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NYTeims ed, “Rethinking Criminal Sentences” (2010 July 27): Sentencing for white-collar crimes — and for child pornography offenses — “has largely lost its moorings,” according to the Justice Department, which makes a strong case that the matter should be re-examined by the United States Sentencing Commission. This probably makes more sense when you’re wearing a [...]

(Know your meme.) McClatchy (Blumenthal, “FDA nears approval of genetically engineered salmon,” 2010-07-11): And the modified fish, all females, would be sterile so that they couldn’t breed with wild fish if any escaped, the company said. You gotta be some sort of crazy liberal DFH to think that’s anything but either (a) awesome or (b) [...]

An aside of rare bluntness from Reuters about one legacy of US military adventurism: The resort town has been known for its vibrant nightlife and sex trade since the days of the Vietnam War, partly due to its proximity to an American air force base at the time. The US pulled out of Vietnam in [...]

Following up on “Home naming is killing the, oh, nevermind…“ (2009 Dec 09), the Wikipedia entry on Ted Klaudt (“accessed,” as they say, 6 July 2010) reports: “Copyrighting” his name In December 2009, Ted Klaudt sent a “Common Law Copyright Notice” to the Associated Press and various state media outlets warning that use of his [...]

For too long, normal white people have had to sit by and watch the efflorescence of new forms of subjectivity and identity. True, some of them joined the fun — but many, in re/discovering themselves, found that they weren’t LGBT, weren’t involved in a multicultural relationship, didn’t have a blended family, and just weren’t marginal, [...]

(JLo)

Dick Destiny: (September 1991, abridged) Soupy Sales, the unforgettable character of comedy, the man who was drummed off the air by the FCC when an anonymous harridan complained to the agency after a New Year’s Eve broadcast in which Sales asked the children to sneak into their parents’ bedrooms, collect all the green paper with [...]

Corporate-sponsored “naked cowboy” in Times Square, 2009 (via streetsblog):   Current context:   Cowboy in Times Square ca. 1969:   (Midnight Cowboy) [Update: Krugman, ever impolitic, asks this about the new TS pedo zone: I’m definitely in favor of making part of Broadway a traffic-free area. But you have to wonder—who’s this for? As far [...]

A nightmare teetering on the edge between the past and the future.

Rush Limbaugh provides a vital comms link to the diving bell USGOP currently plumbing many of the same socio-psychic depths that Klaus Theweleit explored in his brilliant book Male Fantasies (Vol. 1). Spake the blimp: “We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles [...]

Phallocentric/heteronormative assumptions get in the way of amateur attempts to reconstruct the first atomic bombs (Samuels, “Atomic John,” New Yorker, 15 Dec ’08): The source of the error, Coster-Mullen recognized, was an assumption that every (male) researcher who studied the subject had made about the relation between projectile and target. These scholars had apparently been [...]

Sydney Morning Herald (Hutcheon, “Eminent Scientific Journal Gets Hit,” 11 Dec ’08): One of Europe’s most prestigious scientific research institutes has had to issue an apology after discovering that the calligraphy used on the cover of its flagship magazine [Max Planck Forschung] to illustrate a special China edition was in fact an ad for a [...]

Kellaway (FT, 8 Dec. ’08): Over the past month, I have picked up 247 men. Fast work in just four weeks but I’ve been putting my back into it. During my sabbatical from the Financial Times, I have obsessively e-mailed strangers on an adultery website, thereby taking part in what I find is the hottest [...]

Roberto Saviano on the Camorra: But in reality, it is a life of s—. They are always shut inside their homes. They have the same women who they have to share because they do not trust anyone, so it’s not true that they are big playboys. An anthro thesis waiting to be written.

So says an A-list blogger: Pretty funny.

Ethyl Eichelberger died a suicide rather than tolerate the debilitating side effects of the AIDS treatments of the day. As Klytemnestra: Nefertiti: From Joe E. Jeffreys’s memorial note in TDR (The Drama Review), “Ethyl Eichelberger, 1945–1990” (35.1 [Spring ’91], pp. 10–12): Born James Roy Eichelberger in Pekin, Illinois, to Amish Mennonite parents, he received a [...]

This has been hanging on the wall for years, but we never knew what it was (we never needed to know because it was self-evidently excellent):

Kevin Kelly exhumes “Unthinkable Futures” from the Summer ’93 Whole Earth Review, the result of a back-and-forth with Brian Eno. The structure (KK, BE, KK, BE) is important, because KK‘s first round was ‘pure’ fantasy, uninformed by Eno’s very different style. Here are the four gender references from Kelly’s first round: Japan is eclipsed by [...]

Times square in 1970; a Spartacus sex swingers’ club ad (n.d.); Plato’s Retreat ad (n.d.); “Leisure Spa” ads (Taj Mahal, the Retreat, etc; n.d.); Channel J excerpts (n.d.); Al Goldstein; Ugly George.