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My favorite story of facing down a big company's terrible customer service has long been Julie Snyder's war of attrition with MCI on This American Life. But now Dooce has bested Maytag on Twitter in her battle to repair her faulty new washing machine. Read about it in all her trademark gory detail. It's the mommy blogger's perfect revenge: You go after a big company for indifferent and crappy service in front of an audience of a million, the bad guys figure out they've got a PR disaster on their hands, and then they grovel like crazy to get back into your good graces. And in this case, another rival company throws in a free washing machine for a local homeless shelter. Triumph.
Photograph by Getty Images.
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In her post about Vicki Kennedy on Your Comeback, Emma Gilbey Keller notes that roughly 700,000 women in the United States lose their husbands each year. If you're a widow and you'd like to share your story about adjusting to a new life, e-mail emma@thecomebackbook.com.
Photograph of Vicki Kennedy by Chris Hondros/Getty Images.
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A guest post from Latoya Peterson:
When Roger Sterling belted out a tune to his new bride while in blackface as his peers looked on in amusement, I felt a small measure of relief. Finally, we are starting to get somewhere on race in Mad Men.
In my previous piece, I argued that Mad Men held race at arm’s length, obscuring the ugly parts of history while simultaneously denying the black characters on the series their own voice to speak their experiences. Last night’s episode brought some baby steps forward. Showing Roger Sterling’s performance as common and unremarkable, combined with his off-handed comment of how he “did it with shoe polish and she just laughed and laughed,” helps to establish how blacks were perceived then, far more than the various scenes in which the characters politely ignore or converse with Hollis in the elevator.
In addition, Carla, the Drapers' nanny/housekeeper, finally gets a few lines to speak, but I am left wondering about the intention. While the Drapers are attending the garden party, Carla is left to deal with a rapidly escalating situation at the homestead. Sally has taken her grandfather’s money, and Carla is attempting to deal with the situation as best she can. While it was good to hear Carla articulate some of the more common issues with Working While Black (“No, we don’t all know each other”), and launch a pre-emptive strike against accusations of theft, I kept wondering when the show would take a moment to illuminate her life, instead of having her respond to the machinations of the other characters.
Helen Klein Ross, better known as Adbroad, initiated a conversation with the person behind the unofficial twitter feed for Carla. Klein Ross (who is behind the @bettydraper feed on Twitter) reached out to the currently unknown Twitterer behind @carla_madmen to discuss why Carla took to Twitter to express herself:
I do not know who writes @Carla_Madmen. But we have developed an email relationship in which we exchange views on racism and other issues that Carla and Betty can't discuss. I sent her the Racialicious piece and asked for her views on how blacks are depicted in Mad Men. She wrote:
African-Americans are the only grown-ups on Mad Men. To the limited extent you see them, they lack any discernible faults. Whether that's due to their minor roles, I'm not sure. I think it will be interesting to watch Mad Men develop larger roles for minority characters as the 60's progress—single-dimensional with quiet dignity or a more full range of human emotions and foibles. It's obviously a potential land mine for the writers.
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Watch Ted Kennedy Jr’s eulogy for his father. I defy you not to cry when he tells the story of his father taking him sledding shortly after he lost his leg to cancer as a boy. Ted Jr. also makes a nod to his father’s significant personal failings. The Kennedy dynasty is at an end, but here’s someone who clearly has it all: the smarts, looks, charisma. Surely he could have had a political career; it’s perfectly understandable that he’s chosen not to.
He got huge applause and a standing ovation following his eulogy. I understand the impulse, but traditionally one does not applaud in houses of worship during religious ceremonies. Hearing the applause for him (and the more tepid applause for his brother Patrick’s needy eulogy), that prohibition seems wise. Applause turns a ceremony into a performance, and implicitly ends up judging the quality of the “work” done by the “performers."
Photograph of Ted Kennedy, Jr. by CJ Gunther-Pool/Getty Images.
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Mark Steyn is upset at the insufficient attention being paid to the unseemly part of Ted Kennedy’s character. There is something to this, and it’s perhaps more obvious to those of us inclined to see Kennedy as a privileged member of a political dynasty who worked very hard to keep power consolidated in the hands of the political class. But at the same time, I wonder what use there is in moralizing about public mourning.
The public Ted Kennedy is, as Matt Welch says, a political abstraction. He hails from the most famously mythologized family in American culture. People of a certain generation feel connected to this story, the mythos of the self-sacrificing “public servant,” the drama of a dynastic curse. We’re all trained to puncture mythologies, as well we should. On the other hand, mythologies give people permission to share a symbol and a sadness. Maybe there's something valuable in the spectacle of a bunch of strangers sharing a loss, even an idealized loss, with one another. In her wonderful book The Happiness Myth, Jennifer Michael Hecht argues that celebrity funerals ought to be more outlandish, more emotionally climactic, and thus more cathartic for the rest of us. The scolds who would criticize us for picking unfit subjects of mourning—princesses instead of saints—are missing the point. Public expressions of grief are a human constant. They're not rational, but they're meaningful. Save the logical assessments for the thick biographies to come.
I suppose I’ve swerved rather dramatically from Mark Steyn’s stern moral calculus. But then, I’m not sure Steyn will want to apply that same calculus when a Republican dies. Ted Kennedy's one pointless killing was horrific in its intimacy. The pointless deaths for which, say, George W. Bush is partially responsible are horrific in their magnitude. Somehow I do not anticipate a 2030 National Review column bemoaning the lionization of Bush upon his demise.
Photograph of Sen. Ted Kennedy's funeral by Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.
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Lauren, that Esquire story about Christina Hendricks had me gagging too (although I do confess to ogling the photos). That's why I'm glad they showed Christina Hendricks in awful curlers on Mad Men last night. Those intermittent scenes of behind-the-scenes Joanie—the red welt from her bra strap from last season, the Streetcar Named Desire curlers scene from last night, the office rape—are small reminders to the slobbering masses that Joanie has more in common with Marily than she'd want.
As for the curves—your description of our schizophrenia about plumpness brings to mind yesterday's New York Times bestseller lists. Sharing the pulp advice section were a couple of titles involving Julia Child—add three sticks of butter to everything—and Hungry Girl: 200 Under 200, Skinny Bitch and Cook Yourself Thin.
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As if the Jaycee Dugard tale wasn't awful enough all on its own, the NYT reports this morning that the timing of the revelation of this 18-year-long kidnapping could derail a California bill designed to address prison overcrowding. The legislation would parole some offenders early. But only those who committed nonviolent, low-level crimes, and no sex offenders. Phillip Garrido, Dugard's kidnapper, was convicted of rape and released 11 years into a 50-years-to-life sentence in an entirely different era. This bill has nothing to do with him or predators like him. Still, the California Senate is voting today, and some legislators are spooked. This is as predictable as it is depressing: All too often, stories of rare but incredibly horrific crimes translate into misguided policy. In trying to protect the vulnerable, especially children, we lose sight of the costs of reacting irrationally. In this case, that cost involves California's crippling $1.2 billion budget deficit and the injustices inherent in a prison system swamped with almost twice the inmates it was designed to hold. Conditions are so bad that a panel of federal judges has ordered the state to reduce the prison population by 40,000 inmates over the next two years. This bill was a first step. Will the state senate be brave enough to pass it?
Meanwhile, if you're trying to understand how Garrido's parole supervisors could possibly have missed the backyard compound that held Dugard and her two children, here's an explanation from law professor Jonathan Simon on PrawfsBlawg:
Why did the parole agents fails to aggressively search Garrido's compound even though he was a serial rapist and kidnapper who told neighbors that he was a sex addict? Because on a daily basis he did not appear to be deviant. Against the background of a system that associates unemployment, homelessness, and drug addiction with crime, Garrido was a screaming success story. He lived with his wife in a home he owned. He worked at this own business (Phil the printer). He was a man of religion. He apparently did not use illegal drugs, or engage in street level gang antics. Like Charles Manson or Ted Bundy, Garrido did not fit a threat profile directed historically at the urban poor and minorities, so he went undisturbed while he commited unspeakable crimes agains the most vulnerable imaginable victims.
Photograph of a California prison by Michal Czerwonka/Getty Images.
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This month’s Esquire features a hot-as-hell photo spread of 34-year-old Mad Men star Christina Hendricks, alpha secretary with an overlooked knack for TV ad placement, but the accompanying interview (“Christina Hendricks Isn’t All That Fussy”) is devoted almost entirely to a slightly gross self-congratulatory parsing of her curves, appetite, and size. The piece oozes with delight over the caloric bombs she swallows on the regular (cheese poppers, chocolate-covered bacon, carbonaras, all types of pork), before venturing to more duh-worthy territory: Hendricks is “not this little waify nothing” and she “seems to embrace it.” But no worries, Esquire still finds her sexy! The interview fetishizes the deep-fried bits she eats and her girdle-induced upper thigh bruises (yes, she talks about how the Mad Men costumes uncomfortably pierce her flesh) as only a magazine whose pages are usually filled exclusively with size 2 women can.
It’s not that I don’t consider Hendricks really, reaaaaally ridiculously good-looking but I just don’t think that I deserve a pat on the back for admiring her beauty, nor do I get all jizzy over a play by play of her terribly naughty restaurant order, because I’ve eaten more than a few carbonaras in my lifetime and, as far as I can tell, still inspire the occasional erection. Next question, please. (For inspiration: Jack Nicholson’s interview with Mad Men actress January Jones in last month’s Interview magazine. On her (not fake!) name: “It’s from a book called Once is Not Enough by Jacqueline Susann. Bad book.”)
A couple weeks ago a New York magazine piece about Hendricks, titled “Dangerous Curves,” insulto-complimented her “retro-bodacious body” as “oddly empowering to women,” as if it’s such an exception that someone with regular-person heft, er, ahem, curves, as the parlance goes, is sexy. Page Six anointed her the voluptuous being who is “changing Hollywood’s skewed views of females.” Never mind that a handful of shows debuting this season—Dance Your Ass Off and More to Love to name two—game on fat women as a form of voyeuristic alien entertainment (Fat people moving! Fat people trying to love! SO CRAZY.) Which is just to say: Maybe we should stop feeling so proud of ourselves that we love Christina Hendricks’ paunch. And stop praising her as a token of our open-mindedness when it comes to body talk. Let’s simply accept that a hot woman is a hot woman, and pray Matt Weiner gets Joanie out of her terrible marriage this season.
Photograph of Christina Hendricks by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images.
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I'm not proud of my minor vanities: the way I examine my upper thighs or the horror I experience when I realize how coffee-stained my teeth have become. Not so with the subjects of Youth Knows No Pain, a documentary about plastic surgery that premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on HBO. The people director Mitch McCabe interviews are positively delighted with their own superficiality. She shows a couple of twentysomethings who are thrilled at getting Botox because they are convinced that women have "expiration dates," along with a Dallas housewife who spent $35,000 in one year on a slew of surgeries and declares that she feels better than ever, not to mention the 45-year-old who gets his scalp basically ripped off on camera so that he can get a full head of hair implanted.
Though this might sound like a group of grotesques, paraded in front of the viewer as a moral cautionary tale, McCabe is actually overly sympathetic to these souls. She intertwines her own story—McCabe's father was a plastic surgeon who died in a terrible car accident—with her subjects' lurid tales. McCabe is obsessed with her own wrinkles, but mostly because she fears her own mortality, and she implies that the people in her film are afraid of death as well, which is why they fixate on their appearance. She is giving her subjects entirely too much credit. In fact, when she asks the 45-year-old man why he is going in for the surgery, he says, simply, "because I'm vain." McCabe has a few voices of reason in the film to balance out the self-absorbed, including the always delightful Simon Doonan, and friend of Double X Erika Kawalek. But mostly the film presents the youth-obsessed with a far too uncritical eye.
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From USA Today: "The Westin Resort on Aruba is offering twosomes a $300 "conception credit" toward their next stay if they conceive a child while staying Sept.1-Dec. 19 ... How do you prove that the Westin was the site of the happy occurrence? With a note from a doctor saying the stay occurred around the likely conception date."
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