The Blog of Wistar Watts Murray

Dearest readers,

You may have heard rumors about my selling the Cuisinart, buying a plane ticket to the Old World, and alighting on that continent for the remainder of the summer.

The rumors are true. The bbf and I leave for Cascais, Portugal, in a week. Do not try to follow me. Do not try to keep me here in Virginia. Your anguished tears cannot prevent the inevitable. Your impoverished feet cannot walk across the ocean. Your nine-to-five physiques cannot adapt to surfing and lounging as well as mine.

I can see that you are concerned. Will there be enough for me to eat? I’ve looked into it, and I think so. Do Portuguese Wal-Marts stock 12-packs of Fresca? Probably not, but I will try to deal. Will the native people give me the respect I deserve as a blogger? If they know what’s good for them. Finally, will the denizens of Cascais judge me harshly for being a spoiled American tourist who has not yet bothered to learn the language? Perhaps they would, if the language of tawdry string bikinis from American Apparel wasn’t so universal. I will also bring my George W. Bush baseball cap and matching “W” earrings, because I heard foreigners love the guy.

So, dear readers, this would be the end of Us, but I hear the internet is global now and not just installed in Virginia. In addition, I am sun-intolerant and will probably be spending most of my vacation in a Portuguese computer lab complaining about the lack of Fresca. Elizabeth Barrett Browning I am not.

Love,

Wistar

I’m going to take a momentary break from cruising Facebook in order to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

God bless you, Barack Obama. This is a happy day.

I heard a great idea last week, via my boss. HILLARY CLINTON ON THE SUPREME COURT. She’s obviously a smart cookie; she just needs to be outside of politics. So let’s make Hillary a Supreme Court justice, and I will be Barack’s VP. I bet he smells so good.

A few years ago Washington D.C. resident Kimberly Zenz discovered a strange loophole in the elephant polo bylaws. An elephant polo event must provide elephants for all participating sportsmen. So Zenz formed a team - the Capital Pachyderms - and her players have since traveled to Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Nepal to compete on the backs of real elephants.

You can find the full story on Mental Floss.

I might steal a page from Zenz’s playbook and start a Charlottesville yacht club or hot air balloon squadron. Then I can compete in circumnavigating the globe without any initial investment. I also wonder if NASA might provide me with a space shuttle if I challenge George W. Bush to a race to the moon.

I don’t usually gush over the human interest stories on CNN.com. Living in Virginia, I can’t often relate to being dismembered by alligators or to worshiping seven-legged babies as gods. But today I’m all over the headlining CNN story of “The Homicide Report,” an L.A. Times blog that chronicles the names, faces, and circumstances of murder victims in Los Angeles.

Because two to three people are murdered in L.A. every day, bloggers Jill Leovy and Ruben Vives work a lot harder than your average Gawker employee. They drive through the most violent, forgotten neighborhoods of the city to find their stories. They interview grieving families. They take note of spray-painted eulogies and impromptu memorials on urban street corners. They publish the races and ages of the victims, who are predominately young black and Latino men. And the bloggers keep the comments open so the public can post messages about the murders.

These bloggers are doing their city a great service. Not only are they trying to ensure that people don’t die anonymously, but the blog reads like an anthropological study that might prove useful in preventing future murders. In fact, the blog entries remind me of Jared Diamond’s “Annals of Anthropology” article in this week’s New Yorker (abstract).

Diamond writes about vengeance killings in New Guinea. In a society without formal state government, New Guinea clan members take justice into their own hands. In the Highlands, murder (interpersonal warfare) is an accepted strategy of social checks and balances. Murder seems to maintain order.

The same anthropological phenomenon appears to be taking place in L.A. In neighborhoods like Watts, populated by many impoverished, disenfranchised people (I’ve never been there but I watch a lot of movies from the comfort of my couch), it’s probably hard to feel like your life is actively honored and protected by the government. You might feel like the government at large is absent or even against you. And so, as a gang member especially, your Wild West society is regulated by another set of rules, where drive-by shootings seem far more functional than the court system.

In my own culture, The New Yorker and NPR tell me how to behave. But if I were born in South-Central L.A., I don’t know what rules I’d follow. I am a pretty good shot with a BB gun, so if someone wronged me, I can’t promise that I wouldn’t take it to the streets. But around these parts I am limited to blogging my vengeance on the Virginia Quarterly Review website. My lifestyle is basically Boyz in the Hood, but with hyperlinks and pretentious diction instead of guns and ammo.

I realize that anybody who is anybody on the internet has already blogged today about the “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?” Vanity Fair article, itself a response to the VF article “Why Women Aren’t Funny” by Christopher Hitchens. [Full disclosure: Christopher Hitchens will always be a god to me because he devoted an entire book to putting down Mother Teresa. Who else would have the audacity to do that?] Nevertheless, I want to weigh in on this important debate contrived to sell magazines. Are women funny?

Let me start by saying that all those SNL hotties were ugly in high school. I lack the evidence to back up that statement, but I feel in my gut that it’s true. They were ugly and that’s why they cultivated their personalities. And I have to put that out there because a large portion of the latest Vanity Fair article, supposedly extolling the comedic talents of the fairer sex, is about how pretty these funny ladies are. Alessandra Stanley writes:

It used to be that women were not funny. Then they couldn’t be funny if they were pretty. Now a female comedian has to be pretty—even sexy—to get a laugh.

At least, that’s one way to view the trajectory from Phyllis Diller and Carol Burnett to Tina Fey. Some say it’s the natural evolution of the women’s movement; others argue it’s a devolution. But the funniest women on television are youthful, good-looking, and even, in a few cases, close to beautiful—the kind of women who in past decades might have been the butt of a stand-up comic’s jokes.

Of course female comedians are beautiful. Vanity Fair loves to take pictures of beautiful people. Vanity Fair gets to pick and choose who to put on its cover. Vanity Fair gets to slather the funny women in makeup and dress them in revealing “costumes” and Photoshop them into oblivion and then slap rubber chickens in their hands and pretend that their sexuality is not being exploited.

… continue reading this entry.

WELCOME TO DUBAI

Underwater hotels, artificial islands, amusement parks twice the size of Disney World, the world’s tallest buildings, indoor ski resorts, and a mall with “9,000 square feet of shopping.” Is this really what we’re doing with all our money? Is this really wise? Aren’t we earthlings just getting closer to becoming an alien super civilization? These pictures are going to give me nightmares. But the TutzTutz post was still worth reading because of the user comment “These people play Sim City WAY too much!!!”

Before:

After:

You know how there are dirty islands of non-biodegradable plastic floating in our oceans? Well a former carpenter made his own tropical island buoyed by empty plastic bottles, and it looks like paradise. Spiral Island currently lives off the coast of Mexico but Richie Sowa plans to float it around the world. You have to watch the Ripley’s Believe It or Not video on the Ecoble site. It is awesome. And the English narrator manages to dodge both t’s in the word bottle.

Stole the link from Snarfd, a website that has officially taken the last hour of my life.

A Midwestern woman wanted to teach herself web design so she created a joke website that sold tumbleweeds - The Prairie Tumbleweed Farm. Now she makes $40,000+ a year selling tumbleweeds to organizations like NASA and Hollywood.

Wow, judging from her website, it looks like she never got around to learning that web design.

In 2006 New York photographer Alice Proujansky went to the Dominican Republic to document the lives born and the lives lost in a dismally-funded maternity ward. Here are some of the affecting images she captured on film.

Let me preface this story by saying that Barack Obama gives a killer stump speech. If I go to a political rally in the cold, I expect a lot of high falutin’ promises, righteous anger at George W. Bush’s administration, and humorous yet telling anecdotes that will inspire me to clap my hands and hence raise my core body temperature. Last night my fingertips remained numb, but I liked the candidate, and he liked me. At least, I feel that he has faith in people in general (and yes, my emotions will determine the next President). I think that genuine faith in oneself leads to faith in other people which leads to honesty and transparency in the White House.

Obama reminds me of the great college professor who listens carefully to the stupid question you just barely articulated/blurted out in class, then uses his superior wisdom and vocabulary to ask it back to you (”Do you mean ___?” “Yes, sir/ma’am.”), then leads the whole room in a lively and enlightening discussion of the possible answers to the question you actually didn’t ask but in an ideal world where you are smarter and have an extra hour to think in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber before class, you might have. And he gives you credit for the whole thing. Good guy, that Obama. I like his wife too.

After the rally, we went out for Mexican food (thanks Dad). To their credit, the employees of Guadalajara were not overly star struck when I walked into the restaurant, nor when Virginia Governor Tim Kaine walked in moments later with a small entourage. Before Governor Kaine had a chance to sit down and order a beverage, we leapt up to shake his hand. This was sort of a blur. I think I said something like “wonderful job” and then slapped him hard on his heavily trench-coated shoulder. Then I quickly sat down and ordered a beer. He was a swell guy though. I enjoyed his introduction of Senator Obama at the rally. At dinner I kept wanting to stand up and make a speech for Kaine’s benefit, like “This is what America is all about! Eating Mexican food and laughing with my family! I’m fired up!” He stopped at our table and said a nice goodbye before he used the Guad restroom. This made Darren wonder if the Secret Service encouraged him to climb out bathroom windows into waiting limos after he dined in public, but actually he used the restroom like a normal person and probably only said goodbye to us beforehand because he had to walk by our table to get to the facilities and we were all staring at him. Then (of course) we joked about sticking sexy notes or men’s shoes under the door while he was in there. But we didn’t because we were too busy talking about reality TV.

Governor Tim Kaine, please don’t hate me for publicizing your lack of restroom exploits. You do good work and my dad was right - last night Guadalajara missed out on a great opportunity to start a “Wall of Fame.” They totally could have photographed us together.