Peter Krupa

Yesterday Ona’s aunt from Atlanta called her up demanding to know the date of our wedding. She has to make plans, she said. What kind of plans? asked Ona. And she told Ona that she wanted to rent a motor home and drive up to New York City, picking up various and sundry family members all along the way until they arrived at our quiet little corner of Harlem - a literal truckload of Floreses and Monteros - to celebrate our matrimony

Visions of My Big, Fat Latino Wedding flashed before my eyes, and I turned a little pale. I wanted to explain to this woman, briefly, that this is the United States of America - we don’t do crazy things like that, and she should have learned this by now.

As it is, I believe cooler heads are prevailing for the time being. Good thing, because I doubt there are any motor home parking spaces in my neighborhood.

I’m reading an interesting book right now by Sharon Weinberger called Imaginary Weapons. It’s an account of how some fringe-science nutjobs wormed their way inside the Pentagon and, despite getting completely panned by the scientific community, still pulled down millions in Defense Department booty.

They had this idea called an isomer bomb that, using an isomer of hafnium, would supposedly be the size of a hand grenade, yet pack the punch of a nuke. The most interesting thing about this story to me is that it illustrates again that quality of being human that makes us believers, despite all evidence to the contrary - believers in Cold Fusion, in alien abduction, in 9/11 conspiracies, in a socialist paradise, in a loving God.

So I wasn’t too surprised to find that one of the main players in the hafnium saga was also the founder of the organization Lord I Believe. The topic is also a good illustration of Wikipedia’s shortcomings, as the obsession with “No Point of View” means that - thanks to the Believers - the hafnium bomb comes out looking almost legitimate.

Anyway, the book is a nice quick read, and sure to make the science-inclined among us squirm with frustration.

The blog-o-sphere has worked itself up into a frenzy over a recent article on Forbes.com. In that article, a certain Michael Noer makes the assertion that marrying career women is a bad idea, because they are more likely to cheat, whine, neglect housework, dislike children, and have their own opinions. Like any polemicist worth his pay grade, he bases his claims on “statistics” and “studies.”

It really is the formula for a perfect storm: An article in a major publication, wading fearlessly into the Culture Wars, and staking a position that will outrage the extreme of one side while delighting the extreme of the other. This gets both sides posting links to the article and rallying the troops, until we get the blog equivalent of that one giant wave that knocks that ship over in the trailer for that one George Clooney movie.

I’m not really interested in hashing out the relative merits of the studies, statistics, etc. I am wondering, though, what this guy hopes to accomplish with such an article. What’s his point? To give the beer-swilling palookas at the local watering hole a reason to be glad they married high school dropouts? Or to talk guys like me out of marrying successful women?

Well, as the future husband of a future Ivy League graduate, I’m not impressed. First of all he misses all the advantages of marrying a professional woman: We split the rent, I get to cook, she doesn’t want to have kids yet, and - best of all - we get free Yankee tickets through her University.

Not only that, some of the disadvantages he lists are just silly. For example:

The other reason a career can hurt a marriage will be obvious to anyone who has seen their mate run off with a co-worker: When your spouse works outside the home, chances increase they’ll meet someone they like more than you. “The work environment provides a host of potential partners,” researcher Adrian J. Blow reported in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, “and individuals frequently find themselves spending a great deal of time with these individuals.”

So what, we should let husbands have all the extra-marital fun with co-workers? Hardly seems fair. Not only that, historically speaking women are perfectly capable of cuckolding their husbands without the assistance of an MBA, and so there always lurks the unmentionable possibility she would find a way to cheat on you regardless of whether you kept her locked in the bathroom.

Besides all that, the fact is that more women are going to school and starting careers these days, and so unless there still exists in some parallel universe a gigantic finishing school churning out women just dying to do nothing more than cook your food, wash your clothes, raise your kids, and fuck your brains out, the problems Noer lists in his article are ones we’re just going to have to learn to deal with.

No doubt there were similar articles written when women learned to read and started to vote. I’m sure that, eventually, we’ll figure out the two-career thing too.

“Japanese and Chinese people are always studying. They intimidate me. Do you know they don’t eat lunch? They just sit in the classroom studying and put everything on their tiny computers.”

- My girlfriend, who is attending Columbia Law School

Sorry, wireless problems. Back to your regularly scheduled blogging tomorrow.

These people say so. An era has ended. I’m off to tearfully burn my grade school astronomy books, because they are full of lies. Lies!

Poor Pluto. Life just won’t be the same as a … a … wait, what is it now? Oh, no one knows yet, but:

Ron Ekers, an Australian scientist, said that the [International Astronomical] union would try to find ways to involve the public in coming up with a name for the new class of objects, of which Pluto is the prototype.

Hmmmm…

I thought I had it bad when my brand new Sony digital camera froze three days into my Caribbean vacation. At the time I was damning the entire Japanese race, and cursing with surprising fluency and creativity in both English and Spanish.

But it could have been worse. I could have bought a laptop that SET MY GENITALS ON FIRE!

I hope Sony burns in Hell, and that Satan inflicts ironic justice by placing burning laptop batteries on Sony’s stupid, stupid face, then grabbing Sony’s camera in the middle of his stay in Hell and crushing it with a dump truck while screaming, “Yeah, how do you like it! Try and take pictures now! Bitch!”

From now on, I’m buying Chinese.

Just flipping through The Economist today like normal, la-de-da, nothing to see here, reading along and reading along and… wait a minute…

What the hell?

“An aid organisation based in Seoul claimed that last month’s floods in North Korea left almost 55,000 people either dead or missing and 2.5 million homeless.”

There were floods? In North Korea? Sure enough, and some aid group called “Good Friends” (which didn’t show up on a Google search, unless it’s Good Friends the gay bar, which to complete the karmic circle is based in New Orleans. Spooky.) claims there are 54,700 people dead or missing, which could easily place this flood on the upper end of the deaths-by-natural-disaster scale.

My question is, why does no one seem to care? The AP squeaks out a few stories, they make the briefs column on page B6, and that’s that. Why? Because there are no pictures? Because Anderson Cooper isn’t there to cry on live CNN? Because we’ve never cared about North Korea before? Because Live-Aid isn’t as cool when everyone’s Asian?

Really, I think it illustrates the subjectivity of the value we supposedly place on human life. We like to feign horror at gargantuan natural disasters taking place on the other side of the world, but who can really empathize with a number? The Economist rounded the number of dead or missing from this North Korea flood up, by 300 - “Almost 55,000,” give or take 300, whatever that means, which is probably a lot if your wife is one of those 300. But, like I said, numbers can’t possibly have a place in human empathy.

In her book For the Time Being, Annie Dillard writes:

On April 30, 1991– on that one day– 138,000 people drowned in Bangladesh. At dinner, I mentioned to our daughter, who was then seven years old, that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning. “No, it’s easy,” she said. “Lots and lots of dots, in blue water.”

I’ll make it even easier for you, just imagine those dots are North Korean.

My point is that absent any sort of human connection - video footage, pictures, eye-witness accounts, personal relationships - real empathy doesn’t exist. This is the genius of the North Korean dictators: they’ve made it impossible for the rest of the world to develop any contact with North Koreans, and therefore any empathy.

That’s why when thousands and thousands of people die there, give or take a few hundred, we don’t flinch - just turn the page, to check if any more little blond girls have been kidnapped recently.

MD says:

The words conservative and liberal have lost their intended meaning and are merely team names now, much like the Yankees or Red Sox. Only it’s more fun rooting for the baseball teams, though much of the time the conservative-liberal battle “fought” on talk radio is just like sports radio - a bastion for blowhards if there ever was.

But what if the conservatives and liberals just played each other in baseball? Hmmmm…

DOODLYDOODLYDOODLYDOODLYDOODLYDOODLY…..

“Chomsky’s at the plate. He’s 0 and 1 today with a ground out to George Will. Goldberg winds up, and the pitch. Crack! It’s a high fly ball, deep center field, and Charles Krauthammer is going back as fast as his little wheelchair can take him. Gore Vidal is tagging up on third, there’s the catch, and it’s gonna be a close one at the plate! Here’s the throw from Krauthammer, will it be in time? And, oh! Vidal has just body slammed William F. Buckley as he stood athwart home plate crying “stop”! But Buckley has held onto the ball, and it looks like Head Umpire Tim Russert is calling Vidal out. Now Vidal and Buckley are having a heated exchange, and what’s this? Rush Limbaugh is wading into the stands and, Oh my God! He’s clubbed a surprised-looking Colin Powell right in the face! Folks, this is getting ugly.”

Thanks to MySpace, the old internet is back. Remember the old internet? It was the world of guestbooks and geocities, of long, self-indulgent introductions, and of horrible, horrible Web design. (Which in some corners of the net persists. I recently sent the Web mistress of Commentary Magazine an e-mail asking why she chose such “God-awful, eye-bleeding colors” for the homepage. She wrote me suggesting that I “adjust the colors on (my) monitor for comfortable viewing,” then crawled back through a wormhole to 1995. Thankfully, she seems to have been canned.)

But Myspace has brought back the absolute worst of the angelfire days, with amateur webheads all over the globe trying their hands at creating visual abominations. Recently some nerds had a contest to see who could create the worst Myspace page (here’s the winner), but this seems to me like cheating.

Not only that, it’s unnecessary. There are plenty of real-life horrors to behold. Bella, for example. Or her good friend “Rach.” Or, I don’t know, ThatGrantDude, and this other dude. Girls seem to be the worst perps though, as a quick search for “princess” gave us the “GhEtTO PrinCeSs,” Princess Nikki, and Princess Iva.

I don’t know where I’m going with all this. The decline of Western Civilization? That seems a little too grandiose. In the meantime, I’m going to go take a shower and then throw up.