DAY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY EIGHT

I know everyone's anxious to hear about the cat issue, so, it's all good! No idea if the (5 out of 6 who survived) kittens will live, but at least the mom's ok!

Care of Sara, a really cool video:

Last night we got into a debate about the tv show Girls. I saw one episode and decided it was horribly, terribly, annoying and that I never wanted to watch another one.  The reason why?  Let me take some clips from this Gawker article to tell you:

Girls is a television program about the children of wealthy famous people and shitty music and Facebook and how hard it is to know who you are and Thought Catalog and sexually transmitted diseases and the exhaustion of ceaselessly dramatizing your own life while posing as someone who understands the fundamental emptiness and narcissism of that very self-dramatization. This is a recap of it.

And another article, "Am I Rich Enough?":

Let the record reflect that the television program Girls, which is "like nothing else on TV," and which has at long last brought the previously buried perspectives of 23- to 28-year-old females to bear on mass culture, has bravely broken yet another taboo by choosing to set its season finale at a surprise wedding. Nothing has ever been like that, on TV...So what have we learned here, kids? What is the message, finally? That all television shows are stupid, and that television is not art, and to relentlessly valorize a 26-year-old show-runner with tattoos of scenes from children's books as the voice of a new generation is foolhardy and empty? That youth is callow, and navel-gazing, and small-minded? That wrapping your persona in layer after layer of defensive irony and self-deprecation does not absolve you of the responsibility to be interested in something outside of yourself? That an awareness of your flaws is not a defense?
"But," you will say. "You don't get it. The show is a satire. A gentle satire, but a satire. The flaws are the point."
"And yet you celebrate her as an auteur," I will say. "The 'artist' and the character are virtually identical, and you valorize the artist for skewering the character. Besides, she's not skewering the character. These people are meant to be loved, to be understood and explained. It's a celebration, not a satire."
"Do you apply the same standard to Woody Allen?" you will say. "Is his filmic self meant to be loved or is he a comic foil? Is he the hero or the butt of the joke, or both?"
"Laurie Simmons' daughter is no Woody Allen," I will say.
"Stop calling her that," you will say. "Why do you insist on calling her that? Do you really think a feminist artist who works with dolls can call up HBO and get her daughter a gig? The TV business is rife with nepotism. Why single her out?"
"You misunderstand me," I will say. "I don't think she got a TV show because of her mother. But I think that the concerns of the wealthy private school girls ought to be dismissed as a matter of course and not be taken seriously. There are enough people who take them seriously; for largely tribal reasons I don't want to be among them. Especially if they surround themselves with their well-bred peers. I think that we should fight to rob the Laurie Simmons' daughters and David Mamet's daughters' and Brian Williams' daughters' and Drummer from Bad Company's daughters' of this world of the opportunities they have been unjustly awarded. Or at least highlight the injustice." 

He says he doesn't hate the show. I do. Although I guess my hatred shouldn't stem from the one episode I watched. Then again, it can.


A horrifying recount of an event earlier this year.