General

the trend of Chelsea Boys at the gym wearing too-short t-shirts so you can see their pierced belly buttons is a bad thing. When hairy guys without piercings do it, it just makes them look like rednecks. As is wearing A&F shorts with Abercrombie across the ass. As are boys who go for that 70s look – feathered hair and all, parted in the middle — paired with a vacuous stare. Unlike this it doesn’t appear to be ironic.

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Update: I forgot to mention all of the guys wearing ski caps while working out.

I was talking with the waitress at dinner last night, and she mentioned that she is dating someone from North Carolina — he lives in Charlotte. She was playing scrabble with him, and she said, “I can’t remember, does isometric have a hyphen?”

His response was, “What did you say? It sounded like ‘I sold my truck’.”

Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live forever as a child.

  — Cicero

The NY Times Magazine has some wonderful essays this week, about people who died in 2002:

• Tony Kushner on Geraldine of Albania & Lucia Pamela
• A letter from Jimi Hendrix to his father — before he was famous
• David Rakoff on Edith Bouvier Beale — of Grey Gardens fame
• Armistead Maupin on Harry Hay
• Ann Patchett on Eileen Farrell — an opera diva who lived with her NYPD husband on Staten Island
• Anthony Giardina on Stephen Ambrose — notable for taking the historian to task for glorifying war, and thus making new ones more likely
• Plus, a beautiful “What They Were Thinking” with Arthur Miller with a photo taken by his late wife, Inge Morath

This is one of the best things I’ve ever read about gym culture, from The Economist’s year-end issue.

An ad for lube:

Go wish James a happy birthday. I won’t be posting much today — off to get my hair cut and then lunch at Esca.

Nicole Kidman isn’t the only fabulous woman in Australia.

The latest newsletter from Betty Bowers is out!

Some favorites:

Knowledge is not something our current President is fond of — but he is fair about it, as he doesn’t want the rest of us to have much of it either. As you probably know, President Bush has stood firm in his resolve to keep all potentially embarrassing information regarding 9/11 a secret. To ensure that the President is never hurt politically by the death of all those people in New York, he has appointed Henry Kissinger to chair any prying. With Mr. Kissinger’s pedigree of nefarious skullduggery (such as overthrowing a democratic government in Chile that had a pesky habit of voting for people who were simply not our sort), Henry will go into the job with no naïve notions about the American people needing to know facts that might deflate their blind support of their president. Glory! For if there is one thing this administration would like more than strip mining Yellowstone, it is to keep secrets. Indeed, just last week, Mr. Ashcroft’s office asked a court to seal all the records to a lawsuit involving poison in vaccinations, lest the litigation-crazy parents of dead children use the information to sue pharmaceutical companies. After all the money those wonderful companies gave the GOP, it was the least that the President could do. After all, dead children don’t vote — even in Florida!

Remember children, pregnancy and disease are caused by knowledge.

Betty presents religion in the news, also known as You make Jesus vomit.

I have a few of my favorite charities, such as Housing Works, SAGE, and Hetrick-Martin, but I plan to look into the charities of Foolanthropy too.