Day: February 16, 2004

In Which I Discover My Wife’s Adult Magazine Collection

Lisa and I live about an hour from Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is a quite conservative part of Michigan. The local TV station there, WOOD-TV 8, always seems to be running some muckracking moral story or another. Recently, though, it took out radio promos advertising an upcoming story describing a truly shocking event — a local school held a magazine fundraiser which included an “adult” magazine.

So we figured in the worst-case scenario maybe one of those checkoff order forms with Playboy on it made its way to the children, or more likely it included magazines like FHM or Maxxim.

Nope, the “adult” magazine in question turned out to be that purveyor of pornography, Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. Here’s how WOOD-TV’s web site describes the fiasco,

It is natural to assume that magazines purchased through a school fundraising drive would be suitable for children, especially since children are the ones doing the buying and selling. So you can imagine a Grandville mom’s surprise when her daughter was able to order a magazine full of sexual content.

Asimov’s Science Fiction is the magazine in question, and from the outside cover, doesn’t look like an “adults-only” publication. But open it up and you will find it is.

Damn. All those teenage years spent sneaking Playboy and Penthouse when I should have went for Asimov’s and Analog (what is that “plugging the Analog hole” stuff that Cory Doctorow is always complaining about?)

Here’s how WOOD-TV described the offending material in Asimov’s,

Inside the magazine she [parent Marilyn Becker] found various short stories, science fiction, yes, but with strong adult content.

Becker read some of the explicit tales about sex, drugs and molestation inside the magazine for us that included, “Young girls with no panties, young girls in white socks, young girls looking at his wank-mags with him, young girls doing it with one another while he watched.”

Becker was disgusted by what she was seeing on the pages of her teenage daughter’s new magazine. “I was appalled…I was very shocked…literally shaking when I was reading it,” she said. “We’ve never had concerns with the program before.”

The real shocker, though, came after the report when I was trying to find a book on medieval witchcraft in my wife’s collection and came across her brazenly displayed collection of adult magazines,

She tells me she only buys it to look at the pictures than read the sex-soaked stories, but I’m not so sure.

Living in an Alternative Universe

John Robb apparently has just returned from an alternative plane of existence where Bush wasn’t inaugrated president until January of 2002,

When did the recession begin? March 2001. Of course, this isn’t going to stop the Bush team from rewriting history to blame it on Clinton.

Since Bush was inaugurated on January 20, 2001, I can’t wait for Robb to explain precisely what Bush did in the intervening week and a half to cause the recession.

Of course, 9/11 was nearly 2 years after Bush took office, but Clinton must certainly be culpable too.

Talk about rewriting history. 9/11 occurred less than 8 months after Bush’s inauguration.

Perhaps Robb is recounting the history of the Mirror Universe — you know, the one where Spock has a goatee and Osama Bin Laden is clean shaven.

Update: Well, it took Robb just a few hours to rewrite history and delete that embarassing post without explanation. Bush will probably try to blame that on the Clinton administration, too.

Source:

John Robb’s Weblog February 16, 2004.

How Not to Refute Ann Coulter

I have absolutely no use for shock columnist Ann Coulter who this week writes — among others — of Max Cleland,

Cleland lost three limbs in an accident during a routine noncombat mission where he was about to drink beer with friends. He saw a grenade on the ground and picked it up. He could have done that at Fort Dix. In fact, Cleland could have dropped a grenade on his foot as a National Guardsman – or what Cleland sneeringly calls “weekend warriors.” Luckily for Cleland’s political career and current pomposity about Bush, he happened to do it while in Vietnam.

Ugh. Completely inappropriate.

But so is the reaction of Dan Gillmor and the Center for American Progress. Gillmor writes that,

The Center for American Progress shreds her misrepresentations, and wonders why Bush has no problem with this kind of shameless behavior by big-time supporters.

But Dan hasn’t bothered to do any fact checking and, in fact, the Center for American Progress doesn’t appear to know what it’s talking about, at least when it comes to training for Vietnam. According to CAP’s “shredding” of Coulter,

SAYING CLELAND WAS “LUCKY” TO HAVE LIMBS BLOWN OFF: Coulter said, “Luckily for ClelandÂ…he happened to [lose his limbs] while in Vietnam” and said that had he been injured “at Fort Dix rather than in Vietnam, he would never have been a U.S. Senator.” Of course, Cleland probably would not have been dealing with live grenades and enemy fire in the save haven of Ft. Dix. But, then, many top conservatives might not know this because they do not have firsthand knowledge of a combat zone.

What are they smoking? Fort Dix was a major training area for soldiers headed for Vietnam. The military constructed a mock Vietnamese village there and trained American soldiers to assault it in live fire exercises featuring small arms and explosives. People can get killed during such exercises (in fact the military generally has an extremely high accidental death rate even during peace time precisely because training for combat is itself extremely dangerous). Does CAP think that soldiers train to use grenades by simply reading the manuals?

I also find it absurd to refer, as Gillmor does, to Coulter as a “thug.” Referring to writers as thugs crosses the line straight into Coulter territory, in my opinion. That sort of characterization is something I’d expect to see in Newsmax.

Sources:

Will President Bush Tolerate This? Press Release, Center for American Progress, February 13, 2004.

Cleland drops a political grenade. Ann Coulter, TownHall.Com, February 12, 2004

Payroll is Everything in Baseball…Yeah, Sure It Is

Sports commentators are whining today about the Yankee’s signing of A-Rod that will likely put their payroll this season at > $200 million. Oh, it’s horrible for the game — the rest of those poor teams just can’t compete.

But wait a second — didn’t a team that had an opening day payroll of < $50 million win the 2003 World Series by handily defeating the dreaded Yankees?

Maybe other teams can’t compete with the Yankees sky-high payroll, but they can compete by outsmarting George Steinbrenner’s brute force approach to baseball domination.