I haven't seen any of the movies, but I'm DVR-ing the show and will dip in from time to time. You can talk about it here and I might say something now and then.
"It is important to read past her ugly custody case to have a larger conversation about race (one the baby's father apparently does not want to have). Her daughter will have to choose a racial identity, the way she had to choose a racial identity. In America, that means it will probably be chosen, at least in part, by the way people react to her. In America, her skin color (black or white) will be something that people use to define her. I applaud Halle Berry's courage, if not her choice of words. When she says, 'I believe in the one drop theory,' of course, she does not mean to endorse racism. But she does have the courage to do something so few Americans can: talk about race."
Either that or she's using whatever weapons she finds at hand as she fights for what she wants in her child custody battle.
"The other day I got a text from a boy, but it wasn't hot. I mean, if you're going to text me every day, you haven't seen me for months and you're trying to seduce me, you'd better spice up that text and make it more exciting than 'How was your day? I hope you're having a beautiful one.' Sadly, I haven't been doing a lot of kissing lately."
I'd seen it before, but others here hadn't. I'd forgotten some of the details, but I remembered the key surprises. So I wallowed in the old-fashioned acting, especially Joan Fontaine moving her eyebrows asymmetrically in a way that only a comic actress today would use...
"Rebecca" won the best picture Oscar in 1940, beating "The Grapes of Wrath." I guess people preferred watching the melodramatically exaggerated travails of rich people in gigantic houses more than they liked watching the melodramatically exaggerated travails of poor people in gritty hovels.
Drudge is — I think — implicitly asking with this alignment of photographs:
What drives intelligent women to that hairstyle? Are they thinking something like I don't want those feathery bangs...
... or the classic Louise Brooks straight-across look...
... but I can't have my forehead just out there to be gazed at!
What's wrong with foreheads? Is it that the forehead symbolizes the mind, and a woman can't have you looking straight at that? The intelligence must be filtered. There must be a buffer zone of femininity, so there must be some hair veiling the forehead — the theory seems to be. But why the bumper look that we see in the Drudge trio of Angela Merkel, Condoleezza Rice, and Maureen Dowd?
"... even the one introduced to American audiences in the persons of Bette Davis, Irene Dunne, Margaret Sullavan, the other Hepburn (though she could talk herself into a self-centered corner, too), Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, Jean Arthur, as well as Barbara Stanwyck. Instead Audrey rather resembles her physical antithesis Marilyn Monroe (who wanted to play Holly) in that they have very distinctive voices, but not voices that are good for talking to people."
Nice takedown by Jack Shafer. (But isn't the correct spelling "bogosity"? Try saying it. I know the adjective is "bogus," but people don't say "bogusity." They might say "bogusness," but not "bogusity.")
Anyway, the problem is something that's common to journalism about trends (including that ridiculous Daily Caller piece about blog payola). A headline declaring a trend gets readers' attention, but then you need a lot of examples of the things that constitute the trend. The writer has some things that look like a trend, but he's got to beef up the article with more examples or it's not a trend. But he's itching to get to trend!!!! so he includes things that don't really fit, and then the whole thing looks stupid.
It's really annoying for the reader, because the trend!!!! declaration worked, and you've already read it and rewarded the website with traffic before you realize it's not quite a trend. What can you do? Resolve not to read trend pieces anymore? But then you still see the headline and it makes the impression that there is a trend!!!! and now you're been deprived of the evidence that there isn't a trend.
Now, I'm reading the comments at the Shafer piece and see that some of his readers are pouncing on the "bogusity/bogosity" spelling issue. I'm glad to see that others share my priorities. There's also this from one "nerdnam":
Well, what's her name's plastic surgeon just died after driving off a cliff immediately after twittering a picture of his dog at the beach. The dog survived, luckily. So I see a trend here.
Oh?! "Heidi Montag Mourns Death of Her Plastic Surgeon." Oh, lord, look at the expression on her face! Isn't it ironic? You plastic-surgerize — what's the verb for "surgery"? — somebody's face and then you die and her face is incapable of looking convincingly sad. Her gigantic breasts don't look sad either, but they make it into the People Magazine photograph, and because they stand as monuments to your work, that's not ironic at all.
Hmm. That People article no longer contains the information about tweeting that is referred to here:
According to People, Dr. Frank Ryan's jeep Wrangler careened off of the Pacific Coast Highway on Monday....
People later reported that Ryan's former girlfriend confirmed that his accident was caused by texting and driving. He had posted a Twitter message about hiking with his dog just before the accident. The dog survived the crash.
One more dubiously technology-related death. Maybe confirmations from former girlfriends don't cut it anymore.
