He’s a whore.

As a soon-to-be-married music snob, I’m in the same boat as Spencer Ackerman¹:

Putting together a wedding playlist is much harder than it looks. A conservative estimate would make 90 percent of my taste in music completely inappropriate for a day when I really want to hear only the music my wife and I want to hear. Do you know how little Born Against you can play at a wedding? His Hero Is Gone?  Bikini Kill? The fucking Lox?

Stay far from Joy Division and Elliott Smith. Put away the Jadakiss “Champ Is Here” mixtape. If you have to play Catherine Wheel, stay with “I Want To Touch You,” even if their best song is indisputably “Black Metallic.” It ought to be illegal for a Brooklyn native to get married and not play B.I.G., but oh, is that ice ever so delicate.

A new direction.

I’ve noticed that this blog, while reflecting a few of my interests in depth, rarely reflects what I’m doing or thinking about most of the time. So I’ll try and offer up fewer “here’s a bunch of stuff I found interesting” linkwads without any meat on the bones (I’ll save most of those for Twitter), and actually do a bit of writing here and there.

Cooking seems like an ideal topic to bridge the gap. Guesting for Andrew Sullivan, Zoë Pollock notes a study about men and women in the kitchen:

[W]omen and men see cooking in profoundly different terms: most women see it as a “sensual” act—something that “gives pleasure,” whereas men see it as “a performance and an activity at which they can impress.” Sounds familiar. See: other activities, other rooms.

Here’s a part of the research that’s easy to believe: when men do cook, they “enjoy the fruits of their labor more than women do theirs.”

This is also known as the First Law of Men: “He who rarely cleans or cooks, when does, is utterly proud of himself, which does not mean he shall start to thenceforth clean or cook more often, sorry.”

I’d buy it. I do cook pretty much all the meals in our house, and lean towards comfort food¹, but my version of “helping fold the laundry” would more accurately be described as “sitting on the bed with Quipu and vaguely pawing at a pile of socks.”

*Cha-ching!*

I’ve been getting intermittent robocalls in Spanish for a while now, from a number I didn’t recognize. After yet another call from (901) 896.2332, I checked it out:

The recording gives a cash register sound and tells you in Spanish that you have won $1,000.00. You['re] then prompted to dial 1. I tried this and it rings until you are hung up on.

Very weird scam. I wonder if Spanish-speakers are statistically more likely to fall for something like that, but more importantly, I don’t understand why they’d call a number more than once or twice.

Update: Okay, this post has been getting a ton of traffic, so here’s a brief recap of what other people have said:

• It’s a Spanish-language phone scam that doesn’t seem to have an active human component.
• Reporting the number doesn’t seem to have any effect. This makes sense, since it’s, you know, illegal.

Linkwad.

1. Keeping in the spirit of gorgeous data representations on major newspaper sites, here’s the WSJ explaining exactly how many people your phone sends your data to. Pandora and Shazam are extraordinarily gabby on both iPhone and Android.
2. Age before beauty, even in entrepreneurship? I’d like to see the age splits on startup divergence–that is, I wonder if older entrepreneurs have accepted more limits than younger startups. That might give them a higher success rate, but also limit the kind of . I have no evidence for this, just idle speculation.
3. Congress OKs more low-power community radio stations. This is good news, I guess, but it’s pretty irrelevant to most city-dwellers or anyone with access to high-speed Internet.
4. As far as I’m concerned, the only real reason to get married has always been financial (and that’s only true over the long run), and that’s pretty much the only rationale the Sun can come up with, too.
5. In case you missed it, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed over the weekend. Here’s John McCain throwing a tantrum about it. Anyone up in this liberal bastion want to high-five? Incidentally, everyone predicting doom for the Republican party thanks to their retrograde association with… well, everything, really… should remember “Segregation forever!”

General Studies.

Today marks the end of my first week as an employee of the Community College of Baltimore County. The crisis du jour was fallout from an op-ed in the current issue of the student paper, entitled “War is a Drug”:

Over in Iraq and Afghanistan killing becomes a habit, a way of life, a drug to me and to other soldiers like me who need to feel like we can survive off of it. It is something that I do not just want, but something I really need so I can feel like myself.
[...]
At first, it was weird and felt wrong, but by the time of the third and fourth killing it feels so natural. It feels like I could do this for the rest of my life and it makes me happy.
[...]
When I stick my blade through his stomach or his ribs or slice his throat it’s a feeling that I cannot explain, but feels so good to me, and I become addicted to seeing and acting out this act of hate, and violence against the rag heads that hurt our country. Terrorists will have nowhere to hide because there are hundreds of thousands of soldiers like me who feel like me and want their revenge as well.

So… yeah… I’ll just say that actual militants are generally not just going to let you run up and stab them, so there are some concerning implications here¹. [Update: The author of the piece was an Army squad leader in Iraq, not a guy who's played too much Call of Duty.]

It goes without saying that a publication that lets this through has some other gems, like “Tattoos: More than Just a Fad,” or the op-ed claiming that requiring three days of community service before graduation is akin to Soviet Russia.