I've had these news niblets in my open Firefox tabs all week, and they just never arrived at maximum blogability.  I wanted to share them anyway, so I've invented a category for them — "smash-n-grab" — because it's kind of like when there's a riot you just smash the glass and grab whatever you can get your mitts on and sort it all out later. 

I mean, personally, I found Lisa Rinna's admission that her plastic surgery addiction has turned her into a freak both horrifying and hilarious.  And poignant, too, in a way.  But I wasn't sure I wanted to dedicate a post to it.  I don't even know who Lisa Rinna is, really, and honestly I don't have anything to say about it but hear, hear!

I didn't blog about Monday's surprise ice storm because I don't think I even left the house Monday.  When I went into work Tuesday everyone in the office had taken a dive the day before.  I felt bad for them.  A shame the Globe didn't put up their interactive guide to walking on icy sidewalks...


... until two days after.  That's news you can use, eh?  I link to it here in the hopes that their handy tips — avoid stilettos! Wear your bike helmet! — will be helpful when the next storm strikes.

When the weather warms up a bit, it might be worth investigating this $20/month benefit for bicycle commuting.  You'd have to convince your employer to sign up for the program, but it sounds pretty cool. 

Contrary to popular belief, cyclists do incur costs over the course of their commuting season. Last year I probably spent a couple hundred bucks on tune-ups and repairs to my bike, including new brakes, brake pads, and blown tires.  I had a broken axle and a wobbly back wheel that had to be replaced.  Lesson: it's probably best to avoid riding down stairs if at all possible.  The twenty bucks probably won't be enough to cover your copays when you get to the bottom.

And speaking of reaching rock bottom in pieces, as a committed secessionist I found Professor Igor Panarin's prediction that the US would break into six separate nations by June (early July at the latest) 2010 due to to "mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation" heartening, but unfortunately flawed on several fronts.  First of all, Americans are far too fat, lazy, and complacent to fight a civil war. 

The good professor's map...


...also shows no real appreciation or even a rudimentary understanding of regional dynamics.  If the shit hits the fan, it'll be a complete mess, first of all.  You'll need a blood spatter analyst to figure it out.  But, just for starters, the idea that Confederate states would bond with Union states from the last Civil War is ridiculous on the face of it, and should have discredited this quack at the outset. 

It's obvious that what you've got here is actually a bit of good, old-fashioned wishful thinking.  The only part of this map that matters is the chunk of territory in the lower left there.  "Alaska will go to Russia."  Will you take Sarah Palin with you?  Yes?  It's a deal!

She sure has become a whiner, hasn't she?  Her latest gripe? Caroline Kennedy might be getting better treatment in the liberal press than Palin got as candidate for Vice President. OK, lemme get this straight:  Sarah Barracuda, self-proclaimed "pit bull with lipstick," hardcore hockey mom who got her mean girl on for an audience of millions, jeered and ridiculed inner-city community organizers in front of her well-heeled all-white audience, accused any who did not support her of being anti-American, who used the press to fan the flames of her own little culture war, is wondering why no one treated her like a lady during the campaign.

Next!

I mean, please.  If you want to be treated like a human, act like one. 

Ann Coulter actually took a similar tack on the Today Show earlier this week, claiming the liberal cabal that runs NBC's ultra-liberal Today Show with master of Marxist-Leninist agitprop Matt Lauer and Socialist poster girl and host of the obviously ironically titled Who Wants to Be A Millionaire Meredith Vieira had banned her for life from the network for not toeing the Party line. 

Oh, if only it were true.

When you think about it, why shouldn't they ban her?  Why should anyone have her on?  She can even out-O'Reilly Bill O'Reilly.  The question isn't why would anyone cancel an appearance by Ann Coulter, but why anyone would book her in the first place.  Can somebody please tell me why anyone owes Ann Coulter anything?  When did she get entitled to appearances on the morning talk shows?  When did there need to be a conspiracy to cancel her?  Why isn't just canceling her enough?

Of course we all have Ann Coulters in our lives.  People who somehow managed to strong-arm their way in and now you can't get rid of without a big drag queen drama blowing up in your face.  You can't take them seriously, but not taking them seriously means you miss opportunities to file a restraining order and call the cops to carry them off when they violate it.  She's like a mosquito you have to swat as soon as it pokes you with its proboscis, lest it morph over time into a vampire bat.  

I'm sure Coulter and her people feel like the Today Show "controversy" is a marketing coup.  The "conspiracy" to "ban" her fits in nicely with the theme of her book, which is that, while liberals are always playing the victim, it's conservatives who are the real victims.  Again, if only it were true we could enjoy the spectacle of watching Coulter torn limb from limb by ferocious lions broadcast live from Aloha Stadium in Honolulu, officiated by Barack Hussein Obama and sponsored by Prius and Trader Joe's.

Sarah Palin has obviously already read her advance copy of Coulter's latest, and hopes to use it as a road map to her future poltical career as well.  With any luck, she'll be President of Russia by 2012. 

My future career as one of the world's Seven Wonders suffered another serious blow with the announcement last week of nominees in the Seven Natural Wonders Competition.  Once again, bafflingly, my abs were not on the list.  Instead, all the usual suspects were: The Grand Canyon, Mount Everest, and Niagara Falls.  But then there's Loch Ness.  I mean, come on.  It's a lough, for the love of god.  The inclusion of Loch Ness is another marketing coup.  Fecking monsters.  No less than the BBC went to considerable trouble five years ago to debunk the myth of that effin Nessie.  At least my abs are real!

But people see what they want to see... 

To prove this, the researchers hid a fence post beneath the surface of the loch and raised it in front of a coach party of tourists. Interviewed afterwards, most said they had observed a square object but several drew monster-shaped heads when asked to sketch what they had seen.

...which should be heartening to the Palins and Coulters of the world.  That a good many people would take a fencepost for a monster can only work to their advantage.

What struck me about this article in the Globe about how living in the city hurts your brain was actually the absence of monsters.  The article deals with a study that found that what the authors called "nature" was "surprisingly beneficial for the brain".  You can tell the study and the article itself were written by well-meaning, over-educated urbanites.  What they call "nature" — "grassy courtyards filled with trees and flowerbeds" — is actually landscaping.

Which is not to say that I am not in full agreement that green spaces are not just a nice break from the urban landscape but a vital part of it.  One of my new favorite hidden nooks in city is a small park, designed by the lovely and talented Toby Wolf, back behind the Mandarin Oriental on Boylston, a courtyard-like space at the base of the Pru that makes sense of a place that used to be more or less a dead zone.


Courtyard spaces are common in European cities, where some urban neighborhoods have little or no green space visible from the street.  Even where there's plenty of parks and curbside greenage, as in Boston, courtyards, like the one at the Boston Public Library, provide a refuge that parks can't...


As nice as it is, it's not "nature," exactly, any more than my garden in the Fens is.  Gardens are not natural.  They are man-made.  In fact, gardeners can bang on endlessly about the ways in which they're constantly struggling to beat back nature. 

Turns out that as stressful as city life is, life out in real nature can be pretty stressful, too.  And you don't have to be Chris McCandless — he of Into the Wild fame — to figure that out.  In my youth I went through my own brief Into the Wild phase, though never with the brazen hubris that caused McCandless his young life.  It's actually no surprise that, as his biographer Jon Krakauer reminds us repeatedly, McCandless came from a well-to-do family and graduated from an elite college with honors. 

I used to camp out with friends (no shared sleeping bags, alas) and after graduating from a not-very-elite college summa cum nada, I decided it was time to man up and do the rugged Maine portion of the Appalachian Trail.  I was out there on my own for ten weeks and ran into tons of intemperate critters, from the humble but horrible black flies who must have sucked a quart of blood out of me, to rabid lesbian avengers who stole my lunch money.  Haven't been back since. 

Nature is no walk in the park, people.  Trust me. 

The advice of scientists who studied the city's ill effects is "to find ways to mitigate the psychological damage of the metropolis while still preserving its unique benefits."  For all that could be improved in Metro Boston, I have to admit it provides plenty of opportunities to mitigate its own damaging influences, for those motivated to seek them out.

(As for Nature making man feel small, tilt-shift photography seems to capture it nicely.)

Anyway, nature does seep in, doesn't it? Teenagers seem especially vulnerable.  The interesting thing about recent findings that most teens who took those "abstinence pledges" that were pretty much the whole of the Bush administration's sex ed policy had no recollection of doing so, and that those who did apparently thought anal sex was an acceptable form of abstinence is how uninteresting it all really is.  That's the Ann Coulter Effect, too.  Where we end up arguing viciously over things like the existence of evolution and the effectiveness of abstinence, which are both pretty much self-evident. 

I don't want to suggest that teachers of sex ed scour the internet for porn to get ideas as to what their pupils are getting up to, but human nature is monkey see monkey do.  How else do you explain the continued existence of Uggs?  One place evolution obviously does not apply is fashion.  The problem with teachers getting their lesson plans off of X-Tube is that they might see too many of their pupils posting there.  The fact remains, however, that if they can see it online, they're doing it.  And if they're doing it, they're probably posting it online. 

Although porn is a great tool for abstinence, the answer to sex is probably evolution.  And while parthenogenesis would eliminate many of our species' most persistent problems (namely, um, males, without whom anal sex would not be such a practical necessity), there would be down-sides, too.  I mean, what on earth would we watch on X-Tube then?

Ann Coulter anyone?