A lot of Republicans – including Rudy Giuliani – are trying to make an issue of Hillary Clinton’s health. With the exception of a photo here and there that looks less than flattering, this is mostly a product of her age. Some have argued sexism, but other than a general belief in sexism and female age, there’s just not much reason to believe that’s especially true. It’s not as though we haven’t been here before.

The media’s dismissal has lead to some accusations of media bias, because of Bob Dole above and John McCain in 2008. Hillary Clinton will be 69 before election day, Dole and McCain were 72. One could argue that 70 is the cut-off, but there’s no special reason it might be. More likely it’s that while there are allegations that Hillary Clinton has health problems, Dole and McCain both had actual infirmities going back to their war experience.

Now, surely, it seems cruddy to penalize those two men for serving their country. It’s not especially fair. But it is what it is. Bob Dole had to shake with his left hand, and John McCain can’t raise his arms and had skin cancer to boot. Sucks, but there you go. Also, both McCain and Dole were running against young Democrats, putting the age issue in play. It’s possible that if Rubio or maybe even Cruz (though he looks older than his years) had won the Republican nomination, we’d be having a different conversation. Or maybe not. (more…)

I was rather excited when my cousin and/or his wife (it was a dual account) added me as a friend on Facebook. I am not especially close to them, as we’re ten years apart in age and I’m square in between him and his son, but family is family and I was not not-close to them either, as far as cousins in that branch go.

Then I started getting the messages from them.

Evidently, my cousin and/or his wife has latched on to what appears to me to be a pyramid scheme of sorts. Well, if not a pyramid scheme, then a multi-level marketing program with a flimsy pretext. I like to think that I’m a relatively smart guy and even I had some difficulty with understanding what was being purchased and sold. It seemed like game credits of some sort. Everything about it, including my failure to understand it, was a red flag.

I ignored it, which worked for less than a day before I started getting more and more messages about how great this is. Including a link to some assistant football coach who was talking about it. I learned in subsequent messages that it was my cousin’s wife trying to sell me up, which made sense. It seems much more like the sort of thing that she would get into. My cousin is friendly enough, but not the most social person in the world. She’s very social and while not dumb a little bit on the gullible side sometimes. She forwards emails with some rather crazy (political) theories.

I didn’t watch the video, but I knew that I was going to have to say something. I told them while I appreciate the thought I was not interested. I haven’t heard from them since.

Facebook has become less pleasant as time goes by. I used to like it as a bit of an escape from the Will Truman part of my life, but weirdly enough Will Truman has taken it over. Which is to say that its algorithms so deeply favor my Ordinary Times friends that it feels like I never left. I’m not kidding. Though I only have about 10 OT-related friends on Facebook (out of 150 or so total), nine of the first ten items on my feed are from OT people, and twenty of the first thirty are. I just checked.

And weirdly enough, those that aren’t are people I rarely respond to for the most part. I simply don’t understand where it’s coming from on this. I don’t want to block my OT people because I am interested in what’s going on with them. I’m just not interested solely in them.

{Disregard the tweet its attached to}

Tfw people starting arguing in your mentions and you have no escape pic.twitter.com/GYGuolC7lm

— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) August 24, 2016

Add to these atrocities some of the worst recorded baby names of last year: Particularly enchanting were “Elizabreth” (no, really) and “Mhavrych” (pronounced “Maverick”). Parents across the U.S. are either flinging together random collections of letters or, more unsettlingly, looking to product manufacturers for inspiration. In 2014, 73 sets of parents put “Lexus” on their baby girl’s birth certificate documents. In the same year, seven boys were called Disney. And in 2015, exactly 100 girls were named Tesla.

Please make it stop. I’ll go to Donald Trump if I have to. The one despotic law change I could get behind in that lunatic’s neo-fascist America is an officially sanctioned list of names. Of course, if Trump were actually to design a law federally mandating a name list, it would likely consist of less than 10 choices, all of which would be Anglo Saxon and most of which would be variations on Donald. That’s not really what I’m after. I’d just like a law that says, at its heart, “Don’t call your baby Meldor or Little Sweetmeat or Beberly.” (Those are actual real baby names.) Fail to act, America, and today’s babies will grow up harboring the sort of issues that will make our current hypersensitive crop of safe space-seeking, easily triggered teens seem well adjusted.

Source: Why the government should regulate baby names

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These left clearer marks, but less swelling overall. Once again I definitely felt it when it happened. Also, found a wasp nest. May be unrelated, but I’m thinking not. Clancy and I are debating what to do. 

Source: Van Gogh Documentary To Be First Fully Painted Feature Film Ever Made

So… uhhh… is there anything we can do with all that extra water? A large straw or something?

Source: What Earth Will Look Like 100 Million Years from Now | Open Culture

Over there, a conversation broke out in response to an article I linked to about on how to avoid being a creep on Twitter. This lead to well-tread conversation about the importance of physical appearance. Namely, whether an attractive guy can get away with something that an unattractive guy would get the creep tag for.

As it happens, my answer is an unequivocal yes. But also, that guys should get over it. My more general believe is that women are more interested in looks than stereotypes suggest, that, men are less, though that the relationship (men more interested than women) is still true. Given this, men collectively don’t have a whole lot of room to complain about woman superficiality.

This view gets a fair amount of pushback from both sides of the spectrum, and not because of the last part. A lot of women don’t like it because it suggests that women are more superficial than their stereotype, and that a lot of guys who complain about being treated poorly because they’re unattractive aren’t wrong. A lot of men like it because it allows them to believe they will be able to peg up when it comes to getting a woman because women place less of an emphasis on looks than men do. I further believe that this myth (that women don’t just care less about looks than men but don’t really care that much) is a pernicious one, because it places a burden on women to be more than they are, and more than we ask men to be.

So yeah, of course attractive and unattractive men are gauged differently. This is true in dating criteria generally. If a woman is interested in a man (or vice-versa) she is more likely to forgive awkward moments, interpret what he says charitably, and so on. This is true regardless of the source of the interest, which includes a lot of things other than looks. The year before she met me, my wife met a guy at the same venue who put a lot of the same moves as I did. She never described him as a creep, but she was made rather uncomfortable by it. Along comes me, who does the same things, and we’ve been married for over a decade. The criteria there wasn’t looks so much as age (he was ten years older than myself), biography (he was a former alcoholic), and other such things.

But come on. Of course it applies to looks, too. And when we’re talking about initial encounters, it’s the cover of the book and people do judge by it. There are things guys can do to make a better impression, but there is only so much that a guy can do. If a guy at the lower-end of the attractiveness spectrum is approaching a woman at the higher end, he is far more likely to be considered creepy rather than charming. And that’s a reason why it’s important that we be honest about this. Because if a guy doesn’t want to be creepy, he ought not aim high unless he has very high confidence in his social skills (and depending on the context, even then).

Talk about how there aren’t universal standards and how one person’s eight is another person’s six is some combination of trying to muddy the waters and clinging to grade school fictions. Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there is a reason why Hollywood actors and actresses tend to look a lot more like one another than they do like you and me. There may be opportunities to swing for the fences, but it’s a bad idea to do so regularly.

At some point, I started using as a gauge “Would I be doing this if it were an unattractive woman or a guy?” when striking up conversations and the like. If I never would, then I wouldn’t with some attractive lady unless I was willing to admit that I was making a move (however minor). That admission would become important because it meant that if she blew me off I wouldn’t be able to say “How rude.” I swung, I missed, life goes on.

At some point later than that, I realized that was insufficient. That it’s often not appropriate to do towards a woman even if I wouldn’t have a problem doing so towards a guy. That’s where Twitter comes in. Liking every tweet someone tweets (or liking every picture on Facebook) is just not something that a normal person does without some… other motivation. But sometimes on Twitter I do find myself in someone’s timeline and running across several comment-reply-like-retweet worthy tweets. If it’s a guy, I might do three or four or five.

Yeah, but probably not if it’s a female. Not unless it’s one that I have conversed with pretty regularly and have some sort of indication of “Hey, we’re cool.” If they don’t follow me, or my contact with them has been relatively minimal, I will probably pass. This applies especially to young women I follow. Though comparative appearance isn’t an issue (my avatar is a cartoon character, after all), the dynamics between men approaching 40 and women a little past 20 is pretty straightforward. There are a lot more of my type hitting up their type, than vice-versa. And while I am not hitting them up, it’s best to just go ahead and avoid any discomfort they might feel if they even suspected this old geezer was demonstrating a prurient interest.

It’s entirely possible that I am being too deferential, and that I am doing them a disservice by not charming them with my banter or my retweets. But you hear enough stories and think “Yeah, I don’t want to be a part of that” and so you don’t. I don’t necessarily follow all of the rules of the original piece, but they’re worth at least considering. Whether you’re a 20-something stud or a 40 year old dad. But especially the latter.

Well this is pretty awesome. It you haven’t seen it, watch some Louisianians save a woman (and her dog!) from a sinking car:

NPR’s article has some really good pictures. You may remember a previous post with pictures of flooding in Texas. I had some song lyrics attached. Someone has posted the song itself (from a now-defunct band) on Youtube and is shown to the right.

There is a lot not to like about the south, but they do come together in times like this. The Cajun Navy came together in Katrina, and was sort of recommissioned during this flooding. It’s one of the positive aspects of the “Hold my beer and watch this s**t” culture that so often gets people in the region in trouble. You have a boat, of course roaming the floods and looking for people is what you do.

This isn’t unique to the south. There is a communitarianism in the west as well, even among those alleged rugged individualists. Out there, you often really can’t count on help because it’s so far away. But because it’s such a constant problem, it’s sort of always there. In the South it just comes up during freak weather, and with the exception of things like the Cajun Navy there isn’t any real formality to it. It’s just that you’re driving in flooding and you see some joe excited to use his F-150 to pull someone out of the water.

Rod Dreher has a really nice post on the subject.

Over There, JL Wall also has a post with links to ever more stuff.