Three or four college aged people were standing outside a house with sparklers in hand — rolling them around as though it were the Fourth of July.

“Happy Presidents’ Day!  Woo Hoo!”
“Here’s to Truman!”
“Johnson!!”

Any reason for a celebration, I suppose.

Two things about this cover…

… One, she might just be, apparently, she is the latest victim of the “Sports Illustrated Curse” — that rule that states that bad luck follows appearing on the cover of the Sports Illustrated cover.  Or maybe she isn’t.  Her event is delayed in time for her injuries to heal up, so who knows?

… Secondly, the recent controversy over this cover puzzles me.

She continued, “Picture this as a way to frame what I’m trying to get at: Picture a male ski racer in a similar pose on the cover of SI, smiling at the camera. Would we see that? How would you react to that picture, verses the picture of Vonn?”

LaVoi takes an academic approach to backing her argument, claiming researchers have shown, over the last 60 years only about four per cent of all SI covers have portrayed women.

But others have answered her claims that women are overtly sexualized on SI compared to men with evidence to the contrary. One writer, Jordan Yerman of NowPublic, points out, of three SI covers featuring Michael Phelps, only one was an action shot. A commented on LaVoi’s blog notes that the cover shot from the 1992 Winter Olympics was an identical snap, only of male skier A.J. Kitt.

My guage is that this issue is there only because of the “over the last 60 years only about four per cent of all SI covers have portrayed women” (that high, huh?) and the “Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue” factor — and the “sport” of bikini wearing seems to be getting harder.  I suppose there’s a stronger possibility a male skiier on the cover of the magazine would be — … grimacing and gritting their teeth when posed in that position… and your gender roles slide into the picture there of acceptable behavior for a “Bad Boy”…  and note she herself posed for the swimsuit issue — but the issue is this cover itself and only this cover and thinking about these auxilary sports nobody much pays attention to except every four years (except the lack of buzz and ratings seems to suggest we don’t) — Michael Phelps — maybe not.

Technorati.  I used to know how to guage the changes of my supposed “Authority” with technorati.  A fall in numbers from, say 16 down to 12, meant that the year had lapsed since the British Telegraph linked to a blog post here about how John Edwards was kind of a fraud as a way of buttressing the contention that John Edwards was a total fraud.  A rise upward from there to 20 was a demonstration that a batch of spam blogs, splogs, had swallowed up a link to here.  A fall downward a bit later meant that technorati had gotten around to weeding those splots out.

They’ve revamped their “authority” numbers — I think twice since.  The current configuration — I don’t get.  I’ve been watching my number.  It’s fallen one day by a single point.  Then it’s risen the next by a single point.  And that has been the pattern.  Based on what linkage, based on what minute trafficking, based on what factors — I do not know.  Maybe it comes from simply my patterns in looking my site up at technorati — I don’t know.  Consult this, and all what I know is I’m down there — as is to be expected, not lighting it up at the 1000 maximum range.

Not that I care all that much.  It’s just a curiosity.

Beats the Hell out of me.

In the poll, 59 percent say they now support allowing “homosexuals” to serve in the U.S. military, including 34 percent who say they strongly favor that. Ten percent say they somewhat oppose it and 19 percent say they strongly oppose it.

But the numbers differ when the question is changed to whether Americans support “gay men and lesbians” serving in the military. When the question is asked that way, 70 percent of Americans say they support gay men and lesbians serving in the military, including 19 percent who say they somewhat favor it. Seven percent somewhat oppose it, and 12 percent strongly oppose it.

We’re okay with gay and lesbian people, just not homosexual people.
Are people reading odd quirks and qualities of “fey”ness and “queens” into the word “homosexual” where we aren’t “gay and lesbian”?

Okay, I turn to this history lesson for answers.

Generally, the terms ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ are seen as being less laden with negative implications than ‘homosexual’. The term ‘gay’ is used to describe both homosexual men and lesbian women but has become particularly associated with homosexual men. Its derivation is unclear but may come from the nineteenth century French slang for a homosexual man ‘gaie’. Throughout the last century it has been used as a sort of code word between homosexual men.

However, in the late fifties and sixties it came into everyday use in association with the struggle for gay rights. In this context the word ‘gay’ came to represent, as it does now, a word with no negative connotations but associated with a positive and proud sense of identity. Nowadays, the term ‘lesbian’ is used in relation to homosexual women and is derived from Lesbos, the name of the Greek island on which the lesbian poet Sappho lived in antiquity. In the past homosexual women have been called ‘Sapphist’ (again after Sappho).³ ‘Straight’ is used to describe heterosexual people and is an equivalent term to ‘gay’.⁴

Hm.  So some people might think of “gay” people as actually being unironically happy in disposition — no thoughts on sexual orientation.   Can we get this thing cut into age groups to see if the variance amongst older age groups is greater than the variance within younger age groups?

It’s kind of funny.  I see that the “Captain America comic book infuriates Tea Partiers” story has reverberated a bit more even since I myself posted a blog entry about it.  I don’t think there is much of a story here — I gather some of the hub ub comes from the mistaken notion that children actually read comic books.  (In the mid 1980s, DC Comics ran an ad campaign awkwardly grabbing for respectability with “Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore”.  And so that came to be true, and so the comic book industry just kept on the atrophizing that had began back in the mid-1950s.)

This might also partially explain a certain lack of context that appears in the news articles on this story.  The last time “Captain America” received some media attention / controversy (indeed, the last time any comic book did) and scorn from right wing blog-sites, Captain America was deciding not to go along with an item in a fictionalized version of the Patriot Act.  To put this another way, why is it that — with yahoo having this “Captain America” story on its front page this morning, I can go over to google blog and type in “Ed Brubaker” — the writer of this story — and see that my blog post is the second item concerning this story, and the third over-all.  These things don’t write themselves!  I submit to you that if we’re going to get all upset with politics propping up into superhero comic books, well — I expect Bernie Goldberg to slide someone out of the next edition of “101 People Who Are Screwing Up America” and insert Ed Brubaker’s name.

I will state for the record that when I really particularly cared about the work of Ed Brubaker, his comic books looked like this — a poor man’s Chester Brown, I suppose.  In 1999, I had to slant my head a bit upon reading that Ed Brubaker had been hired to write for Batman.  An interesting career move, but the result is apparently that a move to mainstream superhero comic books has his work getting more political in nature. 

Hey!  Is Revenire reading this?

In future editions, Marvel Comics is going to remove the “Tea Party” referencing signs.  I must say, though, that the changes Marvel Comics is apparently going to make probably will upset the “Tea Party” movement a bit more.

Then there’s this other piece of patent dishonesty.

And so.  Apparently Conan’s contract did indeed stipulate 11:30 (or 11:35, rather) slot.

There have been arguments for and against, but a revelation from The Hollywood Reporter reveals that Conan O’Brien’s contract for ‘The Tonight Show’ did specify the 11:35 time slot. It’s good to know that Conan did, in fact, learn from David Letterman’s mistakes.  The only leg NBC had to stand on was the belief that Conan’s contract did not specify the time. It didn’t, but only in a 2004 amendment to an original 2002 contract (which makes it a seven year wait, not five). It was assumed by all parties that the amendment supporting the wording in the original article. NBC, being evil, tried to take advantage of this. Truth was the first casualty of the Second Late Night War.

All this time we’d heard that the network would not be punished for a 12:00 slot, supposedly stuck in the slot to work around the occasional sports events.  But this all explains why Conan walked away with roughly the amount his contract obligated him in the event that the network canned him.  The great mysteries of the “Late Night War 2010″… solved.

Meanwhile, “The Tonight Show with Conan O’brien” has been utterly scrubbed from the Internet.  Now I was expecting this from NBC’s website and hulu, but I am a bit taken aback from the clips removal from youtube.  Old Late Night clips remain on youtube.  Apparently not for that long, though — I see notes that NBC is planning on scrubbing those stray Late Night clips — more concerted than Letterman.
Pretty soon, the 16 and a half year NBC career of Conan O’brien will be a strange underground sensation.  Or, maybe as the years go by NBC will let up — I have to wonder if the Internet were as it is now back in 1993 if they’d take the same scapel they are to Conan but aren’t to Letterman and take a hardline against Letterman.

Interesting to note Letterman appears to be ready to bear, I guess feeling a competitive desire to beat Leno in his second chance.

Letterman’s bookers have put out the call, celebrities, if you sit down with Leno, don’t call us, we’ll call you.  Right now  it’s off limits to any cross over  guest for the Late SHOW with David Letterman.

This may be good news for the viewers, these shows have turned into late night info commercials ,  guests promoting their books ,films or any other  services  they are pitching. […]

The same actors and actress just doing the rounds, the networks are giving us nothing in return, maybe this will force David and Jay to retrench and get with it, and now for something completely different.  […]

Oh, for the love of lard…
Actually hereabouts you get to a crux of a matter with these late night talk shows.  One advantage the 12:30 programs have over the 11:30 programs is a generally more interesting guest list.  Ed Koch, a default regular guest-list of the early Conan years, is a more interesting personality than, say, Harrison Ford.  And these days, Letterman has guarded himself completely from the possibility of another Madonna interview.  His formula has been winded down to the pre-pared “Anecdote #1, Anecdote #2, Anecdote #3, plug your project.”  Oh, for More interesting guests.

Nonetheless, Dave is cleaning up in the ratings.  In the absence of any competition.  Looks like he’ll rise again.

About a week ago, I watched the two shows — Dave and Conan, clicking back between the two.  Conan’s was, of course, a rerun — from just after the NBA Championship — Kobe Bryant was a guest.  The post-monolouge bit was nothing particularly outstanding — a mildly amusing example of what you get in this format of “grind something out 5 episodes a week; go to whatever well you can find” — he ran out to the studio back lot and set up  a giant discarded statue on the stage.  The strange tenants of late night — the show is the show, you’re filling a schedule.  Before NBC scrubbed all presence of Conan from hulu, I picked about and shifted through the seven months of material.  There was Pee Wee Herman.  Norm Macdonald was worth his few interviews — apparently Macdonald was ready to serve as a go-to-guest.  But I’m tending to stray toward the comedy bits in these things.

Hey!  Tonight is the final broadcast of such a thing as “The Tonight Show with Conan O’brien”.  I remain convinced that as we become more fractured in terms of entertainment options, in the years ahead, the networks will look back at Conan’s disappointing ratings as high ratings.

After talking to the gathering that was “more John Birch than John Adams“…

… Notes scribbled on hand…

… at both the “Tea Party Gathering” and the exclusive interview on Fox News — facilitated in part, I guess, because she is employeed by Fox News…

… just like Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee — two other candidates floating about the Republican presidential nomination fight…

… after making a ruckus about Rahm Emanuel’s private use of the word “retard”…

… and it doesn’t take too long to roll through the debris of her political allies on talk radio to find prominent voices using the word “retard”…

… Defend it as she shall because Limbaugh is a “satirist”…

… unlike David Letterman, when he said the same stupid joke as Jay Leno had about another member of her family…

… the daughter who is, voluntarily, a public figure, unlike the unvoluntary public figure special needs child — who’d most certainly be better off outside the spotlight…

… I suppose Don Imus counts as a “satirist” as well, asking if the Fox News interview would take place with Sarah Palin in his “lap”…

… the hand written notes defendedby Fox News as a sign of “folksiness”…

… We don’t need those fancy 4 by 5 note-cards…

… likewise, the odd politically correct “retard” reference double standard accepted…

… the actual noteworthy sound-byte coming out of Ms. Palin is the phrase “hopesy changey stuff”…

… which I take to mean that there’s a contingent of her electorate who knows what this confusing sign is getting at, and can answer it with “yes”…

… I see that the mystery of the sign has been answered.  It’s “pro” Bushies.  Though, the message remains that rorschach test… which, I don’t think quite works in their favor…

… Did Palin break any new ground in terms of policy?…

… waiting for Emanuel’s apology to his erstwhile political allies…