Ben Domenech notes, in this morning’s Transom, that the Mitt Romney, Singing Barber, story is just a moment of love, a dream, a laugh, a kiss, a cry, and so forth that will continue for the rest of our lives as we shift into the Facebook age:

The thing to understand about stories such as this, or ones about racist rocks or insufficiently feminist college papers, is that they’re going to be with us forever, and with even more gusto thanks to the Facebook era. The ability to track down fellow classmates has become so much easier, and dredging up an embarassing incident of teenage stupidity will soon be ubiquitous to the American political experience. But the public hasn’t gotten quite used to that idea yet in my view, which means this story will have a disruptive effect for Romney, even if it isn’t on a major scale. There is likely to be more to come.

I contend these kinds of anecdotes only really tear a candidate up if they confirm a suspicion long held about the candidate. Does Mitt Romney read mean? He is many things, but he doesn’t really seem mean, does he?

Anyway, yesterday, Tom and Lorenzo did a double-hit on Michelle Pfeiffer in Lanvin:

We’re always a little fascinated by stars who clearly have no red carpet training and tend to wander out there looking a little dazed and a little terrified. You see this a lot with stars who became stars prior to this century. The red carpet has really only become strictly codified in the last 15 years or so and anyone who came up through the ranks prior to that always seems completely befuddled by it. Certain actresses, like Nicole Kidman, learned to flourish under the glare of the flashbulbs, but the ones who weren’t churning out movies like Big Macs this past decade still tend to wander out looking like they’re expecting to be jumped.

If you’ve never seen video of a red carpet–and really, why the hell would you?–it’s actually some grim dystopian farce that does not approximate anything you actually see in real life. And that leaves out of the packaging and preparation inputs that go into ushering, say, Emma Stone out on her Spider-man publicity tour.

The speed and infrastructure around that process blew up in the last decade — like the political cycle which can’t really go any faster than it does now–but the shift is the codification of it, as they term it. And that’s the (ugly) shift that awaits with the increasing access to youthful discretions, because the codification could cut two different ways:

A. Somewhat likely: The external (Facebook, Google) presentation becomes some exercise of pureness, where only those with the discipline and desire to do so, succeed. Zadie Smith kind of gets at that in her New York Review of Books piece on Facebook.

B. Much more likely: We move into a place where these are the rules of the game, and these things fall mostly between white noise and glancing blows.

Either way, or both ways, it’s all the time always. This is some interim period where the candidates wander around bewildered, but everyone who says, “[I can never be president because Facebook]” — that won’t be the reason. This will be codified by then.

Not only is it a Holocaust reference, but somehow this t-shirt also costs $100?

Just nothing like a t-shirt someone plucked from the bottom of an elementary school lost-and-found in 1996, and was like, “But how can I make this glaringly offensive?” and ironed on a Star of David patch. And then Urban Outfitters bought it! And is still trying to sell it!

It’s now without the star on the UO site, so I guess prospective buyers are in for a terrible surprise, beyond the existing reality of owning a $100 mustard t-shirt from Urban Outfitters.

Last night, I said I loved Veep on Twitter–Julia Louis-Dreyfuss is great, it has lines like, ”Glasses make me look weak. It’s like a wheelchair for the eye,” and so forth.

Later, though, right before I went to sleep, I had second thoughts.

It is, for one, very insular. I mean, that’s going to happen because it’s television, but it felt kind of like Julia Louis-Dreyfuss was a congressman rather than the vice president. While they get certain parts of how stupid the news cycle is right (a tweet sets off a series of problems for Louis-Dreyfuss), a few other things distracted me, like the one White House aide who continually drops by the office rather than just emailing or BBMing. And, about an hour and a half after watching it, I couldn’t remember any of the jokes, except for that wheelchair gag.

This morning I looked up a review Todd VanDerWerff had tweeted about this weekend, with Jamie Weinman of Macleans on the show:

I say that The West Wing is more realistic because I think that if you look at political gridlock today, and the causes of it, you’ll often find that it’s caused by an increase in idealism, and more idealistic people working in government. In the U.S., there’s a lot of hand-wringing about gridlock and the inability of government to get anything done, but the reason for that is that ideology is more important than it ever was before. Republican representatives are more conservative than they ever were, and their staffers are more conservative still (the people assisting a politician are often going to be more idealistic than the politician, just like a court clerk may be the source of high-flown ideals in a decision). And conservative Democrats mostly disappeared before liberal Republicans did. The reason people can’t come together to get things done is that people have diametrically opposed views on issues, and they care about these issues (or their constituents do). The portrayal of a non-ideological political world seems like a bit of a throwback to the pre-West Wing ’90s, the “don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos” era.

A show doesn’t have to be realistic to be good, of course. and it doesn’t have to be ideological. But the attempt to avoid getting specific – to stick to issues that are not specific to one party, to avoid ideology as much as possible, to cut out party identification – may explain why the show feels a bit generic. Yes, Minister and Ianucci’s own The Thick of It (to which this is the unofficial trans-Atlantic successor) were also cynical, also avoided party identification (update: as noted in comments, the parties on The Thick of It were officially revealed in the Christmas special that aired after the first series) but they never felt like unfocused political comedy the way Veep does so far.

I don’t know the Ianucci catalog all that well, but with the cynicism, Veep seems to be aiming for that 30 Rock-Archer zone, the anything-for-a-joke aesthetic. And that’s my aesthetic! So, fingers crossed. But those shows, especially Archer, wring a lot of jokes out of their characters very defined points of view; then, on top of that infrastructure, the writers remove the verbal filter we all have and let the characters run their mouths.

In the fall of 1987, my grandfather sent my mom a list of potential baby names, with the caveat that “most of these suggestions are exercises in frivolity and punsterism mainly intended for your enjoyment and reading pleasure.”

If you held me at knifepoint and demanded—weirdly—the two most unique people I know, it’d be him and my former roommate Nancy Tan.

My grandfather was the long-time president of a family-owned agriculture company in Florida. But he’s the consummate jack of all trades, like the one-eyed jack of all trades or something—it’s on a completely different, awesome level. Do you know any other 79-year-old iPhone users who owned deep sea charter fishing boats, had the ladies from the local garden club over to look at wild flowers, keep peach trees inside an electric fence, do a daily Sodoku, follow the NBA, and teach their grandkids how to play poker at age four? Here’s how he described his daughter in his 1987 note: “so congenial, knowledgeable, impressive and nice.” That’s an apt description for him as well.

Anyway, these lists. A lot of these names are hilarious, but check out how prescient some of these were. Nobody was naming their children Ava or Eli in 1987. For your enjoyment and reading pleasure*:

I will now be naming all Urban Outfitters models regardless of gender Ulysses and Polly. But, really, if somebody told you today that their short list for a set of twins was:

Eli
Samson
Bentley
Cay (Cayden)
Waylon

Ava
Scarlet
Belle
Alice
Geneva

You’d totally believe them! And if you don’t believe me about this prescience, let me blow your mind with some graphs and charts. (Like my grandfather, I love names. This is one of my favorite blogs. Next to MBTI, if you want to have me bore you to futile, futile tears, get me on the sociology of names.)

These are via the Baby Name Wizard and based on occurrence per million babies born, rather than by ranking–ranking isn’t a particularly accurate measurement of a name’s actually popularity now, because of the sheer variance**. For example, Eva was the 35th most popular name in the 1880s (the peak in that graph); today it’s the 91st most popular girls name, but seen at a much smaller rate.

This is totally lucky, and I’m looking at like three names, but who cares? He was ahead of his time! And besides, this is all for your enjoyment and reading pleasure.

*My dad goes by T.J., but his name is actually Thomas Jess, so it’s an ongoing joke that my grandfather would come up with the longest, most ridiculous name for those same initials—i.e. Theophilus Johannesburg. Tangentially, before they knew my brother was a boy, my mom was really hot on the names Mary Elizabeth and Mary Margaret, to which my father at one point said, “And if it’s a boy, why don’t we just call him Thomas Jesus?”

**From that blog I like: “In England in 1800, the top three names for boys and girls accounted for more than half of all babies born. [...] By 1950 in the United States, you needed 79 names (through Gregory for boys, Paula for girls) to get the same population coverage that those six names achieved in England in 1800. Today, it would take 546 different names, including names like Raegan, Yaretzi, Jace and Heaven.”

***Fun fact: The name Alfie is heinously popular in the UK right now. Everybody over there is naming their sons, like, Harry, Alfie, and Freddie.

Question. What issues are important, but unlikely to be raised by presidential campaigns on their own?

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) April 16, 2012

Let’s gin up scandals to talk about them! I’m not even kidding. This is how we win the Twitter Election.

We put together an elite team of mercenaries to manufacture outrage and scandal, jiggered just so to achieve maximum Twitter and cable news escalation. Once a self-sustaining hurricane is achieved, all kinds of random stuff gets tossed around, so the news cycle is bound to land on some substance eventually.

We assemble two teams: TEAM BOTTLE SERVICE and TEAM NANCY MEYERS. This is basically like S.H.I.E.LD.

You want, for instance, some discourse on monetary policy? Erin Burnett and Megyn Kelly are already dragging the head of one of those dead horses from Luck into Ben Bernanke’s bed, with some forged documents on easing stuffed in the horse’s mouth. BOOM TEAM BOTTLE SERVICE.

TEAM BOTTLE SERVICE also employs the services of Minka Kelly, Blake Lively, and Rihanna–if you’re sensing a pattern, you should. These are the Patriotic Millionaires.

TEAM NANCY MEYERS just is older women running their mouths on cable. Do not underestimate this. The entire reason Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot was something Hilary Rosen said. (This is what Olympia Snowe is doing after she retires.)

You may or mayn’t have caught this New York Times op-ed from Dr. Meg Jay, a clinical professor at UVA, on the perils of cohabitation (emphasis mine):

“We were sleeping over at each other’s places all the time,” she said. “We liked to be together, so it was cheaper and more convenient. It was a quick decision but if it didn’t work out there was a quick exit.”

She was talking about what researchers call “sliding, not deciding.” Moving from dating to sleeping over to sleeping over a lot to cohabitation can be a gradual slope, one not marked by rings or ceremonies or sometimes even a conversation. Couples bypass talking about why they want to live together and what it will mean.

WHEN researchers ask cohabitors these questions, partners often have different, unspoken — even unconscious — agendas. Women are more likely to view cohabitation as a step toward marriage, while men are more likely to see it as a way to test a relationship or postpone commitment, and this gender asymmetry is associated with negative interactions and lower levels of commitment even after the relationship progresses to marriage. One thing men and women do agree on, however, is that their standards for a live-in partner are lower than they are for a spouse.

Sliding into cohabitation wouldn’t be a problem if sliding out were as easy. But it isn’t. Too often, young adults enter into what they imagine will be low-cost, low-risk living situations only to find themselves unable to get out months, even years, later. It’s like signing up for a credit card with 0 percent interest. At the end of 12 months when the interest goes up to 23 percent you feel stuck because your balance is too high to pay off. In fact, cohabitation can be exactly like that. In behavioral economics, it’s called consumer lock-in.

Sliding! What a fantastic term. I’m curious if it’s specific to this area, but it captures what I was rambling on about a few weeks ago with Blackout Theory:

Why do people feel lost? Because the hallmarks of this era—joblessness and underemployment for young people, student debt, credit card debt—defer the decisions that require individual choice. There’s no ownership. You just…drift until you hit a Purpose.

But anyway, read that op-ed, and then get thrilled: Dr. Meg Jay here has a book coming out Tuesday on all this stuff. “Claim your adulthood” is in the description. Already got it preordered on my Kindle, y’all.

So, I live in David Eckstein’s apartment.

If you asked me in middle school for my three least favorite athletes, I’d have immediately rattled off the trifecta: Kobe Bryant, Peyton Manning, David Eckstein.

Bryant and Manning were, in part, resistance to their popularity and media saturation at the time. I disliked the perfectionism both embodied, as well. This was before I came to value the ruthless, studied pursuit of excellence. The demand for excellence.

Eckstein was a little different.

After the Angels won the World Series in 2002, there was this story either in Sports Illustrated or ESPN all about how Eckstein Hadn’t Changed—in a proto-Tebow kind of way. It opened with Rudy origin story stuff; Eck, for instance, ran alongside the University of Florida practice until the coaches let him try out.

The twist of the knife was Eck’s off-the-field trappings: He drove the same Nissan he’d been driving since Antietam or something, and lived in the same barren condo he’d lived in before the Major League success, so without furniture that he kept his clothes in ordered piles on the floor.

O how we must cherish the baseball aesthete, the story implied, for he is so pure in his Love for the Game, he cannot drive over to Ikea and buy a dresser.

My dislike sprung more from the story itself than the man himself—and, really, it should be said, the Eckstein family is by all accounts comprised of great people who have been through a lot. Not that you need convincing, but I’m really the bad guy here. I’ve never, after all, seen a bandwagon I didn’t immediately toss myself under the wheels of.

In the same way this was proto-Tebow, however, those piles of clothes enraged me for a reason I couldn’t identify just then—the picture of suspended adolescence, the refusal to perform the adult act, that cultural impulse to associate indifferent abstention with some higher purity.

Then again, as my brother once told me, “The reason you hate Peyton is you’re exactly like him.”

Cut to 2012 where I live, basically, in David Eckstein’s beleaguered apartment.

My roommate’s bedroom is tastefully done, with a cohesive color palette and complementing furniture. My bedroom, meanwhile, is a desk, a bookshelf, a bed with white sheets, and two lamps my parents weren’t using. The walls are blank. If you walked in here right now, you’d assume I moonlight as a drug dealer who robbed someone with a passing interest in mid-century American furniture.

I have lived long enough to see myself become the villain. I am David Eckstein.

This is why between now and Memorial Day (entirely arbitrary), I will be upgrading and remixing this space I live in, so when people enter it, their thought is “well-appointed” rather than “THIS IS SPARTA.”

Updates, and an inevitable, epic “before and after” to follow. I mean, who doesn’t love a before and after?

After the promos for Ashley Judd’s ABC show, Ashley Judd Stars as Liam Neeson in Taken, appeared, some in the online commentariat broached the topic of her appearance and face, implying that Judd was AN ACTRESS looking for HER YOUTH.

She took to the Daily Beast to rebut the “reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification” and so much more:

That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient. Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.

Earlier in the piece, Judd notes that she long ago stopped reading media about herself, because what she’s learned is, while it’s nice to have the esteem of friends and family, the only thing that really matters is how she feels about herself, her integrity, and her relationship with God. She’s rid “otheration”–presumably a cousin to “hateration”–from her life. It follows then that she could reverse engineer online comments about her personal appearance into society-wide ensnarement in a roving, insidious system that destroys human dignity.

But anyway, I’m participating in the patriarchy.

A few months ago, somebody was like, “You can tell a lot about people by what they put in a bio.” Here is the bio Ashley Judd, a pretty well-known actress for the last 15 years (and actually one I like), attached to that piece:

Ashley Judd is a prolific actress, who will next be seen in ABC’s new midseason show, Missing. Judd most recently appeared in Dolphin Tale alongside Morgan Freeman, Harry Connick Jr. and Kris Kristofferson. Judd is also on the board of directors for PSI (Population Services International), which she joined in 2004 after serving as Global Ambassador for PSI’s HIV education and prevention program, YouthAIDS since 2002.  Judd has visited PSI programs in Thailand, Cambodia, Madagascar, Kenya, South Africa, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, India, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In her work, she witnesses the lives of the exploited and poor to help educated the world about the reality of global poverty and bring solutions to the devastating effects of social injustice and gender inequality. Judd was the subject of three award-winning documentaries aired in more than 150 countries worldwide on VH1, The Discovery Channel and The National Geographic Channel.  In her role as PSI board member, Judd has graced the covers of countless magazines and been the subject of newspaper and television interviews bringing vital awareness to issues closest to her heart, gender inequality and poverty alleviation.  Judd has visited legislators on Capitol Hill, addressed the General Assembly of the UN on the scourge human trafficking, spoke at the National Press Club, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the protection of vulnerable women from violence, sexual abuse and HIV and, most recently served as an expert panelist at Clinton Global Initiative to discuss the issue of safe water and the empowerment of girls in the developing world. Recently, Judd has come on board as a spokesperson for organizations Defenders for Wildlife and The Sierra Club providing her time and voice to advocate against practices of aerial wolf hunting (Defenders for Wildlife) and mountaintop removal coal mining (The Sierra Club). She resides in Tennessee and Scotland with her husband, the international racing star Dario Franchitti.  They have 8 beloved pets and enjoy a quiet, rural life.

Ashley Judd is, inter alia, a woman very secure in her autonomy.

Last night I wrote about The Celebrity Apprentice for money, which can be read here. But I have this bit in there:

There’s a restaurant near my parents’ house that I like, and one of the walls features this awesome mural of the family who owns the restaurant, with what appear to be Andy Pettitte and Pagliacci at a vineyard. I’d like to commission a companion mural, Last-Supper-style, of Lisa and Lou yelling at each other, with Penn and Dayana averting their eyes in sheepish discomfort.

To complete the visual:

Swap out the boardroom for a balcony and you’re good to go.

Unfortunately the quiz–fine, “survey”–was multiple choice and not short answer, so I took care of that myself.

Oh, heads up, I decided to answer the survey like I was a settler on the prairie.

I mean, Sarah Plain and Tall was no Maxxinista, you know?

“That’s Urban Outfitters? Wow. I used to shop there before they got so prosaic. I mean, Urban Outfitters is great,” I said, between mouthfuls of quinoa. “If you like that mainstream thing.”

Urban Outfitters’ lengths actually operate on two levels exclusively: Outer-District-of-Panem Sister-Wife and Hipster Car Wash.

They download a lot of hot UO tracks to listen to while they’re digging their wells and stuff out there in Walnut Grove.

It’s tough out there for a settler!

There were other questions — it wasn’t just a disjunct ee cummings approach to numbering — but my screenshots failed, and now I can’t get back in. Can’t imagine why! (Just kidding, I didn’t even submit this, because I like following the rules too much.) And finally, one piece of credit to UO: I once ordered a pair of boots or a jacket or something, only to return them — and the return process was really simple and efficient.