Category Archives: news

Coster

Coster the horse should complain, there’s no picture of him on his athlete page on the Olympics website.

This is a really cool picture, as is this one.

I had more to say about Coster, but forgot what it was, as I got distracted by this story about Bill and Ben, the oldest living equine twins turning 25 last month.

Bill and Ben are not only the oldest horse twins in the world. It seems they may also be in the running for the title of the naughtiest.

Ponies are by definition trouble. They are pretty cute, though.

update: well geez, I had no idea Coster had been suspended for doping. He’s still a damned handsome horse. Thanks for the tip, Rachel!

Places we're not (weekend edition)

Some places we aren’t:

Flashback Weekend in Chicago, featuring a 40th anniversary reunion event for George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.

Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman‘s workshop, Working with Our Enemies: Finding Freedom from Hostility and Fear (Admittedly, we were too lazy to go to this. We could have).

The US Olympic Team Trials for Track and Field in Eugene, Oregon. It seemed like a wasted trip since we’re pretty confident that as soon as we tried to run they’d arrest us. We’re old and slow. And don’t do track and field. I hear Oregon is nice, so there’s that, but it wasn’t enough.

Crafty Bastards in Silver Spring.

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival. It’s not that I don’t enjoy being packed into an enclosed area with a lot of sweaty tourists on a sweltering day, who doesn’t love that? It’s mostly that I shared an office with NASA-types in Grad School and I think I’ve probably explored that culture enough, thanks. Some nice people doing cool things, to be sure, but I’m not sure this is a culture we want to share with impressionable youngsters from Iowa. Bhutan and…NASA? I honestly thought that was something made up by The Onion.

I can picture the tent full of post-docs who haven’t bathed in a week, are so jittery from mainlining espresso that they’re speaking really fast and in falsetto like Mickey Mouse yet none of them notices, and have been sustaining themselves by grazing off the olive bar at Shopper’s Food Warehouse. The very idea of that makes me slightly itchy, I think I need to stay in my house today.

FYI: If you go to Folklife and you visit the NASA area and you hear vigorous and heated discussions about RDA, they’re referring to Richard Dean Anderson, star of Stargate not a new kind of rocket fuel.

Also, “DIp” is Klingon for beer.

You can thank me later for this information.

Who thought this was a good idea?

The barracks at Fort Benning that house wounded soldiers with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are next to the firing range. According to the Washington Post:

The soldiers are part of a growing group of an estimated 150,000 combat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have PTSD symptoms. The mental disorder has been diagnosed in nearly 40,000 of them.

PTSD symptoms include flashbacks and anxiety, and noises such as fireworks or a car backfiring can make sufferers feel as though they are back in combat. Health experts say that housing soldiers near a firing range subjects them to a continual trigger for PTSD.

“It would definitely traumatize them,” said Harold McRae, a psychotherapist in Columbus, Ga., who counsels dozens of soldiers with PTSD who are at Fort Benning. “It would be like you having a major car wreck on the interstate” and then living in a home overlooking the freeway, he said. “Every time you hear a wreck or the brakes lock up, you are traumatized.”

Fort Benning, which covers more than 180,000 acres, is one of the Army’s main training bases, with 67 live-fire ranges. The base has thousands of housing and barracks units. “There is no excuse” for the housing situation, said Paul Ragan, an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, who treats veterans with PTSD. “Charitably put, it’s very untherapeutic.”

Brig. Gen. Gary Cheek, director of the Army’s Warrior Care and Transition Office, which oversees 12,000 wounded soldiers, said: “I can see how that would be a problem. It’s something we haven’t considered” but should. “We have alternatives for housing the soldiers who have issues” with the ranges, he said, adding that the barracks for wounded troops at Fort Benning are an interim facility.

The gunfire “makes me crazy,” said a soldier who lives in the barracks and has PTSD and traumatic brain injury from a roadside explosion in Iraq. “It makes me jump and I get flashbacks.” He spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from the Army.

It leaves me speechless.

Fred Schneider sings Scott McCLellan

Last night on the Daily Show they made Scott McClellan’s book more exciting by having Fred Schneider from the B52s sing parts of it. (The clips aren’t up yet, but I’ll provide the link now so I don’t forget to come back).

Husband watches politics on TV the way other people watch sports, but I have to admit that I was the one who said, in all seriousness, “John Dean needs to back off, he’s starting to dilute his brand.” Then I thought about what I’d said, and then I thought about taking a little vacation somewhere far away.

Dean has been ubiquitous on talking head shows for several years now. The people who remember, or understand, just how evil the Nixon Administration were are decreasing in number. Dean is in danger of becoming the commentator-equivalent of an aging Arena Rock band. He’s got to be sweating now that McClellan has joined the ranks of insider Executive Branch malfeasance experts who give good interview.

Still, I’ve gotten used to seeing Dean pop up everywhere, so this will require a period of adjustment. It was particularly weird to see Scotty sitting down and getting cozy with Keith Olbermann (May 29th).

I don’t have the Daily Show clip, so here’s the dance remix of that Bill O’Reilly temper-tantrum, which you should know by now is not worksafe.

Farewell to the Magazine Reader

Recently, over 100 writers at the Washington Post accepted early retirement/buyouts. Peter Carlson’s farewell Magazine Reader column on Tuesday reminded me how much we’re losing:

“Looking at 12 Years Between the Covers”

Last week, the cover of Us Weekly screamed in big yellow type “The Plot to Destroy Lauren,” and my first reaction was, ‘Oh, no, they can’t destroy Lauren.”

My second reaction was, “Who the hell is Lauren?”

It wasn’t the first time I was utterly baffled by a magazine cover since I started writing this column, but it turned out to be the last. That’s because this is my final Magazine Reader column. I’m taking The Post’s early retirement buyout and heading off to pursue other interests, such as sloth and gin.

For nearly 12 years, I’ve been paid real American money to read magazines and write about them. During those years I’ve pondered the glories of magazines ranging from Life to Sounds of Death, from Reason to Paranoia, from George to Jane, from Spy to Sly, from Good Dog! to Murder Dog, from New Beauty to New Witch, from Modern Maturity to Modern Ferret to Modern Drunkard.

And let’s not forget Wrapped in Plastic, a magazine devoted to David Lynch’s long-dead TV show “Twin Peaks.”

Such are the fruits of the First Amendment, God bless it.

Many strange things happened in magazines in those 12 years. The National Review published a story called “Is Sex Still Sexy?” McCall’s published a story called “My Boy Built a Bomb! Trouble Signs No Mom Should Miss!” Glamour posed the question “Is your hair making you look fat?” Fitness asked, “Is Your Body Toxic?'” Reader’s Digest asked, “Are you normal or nuts?”

Go read the whole thing, you’ll want to go back and look up all of his old columns.

Few have captured the utterly earnest absurdity of the magazine publishing world as well as Carlson, possibly because he always seemed game to read anything once, to delve into the pages with an open mind, and to describe the results of his forays in ways that were witty and, more often than not, much more entertaining than his source material.