"The Day They Took The Laptops."

(GWU Law Revue 2011.)

"I am the mother of a 13-year-old boy, which is like living with the single-cell protozoa version of a husband."

"Here's what my son wants out of life: macaroni and cheese, a video game, and Kim Kardashian. Have you ever seen Kim Kardashian angry? I didn't think so. You've seen Kim Kardashian smile, wiggle, and make a sex tape. Female anger terrifies men. I know it seems unfair that you have to work around a man's fear and insecurity in order to get married -- but actually, it's perfect, since working around a man's fear and insecurity is big part of what you'll be doing as a wife."

From a weirdly hateful HuffPo piece called "Why You're Not Married," by TV writer Tracy McMillan, who "lives in Los Angeles with her 13-year-old son." You know, get a life, so you don't have to talk about your teenage son. Or just shut up. He's not your husband or anything like a husband, and if you think he is, just shut up.

Why did Congressman Christopher Lee give up so easily?

It's weird, isn't it?

Lee resigned less than four hours after Gawker posted the emails and photo.

His office first claimed his email account had been hacked - which didn't really explain the topless photo of himself flexing his biceps in a mirror.

About two hours later, Lee told Fox News he couldn't discuss the issue because "I have to work this out with my wife."

At 6 p.m. Wednesday, Lee issued a brief statement saying he was resigning the seat he won in 2008. "I regret the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff and my constituents," he said. "I deeply and sincerely apologize to them all. ... I promise to work as hard as I can to seek their forgiveness."

There must be a lot more below the surface, and the quick resignation was to get us to move on. I'd like to know what inspired the desperation. Or was it that he got no support from his GOP colleagues in Congress. Perhaps he was told, quite clearly, that they didn't want to burn any political capital defending him. If so, I think that was probably an excellent choice. They can't want him as the torso face of the party for the next month.

From the ex-governor and his federal judge wife, who are separating after 40 years of marriage: "Please do not hesitate to include both of us in social occasions as we will not find it awkward or uncomfortable."

Ed and Majorie Rendell are breaking up, but please don't think you have to exclude one or the other as you plan your parties and other networking opportunities.

Are they Democrats or Republicans? Here's a clue: neither the word Democrat or Republican appears in the linked article. So?

They're Democrats! Duh! Don't you know how to read the news?

Most sex is bad sex, right?

It's important to draw a line between rape and bad sex. And watch what you sext...



And maybe I should watch my own on-camera gestures...

"On Twitter, folks have started using the Slate-created hashtag #sadbook to tweet about how Facebook makes them sad."

And what am I supposed to tweet if that makes me sad?

"If men are honest, everything they do and everywhere they go is for a chance to see women."

"There were points in my life where I felt oddly irresistible to women. I’m not in that state now and that makes me sad. But I also believe that a lot of the improvements in my character have come through ageing and the diminishing of powers. It’s all a balancing act; you just have to get used to the ride."

Jack Nicholson.

"Adults who make love first thing in the morning apparently not only feel more upbeat for the rest of the day, but also benefit from a stronger immune system."

"Research suggests that adults who begin their day this way are healthier and happier than those who simply opt for a cup of tea and some toast before heading out of the door."

What do you think of this news about sex in the morning?
	It's really unsexy! Sex isn't a health treatment.
	It confirms my experience. I attribute my good health and mood to my sex-in-the-morning regime.
	Good propaganda for getting my partner to go along with quickies.
	It's depressing to hear one more reason why I'm feeling so bad.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I think people are misunderstanding response #1, which I think is the best answer. "It" doesn't refer to sex in the morning. It refers to the news (that sex in the morning is good for your health). Let's have sex in the morning because it's a good heath treatment — that's unsexy. Ah! The aggravation I get for being subtle!

"Is marriage responsible for turning the beastly male into a well-behaved husband?"

"Or are the upstanding men the ones who marry in the first place?"

An old mystery. The linked article is about a study that shows there's combined causality: Marriage tends to make men more upstanding citizens and more upstanding male citizens are more likely to find and commit to a mate.

Related mysteries: Should we incentivize marriage and pressure men into marriage in order to make society better for all of us? Must men marry women to get this social improvement or will gay marriage work too? Should women be enthusiastic about performing the function of improving men? Is the restriction of marriage to opposite-sex couples a way to enlist unwilling women in the social enterprise of improving men?

CORRECTION: I'd originally written "same-sex" in that last question.

"Come to me. I got shot. I'm with Gabby. I'm okay. I got the guy down."

What Bill Badger said to his wife from the hospital before his phone went dead. That's the quote as reported by the wife. Perhaps he actually said "I'm okay" before "I got shot," which is the order I would prefer to hear news like that.

Here's video of Badger describing the way people restrained Jared Loughner.

"Just remember: No dates 'til you're 30."

(Via Bloggingheads.)

"Food is so complicated!"

"Who knows what judgments we make about people because of the way they are or seem to be about food?"

"Perhaps that sounds to you like an archaic feminist assertion - the kind of thing that hip women no longer say."

Rachel Henes — a social worker and "youth violence prevention specialist" — takes up the anti-pornography cause:

During countless classroom discussions, boys have told me that from a very young age, they have been taught that for a "real" man, sex is about the aggressive conquest of female bodies and scoring with as many of them as you can. While these ideas have long been around, they are more socially sanctioned now than ever before.

So what happens when individual risk factors become societal norms? And when pornography, because of its ubiquity and availability, effectively becomes sex ed?...

[Girls are] feeling depressed and worthless as they realize that real-life translations of porn don't make them feel sexy or powerful at all, since the sexual personas they're trying to emulate have been created by - and for - men.

Rachel Henes is...
	1. an unhip, archaic feminist.
	2. a social conservative who just doesn't call herself conservative.
	3. smart and correct and we should listen to her.
	4. a great wake up call to those "sex positive" feminists.
	5. a boring sex-phobe.
	6. all of the above.
	7. 1 and 4.
	8. 2 and 3.
	9. 1 and 5.
pollcode.com free polls

"Relationships are better if you wait over a month to have sex. Huh. I’m not sure I ever did that."

"I’m not even sure I know anyone who did that...."

Says Instapundit, who should picture a Venn diagram with: 1. people who have sex within a month of beginning a relationship, 2. people who wait a month before having sex, and 3. people who inform their acquaintances about the first time they had sex with their partner.

ADDED: After reading some more about Venn diagrams, I don't think you can picture the Venn diagram I've described — unless you can use squares instead of circles.

A purportedly romantic idea: roasting lobster in the fireplace.

Ugh! And look at the picture! The same blogger — at The Atlantic website — who tells us it will be sexy to roast a big old lobster tail at the end of a stick the way you'd toast a marshmallow also attempts to artfully arrange a photographic still-life depicting said lobster-on-a-stick and includes — in the upper right-hand corner — a sculpted ass. An ass! This romantic snack is ass.

Is the blogger — a woman — suggesting this as something a man would try to get a woman excited about or is a woman supposed to cajole a man into this nonsense? Who is this for? It's quite disgusting. Lobster juice dripping into the ashes. What's that going to look and smell like the next day?

Now that I look at what I've written, maybe there is something sex-related about that last question. You meet someone. You're trying to decide what you're interested in doing. Maybe you ask yourself: What's that going to look and smell like the next day?

"He bounds into a room... He doesn’t walk in, he explodes in."/"She’s such a force... She rocks back and forth on her feet as if she can’t contain her energy as she’s talking to you."

The story of their marrying is told in the NYT "Vows" column, but both of them already had spouses when they fell in love. So why did the NYT present their story as if it were something to be celebrated? Or is the "Vows" column more complex than that." Okay. First, let's look at some of the details of the story:

The connection was immediate, but platonic. In fact, as they became friends so did their spouses. There were dinners, Christmas parties and even family vacations together.

So [Carol Anne] Riddell was surprised to find herself eagerly looking for [John] Partilla at school events — and missing him when he wasn’t there. “I didn’t admit to anyone how I felt,” she said. “To even think about it was disruptive and disloyal.”

Ms. Riddell said she remembered crying in the shower, asking: “Why am I being punished? Why did someone throw him in my path when I can’t have him?”

In May 2008, Mr. Partilla invited her for a drink at O’Connell’s, a neighborhood bar. She said she knew something was up, because they had never met on their own before.

“I’ve fallen in love with you,” he recalled saying to her. She jumped up, knocking a glass of beer into his lap, and rushed out of the bar. Five minutes later, he said, she returned and told him, “I feel exactly the same way.”

Before sleeping together, they told their spouses, and Partilla considered himself to be doing the "terrible thing as honorably as I could." Partilla then, as the NYT phrased it  "moved out of his home, reluctantly leaving his three children." Then he came back, then left, back and forth, feeling lots of "pain."

The pain he had predicted pervaded both of their lives as they faced distraught children and devastated spouses, while the grapevine buzzed and neighbors ostracized them.

“He said, ‘Remind me every day that the kids will be O.K.,’ ” Ms. Riddell recalled. “I would say the kids are going to be great, and we’ll spend the rest of our lives making it so.”

Riddell "came to realize" that her predicament "wasn’t a punishment, it was a gift." And in this framing of the tale, the heroine needed to "earn" the gift. How? By being "brave enough to hold hands and jump."

There are 139 comments over at the NYT, many of them very critical of the Times:

Why does the Times glorify home-wrecking? Is it a sign of our times that personal responsibility to one's spouse and children takes a back seat to selfish, self-centered love....

The notions of "Vows" has a deliciously ironic depth of meaning here - the ones they made, but the ones they felt less compelled to honor. I doubt very much there's not more than what is related here - What a rationalization as to why it's OK to "befriend" another family then break up two in one shot. "It was just love!" Methinks it's the selfishness that's big and noisy!

They not only broke up their own families. They broke up the big friendship that had interwoven the 2 families. The left-behind spouses not only trusted their own partner, they also believed that, together with that partner, they enjoyed a great friendship with a wonderful couple and their kids. All those memories of social times spent together are now to be understood in a new way.

Forbes has a story about the controversy:

In addition to strong condemnation from numerous bloggers and many of the paper’s own commenters, the article, as a first of sorts for the Times, invited a number of questions. Why were the ex-spouses of the newlyweds not mentioned by name in the story? Did the reporter call them for comment, as basic journalistic practice would dictate? Why did the Times open up the comment board when most Vows stories are off-limits? And above all, what were the couple thinking in telling their story in a space normally reserved for feel-good, soft-focus meet-cute tales?

“We did this because we just wanted one honest account of how this happened for our sakes and for our kids’ sakes,” Riddell told me. “We are really proud of our family and proud of the way we’ve handled this situation over the past year. There was nothing in the story we were ashamed of.”

Riddell says the backlash is “sort of surprising to me. I think people are focusing a lot on the negative, but there was a lot of positive.” But, she notes, “we’ve had a lot of people say to us how brave we are to do this, how commendable it was that we were as honest as we were.” 

The things people will say... to your face.

So did the story’s author, Devan Sipher, seek comment from the exes?... [A] Times spokeswoman says, “We do not comment on the process of editing and reporting including who was and was not contacted for interviews related to a specific story. The Vows/Wedding column adheres to the standards of the Times.” The paper’s Weddings/Celebrations editor, Robert Woletz, did not return a message; nor did the exes, who, like their former spouses, both have high-level jobs in the media industry. (In both cases, the first marriage was also written up in the Times.)

That's all very complex. But I'm happy with the notion that the Times writes up marriage stories because they raise interesting issues. Happy families are all alike. Who wants to read about them?

"Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless."

"I once spent an evening chatting about the complexity of modern relationships with a male acquaintance, his ex-girlfriend, and her roommate. When I went to bed that night, I thought our conversation had been wonderful. Twelve hours later, I was informed that the ex-girlfriend spent the entire evening 'in a rage,' apparently becasue the other male in our foursome had been 'brooding and surly,' creating a tension that subsequently made the ex-girlfriend's roommate 'completely uncomfortable' with the nature of our dialogue. I never noticed any of this. .I never have any idea how people feel; they always appear fine to me. But if somebody had pointedly played Pat Benatars 'Love is a Battlefield' that night, I'm sure I could have constructed some empathy."

From Chuck Klosterman's  "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto" (comparing the TV shows "Big Brother" and "The Real World")

"I've been texting for a year with a couple of guys without ever going on a date with them."

"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."

Chloe Sevingny.

"I received a phone call anonymously that my daughter was involved with a guy 40 years older than her."

"You said you couldn't stop him - so I did."

A statement to the police by the father of a 17-year-old girl who saw it as his "duty as a father" to wield a bread knife, strategically.

"How to get a workplace spouse to fill in the gaps in your marriage."

Penelope Trunk talks about why you might want to develop a relationship like this — not for sex! — and gives 5 rules:

1. Identify a relationship with a high chance for success....

2. Talk about a taboo topic.

Once a girl starts talking about sex, then the boy starts talking about sex....

3. Blur the normal boundaries between co-workers....

4. Ask for what you want....

5. Find a good balance between the official relationship and the unofficial relationship....

I smell trouble. Lots of trouble. Whatever happened to friends? Trunk tells us she has a husband who wants sex but is "sick of talking" to her. She wants someone to talk to and asserts that "when workplace spouse relationships do cross the line into the sex department, the relationship goes bad." But you can't neatly control relationships, and they do "go bad" — in many unpredictable ways.