How I almost made $5 this morning

As the NYT won't listen to my very assertive requests to cancel my subscription, I browsed through the contents of this morning's edition and found their annual Sunday Magazine obituary issue, quaintly named "The Lives They Lived".


The front page shows in neon signs JUNE ALLYSON EUGENE LANDY STEVE HOWE and a dozen others. Before looking inside, I said to The Husband, who was just getting out of bed and had walked into the kitchen for a glass of water,

I bet you $5 they don't mention Jeane Kirkpatrick.

The Husband might have been half-asleep but is very familiar with the NYT editorial criteria.

He declined to wager. Darn.

Sure enough, no Jeane Kirkpatrick. Instead, they had Anais Nin's "other husband", and the Naked Guy. Can't say I had heard of those two before.

At least The Economist showed more grace: in their year-end "Special Holiday Double Issue", they have her obituary, along with op-ed comment ("Certain sentences from her most famous article, "Dictatorships and Double Standards" - written on her summer holiday in France, published in Commentary magazine in November 1979 - now induce a sigh." [link added], and we all know how deeply The Economist has been sighing):

Her actual job was ambassador to the United Nations, the first woman to do it. She found the UN a dangerous place, the work miserable, and Security Council debates "more like a mugging than anything else". There, too, her shade seemed to haunt the corridors in the days before she died. Her style at the General Assembly was a model for John Bolton's, confrontational and blunt to a degree, and the present ambassador, as he resigned amid general hooting, candidly acknowledged his debt to her. But times were different then. Mrs Kirkpatrick represented an America that had become, under Jimmy Carter, an apologetic and unconfident country. She saw no need to compromise or conciliate on anything, but instead came out furiously fighting against the "expansionist" Soviet Union and its client states. "There is...only one revolutionary society in the contemporary world," she cried in 1984, "and that is our society."

America still remains the one revolutionary society in the contemporary world. Thank you, Ambassador Kirkpatrick.
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Cinnamon Stillwell writes about how the Experts Discover Men And Women Are Different! Cinnamon explains,

The manly virtues include character, confidence, honor, inner strength, pride, responsibility, loyalty, generosity, industry and dignity.

The antidote to the trans confusion, male girlfriends, and weepie guys? The Discovery Channel Guys, of course! Not one wuss in the lot - and Bear Grylls looks great without a shirt on.

Unfortunately he waited to take off his shirt until he was adrift on the Pacific Ocean, but still...