I propose “Weekday Saving Time”. Once each year, during the first week of May, we skip Tuesday. Then we add an additional Tuesday to the first week of November. This will result in an increase in the number of weekdays available overall, significantly boosting American productivity.
Justice Scalia died while on a free vacation at a luxurious resort whose owner had benefited financially from a favorable Supreme Court decision last year.
Some folks I know are gloating that Scalia’s death is no tragedy. I could not disagree more. It’s just that it’s less King Lear and more Coriolanus.
From an article in yesterday’s New York Times:
Take again the case of color and wavelength. Wavelength is a real, physical phenomenon; color is the brain’s approximate, slightly incorrect model of it. In the attention schema theory, attention is the physical phenomenon and awareness is the brain’s approximate, slightly incorrect model of it. In neuroscience, attention is a process of enhancing some signals at the expense of others. It’s a way of focusing resources. Attention: a real, mechanistic phenomenon that can be programmed into a computer chip. Awareness: a cartoonish reconstruction of attention that is as physically inaccurate as the brain’s internal model of color.
The crucial point, in one sentence:
The brain computes models that are caricatures of real things.
Of course, many Buddhists and mystics and philosophers and others have been saying this for centuries (only they say it in Sanskrit instead of scientific language, which makes it easier to read), but it looks like science is rapidly catching up.
So a new upscale Mexican restaurant in the Castro has named itself “Bandidos”, and quite a number of people are finding the name offensive. The owners oh-so-cluefully responded at first by deleting all the criticisms from their Facebook page, a brilliant move that predictably got people even more annoyed and caused news of the matter to spread far beyond the Castro.
My first reaction was, huh? I remember the revolting “Frito Bandito” ads from my childhood, of course, but the word “bandido” by itself? I grew up in Orange County in the 1960s and 1970s, and I remember several common slurs used against Latinos, but not “bandido”.
Then I saw where the owners had posted this apology to their Facebook page, and I found my reaction changing:
Hi All, we appreciate your thoughts and feedback and are truly devastated that we’ve insulted anyone – as members of the LGBT community and neighborhood locals for over 15 years, we would never want to create a space where everyone does not feel welcome. We worked with many people on the creation of Bandidos, from many different racial backgrounds, and we all felt that the name evoked the spirit of an old-school place where badasses and outlaws would meet for one-too-many tequilas. We sincerely apologize to those who have been offended – our intention was never to discriminate or reference racial stereotypes and we hope that our community can see it as we do.
Amazing. In one and the same posting — in adjacent sentences, even — without any awareness of any irony, they wrote:
we all felt that the name evoked the spirit of an old-school place where badasses and outlaws would meet for one-too-many tequilas
and
our intention was never to … reference racial stereotypes
I hate to break it to you, guys, but referencing a racial stereotype is exactly what you were intending to do. Read what you yourselves wrote.
If you take a look at the website, you find that what the decor and menu in fact evoke is the spirit of a new-school place where affluent hipsters can drink $11 margaritas and maybe pretend to be badasses and outlaws — but cool, trendy ones. San Francisco was so needing another one of these.
I have no opinion on how offensive the word itself may or may not be to Latinos, but completely apart from that issue, given the kind of restaurant it is and the owners’ explanation, the choice of name does seem kind of creepy to me.
Headline in yesterday’s New York Times:
Why Can’t the Banking Industry Solve Its Ethics Problems?
Can’t? Of course they can. I think the word you’re looking for is should.
According to an article on Vox Media,
The largest-ever study of same-sex parents found their children turn out healthier and happier than the general population.
I’ve thought for a very long time that this would turn out to be the case, and it’s nice to see that it worked out that way.
However, the writer of this article thinks that the difference is about having parents who aren’t pressured into gender roles and therefore adapt more freely into the needs of the particular family. I’m skeptical about that. I think it’s a lot more likely that the most important (but slightly hidden) factor at work here is that a same-sex couple has to go over a lot more hurdles to have children, whether through adoption or a surrogate or whatever, than an opposite-sex couple does. For an opposite-sex couple, having children is often the path of least resistance due to pressures from family and society; for a same-sex couple, it almost never is. Among opposite-sex couples, then, a lot of those people will have kids anyway even though they haven’t thought about what it’s going to entail or aren’t really committed to making the effort to care for them; among same-sex couples, nearly all those people are going to get filtered out.
Indeed, until fairly recently, being gay or lesbian and having children meant knowing that your children could very well be taken away from you by some homophobic judge for flimsy reasons that children would never be taken from a straight couple for. Seems to me you’ve got to really want a child in your life before you’d accept the possibility of facing that kind of pain.
Unless a family is so isolated from all other society that there are very few or no other adults of both sexes who play parts in the children’s lives, my guess is that the difference between having parents of the same sex or of opposite sexes is pretty trivial compared against other factors. Whereas whether the child is really loved and wanted by the principal adults in his or her life is always going to be a huge factor.
And my guess is that in another twenty years — maybe ten given how quickly society is changing now — it’ll be almost as easy for same-sex couples to have children as for opposite-sex couples, and the same sort of study will find no significant difference any more.
We are apparently at the point where we now need a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing individuals the same rights as closely held corporations. There are a whole lot of laws that conflict with my own religious beliefs that I too would like to be excused from having to follow.
Look at it this way. For every new male-male couple, there are two more women left without husbands. So the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage actually increases the chances that frustrated straight young men can find women who’ll sleep with them.
See? The Family Research Council should be thanking us for preventing even more tragedies like this one.
This is chillingly reminiscent of the Up Stairs Lounge massacre, but with a far happier ending. On New Year’s Eve in Seattle, somebody poured gasoline on the carpeted stairs to a crowded second-floor gay nightclub and tossed a match on it. Fortunately, some quick-thinking soldiers thwarted the attempted historical reenactment.
(For those who don’t know, the Up Stairs Lounge in New Orleans was a gay bar that was the target of a terrible arson attack in the 1970s. It’s an important part of our history as LGBT folks and worth at least knowing about. The Wikipedia entry is informative and not too upsetting, but be warned before searching further than Wikipedia that the details and photographs available online are horrifying and the stuff of nightmares.)
Also fortunately, the Seattle club was sprinklered and had multiple fire exits. Yay for modern fire codes, too. And for newspapers that will report on these things and police departments that will investigate them, neither of which we had in the 1970s.
Scratchings 