Day: April 10, 2018

This article about the closure of Backpage is pure comedy. I’m sure it’s not supposed to be funny but it is.

Prostitution is perfectly fine but we are only going to write about a prostitute who did “nothing but” handjobs. Nothing too distasteful for our classy readers, please.

The prostitute has no contact information for her clients because “she cares about their privacy.” And they are not managing to find her in her “office in a nice building with a receptionist” because they are apparently brain-damaged and need to be given directions afresh every time. Through the website. Because a website is a lot more private than one-on-one contact.

And she lost all her clients not because she’s nearing retirement age but because a webpage closed. Of course. Clients are desperate to use a prostitute on a Zimmer frame. If only they could remember the address where they always see her. Drat. Old age is a bitch.

And of course it wouldn’t be a good sob story without cancer. So cancer was somehow massaged – sorry for the pun – into the narrative.

And Craigslist reduced the number of homicides by 17%. I wonder why not by 117%. It’s not like anybody is a fanatic of accuracy here.

We were talking about reporters who take bribes for stories yesterday. This has got to have been paid for by some coalition of not very bright pimps.

Very true. I was confused when I was first asked over for coffee in North America and was served a cup of coffee, wartime style. And that was all. I kept waiting but nothing else materialized.

“I threw up tonight and papa cleaned up my mess,” Klara says.

“Oh, poor papa,” I say.

“No, poor me,” she retorts calmly.

For those who don’t know, she’s two.

This snack quiz told me I grew up in the south. Of course, it’s the south in relation to the North Pole. Or Finland. But not much else beyond that.

I said I like poutine. How southern can that be? I mean, for the Inuit, I’m sure poutine is what the Southerners eat but that’s about it.

I don’t know anything about Jordan Peterson except that he was in the midst of one of those bizarre pronoun scandals and that he was in a very weird interview. But there is a stack of copies of his book at the local bookstore, and every time I’m there (which is every other day because it’s Klara’s favorite place), I see men between the ages of 20 and 50 reading his book, buying his book or avidly leafing through his book. The men look very working class, with the kind of hands that you don’t often see holding books by college professors. I wish I had time to read the book because now I’m very interested in what he could have written to attract this particular audience. But it’s beyond heart-warming to see it.

Of course, the most reasonable thing to do is to delete anybody who uses the word resistance (or even worse, Resistance) from my newsfeed. But save for Inc.com and the Lovers of Australian Literature blog, that’s the entirety of my enormous newsfeed. It took me years to compose it. And I used to enjoy scrolling through it while having my morning coffee. The newsfeed had geeky people, funny people, brilliant people, policy-wonk people, activist people, ultra-smart couch potato people, academics, gamers, journalists, bloggers, feminists, anarchists, libertarians, reformist Muslims, etc. It was a multitude of fascinating voices that told beautifully different stories about the world.

And now all that is gone. The newsfeed has become downright robotic. Everybody is saying exactly the same thing in exactly the same voice. And the thing they are saying is very dumb.

I’m beginning to feel an overpowering desire to vote for Rauner just to avoid being on the side of folks who think it’s ok to use a story about the Holocaust to illustrate some entirely trivial and ridiculous point about Resisting Trump. Mind you, the linked author used to be a really good blogger. One of the best. And then she completely unraveled.

I’m sure (or I really want to be) that back in 2009 there were folks who’d go all “resist Obama like people resisted Hitler!” But I never followed their blogs, so I never got a chance to experience a crushing disappointment in their intellectual capacities.