In his memoir-cum-manifesto, Yale Law School professor Kenji Yoshino wrote of his college years, “I sensed these bodies knew other bodies the way I knew calculus or Shakespeare,” he said. “On Saturday nights, I would sit in my cement-block dorm room with my face lit green by my IBM’s glow, agonizing not over women, or men, but line breaks.” That’s because Yoshino was gay and in the closet — and, according to what’s known as the “Best Little Boy in the World” hypothesis, perhaps overcompensating for the stigma he faced as a sexual minority.This theory holds that closeted young men in bigoted environments often respond by overachieving in certain areas, like sports or academics — the idea being that it’s an adaptive means of finding a sense of self-worth where they can. It can also serve to distract from their sexuality: As Andrew Tobias wrote in his 1976 memoir, “The Best Little Boy in the World,” a key “line of defense” was his endless list of activities. “No one could expect me to be out dating … when I had a list of 17 urgent projects to complete,” he wrote.Continue Reading… … Read More
‘Torture’ punishment: Saudi sentence man to be paralyzed
Twenty-four-year-old Ali al-Khawaher stabbed his friend in the back when he was 14, putting the victim in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Islamic Sharia law, which is enforced in Saudi Arabia, allows for ‘eye-for-an-eye’ punishment in such cases, or monetary compensation for the victim. The court ruling provoked the ire of international human rights organization Amnesty International, which likened the sentence to torture.”Paralyzing someone as punishment for a crime would be torture,” Ann Harrison, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa deputy director, said in a statement. “That such a punishment might be implemented is utterly shocking, even in a context where flogging is frequently imposed as a punishment for some offenses, as happens in Saudi Arabia.” Harrison stressed it was high time the “authorities in Saudi Arabia start respecting their international legal obligations and remove these terrible punishments from the law.” Reports say that al-Khawaher has been awaiting his punishment in jail for the past 10 years.“Ten years have passed with hundreds of sleepless nights. My hair has become grey at a young age because of my son’s problem,” al-Khawaher’s mother told the Saudi Gazette. “I have been frightened to death whenever I think about my son’s fate and that he will have to be paralyzed.” Furthermore, she told Arabic language news daily al-Hayat that previously the compensation for the family of the victim had been double but was later reduced. She told the publication that the family did not even have a tenth of the 1 million Saudi riyals ($266,000) necessary to save their son from paralysis. Corporal punishment is common in Saudi Arabia, where flogging is an obligatory punishment for a number of offences. Additionally, amputation is practiced as a punishment, but is mainly confined to cases of theft. Al-Khawaher’a case is known as gisas (retribution), which can incur such punishments as eye-gouging, tooth extraction and execution where the original crime committed was murder. However, the victim can call for a pardon or monetary compensation instead of corporal punishment. … Read More
Blast from the Past
One day, life as we know it will stop. The TEOTWAWKI moment will have arrived. Hopefully we will be as ready as we can be. … Read More
Michael Penn: “Part of me thinks Hannah’s really more the voice of MY generation”
Musician Michael Penn has the enviable, if not incredibly difficult task of scoring “Girls.” OK, that didn’t sound quite right. Allow me to rephrase: Penn composes the music for Lena Dunham’s HBO series, which he’s done from the very beginning. Of course, he’s scored films before — for Paul Thomas Anderson: “Hard Eight” and “Boogie Nights,” among many other films. I tried to imagine what it must be like to evoke through music the millennial female Brooklyn experience, as a 54-year-old man living in Los Angeles — and frankly, I couldn’t (and I’m a huge fan of “Girls” and I live in Brooklyn!). But he gets Lena Dunham, and he fully appreciates the state of mind she’s tapping into, because he says, what she’s writing resonates as much with his generation as hers — he admits, in our conversation, it involves at least some degree of entitlement. Penn, who is funny and warm and smart as hell, is perhaps best known for his first single “No Myth (Mr. Romeo in Black Jeans)” and his collaborations with singer-songwriter wife Aimee Mann. He talked with me about what it’s like to work with Dunham, and set the mood of Hannah’s world.Continue Reading… … Read More
Matthew Rhys: “I still blink hard when the young PAs say, ‘We’re doing this period drama’”
The Cold War-era espionage thriller “The Americans,” which is halfway through its first season on FX (and airs on Wednesday nights at 10 p.m. ET), is not the first series to challenge the audience to identify with unsympathetic characters. But this early 1980s drama pushes American views a little harder, asking us to root for KGB sleeper cells living in suburban northern Virginia as Americans — and see CIA and FBI agents as the enemy. Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, who last appeared on U.S. television in ABC’s family drama “Brothers & Sisters” as a gay lawyer (and whose TV brood included Rachel Griffiths, Calista Flockhart and Sally Field), returns to the small screen to play Philip Jennings, a Russian spy, who takes all of his roles very seriously, no matter which identity he’s assumed. He is an effective strategist when it comes to collecting intelligence — and a scrappy thug when he needs to be. But equally interesting is the domestic drama within “The Americans”: Philip is devoted to his wife, Elizabeth (Keri Russell) — despite the fact that theirs is an arranged, sham marriage — and an extremely protective father to their daughter and son, who know nothing of their parents’ secret and past lives. And part of Philip wonders if it would just be better for the family to defect, to buy into the American way of life — which would, of course, mean betraying his country and abandoning his life’s work.Continue Reading… … Read More
NHD 2012 "Reform, Revolution, and Reaction" We Are… Revolutionaries Black Panther Party
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Weird news: Pet chicken fire alarm
MILWAUKEE (AP) — A Wisconsin couple says clucks, not fire trucks, helped them escape a blaze at their home.Dennis Murawska, 59, said a pet chicken named Cluck Cluck woke his wife Susan Cotey, 52, with loud clucking from its cage in the basement two floors below about 6:15 a.m. Thursday. The couple’s two cats also were running around the main floor.Murawska said he had been half awake but didn’t know about the fire because the smoke alarms hadn’t gone off. He realized something was wrong when his wife got up.”The chicken gets quite vocal when she gets excited,” he said.Cluck Cluck came from a nearby farm in Alma Center, about 135 miles east of Minneapolis, Murawska said. When the chicken began wandering over to his house, his neighbor said he could kill it because it wasn’t producing any eggs. But Murawska felt sorry for Cluck Cluck because she had a mutated foot and decided to keep her. He fed the bird and built a coop, and then his wife let Cluck Cluck into the basement on cold nights.”I spent way more money than I ever should’ve,” Murawska said by telephone. “I guess it paid off.”Continue Reading… … Read More
