Quote of the Day

"The headline-grabbing outburst is a common ploy, one that, it depresses me to say, is far too often used by those of us here on the crunchy left. We can say that dire circumstances call for extreme reactions, but really, all that heckling does is broadcast to the world, 'What I feel right this moment is more important what everybody else in the room paid money to experience.' We see it again and again, and never satisfyingly. Last summer, a comedy club patron enticed Daniel Tosh to make some very unfortunate remarks about rape – an event that was set in motion the woman decided, 'I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman.' In other words, much like Sturtz, she decided that her values should be made known to everyone in the audience, because they were more important than anything anybody else was saying or doing. Certainly more important than what the person the rest of the assembly had paid their money to see was saying and doing.

I believe in vigorous debate and fighting with all the passion we have for the issues that matter. And that is not possible when we are selfish, self-appointed arbiters of what the person in the front of the room with the microphone ought to be talking about. There is plenty to be pissed off about in this world. I’m in the Yes to Equal Rights, No to Rape camp too. I think that Rick Santorum actually looks better covered in a sparkly dusting of glitter. But the moment we play the 'I just couldn’t help myself' card we shut down meaningful conversation. Yelling at someone is not 'interaction.' Sure, we get noticed, but it’s easy to get noticed. A no-nonsense mom like Michelle Obama could tell you that any two year-old in a WalMart can get noticed just by throwing herself on the floor of the sporting goods aisle. That doesn’t mean anybody is going to take her seriously."

-- Salon's Mary Elizabeth Williams on getEQUAL activist Ellen Sturtz's highly ill-advised attempt to shout down Michelle Obama at a fundraiser last night over the subject gay rights

Fuck. Yes.

This sums up so much of what I've said before about both the ridiculous Code Pink-style protest model of screaming, shouting, and general disruption and why heckling a comic opens you up to just about whatever abusive response consequently comes your way.

Hating Life

I'd normally say that I hate to mention another online writer more than once in the same week, but when it's Mary Beth Williams I'll make an exception. Her piece running over at Salon right now on dealing with negative comments from trolls is pretty good stuff. It's especially timely reading for yours truly given the amount of righteous indignation I've been on the receiving end of from people I don't know over the past couple of days.

Writing about negative feedback is tough only because by mentioning at all you're giving the trolls what they want (attention) and by writing about how it affects you you're really giving them what they want (the satisfaction of knowing they can get to you). No, I've never worried about whether people love or hate me since I always assumed, as with most internet endeavors, there would be an equal helping of each. The only advice I ever received on dealing with the assholes came from Drew Curtis, who told me after the first couple of times I was published over at Fark, "Don't read the comment from the Farkers."

And that's kind of what Mary Beth's piece is about today -- her decision to stop reading the comments from her own peanut gallery. Yeah, I occasionally revel in people's hilarious and often "gramatically creative" screeds against me, but I also confess that I'm not typically the target of very personal attacks (which isn't to say they haven't ever happened, since they have). Mary Beth, I know, has really been beat up on, often by a rotating cast of regulars who exemplify the standard troll archetype.

Anyway, take a look. It's worth your time.

Salon: I'm Never Reading the Comments Again/10.25.12

By the way, anyone who's read this site consistently for the past several years knows that I myself used to pick on Mary Beth quite a bit. I considered her part of the stable of catty New York-Centric liberal neo-feminists that Salon once cultivated to obnoxious effect. But when she was diagnosed with cancer, I wrote a very sincere little piece asking readers to keep her in their thoughts, because even though I didn't agree with her on everything, I read her regularly and wouldn't in a million years want to see her suffer. She wrote to me, telling me how much she appreciated the sentiment, especially coming from a "critic." We became friends. Good friends. While I wasn't too harsh on her early on, I still feel kind of bad because I was wrong about her. She's become one of my favorite people -- someone I love dearly. I'm glad she survived. The world's a better place with her in it.

Glutenous Maximus

Remember a few months back when I managed to piss off every pothead in the continental United States? Well, that was nothing compared to the wrath I'm now drawing from the celiac disease-suffering community.

My silly little rant yesterday about Jennifer Esposito's fight with CBS over what she claims is the network's discrimination against her because of her struggle with celiac must've been posted on a celiac support website somewhere because over the past several hours I've been pummeled with tweets from people with handles like "@GlutenDude" and "@WheatFree" letting me know in no uncertain terms what an asshole I am and how I should do my research before running my mouth off. Mary Beth Williams is also getting an earful from people who seem to think that we both were ignorantly dismissive of what's in reality a very serious condition.

Look, I was a dick -- I admit that. It's what I do around here a good portion of the time. But both Mary Beth's and my point wasn't that celiac isn't a real disease and that it doesn't cause pain and lead to lifestyle issues for a lot of people. Our argument was basically that by conflating celiac with the more frivolous aspects of a recent dietary fad, it's people like Esposito who may be diminishing the disease and making it easier for those not affected by it to believe that it's not a big deal. Put it this way: For a lot of people -- certainly the Gwyneth Paltrows of the world -- going gluten-free is a choice and nothing more, while for celiac sufferers it's often a necessity. But if you're one of those people who actually has celiac and you incessantly preach gluten-free to everybody -- irrespective of whether they need it -- by making the claim that it'll make them feel less bloated and icky, you're essentially making it appear as if your reasons for not eating glutens have little to do with the actual disease. You're carelessly combining a serious subject with one that's not at all serious and risking being eyed with suspicion.

A friend of mine said it best in a text to me a few minutes ago: You don't see Michael J. Fox out there talking about how you can lose 20-pounds with Parkinson's.

As for trends in medical diagnoses, they absolutely happen -- and not simply because the medical community becomes more "aware" of the disease. Sure, it becomes aware -- and so do millions of average people who then begin self-diagnosing and going to doctors who, provided it's not deadly serious, often shrug their shoulders, issue a tepid, "Eh, could very well be," and, bingo, you're being treated for the disease, syndrome, disorder, etc. Granted it really gets out of hand when there's a commercial out there telling you to "ask your doctor if you have" whatever-the-hell because Madison Avenue has invented a clever acronymic name for an often bullshit condition that Big Pharma has already created a pill to cure. But inject any medical issue into the pop culture blood stream by way of Oprah, People Magazine, and so on -- inevitably leading to mass-media ubiquity -- and you'll suddenly have everybody in our scared shitless, hypochondriac nation checking WebMD to see if the symptoms fit how they're feeling.

Awareness of a medical condition is often a double-edged sword. That's just how it is and how things work now in our media culture. As for going gluten-free, I stand by my original statement, with one caveat: If you're one of those pretentious assholes who's militant in his or her rejection of glutens -- and you're not suffering from a disease like celiac -- just shut the fuck up and eat already.

Assistant Quote of the Day

"See, this is an issue. If you’re talking in one breath about a serious, debilitating disease and advocating that anyone who suspects they have it see a doctor, that’s a world apart from suggesting someone self-diagnose a 'problem' because she could 'lose almost 20 pounds.' It doesn’t help alleviate 'the general disregard' for a disease you’re trying to get people to take seriously. There are already a whole lot of people out there jumping on the gluten-free bandwagon as this month’s Atkins diet — and even more, who don’t understand the distinction between a severe food intolerance and a 'Yeaaaaah, cookies make me bloaty.'"

-- Salon's Mary Beth Williams on gluten-free militant Jennifer Esposito's battle with CBS over claims the network didn't take her "celiac disease" seriously

Back when the whole Atkins diet was turning America into a nation of preachy, particular, overbearing assholes, I joked that I was gonna write a book called Shut the Fuck Up and Eat. The premise of the book would be based on common sense: Eat a little of everything in moderation, get some exercise and you'll be healthy and fit -- no big mystery there.

The whole gluten-free thing is the latest ridiculous food trend to put a stranglehold on our cultural imagination and of course the disciples of it proselytizing the loudest are the people who can most afford flights of fancy wherein they frivolously decide to chop an entire food group out of their diets: Hollywood celebrities. People like the insufferably aristocratic Gwyneth Paltrow. People like the comically melodramatic Jennifer Esposito. Must be nice.

Look, no one's saying celiac disease isn't real, only that it's now fashionable. The number of cases of it have indeed increased over the past few years but that's very likely because impressionable Oprah fans -- the kind of people who can't go ten minutes without consulting a self-help book to guide their decision-making -- are going to their overwhelmed and exhausted doctors in droves with a self-diagnosis already in mind. This is often the reason diseases -- as well as the various "disorders" and "syndromes" that now apparently plague our country -- can become medical trends.

Chris Rock said it best: "We got so much food in America we're allergic to food. Allergic to food. Hungry people ain't allergic to shit. You think anyone in Rwanda's got a fucking lactose intolerance?"

I stand by my statement from years ago: Shut the fuck up and eat.

Or at the very least, just shut the fuck up.

You're Not One To Talk

This is why I'm friends with and love the hell out of Salon's Mary Beth Williams:

"Not even Daniel Tosh deserves to have an audience member yell at him about what’s 'never' funny while he is doing his job. But wait, you say. First they made jokes about the communists and I didn’t speak because I wasn’t a communist, and all that! The comic needs to know when he is going too far! you argue. Still, no. A comedy club is not a town meeting. It is not a dialogue. Even if you’re going to see improv, and the comic is asking you to shout out suggestions, he is not inviting you to tell him that rape is not funny. There’s really not a whole lot he can do with that. He is not going to pause thoughtfully and say, 'Why, perhaps I should reconsider my material. I’m off to do some rewriting. Thank you, helpful expert in the back!' He is going to attack you with everything he’s got now, because that is the nature of stand-up.

The moment the comic takes the stage, he is fighting every second for control of that audience. He is competing with the table full of drunks over at the side who are talking through his routine. He is vying for attention against the group that can’t stop looking at their phones. As Todd Barry once told a New York club crowd, 'You are the nicest audience that has ever texted through my whole set.' And he is just holding his breath for the person, like you, who has suddenly decided that this is the night to get into a debate. Comedy is a power struggle, and I promise you the person on the stage will not let you win it. If he’s worth his salt, he’ll do it in a way that’s so incisive and devastating that even you, random person with poor impulse control, will laugh. If he’s not, he’ll do it in a clumsy, angry manner that becomes a gigantic stink on the Internet and you will still have been wrong in the first place."

Amen.

Quote of the Day

"Kate Hudson is officially worse than cancer."

-- Salon's Mary Beth Williams in a text she sent to me yesterday immediately after sitting through a screening of A Little Bit of Heaven, in which Kate Hudson plays a woman battling cancer

Since that text, I've been waiting for Mary Beth's "review" of this movie to be published. Well, it's now up -- and as somebody who still has a crush on Hudson's Penny Lane character in Almost Famous and yet can't help but regard her with nothing but shame these days, it's everything I'd hoped.

Judging Nancy

As a nice little follow-up to my piece yesterday -- the one that ran both here and at the Huffington Post demanding that CNN take action it never will -- my friend Mary Beth Williams over at Salon ran down in pretty graphic detail the despicable ins and outs of Nancy Grace's reign of on-air terror.

In case you still don't know why Grace is such a worthless piece of shit, consider this all the elucidation you'll need.

Salon: Nancy Grace Is More Terrible Than Ever/2.15.12

I'd like to think that I inspired this piece, but then again I'd like to think that I'm constantly inspiring Mary Beth to do all sorts of things -- none of them, unfortunately, ever done to me.

Cut To Ribbons

I'm going to once again defer to Mary Beth Williams for the full story of how the Susan G. Komen organization quickly backed away in shame from its lunkheaded decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood. But I want to say one quick thing about the social media shit-storm that was largely responsible for forcing the Komen people to do the right thing: It scares me a little.

Look, I get that the masses spoke loudly and -- in social media circles, anyway -- almost unequivocally, and that the outrage was so incisive and so vast that in the end the Komen organization was really left with no choice if it wanted to save its brand (and if you know anything at all about Komen, that brand is the most important thing in the world to it). What we witnessed was a new manifestation of age-old democracy, the public effecting change in one of the purest forms possible. We witnessed it a couple of weeks ago with SOPA; we saw it help to change governments in the Middle East last spring; now we're seeing it again. The only problem with it is this: social media already has us thinking at a speed that isn't really thinking at all and spouting whatever the first thing that comes to mind happens to be, generally without contemplation or the consideration of context.

Now the natural byproduct of that has arrived: we act and react reflexively, also without really taking the time to think about what we're doing. Komen backed down quickly and unconditionally, bowing to the supposed will of the very loud masses and the media -- traditional and social -- which amplified their anger. In this case, it was not only right but warranted -- the outcry and backlash really was that ferocious and far-reaching. But today's media have the ability to amplify almost any message until it becomes its own echo chamber, one with the ability to fool us into thinking that the volume of an opinion directly correlates to how many people really have that opinion. Need a good example of this? Look no further than the Tea Party. Even a small army can make a hell of a lot of noise if it knows how, especially since the modern media abhor a vacuum of sound and fury.

This time the cause was noble and the outcome just.

What about the next time?

What happens when the person or organization forced to knee-jerk capitulate isn't someone who should?

Salon: How the Internet Changed Komen's Mind/2.3.12


"On Second Thought" (Originally Published 11.23.09)

There's a decent piece by David Sirota that's making the syndication rounds right now in which he takes aim at the dumbing-down of America as a nation; specifically, he ties it to what may eventually be remembered as the most inadvertently prescient not-very-good movie in history: Idiocracy. Sirota's contention is that while we've known for some time that unapologetic stupidity is steadily gaining an at one time undreamed-of respectability within our culture -- to the point where we're now besieged by it in politics, on cable TV and talk radio, and wherever Sarah Palin's new book is sold -- a couple of things happened recently to either pick up the pace, or at least significantly mark a sudden downward plunge, on the "de-evolution" of America as a society of people with brains at least slightly larger than a couple of Chicken McNuggets.

Last week, two of the Washington Post's top columnists -- White House press corps "dean" David Broder and the Post's foreign policy guru Jackson Diehl -- penned articles that slammed Barack Obama for not moving fast enough on making a decision whether or not to deploy more troops to the increasingly intractable war in Afghanistan. Broder's point was just plain fucking staggering:

"It is evident from the length of this deliberative process and from the flood of leaks that have emerged from Kabul and Washington that the perfect course of action does not exist. Given that reality, the urgent necessity is to make a decision -- whether or not it is right."

Meanwhile, Diehl's point seemed to hinge on the belief -- proffered without evidence, merely speculation -- that even though NATO, the Pentagon and Congress are supposedly unanimous in the opinion that we need more troops in Afghanistan, Obama just can't bring himself to commit, and that should be cause for concern among the electorate.

Sirota's response:

"As leading opinionmakers, Broder and Diehl are paid to carefully ponder issues and then offer their considered thoughts. That's not part of what they're supposed to do -- it's what they are singularly employed to do. It's how they earn their living and credibility -- indeed, it's their entire raison d'etre. And yet, these leading lights of the intelligentsia are overtly preaching anti-intelligence, insisting the president must avoid taking time to think through his actions.

This isn't interpretation -- it's what these Beltway sages are literally saying. Broder is explicitly demanding Obama make a knee-jerk decision -- any decision -- even if it has catastrophic consequences. Likewise, Diehl is calling for Obama to immediately risk thousands of American lives simply because that's what Diehl believes the establishment wants.

Let's be clear -- these are just two of many similar examples. Today, screeds calling for leaders to prioritize lightning-fast decisions over measured deliberations are increasingly commonplace in the Washington intelligentsia, even after an Iraq debacle brought on by the same ideological know-nothingism...

When the supposed guardians of political cognition and empiricism begin publicly flaying leaders for taking time to fully evaluate potential decisions — it's a sign our country is becoming the ignorance-deifying Idiocracy we should all fear."

While I agree with Sirota that calling for a president to make a decision to potentially risk the lives of American soldiers without first really thinking it through is reprehensible and the definition of anti-intellectualism -- unfortunately, I think the problem is even worse than he describes. The reality is that this course we're on -- this downward spiral -- is likely irreversible. The reason is that the ever-increasing speed with which we communicate these days has made introspective analysis not only seem antiquated but downright intolerable. We just don't have time for things like stopping and thinking anymore.

Through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter -- and, yes, even through texting, e-mail and blogging -- we've removed the need for context and contemplation as a prerequisite to opening our big mouths and can now spout an opinion to each other or to the world, occasionally with dire but all-too-avoidable consequences, without giving it, literally, a second thought. We've fractured and fragmented our communication skills to fit the new model of speaking -- one that only requires 140 characters, with as few vowels as possible. Our brains haven't evolved as quickly as our ability to express ourselves. We're officially a nation of knee-jerks.

And by the way, I'm the first one to admit that I've both fallen victim to this trap and have sung the praises of the Brave New, Hyper-Connected World that created it in the first place.

Admittedly, there is such a thing as overthinking -- becoming paralyzed by your own ability to analyze the potential effect of every choice to the point where you become perpetually lost in minutiae and unable to act. Barack Obama is certainly wonky enough to get hamstrung by his own intellect, but have we really regressed to the point where we can't tolerate a few weeks worth of careful consideration before our president makes a choice with such potentially devastating ramifications? Have we already forgotten the last time a U.S. presidential administration, filled with hubris and certitude, barreled headlong into committing American lives to a war before trying to discern any clue what they hell they were doing?

Just a decade ago -- maybe even less -- the notion of taking a little while to think things over before rendering a decision still seemed like the wisest course of action, an action in and of itself. Now? Take even a day or so to measure your options and it's considered glacial -- because 24 hours, one full news cycle revolution on cable and in talk radio and the span in which 850-gazillion tweets were fired back and forth on Twitter, is like an eternity to us. While you were sitting there analyzing, Mr. Smarty Pants, everyone else was actually doing.

But in the end, really, who's doing the right thing?

Pink Slip

I'm still on a pretty tight deadline so I don't have a lot of spare time, but this morning no fewer than three readers reached out and asked me to say something, anything about the fact that the Susan G. Komen people -- otherwise known as "Breast Cancer Inc." -- pulled all funding from Planned Parenthood. One person, in particular, implored me to do it for all the breasts I've fondled throughout my life (which for the record is a pretty good pitch, albeit one that seriously overestimates the generosity of most women).

Bottom line: I don't have the time, although I'd have plenty to say on it since my mom recently underwent treatment for breast cancer and was forced to submit, somewhat at least, to the Kult of Komen.

Thankfully, my friend Mary Beth Williams -- who's also battling cancer and who recently received some excellent news on that front -- tackles the subject quite nicely and even-handedly in Salon right now.

Salon: Komen for the Cure Sells Out Women, Again/2.1.12

In the Cut

The surgery I underwent five years ago is known as "non-invasive." That's an almost comical misnomer, as you quickly come to realize that the term is a relative one, with most doctors only considering a procedure invasive if it requires that they cut or drill into you and hack off various parts of your physical person.

In today's Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams writes about the thing the medical community doesn't often warn you about when you undergo a potentially life-saving surgery: that it can leave devastating psychological and emotional scars to go with the physical ones, and that somewhere along the line doctors may have become so impressed by what they're capable of as a matter of routine that they forgot how violative their actions can seem to the patients.

There's a reason "body horror" is its own sub-genre of scary movies.

Salon: The Post-Surgery Secret Your Doctors Won't Share/12.28.11

Topic of Cancer

Remember how I recently mentioned that a couple of weeks ago I spent a really terrific evening hanging out with Mary Beth Williams of Salon (which was actually yet another excuse to enthuse about how completely crazy I am about that woman)? Well, over those few hours and several beers at the bar at Fanelli's in SoHo, she ran down for me what was going on with her medically -- how her battle with stage 4 melanoma was going. The bottom line is that it's not going well, although in some ways it's going very well. I guess you need to actually have cancer or be close to someone who does to understand how such a paradox is possible.

But if there's anyone who can make it make sense for you, it's Mary Beth. And she's doing just that in Salon right now, in a piece she's written about the traumas, terrors and occasional triumphs of undergoing a clinical trial and being essentially a medical experiment -- at the mercy of doctors and drug companies who are trying to make history while you're just trying to make it from one day to the next in the hope that it'll all add up to a lifetime.

You just have no idea how much I'm pulling for her.

Salon: My Life as a Lab Rat/11.24.11

Cutting Room

Two weekends ago, when I was in New York City to pick up Inara, I went out for beers with Mary Beth Williams. For those who haven't been paying attention, she's become one of my favorite people in the world -- and her piece in Salon today is close to my heart because I happen to have a very serious thing for very short hair on women.

Maybe it's the quirkiness, the tough-chick masculinity or the fact that it just makes her stand out -- or maybe it puts me in touch with the latent queer inside me dying to get out -- but the willingness to go short says that a woman has fire, and it's sexy as hell.

And yes, I like to think that an appreciation of a woman with short hair says something about a guy -- other than, like I said, the fact that he's probably secretly gay.

Salon: Are Short-Haired Women Less Attractive?/11.7.11

Quote of the Day

"Survival isn’t just for those who, as Herman Cain puts it, can only 'blame yourselves' for not being rich. And death and disease are not just for those who, like Ron Paul, think that’s 'what freedom is all about — taking your own risks.' All the riches and 'freedom' in the world won’t save your ass if you don’t have access to the right treatment. And when effective medicine isn’t getting out there because the financial incentive isn’t compelling enough, it’s just plain sickening."

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon, on the difficulty some patients with life-threatening diseases are having finding drugs to treat them and how it pertains to her own current battle with metastatic melanoma

That other person I know and care about very much who's battling an aggressive form of cancer? The one besides my mom and the guy who's blogging, that I mentioned a couple of days ago? It's Mary Beth. I didn't want to say anything more simply because it's been a while since she made any of the details of what's going on with her public and it's not my place to talk about it if she's not talking about it. Suffice to say, though, she's still trying to kick this thing's ass -- and thankfully she has the help of the best cancer center in the world and, as she says, a radical clinical trial that not everyone has access to.

And anyone who claims that the market should dictate whether she -- or anyone's loved one -- should get the care she needs to survive can go fuck himself.

Related: DXM: Death Be Not Proud (But It Is Cost-Effective)/12.30.07

Quote of the Day

"In a Monday Wall Street Journal editorial on 'News and Its Critics' that borders on brilliant satire, the Murdoch-owned paper rails on about how 'our competitors are using the phone-hacking years ago at a British corner of News Corp. to assail the Journal, and perhaps injure press freedom in general.' That's right, haters, when you criticize an organization that breaks into a murdered girl's voicemails, and believes paying off cops and tampering with individual privacy is 'part of the game,' you're messing with the First Amendment itself. Though the editorial is unsigned, one can't help noting its spiritual kinship with the persuasive rhetoric of that legendary debater, Eric 'Otter' Stratton, who once noted, 'The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties... You can't hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few sick, perverted individuals... for isn't this an indictment of our entire American society?'"

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon

Quote of the Day

"Whatever you or I may think of the case, the fact remains that a 'kooky jury' found Anthony not guilty, which means that Anthony now has, among other things, the right to not be excoriated by a two-bit character assassin like Nancy Grace. Yet in Grace's avenging world, her ironclad interpretation of events trumps anyone else's – it even, as in the case of the Duke trial, trumps the eventual illumination of the facts. She talks about speaking the truth, yet weaves elaborate fictions of a champagne-popping defense team, a story in which 'Tot Mom is going walk out of jail probably tomorrow and she's probably going to get a million-dollar book deal and maybe a quarter-a-million dollars for licensing fees for photos and she's going to be living on easy street, living the sweet life that she's got tattooed on her back.' Grace's version of 'truth' is what the rest of us like to refer to as 'imagination.'"

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon

By now it's no secret what I think of Nancy Grace. I wish I had the time to expound on her predictably grotesque and opportunistic reaction to the Casey Anthony verdict, but thankfully M-Liz hit it on the head.

In case you don't know my thoughts on Grace, I once called her "the most loathsome, feckless troll to currently, inexplicably, have a forum on national television," a "vile, unscrupulous monster who peddles morbid prurience like a five-dollar whore and whose brand of rank solipsism is matched only by her near-sociopathic disregard for the lives she's ruined and exploited and by her apparent contempt for the tenets of responsible journalism (to say nothing of basic human decency)."

Speaking Terms

I'm all about cheap and easy content right now given than I'm up to my ass in work projects, so the latest person I can be grateful to is Mary Elizabeth Williams.

She churned out a really decent little piece today in Salon on what seems to be a favorite subject around here lately: how saying something really rash and stupid -- but more than a little offensive -- can put your career on the line.

Or in the case of Megan Fox, get you fired outright.

Or in the case of John Galliano, get you fired and put on trial.

There's no doubt, as we've seen quite a bit recently, that there's occasionally a hefty price to be paid for shooting your mouth off, but to her credit M-Liz looks a little deeper into the two cases cited above.

Salon: The New High Price of Mouthing Off/6.21.11

Jock Scrap

I was really hoping she and Salon would stay out of it because anything they said was always guaranteed to provide the textbook definition of a really bad cliché but, well -- Mary Elizabeth Williams is kind of taking on Opie and Anthony. Really, you could scour the media landscape and I'm not sure you'd find two more traditionally polarized factions than the hyper-cultured Upper West Side liberals whom Mary Elizabeth Williams speaks for and the Bridge and Tunnel scatologistic man-child demographic represented by guys like Opie and Anthony. That battle -- the one pitting, as the trailer for Caddyshack said decades ago, "the snobs against the slobs" -- is as old as time itself.

Basically, in a column in today's Salon, M-Liz asserts that this week's Anthony Weiner prick-slip -- the one brought to you by Andrew Breitbart, during an appearance on the Opie and Anthony show -- was surprising for the most part because it revealed that shock jocks are still on the air in 2011. If you believe the column, guys like Opie and Anthony are well past their moment as a tolerable cultural anomaly and a desperate grab for relevancy like the one we supposedly witnessed earlier this week proves it in spades.

That O & A's core audience won't care one bit what someone like Mary Elizabeth Williams thinks is so obvious that it isn't even worth expounding on. Likewise, that most Salon regulars probably don't wake up every morning and catch the latest O & A gags is also not something worthy of discussion. Not to single myself out as special or anything, but I've gotta be one of the few who actually does really like both M-Liz's high-minded wit and O & A's low-brow stupidity; there's a place, and an audience, for both in this world and I think it's ridiculous for anyone to make the argument that one side of the equation somehow isn't fit for public consumption. In other words, I'm taking the slobs' side on this one -- because while M-Liz is right in saying that a radio show that occasionally pulls juvenile on-air pranks and which caters to America's overgrown adolescent guy community shouldn't survive if it doesn't, ironically, evolve, she's wrong when she says that shows like that haven't evolved. Many of them have, quite a bit. Just because she doesn't "get it" doesn't mean others don't, or that their opinions don't count, or that the overall joke isn't funny.

Opie and Anthony aren't everyone's brand of vodka, but they're not trying to be. You don't like what they do? The solution is as old as indignation itself: don't listen. Complaining about it from on-high is as tired and pathetic as the genre you're ineffectually railing against.

Quote of the Day

"And that's the rub. The eagerness of designers and the press to seize upon children and dub them 'fashionistas' isn't about kids trying mom's platforms -- it's about a relentless and incredibly twisted industry that worships at the altar of not-even-womanhood. Because if you're Marc Jacobs or Proenza Schouler or any of the designers making clothes ostensibly for adult women but eagerly peddled out to high profile middle-schoolers, you're essentially saying your wares look best on females who perhaps have not yet even started menstruating. And if you're a journalist fawning over how those Valentino and Rodarte dresses 'look good' on a child, you are part of the problem, big time."

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams in a Salon piece decrying the rise of the "tween fashionista"

Assistant To the Quote of the Day

"If we have to pay the Kardashians a million bucks to get back online, how much will it take to keep them off? "

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams, summing up perfectly the irony of tomorrow's planned "Digital Life Sacrifice," in which several already overexposed celebrities will boycott their own Facebook and Twitter accounts, essentially going dark, until one million dollars is raised for charity

Quote of the Day

"(Anderson) Cooper's own skittishness around the issues of language seem at once both genuinely compassionate and oddly awkward. Can a man who is so intensely private about his own personal life really lecture society about how to use words? The way we speak among our own tribes, after all, is different from what we'll permit from others, and our personal stake in words matters. If a lesbian friend wants to rag on her 'dyke haircut' I yield the floor -- and hold my tongue. Maybe that's why I found it odd when Cooper, who coyly referred to either that three- or six-lettered 'F-word' on 'Ellen' (Is there a difference? Is the longer version more hurtful?) didn't trip his tongue over 'bitch' in his Sunday interview with Eminem. Mr. Cooper, your selective umbrage is showing."

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams, in a good little piece in Salon examining the question of whether it's ever permissible to refer to something as "gay"

Look, if you can come up with a better word to describe Glee, I'm all ears.