Things I Hate

Blogs filled with clutter but lacking essential information. You know what I mean: the pages where you canNOT tell who owns the damn thing or what he/she does or is. Blog pages where the blogger rambles on and on and on in loooooooooooooooooooong paragraphs, which of course are single-spaced so they're incredibly hard to read on a screen. Plus there's usually fifty-five kinds of shit running down both sides: Links to other bloggers. Links to this. Links to that. Links to other sites. None of which I give a rat's ass about because I don't know anything about the whys and wherefores of the blog itself!

Ugh. I cannot be bothered. Not naming names, although I'd love to. But being a polite midwesterner, I'll keep my mouth shut. Plus, why generate traffic for ungainly, poorly designed and conceived bytes o' nuthin'?

Living With Chronic Pain (No, Beer Is Not Always the Answer)

The New York Times is running a three-part series on living with chronic pain. (The link is to Part Two, and from there you can also get to Part One. The series concludes next week.)

It's fairly basic stuff, but it's nice to see this acknowledgment of the issues involved. For the past fourteen months, I've "enjoyed" a crash course in chronic pain. Torn rotator cuffs, the doctor told me. "Not much we can do for it," he said. Bad news. And depressing, too, I discovered as the months wore by. Because that's the nightmare of chronic pain: The body hurts, but the spirit hurts more. I can't speak for others, but in my case, the pain transformed daily life into drudgery, and the "future" into a burden. Every day, I was just a little less interested in the world around me, less willing to engage with friends, family, work.

This story has a happy ending. In September, a different doctor provided a different diagnosis: bone spurs. Those can be fixed. Last week he operated to remove bone spurs on my right shoulder. He'll "fix" the left shoulder as soon as the right one heals. But for millions of people, there won't be a happy ending. Either the physical issues can't be resolved, or they lack the funds needed to pay for good medical care.

So today I raise my glass in celebration of modern medicine -- and pray for all those who wake each morning knowing that their's will be a day of pain rather than pleasure.

Know Thy Pleasures. Know Thy Self

Okay, speaking of the marvels of the human brain (see previous post) -- I expended part of yesterday musing about "guilty pleasures." You know. The stuff we wallow in, resishing every second of trashy delight -- and believe, in our guilty minds, to be a total waste of time. For me it’s things like “Survivor." Anything by Penny Vincenzi (that's likely what prompted my musings: I'm in the thick of one of her novels right now).

What fascinates me about guilty pleasures is not that I’m apt to conceal them. (Of course! That’s the guilty part.) What’s more interesting is what happens when I confess them. People who know me are visibly startled to learn that I’m a devoted, die-hard, watch-every-minute fan of "Survivor" (okay, "Top Chef," too). (Well, alright. You can add "Project Runway" to the list.)

Those things seems so .... not me. For reasons that are lost on me, other people see me as an agressive, brainiac intellectual who devotes hours to reading "The New York Review of Books," thinks great thoughts, and watches no TV at all (and when I do it's public television or nothing).

Wrong. All of it. If someone wants to know me, really KNOW me, they need to know that I watch "Survivor" and devour Vincenzi's tales of the rich and neurotic. Put another way, guilty pleasures are a sparking-clean, uncurtained picture window into our personalities. They tell us and others more about "who we are" than our street faces. Not, mind you, that I understand WHAT our GPs tell us about ourselves. Do they reveal our child selves, now buried in adult worries? Do they hint at how we’d spend our time if left to our own devices in a perfect world where food and shelter were provided worry-free?

I dunno. But I do know that if you want to know me, know my guilty pleasures first. So. What's your guilty pleasure? And what does it tell me about you?

Music and Drinking

Okay, in a million years I would not have thought of or about this. But now I have, and I must say: the human brain never ceases to amaze me. Start here with W. Blake Gray's piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. Then read Stan Hieronymus's take on the topic. I love knowing that Vinnie Cilurzo is a believer (and that his dad loved Sinatra). It's, well, just too marvelous. Too marvelous for words. Etc.

Bye-bye "Bower Show"

I just learned (okay, I'm always waaaaaaay behind the rest of the world) that "The Bower Show" is no longer on Maxim radio. I'm truly sad to hear this. I had the pleasure of appearing (if one "appears" on radio) twice to talk about beer and the beer book. Magic! Bower, Scooter, and Laura were chemistry in action: funny, irreverent, and, most important, smart. (Irreverence without intelligence equals crap. These three were smart.) I'm not sure why the program was canceled, although I gather Laura is still producing for Maxim. In any case, I'm sorry I won't get another chance to experience their particular form of verbal mayhem. Near as I can tell. Bower is here (or at least he was at some point). You can find Scooter here. (During my first stint on the program, he asked if I would adopt him. Wish I had, sob snurfle....) And Laura is here. My sincere best wishes to all of them. It was a blast!

Deborah Solomon? A Waste of My Time.

Yeah, yeah, okay. I know blogs are supposed to be specific and targeted and mine rambles all over when it should stick to history or beer. But.......... when a girl’s gotta rant, she’s gotta rant.

And here’s a rantable subject if I ever came across one. Deborah Solomon writes a column for the magazine section of the Sunday New York Times titled "Questions For," in which she poses questions to various "famous" people. Or not. In last Sunday’s opinion section, the newspaper's public editor revealed that Solomon routinely "reworks" her interviews after the fact. The column typically contains quotations taken out of context and questions that she never posed.

Worse yet, her bosses at the Times knew this, but failed to alert readers. According to the magazine's editor Gerald Marzorati, that's okay because Solomon's column is intended as "entertainment." Oh? That's news to me. I’ve always read Solomon’s column the way it was presented: as accurate representations of actual interviews.

On the surface, this feels like a rehash of the Jayson Blair episode of a few years ago: Blair was a Times reporter who regularly faked his sources, his quotes, and his reporting. When that story broke, his supervisors struggled to contain the damage. Heads, as they say, rolled. The Blair affair came off as a case of bureaucratic bumbling induced, perhaps, by lethargy or incompetence.

The Solomon ugliness, however, feels more like arrogant indifference induced by -- a kind of smug condescension. As if various editors at the Times are trying to woo the snarky YouTube crowd: If you’re clever and hip, you knew Solomon was having fun at her interviewees' expense. If you took her text literally, well, you’re kinda stupid and definitely unhip. Maybe I'm old (well, okay, I am. I've over fifty).

But I ain't stupid. If Solomon couldn't figure out how to do good interviews without resorting to deceit, then she's simply a bad reporter. I sure won’t read waste time reading anything else written by her. Unless, of course, she turns to fiction. I’m always up for an escape into make-believe.