The Electron Pencil

In Utero

The National Right to Life Convention is happening as we speak a mere 90 miles away in Louisville this weekend.

Abortion, says Kentucky Right to Life Ass’n president Margie Montgomery, “is the leading moral issue in our world.” A 19-year-old volunteer added, “It’s the most important civil rights issue of our time.”

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Christian radio host Joy Pinto chipped in: “I have the privilege on a daily basis — being the director of a pregnancy medical center — to see the wreckage of humanity that walks in my door, because they have bit the apple, they have believed the lie that this government, that all of the politics, that even some churches tell them. That it’s okay to go use contraception, it’s okay to use abortion as a backup birth control.”

And these are quotes only from the first day of the bash.

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Sweat Equity

Have you noticed that the Indiana University Athletic Dept. has issued a student-athlete bill of rights?

The Herald Times this morning carries news of the announcement, made yesterday by Athletic Director Fred Glass’s PR people. Glass, acc’d’g to the flacks, was aghast that parents of potential Hoosier jocks didn’t know how spectacularly wonderfully their snowflakes would be treated once they committed to the IU plantation.

Free At Last, Free At Last….

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Certainly better, I would imagine, than some dumb schlubs who choose to attend our institution of higher knowledge to concentrate on less glamorous pursuits like playing the oboe or learning how the brain works.

Nowhere, though, does this latest B. of R. mention cold, hard cash. As in paying the football and basketball serfs whom the local populace pays through the nose to watch, in season. Which is the crux of all the folderol over the NCAA’s system of squeezing entertainment dollars out of teenagers who can dunk a basketball or transform a running back’s knee sinew into a plate of spaghetti.

Here’s a pdf of IU’s putative emancipation document.

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Don’t Mess With Fútbol

Isn’t it funny? Ann Coulter has been saying hateful, alarmist, untrue, royalist things for years now, so much so that nobody really pays attention to her anymore.

For instance, after the meltdown of that Japanese nuclear reactor in the wake of that 2011 tsunami, she bleated, “There is a growing body of evidence that radiation in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts we should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer.” A statement, BTW, that’s endorsed and/or corroborated by exactly zero reputable scientists on this or any other planet. No matter; because it was uttered by this holy land’s most prominent harpy loon, it didn’t make headlines.

The poor thing; she must feel so neglected.

Not any more, though. Ann Coulter is nothing if not clever. She’ll find a button to push and these days the most pushable buttons are being worn by soccer fans. So, even though Coulter has never stopped disparaging and slurring homosexuals, liberals, social workers, community organizers, Democrats, brown people, black people — really, anybody who is not fabulously fortunate enough to be Ann Coulter — all her verbal retching of late has raised nary a peep. But when she slanders soccer, well, dammit, that’s going too far!

To wit:

From Awful Announcing

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(above and below) Typical Online Comments

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I’ve learned a few things running this communications colossus. One, don’t challenge anybody’s belief that eating a certain food — or, conversely, not eating something — will cure them of everything up to and including dandruff and make their lives heaven on Earth unless you want to be pilloried from here to eternity. Two, if you criticize any of the current crop of cable evening dramas — Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Orange Is the New Black, etc. — or you openly wonder why people are wasting their time watching television, be prepared to be attacked with all the ferocity of a grizzly bear mom protecting her cubs. Three, should you ever let slip even the slightest criticism of teachers or the teaching profession, you will be forthwith excommunicated from the civilized world. And, finally, do not slam soccer, or else soccer-istas will make you wish you’d never been born.

The takeaway? The most thin-skinned humans alive are foodies, “prestige” TV drama lovers, teachers, and soccer fans.

Discuss.

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Eat This, Not That

And people wonder why diets don’t work:

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These are vintage Weight Watchers recipe cards, as collected by Wendy McClure who runs Candyboots. Yes, Weight Watchers was the way to lose those excess libra pondos back in the glitter ball ’70s. And shedding the poundage was simple: just eat WW’s recommended dishes.

That is, if you could get them down without gagging.

Check out more such savory lab experiments on McClure’s Weight Watcher’s Recipe Cards from 1974 page.

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