urinary tract infections. Or look at his claim of much greater rates of HIV infection. Armed with this hunch, rather than set up a website I chose to do some research.
It’s also an argument that can cut both ways. Skepchick -