Demands a flash update. Not on this company-locked machine!
There's one that someone did on Slate about the future of satellite photo technology that results in a guy torturing his wife's lover and abandoning him to die. It's really horrible and disgusting jealousy-and-torture-porn, for basically no reason other than, apparently, because he can do it. (Click to the second page of videos and watch "Google Earth's Downside" to see.) What is the point of this shit?
This Slate video about soap commercials directed by Ingmar Bergman is pretty interesting.
I blame Robert Wright for this. Letting us note that Yoffe is attractive is a worthwhile project, though: as I age, unmarried, it becomes increasingly important to know that there are attractive women well above my current age.
I very seldom watch TV, and when I watch videos it's often without sound. One thing I really notice when I do is the enormous repertoire of little tics and moues and nods and blinks and tosses and eyebrow lifts and smiles and smirks and frowny-faces and thoughtful stances that talking heads use to make their visual less crushingly boring. It seems to be far beyond what any actual non-insane person would use in real life, or what actors and actresses use in performance. I find the whole effect entirely weird.
Has a study been done of this? Are there moue critics somewhere?
She's still a horrible person; let's not forget.
She does seem pretty unlikable. Human Guinea Pig is still good though.
I used to like her HGP stuff before she took over Prudence. Every time she gets a letter from a young woman who doesn't want to have a marriage-and-babies kind of life and is taking a lot of shit for it, she just calls her selfish and goes on to describe how universally lovable babies and husbands are.
What don't you guys like about Yoffe? Her HGP columns are good, and she seems reasonably sensible as Prudence...
She's still a horrible person; let's not forget.
Wait, I actually have forgotten why. I'm guessing it's the husband/babies thing that you've mentioned above, right? Is there anything else?
Post-Althouse, people should really avoid making videos while watching TV, wine glass in hand.
That Google Earth thing is awful.
weird. Unfogged wouldn't load for me and then all at once it loaded. OT: is the Minneapolis commentariat (Minneapolitan? anyone else?) all checked in as okay?
10: The old Prudence was really good about trying to see the letter-writer's point of view. Yoffe is just a narrow-minded asshole who decides she wouldn't personally like the letter-writer and tells her (usually only the women) they need to go get a new personality, basically.
12: I think the MN-folk are all OK.
13: Yoffe is just a narrow-minded asshole who decides she wouldn't personally like the letter-writer and tells her (usually only the women) they need to go get a new personality, basically.
Yes, but you don't seem to be factoring in that she's genuinely attractive. In the past, baa has noted that there must be a certain moral leeway for Great Powers; surely it's the same for the attractive.
Is there anything else?
There's this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/24/AR2007062401374.html
Yoffe also wrote a spectacularly dunderheaded (really, it was sub-Alt/housian) op-ed in the Post about how Al Gore was an alarmist about global warming. Her reasoning was pretty much unstated. This from a woman who admitted in a (funny!) HGP piece that she has trouble with fifth-grade math.
She's not that good-looking. To excuse her dismissive attitude toward human beings, she would have to be attractive AND charismatic.
The old Prudence was really good about trying to see the letter-writer's point of view. Yoffe is just a narrow-minded asshole who decides she wouldn't personally like the letter-writer and tells her (usually only the women) they need to go get a new personality, basically.
So, like Dr. Laura, except with "go get a new personality" instead of "sacrifice her sanity and happiness forever for the sake of her marriage".
Was the old Dear Prudence a Dear Abby or an Ann Landers sprog? Are those biddies still alive and feuding with each other, or have they passed the torch like Heloise did?
As a true connoisseur of attractive older women, I have to say that she doesn't jump out at me.
The Minnesota contingent is more than OK. We're awesome!
I find this response to Yoffe puzzling. So much so that I just neglected my work for ten minutes reading her columns for the past week. My thoughts:
1. Yoffe takes a "problem solving" approach to Dear Prudence. It's more "based on the problem you've described, I recommend X" rather than "I see where you are coming from"
2. Her level of pre-judgment seems about normal for an agony aunt.
3. She's funny! I liked particularly this quote: "You know those movies in which the bad guy thinks he's stolen a suitcase full of cash from some sap, only to find the sap has filled the suitcase with scrap paper? You need to give your ex one of those suitcases."
4. Great powers which are also, generally speaking, forces for good in the world get one mulligan every two decades.
Link me a still image of her, please.
To excuse her dismissive attitude toward human beings, she would have to be attractive AND charismatic.
Fair point, though I think the criteria need better definition. Surely there's research money available for this.
4. Great powers which are also, generally speaking, forces for good in the world get one mulligan every two decades.
Fine, but the issue before us is how this maps onto the attractiveness map (or, more properly, as AWB rightly pointed out, attractive and charismatic map). Don't evade the nub of the thing, baa.
Yoffe. I really don't want to debate her attractiveness. (I would feel pretty guilty if this turned into that.) I was just fucking around.
29 is a very attractive photo. She doesn't look like that in the video, though.
about how Al Gore was an alarmist
dismissive attitude
I find her sympathetic and often funny, much better than her predecessor, so maybe I'm rationalizing. But the WaPo column covered the alarmist industry with Al Gore as an example, I thought; she took issue with being stridently told "this is too important for you to ignore."
There are plenty of irritating strident green advocates; they're jerks even if they are right about coal plants in the Ohio Valley. Also, WaPo editorials usually suck rocks through a hose, so points for raising the bar.
I'll look for the pattern that bugs AWB, maybe she does go easy on guys. But many human beings are self-destructive and short sighted; being entertainingly dismissive of such people in an advice column is OK.
Wow. That's just, well, horrible advice. Based only on seeing that video, I hate Prudence.
The animation was pretty neat, tho.
Wasn't there a Human Guinea Pig column in which she entered a beauty pageant?
Wasn't there a Human Guinea Pig column in which she entered a beauty pageant?
Two comments!
Loved Dear Abby's daughter, don't like Yoffe as much.
I really haven't gotten into the video-i-zation of the internet. Most of my internet use is avoiding work. The rate that I can apprehend video is unvarying: If I want the information, I have to spend the amount of time with it that the maker determines. (I feel much the same about my voice mail.) Reading email or a web page, I can still feel like I haven't abandoned my duties so throughly.
You know what's awesome about blogs? They never run out of things to tell me to hate. They're like Buddha or Jesus, only entirely different and on the Internet.
Third comment!
That video made me feel bad about being a person, but I liked the way he did "The End".
I really haven't gotten into the video-i-zation of the internet. Most of my internet use is avoiding work.
It's the same for me only much more so. My internet use is almost exclusively while at work -- and my desk is in a semi-public location, so I can't have the audio on.
32: But the WaPo column covered the alarmist industry with Al Gore as an example, I thought; she took issue with being stridently told "this is too important for you to ignore."
I don't read it that way. I don't know enough about her to know whether I should attribute what she wrote to stupidity or malice, but that column trots out numerous standard talking points used by those who seek to refute global warming. For example:
Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it's supposed to be a sign I'm in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August 2008 (or 2007 for that matter)."
This completely misses (or perhaps deliberately ignores) the point that whether August of any given year is unusually hot or unusually cold in any given location does absolutely nothing whatsoever to support or refute the theory of climate change. It is just a single data point. It is only by looking lots and lots of data points that you start to see a broader trend. Stupid non sequiturs such as "I, however, refuse to see the apocalypse in every balmy day" only muddy the waters and make intelligent discussion of the issue more difficult.
Human Guinea Pig is so great. Dear Prudence, not so much, but better I think than most advice columnist. Yoffe, esp. in her early colums, is more normal in her tone and more earnest in her advice, but she's often v. thoughtless and oout of her depth. Re the op-ed she might not actually not be rightwing or even anti-gore at all, just apolitical and clueless.
The most egregrious prudence columns break my heart a little, b/c the Human Guinea Pig Yoffe is so likable and charming.
