Some of this has been sitting in my queue for five days or more. Apologies if this is old news.

+ Terrifying story of a girl who was attacked after rebuffing a cat-caller.

+ One woman combats street harassment by getting naked.

+ Polygamy watch! Creepy photos of Warren Jeffs and his child brides. And an appellate court ruled last week that Texas had no right to take the children, but did not order that the children be returned. Hmm.

+ A desk for fun-loving executives.

+ Speaking of corporate stuff, watch this video from 60 Minutes on Millenials”

So, here’s the thing. Millenials were, according to this segment, born between 1980 and 1995. I was born in 1980, so I guess that includes me, but my personal experience is so far removed from these kids who allegedly arrive at the workplace unprepared and yet entitled. Some of these shenanigans would have gotten me fired but quickly from some of my previous jobs. (Also, you know, I started working when I was 16 and spent the better part of my middle teenage years on a competitive debate team where there were definitely winners and losers, so I guess I managed to escape the expectation that everything should be handed to me.)

One thing I do like: there’s a movement away from sacrificing all to The Corporation. Of course, someone grumbles about the economic consequences of that, but I would argue that letting your workforce breathe occasionally would actually increase productivity, because you’d have a pool of well-rested eager people working for you instead of strung-out disgruntled people.

Thoughts?

+ This makes me laugh every time I look at it.

+ Is it just me, or are there a lot of copyright infringement lawsuits going on right now? Here’s one: Starbucks is suing the Rat City Rollergirls to change their logo. Judge for yourself, but the only similarity I see is that both are… round?

+ A gay superhero may be coming to TV.

That’s all for now. You ever notice how these quickies posts have no theme?

On this day in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge opened. There are festivities related all weekend.

I actually walked across it myself a couple of weeks ago. You can see my photos here.

See also: Gothamist, The Bower Boys, and some documentaries: Ken Burns, and there’s also an episode of Modern Marvels. These are both available on iTunes. The Ken Burns documentary is a little more thorough and artistic.

Don’t you just love sunny days when the sky suddenly turns dark and gray and then lets loose five minutes of harsh rain? Yeah, me? Not so much.

+ Interesting interview with Alanis Morissette in the Guardian. I haven’t been that crazy about her last couple of albums (though I adore “Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie,” despite the fact that Alanis calls it “self-indulgent” in the interview), but this one kind of has my curiosity piqued after reading the interview. Alanis, I think, fell victim to what some of my favorite artists have: once they find happiness and are no longer angsty, their music starts to suck. But Alanis’s ex-fiance just got engaged to Scarlet Johansen! So… angst and anger!

(Speaking of which, I just got tickets today to see Liz Phair perform songs from “Exile in Guyville” in June. I know you’re jealous.)

+ Lost City has photos of an awesome lampost commemorating the Filmore East with mosaics of some bands that played there.

+ That whole “boy crisis” thing is a myth. Also, more women earn bachelor’s degrees and yet more men succeed in business. Makes you wonder if sexism will make your degree irrelevant, eh? (more)

+ The death of publishing: new Random House CEO is “a complete production bean counter. It doesn’t look hopeful that he’ll share the romantic idea of literature and publishing.”

+ More on racism and the election, especially re: those people in Appalachia.

+ There’s a kind of awesome article about Park Slope from the Times.

+ Phyllis Schlafly got dissed.

And I’ve got a backlog of other things, too, but maybe later.

+ PZ Myers noticed that the romance genre is lousy with vampire novels. People I know in the industry are saying vampires are so last year, so PZ is late to the party. The trend now? Werewolves.

No, seriously. I am not making that up.

+ Interesting post up on Galleycat contemplating the relative merits of having a separate African American section in the bookstores. I don’t know. I guess I can see having a separate table, just like you’d have a table of books by women or a table of books about baseball, but shouldn’t all novels be shelves in their appropriate genre regardless of who wrote them? I mean, yeah, Toni Morrison belongs on the same shelf as Faulkner and Hemingway, but also, there are plenty of trashy novels written by white writers that we’re calling “fiction” these days, so why segregate? The argument for a separate section seems to be that customers would like to more easily locate black writers, but… I don’t know. Do your research before you go to the bookstore? Or ask me, I can tell you some good ones.

+ Polygamist watch! A second teen mom gives birth; she claims she’s 22, authorities think she’s actually 17, and this was her third child. — Tricky economics on the compound.

+ Current TV has an awesome take on yogurt ads targeted towards women. Best line: women who eat yogurt have that gray-hoodied, “have a masters but then I got married.” Indeed.

As of this writing, polls are still open in West Virginia, but Clinton’s expected to walk away with the win there. That is what it is. What interests me about the WV primary is that the talk in my biased liberal bubble is almost universally, “Clinton’s only going to win because WV is full of ignorant racists.”

I wonder what it must be like to live in a state that everyone thinks is kind of backwards. If you are a forward-thinking person, how do you rail against that? I mean, I live in New York City, branded by many outsiders as an elitist liberal enclave and… it is, kind of. (I mean, I know people who grew up in New York and don’t leave very often who are just as close-minded as those people in West Virginia are thought to be. My mother contends that a New Yorker would have a much harder time getting by in Appalachia than an Appalachian would have getting by in New York City. This may be true.)

Anyway! Let’s talk about West Virginia! And speaking of my mother, she says:

There are legitimate reasons one might prefer Clinton to Obama as a presidential candidate. However, when we see consistently that white, older, less-educated voters tend to prefer Clinton, it’s, um, naive to assume that all those folks made their decisions based on those legitimate reasons.

Coming from a white, small-town, working-class background myself, I suspect many of those Clinton voters are profoundly ignorant people with limited experience of the world outside their (often racially homogeneous) communities. And if you’ve spent much time with die-hard white racists, you might notice they are not so much sinister as they are profoundly unremarkable. Without race, they’d have little self-identity at all.

The lady in this clip isn’t doing much to refute the meme. She says she can’t vote for a Muslim, and when the reporter points out that Obama is not, in fact, Muslim, the lady says he must be lying. Good times, right?

So what say you? Is West Virginia a backwards wasteland? Will Hillary Clinton declare victory?

Obama, at least, is rising above and working on a national campaign. So… let’s make fun of McCain now, okay?

I purchased three books tonight. I am eager to read them. You may expect reviews when I get around to it. They are:

American Eve: Evelyn Nesbit, Stanford White, The Birth of the “It” Girl, and the Crime of the Century by Paula Uruburu
Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach (maybe one of the best book titles ever)
Rapture Ready: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture by Daniel Radosh

I mean, come on. You can’t deny that “In the Air Tonight” is a great song.

+ A friend of mine is working at Starbucks part time, so stories about Starbucks are much more amusing than they might otherwise be to my non-coffee-drinking self. Thus I knew about the new (old) Starbucks logo even though I am not a frequent Starbucks customer by any stretch. And the logo (which always makes me think about Leviathan) has boobies. So, of course, some crazy Christian group is boycotting.

+ fshk blog idol Toni Morrison sets the record straight about calling Bill Clinton “the first black president.”

+ Interesting story on NPR about raising boys who want to be girls in different ways. One kid got hurt on the playground for playing with a Barbie, so the mom and the psychologist worked hard to socialize the boy as a boy. The other boy’s parents are letting him be a her, and she seems to be all the happier for it. Makes you think about trying to stick kids in specific gender boxes.

+ Presidential candidates as represented by groups of New Yorkers. My favorite comparison? “John McCain Supporters and Tourists Who Stop in the Middle of the Goddamn Sidewalk”

+ Some history for ya: Evelyn Nesbit as forerunner of Lindsay Lohan: here’s a woman whose whole career happened from age 14 to age 21, attracting public scandal and being indirectly responsible for the murder of one of New York’s great architects. Well, so, I guess Paris, Lindsay, or Miley haven’t gotten anyone killed. Yet.

+ Polygamy Watch: Creepy story about teen cult led by a scraggly old guy. The clips will make your skin crawl. — Tim Gunn on polygamist fashion — Of the teen girls taken from the Eldorado ranch, nearly half have babies or are pregnant.

+ I just thought this was interesting: Ashley White was featured in the movie Spellbound, but her dream was deferred more or less by the birth of her daughter. Now she’s finished college and plans to do more. There’s a lesson in here about race and opportunity, but I’ll let you ponder it out.

+ Speaking of race, Mildred Loving died recently. (See Jezebel) When I was in high school, all seniors were required to take this basic civics class, and we watched the cinematic classic Mr. and Mrs. Loving starring Timothy Hutton and Lela Rochon. I kid, but it was actually pretty good for a made-for-TV movie. I remember it being one of those, “How could that have ever happened?” moments for me, as I hadn’t realized at age 17 that there had been a time so recently that people could not marry who they loved. Hey, wait, we still live in that time. *sigh* Anyway, Mildred Loving was a trailblazer and deserves to be recognized as such.

I mean, come on. Is “Against All Odds” not one of the greatest breakup songs ever? You know you sing it in the shower.

Tumperkin has written a tribute to Regency romance, and I was struck by the fact that she seems to be fascinated by the era for many the same reasons that I’m fascinated by the jazz age, namely for how women of the era behaved.

Strikingly:

the fashions were interesting and extreme: there are accounts of women of the Ton going out without corsets and wearing almost transparent gowns, like prostitutes. Many clothes and hairstyles were inspired by classical antiquity (I also adore Greek and Roman myths and legends so that is soooooo speaking to me). And clothes were taken terribly terribly seriously. They were a religion to the Dandys.

Hmm, scandalous dresses, no corsets, clothing as political statement, what does that remind you of? Flappers, maybe. (Bonus! Check out this awesome video on YouTube.) Now, during the Regency period in England, women were still property of their husbands so it wasn’t as progressive as the Jazz Age, but it was transgressive enough for the Victorian era to be a reaction to it, if you follow what I think is a two-steps-forward-one-step-back progress (or devolution) of women’s rights and morality. Think of it this way:

Regency –> Victorian Era
Jazz Age — > buttoned-up 1950s
Counterculture 1960s –> our current reactionary period

Speaking of loose morals, I finished reading Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander. This is the bisexual romance sex comedy I mentioned last week. Here, I’ll take the book description from the author’s website:

Andrew Carrington is the ideal Regency gentleman: heir to an earldom, wealthy, handsome, athletic—and gay. When he decides to do his duty to his family, he wants marriage on his terms: an honest arrangement, with no disruption to his way of life. But in the penniless, spirited—and curvaceous—Phyllida Lewis, a self-educated author of romances, Andrew gets more than he bargained for, perhaps even love. And when he meets honorable, shrewd—and hunky—Matthew Thornby, son of a self-made baronet, Andrew seems to have everything a man could desire, until a spy and blackmailer tries to ruin him and his friends.

I really enjoyed the book, despite some flaws (the subplot with the spies is confusing, scenes without the protagonists drag a little, there are a whole lot of tertiary characters that don’t get developed enough to be distinguishable, and some other things) but the main thing I want to talk about here is that I think the heroine, our titular Phyllida, gets the short end of the stick in the end. [SPOILER ALERT!] Andrew marries her and Matthew, but it’s not a mutual arrangement, it’s more that Andrew gets the best of both, plus it’s implied that Matthew can, uh, see to his needs while Andrew and Phyllida get to work with the heir breeding, but Phyllida, it is understood, will not have relations with anyone but Andrew, both by agreement and because she’s not interested. I was kind of hoping Matthew would get a thing going with Phyllida, but it never comes to that. And I find it all kind of problematic after thinking about it. Poor Phyllida, victim to the old double standard.[END SPOILERS]

Meh, at least there are steamy sex scenes, right?

Actually, you can still argue that the author did a brave thing, both in putting gay sex scenes in a novel and for putting them in a novel ostensibly marketed towards women. It’s one of those female fantasies no one talks about, although slash fanfic writers (and female Queer as Folk fans) the world over may have a few things to say about that. The novel is fantasy and reads as such and it’s a compelling read as much as it is transgressive.

I’d argue further that romance novels have kind of a bad rap. Sure, a lot of them are fluffy, but — and I can say this with authority because I’ve read a whole hell of a lot of them over the last year or so — but some of them are subversive, too, putting men and women into interesting situations and exploring how they react to each other. A lot of romance writers are probably doing more for feminism, particularly by writing in a medium that is devoured primarily by women, than I do on any given day. See the above example, but I will also mention my favorite romance novel of late, Laura Kinsale’s Flowers from the Storm, in which the heroine is a Regency-era Quaker who likes math and never compromises who she is even for the love of the rakish Duke with whom she falls in love. That’s a heroine I can get behind.

+ Chocolate may help prevent heart disease in women and preeclampsia in pregnant women. Awesome!

+ Someone’s been altering ads on the subway and turning them into art. Awesome!

+ Fox News gets the wrong Douglas. Dumb!

+ Galleycat asks why JK Rowling isn’t suing everyone who does anything related to Harry Potter, like the wizard rock bands. My guess is that JKR is suing the Harry Potter Lexicon people because they intend to publish a book similar to the encyclopedia she intends to write specifically, but still. Voldemort can’t stop the rock! Awesome!

+ Want to feel sad about how little you’ve accomplished? Here’s a list of things some people accomplished by age 29. I’m turning 28 soon, so I feel pathetic. Sad!

+ “Women’s Fiction” book covers and disembodied female body parts. Maybe not what you think. I may have more to say on this topic later. Sexist!

+ More on the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints: Newborn baby of a teenage mom taken into custody; Boys may be getting abused, too. Scary!