Is this a good which or a bad which?

Women police officers issued with uniform hijab

From Times Online, July 28, 2009:

The £13 headscarves are embroidered with the West Country force's name and logo, and come in two colours — black for police officers and blue for community support officers. A spokeswoman insisted that they were not intended purely to cater for Muslim cultural sensibilities but were multi-faith.
"They are designed to be used in any place of worship and can be used to cover the head or the shoulders. For example, plain clothes officers could use them to cover their shoulders in a Catholic Church, or they can be used to cover the head in synagogues," she said.

In other news

I finished chapter 3 of the manuscript I'm ghosting this morning at 7:52 am. I've now done the front matter, chapters 1 - 3, and chapter 6, for a total of 357 manuscript pages. This makes me feel less bad about it having taken a month; that's a lot of channeling what somebody else would write if they could, um, write. I have about 48 hours left to finish the rest of it, and of course I had to sleep all day today. I know I can make it coherent; I just don't know that I can make enough of it coherent enough fast enough.
And, yes, not only can I rant endlessly about the news business, I have some good rantation stored up about book publishing, too. Mainly, I was trying really, really hard to make this not be one of those books where, um, chapters 1 - 3 are coherent and then the whole fucking thing just falls apart. However, no such luck. Because it is, as always, more important to get the book out in time for the New Year, New You promotions than to have a coherent book.
The folks in charge keep telling me I shouldn't be trying to make a perfect book. When did maintaining alphabetical order become perfectionism?

When pseudonews jumps the shark

At this point, I am just so hoping they all get into a fistfight...

In today's periodicals

OK, neither of these items is news but then, it is Sunday, and everybody knows world events observe the Christian sabbath.
Nonetheless, here is yet another example of why Heather Havrilesky is my all-time favorite TV reviewer. Just the right mix of mean, realistic, and humane, with a good ear for the turn of phrase that will make me laugh involuntarily out my nose.

From Embrace the reality TV underdogs!
TV experiments with the unbearable importance of looks, from "More To Love" to "Dating in the Dark"

Salon, July 26, 2009

"Obviously size is a central issue in these women's lives. But if you took a group of medium-size single women in their 20s and asked them the same questions about how successful they've been at finding love, you'd hear variations on the same theme. Average-looking women would claim that their cute friends get all the guys. Women with incredible figures would worry that men only like them for their big racks. Women with advanced degrees would say that men reject them because they're smart and successful. Assertive women would claim that men don't like assertiveness while timid women would say that they're too shy to charm good men.

The real problem is that most men in their 20s aren't all that serious about finding love, period. They would not like it in a boat, they would not, could not, with a goat. Sadly, though, instead of identifying the real cause -- flinchy, commitment-phobic young men -- most women assume that there's some fatal flaw that prevents them from finding true love." (My emphasis, there.)

I must also yet again recommend the estimable former drama critic, Mr. Frank Rich, this time with his attempt to deflate the pompous journalistic hypocrisy on the occasion of the death of Mr. Walter Cronkite.

From: And That's Not The Way It Is

New York Times, July 26, 2009

"What matters about Cronkite is that he knew when to stop being reassuring Uncle Walter and to challenge those who betrayed his audience’s trust. He had the guts to confront not only those in power but his own bosses. Given the American press’s catastrophe of our own day — its failure to unmask and often even to question the White House propaganda campaign that plunged us into Iraq — these attributes are as timely as ever.

That’s why the past week’s debate about whether there could ever again be a father-figure anchor with Cronkite’s everyman looks and sonorous delivery is an escapist parlor game. What matters is content, not style. The real question is this: How many of those with similarly exalted perches in the news media today — and those perches, however diminished, still do exist in the multichannel digital age — will speak truth to power when the country is on the line? This journalistic responsibility cannot be outsourced to Comedy Central and Jon Stewart."

Not, you know, that Jon doesn't do a good job with it. And somehow this makes me want to insert, "They would not like it in a boat..."

Another inch further from shore

Since I was laid off in April I have been writing longer and longer, and more and more, um, didactic, pseudo-column posts on my LJ page. This is probably some kind of abuse of LJ. So I think I am going to switch that activity over here. If I can just consistently remember my passwords and stuff...