Now that's bad marketing!

What the frak were the marketing geniuses at "Dress Barn" thinking? If you're going to create a clothing store for large women, what the Hell leads you to conclude "Let's call it 'Dress Barn!' That's where cows and sows whirl the night away. See, it's funny!"

A small, cynical, depressed corner of my brain contemplates the idea that the name was actually arrived at through A/B testing, and large women actually responded to the farm animal metaphor better than any other name the marketers created.

Anecdotes At a Restaurant

Omaha and I went to Black Angus down in Federal Way, one of those restaurants that, once upon a time, actually gave a damn about their steaks, but apparently that's fallen by the wayside. It's more like a slightly quieter and less impressive Claim Jumper. The lights all have that annoying 50Hz flicker to them, which was driving my eyes crazy. I seem to be susceptible to that more and more as I get older.

Went to the restroom and the guy in the next urinal over has his Blackberry glued to his ear. "Where are you?" he says. "I thought you'd be at the Black Angus! You're where? Trader Joes? Stay there, I'll be outta here in a minute." I so wanted to lean over and shout, "Give him time, he's got his dick in his hand right now."

Omaha and I gave our orders, including wedge salads-- basically, a tight chunk of iceberg lettuce dribbled with blue cheese, cream, and maybe bacon bits. I noticed an artichoke on the menu, and related to Omaha a recent story about a man who sued a restaurant because the artichoke did not come with instructions. The waitress (gorgeous woman-- black skin, amazing dreads, huge eyes, genuine smile) must have overheard because she told us that, at the last table she waited for, both ordered the same salads and neither knew that you were supposed to cut the wedge into edible portions with a knife. They tried to pry the things apart with their forks.

The prime rib was mediocre-- thin, bland. The horseradish was authentic. The grilled prawns were greasy even before the butter dip. The onion rings were acceptable, but Set and Osiris each ring is 300 calories!. Generally, too much money for too little value.

And we share the noosphere with this...

Stuck at the vet waiting for the results of a routine vaccination, and flipping through Reader's Digest. Among their charming Americana and humor sections ("Humor in Uniform," "Laughter is the Best Medicine," etc., etc.) is the "Family Funnies," about something cute or amusing or whatever someone said. It's like blogging, only on dead trees.

I gotta say, though, the people who sent their letters into Readers Digest wouldn't survive ten seconds in the blogosphere. The sheer embarassing dysfunction on display, the hideous unselfconscious encouragement to the next generation to be no better than Homer Simpson or Al Bundy, the willingness to discourage anything better than a consumerist existence from birth bed to death bed, is everywhere on display.

The one that sticks most in my head is the woman who thought it cute that her six-year-old had never seen an oven mitt before. When he asked the teacher why she used one, the teacher explained that something coming out of the oven might be hot and the mitt protects her hand. The kid replies, "Oh. My mom's usually just really careful about opening the pizza box."

The mother's child has (a) no idea of kitchen safety, (b) no need for kitchen safety, and (c) no experience at all preparing his own food or watching others do it. And the mom thinks that's adorable.

I don't know if the editors put that letter up because they were genuinely charmed by it, or they were horrified.

Defiled Waifs That Creep Me Out

Defiled

Speaking of Abercrombie & Fitch, I have to say that the latest collection of waifs, male and female, at the Abercrombie and Fitch store near the office really bug me. They're not just so beautiful, but so young. And this picture especially bugs me. She looks like she's about to tell a social worker how her stepfather hit and raped her. Those flat, hollow eyes and that big, almost inflamed mouth, as she tries to cover herself up-- it's a very creepy image.

Michael Berube is bizarrely daft here...

Far be it from me to take on noted philosopher Michael Berube', but it is completely and utterly astonishing for Berube' to take a thwack at bioethicists and write:

This then is yet another version of the classic "trolley problem," in which we are asked to decide whether it is better that people with X disability not be born at all (because the prospective mothers wait two months and have different children altogether) while some people with X disability go "uncured" in utero, or better that people with X disability be "cured" in utero while others are born with the disability because their mothers went untreated.I suppose this is the stuff of which bioethical debates are made, but may I be so rude as to point out that there is no such trolley? This thought experiment may be all well and good if the object is to ask people about the moral difference between foregoing a pregnancy that will result in a fetus with disabilities and treating a disabled fetus in utero (and miraculously "curing" it!). But it does not correspond to any imaginable scenario in the world we inhabit.

To somehow manage to go through all these intellectual peregrinations about pregnancy and prenatal care, without ever once mentioning the word "abortion." Or in-vitro fertilization. Or any of a gazillion other technologies coming.

Berube' also makes the classic mistake of showing how some people somehow turned harsh necessity into some flavor of virtue by embracing that disability about which they could do nothing, and telling others that they have found a beautiful life without it.

Berube' is apparently blissfully unaware of the current research into the hedonic set point, the notion that almost all of us have, much like we have a set weight, a set happiness, and only utterly drastic changes or incessant outside influence can somehow shift that set point. No matter how terrible our circumstances, or how grand, without great effort we are gifted with a certain hedonic state: a mean optimism, a mean chearfulness, to which all our sorrows and joys regress over time. Disability has been one of the hot spots of this research: despite losing sight, or mobility, or speech, in the long term individuals remain unfazed by circumstance. Disability only gives some (but not all, possibly not many) the chance to express their joy in life and garner amazement from others, in a way that the fully abled merely annoy us.

I don't see how Berube's point somehow invalidates the fact that disability is an antonym of ability.

Berube writes: "There is no scenario - I repeat, no scenario, none whatsoever - in which any woman knows that, if she foregoes conception now, she will have a normal child later on." Natural limitations are just those, and they cease to be limitations once our knowledge and technology catch up to desire. There will come a day when any child born with a disability is one whose parents chose to passively sit by and "let nature take its course," arbitrarily chosing what is "natural" and what is not, in the same way that some parents choose now to not vaccinate but enjoy the widespread benefits of public hygiene-- and they will be just as culpable for the suffering, disability, and attenuated lifespand that child consequently endures.

There are damned few disabled people who agree that the world is better off having the blind, the deaf, and the lame, than having procedures that restore site, hearing, and mobility. Leon Kass once wrote that the disabled, the suffering, and the dying are moral tonics for the rest of us, and a world without them would be a smaller, darker world. I think a world with suffering is small and dark enough as it is, thank you; my responsibility is to alleviate it. Berube' stands uncomfortably close to Kass in this latest missive, and I can't stand there with him.

I'm such a pushover...

After making tacos, the girls ganged up on me and forced me to bake chocolate chip cookies.

The second batch is cooling right now. I'm betting on sheer yumminess.

Quite the windstorm...

Smashed

We had a windstorm a little over a week ago, and while it tore the hell out of trees and threw debris everywhere, this was the most surprising of all. A utility pole, with a single line tensioned over a four-lane road, snapped down low and was hauled across the street, smashing into the sign outside of Kouryou-chan's school. It was rather shocking.