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Caitlin Clark: Open Season on the Golden Goose

Caitlin Clark gave the WNBA the audience it spent thirty years failing to find. On the night of June 24 it gave her a fist to the throat and a step over her body, and the officials paid to watch the floor saw nothing. Here is the case for her leaving. Begin with the tape, because the tape is where excuses go to die. Phoenix led Indiana late in the first half at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, a building that exists in its current sold-out form for one reason, and that reason was lying on the hardwood. Caitlin Clark had driven the lane, absorbed contact from Lexi Held, and gone down onto her side. The ball came loose. Held, DeWanna Bonner, and Alyssa Thomas dove after it and landed in a pile on top of her. Then Thomas, with Clark pinned beneath her, drove a closed fist into Clark’s throat, pushed herself upright, and stepped over the body of the best thing to happen to women’s basketball in forty years. One account of the scramble puts Thomas’s knee into Clark’s groin on the way down. Three referees stood within a few yards of all of it and called nothing.

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Backstage Collapsed: Universal Recording and the Architecture of Courtship

A panelist on a recent broadcast conversation made the following argument. Young people across the wealthy world are not having children. Before they do not have children, they do not date. Before they do not date, they do not interact at the dances, the parties, the mixers their parents and grandparents used as the primary infrastructure for finding mates. Even when they show up at such gatherings, they hold the wall, not approaching, not asking, not risking the awkward overture that has been the entry-cost of human pairing for as long as human pairing has been formalized into ritual occasions. The panelist asked why, and answered himself. They are afraid of being recorded. They are afraid that any silly thing they say or any failed dance step or any drunk confession will be filmed and uploaded and used against them by people they cannot identify in advance. So they withdraw. The species, the panelist concluded, cannot continue under such conditions, and the only available remedy is to restrict the technology that produced those conditions.

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The Box You Cannot Check

The clinic intake form on the clipboard at the front desk has two boxes next to the word “sex.” A patient who is neither of the two options has been given three choices: pick one box and lie, write something in the margin, or refuse the form. The receptionist will not read the margin. Data entry clerks will not transcribe it. EHR systems will not store anything outside the two values the form lists. The patient walks out of the clinic with a treatment plan based on a box that does not correspond to their body, their history, or their current endocrine state. The form has done its job, which is not the job it claimed to do.

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Advice for 2020 Democrats

Today, let’s offer some friendly advice to the Democrat nominee nation based on the results of the first debate, and inspired by things to watch for in the upcoming second debate. First, I was born in the middle of the country surrounded by waves of Republicans. I currently work on the East Coast and on the West Coast — and a lot of Democrats pay me a lot of money. I have experience flipping on both sides of this national dime, and the Democrat Party has a long way to go to defeat an anachronistic, charismatic, President who feasts on the gruel of the worst in humanity.

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Curse of Old Men: More Creepy than Funny

Unlike women, as men age, there’s a tendency to stigmatize our awful attempts at humor by branding us “creepy” or “perverted” or “just gross.”  Plant an unfunny line on a 20-year-old guy and a teenaged woman might giggle, while the same line said by a guy over 60, to the same young teen, begets the world breaking apart as the whole tone and timbre of the conversation changes to a perceived perversion.

Why is that?

Is there always some sort of unspoken sexual underpinning to every male-to-female interaction that cannot be denied or generationally negotiated?  Why doesn’t the curse cut the opposite way against older women who are labeled creepy and perverted in the same condition?

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Subliminal Sexual Discrimination via Voices on a Train

I read something interesting online a while ago, but I can’t remember the source material.  The gist of the story was that the pre-recorded automated announcements you hear in train stations — and other public transit hubs and modes — are purposefully driven by subconscious sexual stereotypes.  The female voices you hear provide “information” about the current stop and next stop, while the pre-recorded male voices give you warnings and orders like, “Get out of the way!”

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Born this Way: Chaz Bono, Jo Calderone and a Fake Penis

I am disturbed by all the hate focused on Chaz Bono as he competes on Dancing with the Stars:

“Of course, they knew there would be some anti-Bono calls and emails,” said a longtime “DWTS” insider. “But this has been more vicious and in larger volume than was anticipated. … Some of the comments are downright scary,” the source added.

It seems some of the negativity may be coming from ABC viewers in the Bible Belt — riled up by denunciations of Bono in sermons delivered by unhappy preachers.

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