Dignity will fall. Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's home run record, and he did it with class. Now, Barry Bonds will break it. He has re-signed with the Giants, and he needs just 22 home runs to break Hank's record (he hit 26 last year). He's 42 and his body is racked with steroids. Maybe he won't make it.
Suddenly worried about getting stranded in your car? Try stocking a 3,600 calorie bar. Also comes in handy if you're drunk and miss the Burger King drive-through at 2:15 a.m. or you need to feed my family for a week.
Bette Midler has had it. She says Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears are "wild and woolly sluts." Well, yes. And Americans are absolutely infatuated with them. What does that make us? Wild and woolly slut watchers? Wild and woolly slut wannabes? Fantasizers about bedding wild and woolly sluts? Quite frankly, the whole thing bores me. It's wholly puerile (at least once you get past the breasts). Maybe in the future, when it looks like all the stunts are over and they can't go any further, maybe one of them will pull off a real stunner and enter a convent. Any girl can walk around without underwear and let men fondle her. It simply isn't newsworthy, if "news" means something unusual or important. But taking a real vow? That'd be news.
Great piece at the National Post, ripping into the Conflict Police: editors and their minions who fear any sort of conflict between an author and reviewer. Two excerpts:
Do the people editing book pages read criticism as well as commissioning it? If they do, they must know that in the last century much of the best critical writing was produced by people close to their subjects. Have they heard that the most celebrated American critic of his time, Edmund Wilson, wrote more than a few words about his dear friend F. Scott Fitzgerald? Or that H.L. Mencken had a platoon of novelists he both reviewed and published in his magazine, the American Mercury?
In 1982, when A. Alvarez, the poetry critic, discussed his own marital history in Life After Marriage: Scenes from Divorce, the London Review of Books carried a rather acerbic review by his first wife. She disclosed her status, not in apology but to prove she was an expert witness.
It's a great piece, but the Conflict Police hysteria isn't limited to published works. Americans walk around in a conflict maze, looking for conflicts under every rock and contact. We're paranoid of conflicts. A person who doesn't disclose a conflict of interest is more insidious than a child molester (okay, maybe it's a tie). From whence all this fear of conflict? I don't know, but I suspect it's because Americans value objectivity above all other thinking. Problem is, all people are irrevocably and irredeemably subjective, hence much of the appeal of the personalist philosophy that looks at the whole person, including his subjectivity and inner workings that we're just beginning to scratch. There's a bizarre chair in our mental furniture that says, "If you're personally interested in something, you can't think about that something." There's an element of truth there (passion distorts thinking), but that element shouldn't override everything else.
Brews You Can Use
A couple of beer bloggers have great gift ideas. The Brew Site. Hail the Ale.
Pretty funny assortment of pics: What the drunk sees. Sample:
A virtually blind New Zealand man has been banned from driving after taking the wheel from a drunk driver. The driver was actually blind, not just blind drunk. Would MADD applaud the guy? Loosely-related: A German cyclist lied to police about being mugged because he was afraid to tell his wife the truth: he rode into a lamppost while drunk and injured himself.
