As I get older, I notice that things I once loved, and remembered with a philosophic passion, no longer measure up to the memory in reality. With the resurrection of old TV shows in expanded reruns on new cable channels like MeTV, old childhood favorites like “Wonder Woman” and “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Incredible Hulk” are bitter comparisons to what they used to be in memory.
I’m always fascinated by labels and meaning and the attributes we actively choose to apply to people and thoughts and concepts. Disambiguation is important — words have previously defined meanings — and to purposefully change the common use of a word to fit a narrow political stream, or a personal agenda, is both dangerous and daunting. There are two words I’ve lately been pondering: Precious and Precocious!
Continue reading → Precious or Precocious and an Eerily Dissimilar Disambiguation
Sheryl Sandberg sure knows how to make a headline. First, she wanted young women to “LEAN IN” and now she wants us to all stop using the word “Bossy” to describe the behavior of some young women because that word somehow destroys their inner need to tell people what to do.
Continue reading → Little Miss Bossy Pants and the Incongruity of Expectation
Over the holiday break, I decided to watch the newest Superman movie and I was certainly disappointed in the silly story, the rebooting of the franchise, and the awful acting of the lead character. Superman should be wily, and funny, and tough. He never preens.
It’s always boring when movie production houses feel they have to re-start a story that’s been never-endingly told for generations. We pretty much know the backstory of Superman and we don’t need to re-live, over and over again, every 10 years or so, just how the star child becomes the Superman on earth.
In my short life, I think I’ve lived through at least a dozen iterations of Superman in film and on television and I would be perfectly fine to have a new Superman just appear in media res. We get it he’s special and Superhuman, so just drop him in and let the story start with no explanation necessary!
Continue reading → Superman, Batman and Spider-Man: How Murdering Loss Creates Comic Book Character
On February 17, 2012 I wrote an article — When Doctors Fire Patients — that dealt with, among other things, the anti-vaccination efforts of some people — led by debunked semi-celebrity Jenny McCarthy — who believe childhood immunizations cause Autism even though there is, and has never been, any empirical medical proof for that claim. When pressed for scientific evidence, the anti-vaccine believers simply talk about “mother’s intuition” and other nonsense that not only puts their non-immunized children at risk for disease, but the rest of society at risk as well as these unprotected children become certain carriers of diseases that should have been eradicated from the face of the earth.
Continue reading → When Anti-Infant Immunizations Become Childhood Onset Diseases
In Gordon Davidescu’s excellent article — Tznuis and the National Football League — we shared a fascinating conversation in the comments stream about Jewish law and children and the age of sexualization of the female body.
Continue reading → Precocious Puberty and the Age of Sexualization
There is something viscerally pleasing when your fingers have to dig in to the corners of a candy box to lift the flaps to reveal a hidden taste from the void. Unfortunately, the boxed candy of my childhood has been replaced with the convenience of — and the impossibility of tearing open — a plastic bag.
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