"Well, given that we prize women for sex rather than childbearing nowadays..."

"... maybe it makes sense that women want to look at what’s supposed to be their sexual, rather than reproductive, peak — age 36!"

Glenn Reynolds makes a great point about the "zero face" article we were talking about yesterday.

In the future, everyone will be...

... 36.

"I'm desperate to go back to normal. I'm downgrading and going a little smaller, to a D or a double D."

The ever-changing definition of "normal."

Though it's been more than nine months since she went under the knife, [Heidi] Montag says she is still in severe pain and her body has not acclimated to the over-the-top breast augmentation.

"I have major anxiety about it," she confides. "I was taking painkillers but they weren't working, so I stopped. It hurt either way," 

In addition to the physical pain, the busty blond reality star's new assets have prevented her from properly hugging her four dogs or wearing anything that isn't a custom-made design.

"I'm obsessed with fitness but it's impossible to work out with these boobs," Montag says. "It's heartbreaking. I can't live an everyday life." 

Yet, on the plus side, there is all the publicity and reality show material entailed in this "realization" and subsequent additional surgery — and surgery is her only real basis for fame.

With the passing of her confidant Dr. Ryan, Montag fears that she will be stuck living in her cartoon-like figure forever.

"I feel trapped in my own body," she confesses. "There's just no fixing it. Dr. Ryan knows the work he did, he knows everything."

Because how could another doctor ever locate those implants?

... Montag was quick to squash the rumors....

Oh! The imagery!

Find a doctor to (find and) remove your implants, and find the decency to remove your "downgraded" self from the public stage.

"The bogusity of the New York Times' story about how technology leads more park visitors into trouble."

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.

"I want my kids to know when I'm pissed, when I'm happy and when I'm confounded.."

Why Julia Roberts won't get Botox.

"It's unfortunate that we live in such a panicked, dysmorphic society where women don't even give themselves a chance to see what they'll look like as older persons.... I want to have some idea of what I'll look like before I start cleaning the slates."

Cleaning the slates? As in wiping the slate clean, the slate being the face? If I get that correctly, I think she's saying you should initially let yourself age and see how that is going, then make a judgment about whether to erase the signs of aging.

And... does Julia Roberts really talk like that? Confounded... dysmorphic... These quotes are in a British newspaper and they sound like their were written by a Brit.

It's also interesting that she says she wants to keep her natural face so her children will see her emotions. We moviegoers need to see that emotion too. I say "we," but the truth is, my moviegoing habit has decreased over the years, seemingly in proportion to the destruction of the human face. I don't want to see it. Ah, but I don't know. I remember a few years back — in my peak moviegoing times — hating a halfway good movie because I got sick of the big closeups, and it was a Julia Roberts movie, "My Best Friend's Wedding." My reaction was: Yes! I get it! You have a face! Now, step back!

It was around the same time that I walked out on a movie because the closeups were inducing nausea. That movie was "Antz." And I don't know what I hate more, plasticized human actors or computer generated animation. But those 2 phenomena are a big part of why I almost never go to the movies anymore.

"Everywhere you look there are jokes... I mean, my life is just... jokes."

A clip from the excellent documentary "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work":



We saw this movie last night at Sundance in Madison. I have a special love for the documentaries in this niche. Show this new one as a triple feature with "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" and "Grey Gardens." Here's the trailer for "Joan Rivers." Watch for the insult to Wisconsin, which got a huge laugh here in Wisconsin.

There was a line I tried to memorize, for me, the most interesting line in the movie. It was something like: "I am an actress — an actress playing the role of a comedian." When she was in high school, Joan was in all the plays. We see her in Shakespearean costume. She still sees herself as an actress. She says: You can say anything about her as a comedian, but don't criticize her acting. That's the one thing that hurts. That may seem very odd, because do you think of her as an actress (other than in the sense that when she's doing her comedy she may conceive of herself as playing a character that isn't really her)? She had a dramatic role in the movie "The Swimmer" (with Burt Lancaster)? And in the 90s she starred in (and co-wrote) the Broadway play "Sally Marr ... and Her Escorts" (a play about the woman who is mostly famous for being Lenny Bruce's mother). The NYT said:

Is Ms. Rivers also a great actress? No, she is not. But she is exuberant, fearless and inexhaustible. If you admire performers for taking risks, then you can't help but applaud her efforts. "Sally Marr" asks her to dig down deep and dredge up some elemental emotions. Ms. Rivers backs off from none of them. In her portrayal of a gutsy woman who has hit the skids more than once in her 80-odd years, there is a childlike sincerity that exerts its own spell in the end. Between Ms. Rivers and Ms. Marr an understanding obviously exists.....

[E]arly on, when Sally goes into her theory of comedy. "You don't start with funny and make it funnier," she explains. "Comedy comes from pain."...

It is the play's contention that without Sally Marr... there would have been no Lenny Bruce. Her outspokenness blazed the way for his iconoclasm; from her hatred of hypocrisy sprang his. She was even there when he made his first tentative steps as an M.C. in strip joints to coach him on the intricacies of comic timing and lend him some of her material. "Lenny Bruce opened the door for every modern American comic, right?" she says, putting her checkered past into perspective for us. "So, in a way, you could say I gave birth to George Carlin and Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy and Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams and Bill Cosby and Gilda Radner and David Letterman."

So is she an actress, and if so, who is the real person? I don't think you get the answer in the "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work." There's a scene where she's doing a radio promotion for her new book — "Men Are Stupid . . . And They Like Big Boobs: A Woman's Guide to Beauty Through Plastic Surgery" — and the interviewer goes on about how, whatever a woman does to herself to try to look beautiful, she must, in the end, want to be loved as the person she really is. Joan's response: Who is the real me? Perhaps when the real person is an actor, there is a hollowness that must be filled with a written character.

***

Note to commenters: Please say something more interesting than that you don't like her surgically destroyed face. We can take that as a given. Don't be boring. It's worse than being ugly. Around here.

French-style female aging.

They reject the notion that "you either have to disguise that process with Botox, eye-lifts, lip plumpers and all sorts of procedures that convey a desperate 'youthful' look, or else just give up altogether and let the ravages of time take their toll."

I love the photo of Isabelle Huppert. She looks great, even as she looks older than her age. She's 57, and it would be easy to believe that she's 67 or even older, but she still seems youthful, because of the expression and life in her face. The contrast is the American Ellen Barkin, looking smoothly dead-faced at 56.

Mel Gibson teaches us that Americans are more roused by racism than misogyny (or breasts).

There's so much talk of Mel's "racist rant." I listened. Although he most certainly says the n-word and says it in a line that suggests contempt for black men, the rant is all about the woman's purportedly fake breasts. The hatred is squarely aimed at the (white) woman.

A feminist issue.

"You're a bitch"/"I didn't do anything"/"Did so."

The Mel Gibson tapes. And that's not the worst of it.

The tapes do not make it clear what the couple was arguing about.

But Mel tells Oksana, "Look what you did to me... look what you are... look what every part of you is... f**king fake... f**king fake.

"You are the most synthetic person... who the f*** are you?"

That's not the worst of it either. I excerpted the bit in the title because of the childishness of "Did so." I excerpted the other part because Gibson chose Oksana Grigorieva presumably because of and not in spite of her looks. But maybe "every part" included her soul and it was only after harsh experience that he was able to determine that that part of her was fucking fake too. But our Mel — he is not fucking fake. He's always had genuinely great looks and a genuinely horrible temper.

Sarah Palin had breast implants, she's divorcing Todd, she bought a place in the Hamptons, and Trig is not her own child.

Things that are equally untrue, per Sarah Palin.

"Nooo, I have not had implants," said Palin. "I think a report like that is about as real and truthful that Todd and I are divorcing or that I bought a place in the Hamptons or that Trig is not my own child.

"And we still put up with that garbage, too."

Speculation was rampant after photos of the former Alaskan governor at the Belmont Stakes showed her looking a little more buxom than usual.

"'Boobgate' is all over the Internet, because there are a lot of bored, idle bloggers and reporters with nothing else to talk about," Palin said in the interview.

Come on, Sarah, don't put down bloggers generally. And don't put down talking about breasts generally. I reject the idea that breasts belong at the bottom of the list of things to talk about. Breasts are important. They mean something. Let's not minimize their significance in our culture. They are the subject of many journals, books, and movies. I have taken my knocks for talking about the meaning of breasts in politics (though, of course, the knockers were my political opponents, motivated to squelch what was a criticism of Bill Clinton, whose attraction to Lewinskis was well-known ). So I will talk about breasts, and it's not at all for lack of better raw material. Breasts are big! Let's talk about them!

Now, speaking of breasts and bloggers, what amuses me — aside from the endless obsession with Sarah Palin, specifically, and with the physical aspects of female politicians, generally — is the low level of knowledge of breasts on the part of the Boobgate bloggers. They didn't seem to realize that different bras and different kinds of shirts and jackets affect the way breasts look. A woman can draw attention to her breasts or downplay them. In professional settings and for political appearances, women tend to wear jackets. Even when jackets are fitted through the midsection, they flatten and disguise the curve of the chest. That's the point: to blunt the point.

By contrast, the contour of the breasts is accentuated by a knit top — especially if it's thin, clingy, and light-colored, like the one Sarah Palin wore to the Belmont Stakes. And when a woman wears such a shirt, it's particularly easy to perceive the existence of nipples. Everyone knows they are in there, but reasonably modest women — like Sarah Palin — try to avoid the nipple protrusion of the sort you can see in this photo of that woman who's suing her ex-employer for objecting to the way she dressed for work. The way to do that — and I laugh at people who write about breasts but don't know this! — is to wear a bra with a reasonably thick layer of foam padding.

I feel sorry for the bloggers who know so little about breasts that when they saw that Palin photograph, their first explanation was surgery. Before you think scalpel, think Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is most likely. Palin was wearing a t-shirt and a t-shirt bra. Now, go, get a life, and some real experience of your own in this fleshly world, you blogger losers.

ADDED: Thanks to Crack Emcee (in the comments) for pointing out my typo:  "a reasonably think layer of foam padding." Corrected.

"Dear Lord: As You probably know, because I guess You sort of know everything, I’m thinking about having a mini brow lift..."

"... lipo on my neck, waist, hips, and thighs; a chin reduction; an ear job; fat injections in my cheeks, nasolabial folds, and lips; a revision of my previous rhinoplasty; a redo of my earlier breast implants; Botox injections in my forehead and frown area; and a buttocks augmentation, if that is Thy will. I won’t go ahead with any of this if You don’t approve, but I keep thinking, Why would God have made my plastic surgeon, Dr. Frank Ryan, so totally cute if He didn’t want me to use him? Although, of course, I also wondered, Why did God make my hips and thighs, both inner and outer, a teeny bit chunky, and why did He dig those grooves around my nose?"

Caulk.

Caulk.

"A woman who had everything lost her life to have..."

"... a slightly firmer behind."

"He liked actors. I didn't know then, of course, that he was a celibate homosexual."

"If he cast you as the lead in a movie, it's probably because he fell in love with you. I didn't understand any of this. I just thought he liked me because I was very talented. It was that too, but it was much more complex. He fell in love with people who were unavailable."

So says Malcolm McDowell about Lindsay Anderson, whom he contrasts to Stanley Kubrick: "Stanley was sort of anti-actor and anti-drama. He didn't know what the hell you were talking about if you wanted to actually analyze the scene... Then I realized that it was an enormous gift because he was saying to me, 'You can do it. Create it. Find it.' That was really fabulous, and I really went for it."

Everyone remembers Kubrick. Do you still think about Lindsay Anderson? I remember when everyone was talking about "O Lucky Man." Here's the scene — with McDowell — that freaked us out something awful:

"I feel terribly '20th Century' with these two boulders of silicone in my chest."

"They simply don't fit with the whole androgynous aesthetic of the day, as epitomised by the elfin figure of the new supermodel Agyness Deyn.... Now I long to go braless, to wear all those pretty little spaghetti strapped tops, to have that elegant, cherry-pipped silhouette that all the models in the magazines have."

***

(Fashion pics of Agyness Deyn.)

ADDED: I love this one:

"Until now celebrities didn't expose their nipples so they were no 'nipple role models.'"

But now that we have nipple role models, everyone suddenly wants nipple surgery.

"As the Ghost of a Gentleman, dead these 260 years and more, I should be happy to welcome Mrs. Bono to the Astral Plane..."

"... upon her Departure from her Earthly Frame, which she seems greatly intent upon preserving from Decay."

Sir Archy, our ghostly commenter from the 18th century, made an appearance here in the early hours of the morning — in the Cher post.

"We started analyzing what it was that we were really missing. We were missing being around each other."

"As long as we can keep decreasing our bills we can keep making less money."

Trading money for time together. A trend? A good trend regardless of the condition of the economy? There's a lot you can say about this, but I'm taking it from a Peggy Noonan column, so let's see where Peggy goes with it:

The cities and suburbs of America are about to get rougher-looking. This will not be all bad. There will be a certain authenticity chic. Storefronts, pristine buildings—all will spend less on upkeep, and gleam less.

So will humans. People will be allowed to grow old again. There will be a certain liberation in this. There will be fewer facelifts and browlifts, less Botox, less dyed hair among both men and women. They will look more like people used to look, before perfection came in. Middle-aged bodies will be thicker and softer, with more maternal and paternal give. There will be fewer gyms and fewer trainers, but more walking. Gym machines produced the pumped and cut look. They won't be so affordable now....

This will be the return of an old WASP style: the good, frayed carpet; dogs that look like dogs and not a hairdo in a teacup....

More families will have to live together. More people will drink more regularly. Secret smoking will make a comeback as part of a return to simple pleasures. People will slow down. Mainstream religion will come back.... Bland affluence breeds fundamentalism. Bland affluence is over.

Everyone will become Peggy Noonan!

Stylish thrift.

Supposedly thrift is the style now, says the NYT, quoting some wife of a Cincinnati plastic surgeon who has taken to borrowing DVDs from the library and growing her own vegetables, blah blah blah.

Maybe times are hard for plastic surgeons, though. If there's one thing people with real financial troubles can skimp on, it's plastic surgery.

In San Francisco, Cooper Marcus, 36, has started choosing recipes based on the ingredients on sale at the market. Mr. Marcus canceled the family’s subscription to Netflix, his premium cable package and a wine club membership. He uses a program on his iPhone to find the cheapest gas and drives out of his way to save 50 cents per gallon.

“It seems a little crazy,” he laughs, then adds: “I’m frugal and loving it.”

I guess greenness isn't the style anymore or Marcus would be ashamed to say he was driving a lot more just to save some money.

Kellee Sikes, 37, a consultant in Kirkwood, Mo., no longer uses paper napkins. Ms. Sikes uses organic cloth ones until they get threadbare and then uses them as cleaning rags.

Oh, bullshit. It takes years for cloth napkins to reach the rag stage. They do make great rags, though, but this napkins-to-rags stuff doesn't fit the trend story. Unless that "organic" cloth is really crappy, in which case, it's not to frugal to buy it.

When they are no longer useful, she puts them in the in-ground waste composter in the backyard. She plans to start burying her dogs’ feces there, which saves on the cost of sending refuse to a landfill.

Oh, now they've deteriorated to the point where they are not even usable as rags? Spare me. And TMI about the dog shit.

“I recently heard a phrase: ‘Never waste a crisis,’ ” Ms. Sikes said. “I love it. This is a chance for us to re-examine what’s important.”

Never waste a crisis... Yeah, somebody said that recently. But it sure as hell wasn't about resisting spending money.

Breast implants.

The career move.