’splain it to me!

How can an ardent Republican give a shit about gay equality? It blows my mind.

Objecting to Shallow News Coverage

2 years and a few days ago I wrote this letter to the New York Times in objection to the trivial, high-school approach to the news I observed. Since that time I have turned to “mainstream” sources less and less. I reprint it here because I think it is well-written and probably only attracted 3 eyeballs at the time (a person and a half?). One of my intentions with some thinks gone wrong is to weave together my past and present (and future?!) into something coherent, if possible.

So, please read on as I explain how I turned away from the childish name-calling of columnists like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich who once amused me so. Perhaps this letter marks the moment my distaste for immaturity had leapt off the opinion pages to include the “obsession with style, a petulance, an insistence on storytelling and mind-reading” evidenced even in the Times‘ straight news reporting.

OMG internet silliness

So, I’m going through my Twitter account (never did make it to lunch yet) and found this bizarre thing called @confessionwall which is following me. This tweet caught my eye:

I confess that sherry ann walker is a slut, she dating a guy name rob but she is sleeping with 3 other guys as w…  http://bit.ly/g5WDTF

Obviously it’s unrelated to anything. And it’s in Manitoba, I discovered by following the link. And I don’t know any Sherry Ann Walker. But it made me laugh!

(The infamous Ms Walker is in Manitoba, but the Twitter feed claims to be based in Munich!)

I read it in The New Yorker

Right now I’m reading two articles at the New Yorker online:

• Review of Broadway’s “The Book of Mormon” by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The review is oddly written and seems disappointed in the lack of meaning to the musical. But I’ve learned not to expect profundity from the South Park guys. To me it is enough that they find success poking at the things they do. Like an abstract artwork, or much of the literature I enjoy, the lack of a defined point of view in their cultural product is sometimes a good thing. One great thing I got out of this review: ‘The actual Book of Mormon, whose hieroglyphs Smith “translated” while peering at peep stones in the bottom of his hat, lives up to Edmund Wilson’s estimation of it as “a farrago of balderdash.” ‘
• Paul Haggis vs. the Church of Scientology. Haggis, Oscar-winning writer and director, publicly broke with the Church of Scientology over its poor treatment of gay people, specifically its support for Prop 8 repealing gay marriage in California. This article is over 20 pages long, so I’m going to save it for later. Lunch time!

Jeesh!

This is starting out as a pain in the ass!

Let’s do it…

Hi,

Well, I did it. I set up the blog at https://somethinksgonewrong.wordpress.com/.

It’s a little confusing over at WordPress, cuz there are so many options and features, but what I really want you to do is just sign in and write. If it’s okay with you, I’ll take care of all the “meta” blog shit. So, if you have a question or request for a change, just let me know. It’s not that I don’t think you’re capable or that you wouldn’t have great ideas about formatting and appearance — it’s just that, I can remember a time in my life when I could never even start something because I would spend all my creative energy on fonts and colors and margins, etc. So I’m thinking it will be best if we keep it pretty simple and just write.

You’ll see I’ve created some Categories for the blog. These can be changed. I happened to think of a few topics we’d be likely to cover. We can add and subtract as we go along. Every post we write has to be filed under some category (or more than one), so feel free to invent new ones as you’d like. If it’s about the blog itself I created the meta category. Notes between us fall under conversation. And, uncat is for our uncategorized (or uncategorizable) postings — or just when we’re feeling too lazy to select a category.

I’m most excited about the “Conversation” and “Collaboration” categories. It will be fun to test our capacities for sharing and working together online. So, true to the spirit of the thing, this note is our first post under Conversation.

– Y.