beyonce-knowles-nose-job.jpgPeople get nose jobs all the time. It's become something of a status symbol: once you've made it, you get to make totally unnecessary and costly changes to your face. Jennifer Aniston got one, as did Katie Holmes, Beyonce, Marilyn Monroe, Halle Berry, and of course, the late Michael Jackson. The list is astonishingly long. What do the celebrities named above have in common? They were all beautiful before their nose jobs. So what gives?


In January, Ezra Roth wrote a piece for this blog about the nose job "epidemic" in Iran, where thousands of women aspire to the Western (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) ideal of beauty. He wrote that Iran leads the world in rhinoplasty, with up to 70,000 operations per year.


Now I don't know about you, but I find Iranian women very beautiful -- and not in the asexual way one might describe an elderly woman as "beautiful." No, I find them sexy and gorgeous. Indeed, desirable. And I find them desirable precisely because they don't look like the women I went to college with in southeastern Minnesota. Likewise, I thought Halle Berry was a lot hotter when she looked less like a white woman.


To wit, on Sunday I called a friend with whom I often have dinner to see if she was free. She said no, because she's recovering from a nose job she got on Friday. She didn't tell anyone she was going to get one, and she asked me to keep it a secret. (I figure as long as I don't name her here, I'm not betraying that trust by writing a post about it.)

 

madoff1.jpgBernie Madoff had the book thrown at him -- 150 years for the ponzi scheme that bankrupted families and non-profits. I suspect that I should be rejoicing and in fact I did when I heard. He did something so despicable that he does deserve to die in prison.


Yet I have little sympathy for his victims and their quest for the government to get them some of their money back:


[S]houldn't the Madoff victims have to bear at least some responsibility for their own gullibility? Mr. Madoff's supposed results -- those steady, positive returns quarter after blessed quarter -- is a classic example of the old saw, "when something looks too good to be true, it probably is." What's more, most of the people investing with Mr. Madoff thought they had gotten in on something really special; there was a certain smugness that came with thinking they had a special, secret deal not available to everyone else. Of course, it turned they were right -- they did have a special deal. It just wasn't what they expected.


As PunditMom says, greed will trump any sort of regulation the government does craft. Greed from the Madoffs of the world as well as greed from those doing the investing.


I'm not an economist nor do I feel like I have a firm hand on my own retirement funds, but even I would balk at a deal that is just too good to be true. I don't even go hirer than the quarter slots in Vegas. I just don't gamble with money nor do I think that get rich schemes win out in the end.


[Image: Kathy Willens/AP via The Guardian]

479px-GovernorSanford-_OfficialPortrait.jpgAbout 15 hours after official word that Michael Jackson was dead ricocheted around the world last week, I realized something about what makes the headlines -- and it had nothing to do with Farrah Fawcett or Ed McMahon getting short shrift.


I was in a public space with two large TVs tuned to CNN on Friday, and news of MJ was everywhere. He dominated the front page of the Times and every other paper that morning, too. The subway was full of people reading articles about him. And above ground, he's all anyone seemed to be talking about.


Then it occurred to me: if Michael Jackson hadn't died, we all would have instead been talking and reading about one of the country's front-runners for the Republican ticket in the 2012 presidential election, and how he used tax payers' money to visit his mistress in Argentina. We'd have been talking about how he publicly denounced such behavior in other politicians just a few years ago, revealing himself to be a hypocrite who's arrogant enough to believe he could get away with it.


Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina who went missing over Father's Day weekend, only to turn up a few days later claiming that he'd been hiking the Appalachian Trail, was the hot story on Thursday morning. He had just confessed to his affair, and a case was mounting against him for all the betrayals and hypocrisies listed above. What's more, the GOP had just lost someone it was calling one of its strongest contenders against Barack Obama just three years from now.


But by the next day, he was a sidebar, and the news -- TV, newspapers, blogs, and chit-chat around the water cooler -- was all Michael.

 

madoff.jpgI was relieved when I read this afternoon that Bernard Madoff received the full sentence requested by lawyers prosecuting his case: 150 years. In contrast, Madoff's lawyer's request for 12 was both a joke and an insult to the people whose lives Madoff all but destroyed.


The presiding judge, Denny Chin, said he wanted to make an example of Madoff and believed that levying the full 150 years would be a deterrent to future white-collar criminals. The Madoff sentence is the third-longest for any white collar crime, according to a compilation by Forbes.


The $65 billion Ponzi scheme that Madoff had constructed since the 1980s was a vast, far-reaching deception. It convinced thousands of people that Madoff was a man with eminent financial savvy, an ability to turn modest wealth into a fortune through wise investments. But all he was really doing was taking the money from new, unsuspecting customers and giving it to older clients to create the illusion of successful returns. It was a gigantic jig-saw puzzle with numerous missing pieces, and eventually the 71-year-old Madoff could no longer keep up the charade.


When he ran out of money last December, and told his kids about the Ponzi scheme, it's doubtful that Madoff thought that in just six months he'd be facing life behind bars. But even if he did suspect this fate, his apology to his victims rings as hollow as the investments he pretended to be making.


During his trial, Madoff turned to his victims and apologized, claiming that he lives in a tormented state for what he's done, and while he knows it won't make any difference, he feels he must say how sorry he is.


Bull. He's not tormented for defrauding his clients; he's tormented because he's been living in a holding cell in Lower Manhattan for nearly four months. If he really feels bad about what he did, he wouldn't have spent 20+ years doing it.


Madoff will most likely be sentenced to a medium-security prison in Upstate New York or New Jersey, to ensure that he is close to his family. Authorities do not intend to sentence him to a maximum-security facility because he is not a violent criminal, but his sentence is also too long for him to be a candidate for a minimum-security prison or a "prison camp" -- a facility in which prisoners are granted maximum freedom and the illusion of being outside through open-air yards with fences instead of walls.


Madoff is likely to find his next job in the kitchen or laundry of his new home, earning no more than 40 cents an hour.


[Image: The AM New York blog]

SHOUT.jpgIf I had HBO -- let alone a TV -- I'd spend my evening tonight watching Liz Garbus's acclaimed documentary, Shouting Fire: Stories From the Front Lines of Free Speech.


A hit at this year's Sundance Film Festival and praised by critics for its engaging approach to such a complex subject, the film takes a hard look at just how fragile the First Amendment really is. Garbus considers diverse cases in which Americans voicing unpopular views were kicked out of schools, lost jobs or otherwise censored to the point of undermining one of the central liberties that (we think) defines American life.


Among the film's subjects is Ward Churchill, a former University of Colorado professor who was attacked for an essay he wrote after 9/11 in which he referred to the people who worked in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns." Adolf Eichmann was a member of the Nazi party and is often called the "architect of the Holocaust" -- not because he planned it, but because of his organizational prowess and reliability in executing the plans of those who did. Likewise, argued Churchill, the people who worked in the WTC were complicit in engineering the capitalist system the terrorists meant to destroy.


He defended his position, and by speaking he only made matters worse for himself. As did the rest of the film's subjects, such as Tyler Chase Harper, a San Diego high school student who was suspended for wearing a T-shirt that said "Homosexuality is Shameful" during a gay and lesbian awareness event. Subjects like Harper may provide the balance the film needs to make its point to all Americans regardless of political leanings.


Garbus, whose father, Martin Garbus, is a First Amendment attorney, also includes footage of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, at which more than 1,800 people were arrested -- many for no apparent reason. As Gina Belafonte writes in the New York Times, these shots recall those taken much more recently in Iran, suggesting that the suppression we are witnessing in that country is just as present in our own.


As I said, I'll have to wait for Shouting Fire to come out on Netflix, but if you have HBO, take a look -- and drop a comment to let people like me (TVaphobes) know how it is.


The film's HBO schedule can be found here.


[Image: Still from Shouting Fire]


By now we have all seen or heard of that viral "gay exorcism" video making the rounds. Being gay, according to something called Manifested Glory Ministries in Connecticut, is influenced by malevolent supernatural forces. "You homosexual spirit," recited one elder with gusto, "we call you out right now, you have no power." Another amateur exorcist locates the evil spirit in the boy's belly. The merry jokers at "The Colbert Report" managed to mine some humor out of the guts of those bodiless wicked minions of Beelzebub.

President Obama announced this weekend that the House has passed the so-called "climate change bill" -- a sweeping piece of legislation that aims to curb global warming, radically reduce pollution, and generally move the United States -- and by extension, the planet -- toward a greener future.


The bill passed narrowly, with a vote of 219 over 212, and eight Republicans voted in its favor. This didn't prevent Minority Leader John Boehner from reading large portions of it aloud on the House floor, not because he supports the bill, but because "people deserve to know what's in this pile of shit."


Fortunately, Boehner's opinion is the minority one (pun intended). Though the majority may be small in this case, it was large enough to squeak the legislation through. President Obama spoke optimistically about the changes we can expect to see as a result of this Congressional move in his weekly address:


nettelhorstpride.jpgNettelhorst Elementary School has become the first school to march in Chicago's Pride Parade. Parents of this magnet school located in the middle of Boystown, the heart of Chicago's gay community, decided that it would be a good idea to have the kids and the school show solidarity with the community.


As one might expect, some were not happy with this idea...at all:


Children at Nettlehorst [sic] Elementary will be made to march in a gay pride parade in Chicago during the weekend of June 26-27. Nettlehorst is located at 3252 N. Broadway Street, Chicago, in the East Lakeview neighborhood, also known as "Boys Town."


A typical shop window along a main strip of Boys Town (top left) gives you an idea of the predominant "culture" in this part of Chicago. That culture is based largely on anal intercourse and the pursuit thereof.


While the person I quote above pulled back on his criticism some, he still did not like the idea. From what I can tell, the man does not have a child at that school. It also does not appear to be near as "mandatory" as he puts on his blog, so I doubt that children were "made to march" in the parade. Yes, their parents made the decision, especially for the younger ones, but does that mean they were "made" to march?

 

Nico Lizarraga_image.jpg

My longtime friend Jason and I were walking through the very affluent Nob Hill neighborhood here in San Francisco. Jason is the extreme opposite of affluent. I love Jason to pieces and have always been struck by his absolute and complete satisfaction with living as simply as he can. Jason is incredibly intelligent, good looking and charming and could have almost anything he wanted in life but scoffs at most everything people want. We photographed each other throughout Nob Hill but the picture that says the most is his proud declaration of what he is happiest with, his minority status.

Comparisons between Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon are inevitable: they were major celebrities for decades and all died with a few days of each other.


Comparing the above to Billy Mays, the king of infomercials with a booming voice and the boundless energy to hawk everything from OxiClean to energy pills, is more of a stretch. Still, you know people are going to do it. Why? Because he was famous too, in a way. And because, like Michael Jackson, he was 50 years old and died before his time.


But the big difference is how the deaths will be treated. When Mays was found dead Sunday at his home in Tampa, Florida, the cause was not apparent -- and the family is justifiably keeping any details fairly quiet.


How ironic is it that Mays, whose unabashed hucksterism was developed during his years pitching products on the boardwalk of Atlantic City, would be the one treated with the most dignity upon his passing?


Or maybe it's not ironic at all -- it's just a reflection of what Americans care about: scandal, sadness, tragedy and suffering. Either way, let's take a moment to commemorate the well-honed skills of another American legend: