40th Anniversary of Sesame Street

Did you know that this year marks the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street? As a kid, it was the show I was most into, before Barney came along and replaced Sesame Street as the prime kid show in my house for my little sister. I always thought Sesame Street was far superior than any children's show then, and even now. I'd watch it over Dora, Spongebob or Blue's Clues any day. I'm not usually one of those women who begin phrases with, "When I have kids...", but when I have kids, they are definitely going to watch this show. And they are going to love it.

You Gotta Put Down the Duckie is perhaps my favorite of all Sesame Street segments. I even used that exact phrase as advice for someone not too long ago- sometimes, you gotta let go of some things to move on to something new.

Feminist Blog Wars

There has been a bit of a blog war started after the launch of the new “Double X” website. For background, Double X used to be solely a blog on Slate that covered feminist/women’s issues. Although I peruse several feminist sites pretty regularly, I never really enjoyed Double X. It was mostly their format- it was just a long conversation with one another, so it became annoying to have to keep going back to what the person before had said. Plus none of what they wrote ever kept me clamoring back for more.

The blog war started when Double X launched as its own website. Linda Hirshman (whose book I reviewed here), wrote a article on how the site Jezebel is ruining feminism.

For full disclosure, Jezebel is my favorite of all the feminist sites I’ve come across, and Linda Hirshman is one of my least favorite feminists. I found her book, “Get to Work...And Get A Life, Before It's Too Late” lacking in real, practical solutions for a happy work-life balance for working mothers, and the cherry on the top for me was when she wrote that women who are abused by their partners should be shamed by other women until they leave the relationship. I think it’s pretty obvious how ineffective this would be to get women to leave, and it again squarely places all responsibility on the women who get abused, instead of trying to end domestic violence and reverse the culture that finds violence against women acceptable. So, in conclusion, I tend to disagree with most of her writings.

She wrote that Jezebel is ruining feminism for several reasons, but one she discussed is because two of their bloggers who were sexually assaulted did not immediately report their attackers to the police (one woman was 17 at the time). Therefore, they did nothing to stop these men from attacking women in the future, and can shoulder some blame for their future attacks. There were other reasons as well, which included the sex lives of one of the bloggers and the drinking choices of another. The personal is political, anyone?

The internets buzzed with the talk of the blog war. Jessica Valenti thinks that it’s great that we are all arguing and discussing what feminism is, as does Rebecca Traister at Salon. Feministe weighed in on it as well here.

Watching women attack other women becomes old and disheartening. I almost wish Jezebel didn’t even respond to Hirshman’s article, although I knew they had to say something about it. I think deeming women “good” and “bad” feminists just diverts us from the bigger issues out there. But can these bigger issues ever get resolved if we don’t decide what real feminism means? Or is it time to redefine feminism, thus making these constant discussions about it important?

My issue with the new Double X is that that Slate thought women’s issues weren’t important enough for their own site and had to create a separate site- deeming our issues a “niche” interest. Slate has done this with The Root as well. The longer women’s issues aren’t recognized as issues that affect men, women and families- like reproductive health and adequate work-life balance- then the longer it is going to take to resolve them. I suggest we all start talking about that more, instead of pointing the finger at each other.

Obama is Just One of the Guys

This is taken from the White House Flickr page. "The youngster wanted to see if the President's haircut felt like his own."

"My Personal Credit Crisis"

The New York Times Magazine published a story by one of their own economics reporters, Edmund L. Andrews, who, even with all his experience covering the bank and mortgage industries, still found himself in a financial hell hole:

If there was anybody who should have avoided the mortgage catastrophe, it was I. As an economics reporter for The New York Times, I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years. I watched Alan Greenspan and his successor, Ben S. Bernanke, at close range. I wrote several early-warning articles in 2004 about the spike in go-go mortgages. Before that, I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.

But in 2004, I joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages. Nobody duped or hypnotized me. Like so many others — borrowers, lenders and the Wall Street dealmakers behind them — I just thought I could beat the odds. We all had our reasons. The brokers and dealmakers were scoring huge commissions. Ordinary homebuyers were stretching to get into first houses, or bigger houses, or better neighborhoods. Some were greedy, some were desperate and some were deceived.

Even though Andrews took home only about $2,400 a month after paying his first wife alimony and child support, he was banking on the fact that his new wife, Pam, would be looking for a full time job once she moved to Washington to help pay the giant $460,000 mortgage. Being that she was a housewife for the past 20 years, it was hard for her to find a job, though she eventually landed a position at Saks Fifth Avenue. This income was still not enough to make ends meet, so they turned to credit cards. Before they knew it, they were paying endless fees to the mortgage company, and were carrying $50,000 in credit card debt.

Pam eventually found a full time job as an editor with a salary of $60,000. Even this combined with the $100,000 Andrews took home was not enough to cover their mortgage and now mountains of debt. The last time they put money down on their mortgage was eight months ago, and they might lose their house.

When I hear stories like this, I always think, how could anyone let this happen? Andrews had a good paying job at one of the top three newspapers in America. He made six figures. He wrote about the economy as his profession. Yet he took a mortgage he knew he couldn't afford, relied on money that he thought his wife might possibly make, and then just got deeper and deeper into trouble.

It wasn't entirely his fault. His broker, Bob, sounds like a total snake oil salesman. He offered him some shady alternatives just when Andrews was at his most vulnerable, and ended up making thousands of dollars off of him. But still- even Andrews admits he barely understood the paperwork that he was signing most of the time. Did the thought of being given that much money really put him on such a high that he was unable to plan for the future of paying it all back?

Reading these stories are like driving by a car accident- you can't look away. Hopefully they serve as a warning to the rest of us: don't spend more money than you earn. Nothing good can come of it.

Childhood Vaccinations

Slate posted an article today on how Oprah might be joining Jenny McCarthy in the anti-vaccine crusade, which is pretty terrible news. Oprah has more power than a politician, and the false idea that vaccines cause autism has already gained a lot of traction.

There is abundant evidence that vaccines don't cause autism. More than a dozen studies, as well as trend data from California and other states, show that neither the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal nor the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism. In March, a federal court dismissed both of these theories in a most definitive way after hearing weeks of testimony and gathering thousands of pages of evidence.

Jenny McCarthy begs to differ. McCarthy dropped out of nursing school in 1993 to become a Playboy bunny and later starred in an MTV show that focused on her bodily functions. She believes that vaccines made her 7-year-old son autistic—and that she "recovered" him with alternative therapies, as she details in her parenting books. McCarthy has appeared regularly on Larry King Live and Oprah to blast the medical establishment, and last year she led a march on Washington to demand that children get fewer vaccines.

The American Academy of Pediatricians is pissed, understandably:

"I think show business crosses the line when they give contracts to people like Jenny McCarthy," Tayloe says. "If you give her a bully pulpit, McCarthy is going to make people hesitate to vaccinate their children. She has no medical or scientific credentials. It disturbs us that she's given all these opportunities to make her pitch about vaccines on Oprah or Larry King or U.S. News or whatever. We have to scramble to get equal time—and who wants to see a gray-haired pediatrician talking about a serious topic like childhood vaccines when she's out there blasting the academy and blasting the federal government?"

The Wall Street Journal reported today that cases of whopping cough and measles- illnesses that has been pretty much eradicated since the development of vaccines- is on the rise:

Too many abstainers can put a town at risk, wrote Dr. Saad Omer, of Emory University in Atlanta, the lead author in the report in this week's New England Journal of Medicine.

"People need to recognize that in the case of infectious diseases, what other people do impacts my child," Dr. Omer said in an interview. "If they live in a community that has a cluster of refusers, their risk of getting a vaccine-preventable disease goes up, just by virtue of who they play with."

It may be easy for parents to choose not to vaccinate their children because they think the diseases we vaccinate against are gone, but they are not. Parents today don't remember a time when children died of things like polio, measles and rubella- but that doesn't mean they are gone. It means that our vaccines have been successful.

I can't imagine how hard it is to be a parent of an autistic child. I worked with autistic children for a few summers when I was in college, and it was taxing. And I hope that they find the cause of autism soon, and that that discovery will help work towards a cure. But until then, choosing not to vaccinate children is not the answer to preventing autism.

Texts From Last Night

Perfect for those days when you're really bored at work. But proceed with caution, because you will laugh out loud.

(546): Just did shrooms. Don't feel shit! Wsasted 40 bucks on this! Nothing's happenig except for this little gnome on my shoulder and the couch is melting. Fuckin waste of money.