Democratic Rep. Ryan Dvorak said he was cool with the bill—as long as it also mandated that all state legislators take drug and alcohol tests as well. Ha! He attached an amendment to the House bill—and it actually passed. But the bill’s author, Republican Rep. Jud McMillin, then withdrew his original bill. He brought it back a few days later with a watered-down version of Dvorak’s amendment.

Under McMillin’s amendment, there would be no alcohol testing. Half of the legislature would face random drug testing during each session, and the House speaker and Senate president pro tempore could also order drug testing of a particular member. Lawmakers who refuse a drug test would lose perks such as their parking space, franked mail and laptop computer.

The results and the names of any legislators who refuse testing would be made public.

Some Democrats voted against it, because they preferred Dvorak’s original amendment. But McMillin’s amendment still passed, 81-15.

The addition of this amendment still doesn’t make the original bill right, in my book. But that’s okay, because it probably won’t stand—similar proposals in other states have been struck down by federal courts.

Photo: ryandvorak.com

2. Kate Middleton

3. Kirsten Dunst

4. Most of my friends

5. Seth Rogan

6. Elizabeth Moss

7. The Situation 

8. A guy who looks like this

9. 1/2 of the young cast of Now and Then [apparently the girl who played the chubby one died of a drug overdose in 2007.]

10. Lil Wayne

About two years ago, I took Amtrak from New York City to Pittsburgh (Cleveland was the ultimate destination, but we ran into a blizzard) with a dozen other Brooklyn kids to film a semi-improvised, open-ended ‘train film.’ A friend, Gina Telaroli, conceived of and directed the project, which came to be titled Traveling Light.

Anyway, the finished product—Gina calls it “a video essay celebrating cinema on the railroad tracks”—got some nice words from folks writing year-end film reviews. On film site Notebook, David Phelps calls Traveling Light ”a type of found object” and writes:

 … what starts off as plain-air documentary comes quietly to seem like a closed movie set in which the inhabitants are subjected to shifting red flares and matted Midwest, magic lantern backdrops. Instead of pinning down space, the long takes can defy it—the constants, determining the movie’s own space and screen, are unseen windows—in the train’s endless trackback.

And on Moving Image Source, critic B. Kite says:

I think they put cameras in everything now. And that gives a lot of the newer durational work a kind of floating anxiety, a need to justify its existence, which usually finds expression in either a sense of intense strain (grandiose images composed unto death) or, at the opposite extreme, those soggy, shapeless lumps of space-time I’ve come to call “video bloat.” So how unexpected and cool to come across Gina Telaroli’s Traveling Light, a feature that demonstrates neither the hyper-consciousness of the first camp nor the apparent unconsciousness of the latter but instead maintains a remarkably composed comfort in its rhythms and objects of attention. A train trip from New York to Pittsburgh under brown mid-winter skies, past tract houses, snow scabs, and those deeply unmysterious piles of concrete somethings that always seem to crop up in the blank, functional spaces of America. It’s hard to say whether the hanging melancholy is a state of mind or just an expression of the weather, but it rests at the center of the film and exerts a steady sweet-sad pull until the trip finally comes to terminus in one of the loveliest shots I’ve seen in digital.

So, yay. Gina shoots lovely things, and deserves the attention. Besides which, I have her to thank for finally getting to visit Pittsburgh. In 5 feet of snow. With no means of escape. For two days. Oh, and inspiring the amazing Whirlwind Cross-Country Amtrak Adventure! that consumed the first few months of my 2011 …

Photo: Ian Westcott

Helen deWitt: Lightening Rods
Tyler Cowen: The Great Stagnation & Create Your Own Economy
Evelyn Waugh: Vile Bodies & Decline and Fall
Marya Hornbacher: Madness
Nick Zimmer, Zachary Lipez and Stacy Wakefield: Please Take Me Off the Guest List
F.A. Hayek: Constitution of Liberty (well, mostly…)
Bill Clegg: Portrait Of An Addict As A Young Man
Diana Athill: Instead of a Letter
Sharon Solwitz: Bloody Mary
Kay Redfield Jameson: An Unquiet Mind
Siri Hustvedt: The Summer Without Men
Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet
Peter Kramer: Listening to Prozac
John Tierney & Roy Baumeister: Willpower
Douglas Kendrick: Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life
Ratey & Hallowell: Delivered From Distraction
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Collected Poems
Porter Shreve: The Obituary Writer
Amy Sohn: Prospect Park West
Aleister Crowley: Diary of a Drug Fiend
Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories
Anne Lamont: Bird by Bird
Anton Chekhov: My Life
Arin Greenwood: Tropical Depression
Portia de Rossi: Unbearable Lightness
The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick
Sam MacDonald: The Urban Hermit
Kathleen Gerson: The Unfinished Revolution: How a New Generation is Reshaping Family, Work, and Gender in America  

Beautiful people, beautiful shots, beautiful song …

1. How much do I love the new Herman Cain ad? So so so so much. It’s brilliant in that Mike-Huckabee-teaming-up-with-Chuck-Norris-in-2008 kind of way (and everyone knows I loved me some Mike Huckabee in 2008). Because if you’re going to run for president as sort of an ill-prepared hack, at least have some fun with it, right? And it genuinely seems like Herman Cain (unlike any of his presidential competitors) is having fun.

Chuck Norris doesn’t endorse, he tells America how its gonna be. —Mike Huckabee, 2008 ad

Here is the guy in the video, Cain chief of staff Mark Block, responding: “I’m standing outside smoking a cigarette. What else was I supposed to do?”

What, me intentionally try to bait the press? Well played. 

2. It has become so ingrained in me from professional blogging to bold keywords in posts that now I want to do it all the time, anywhere I write. Like, emails even. And certainly here. I find it kind of aesthetically pleasing, really. Do you find it annoying? Check yes or no, please.

3. You know what else is kind of badass? The Obama administration’s new f**k-you to Congress plan. They are actually calling it the “We Can’t Wait” campaign, and Obama’s all, hey, you do what you can in spite of an “increasingly dysfunctional Congress.” I don’t mean this as endorsement of either executive power or any of the administration’s particular economy-boosting plans, but—damn. I like the cut of their jib right now, you know?

4. I am one of the people news outlets keep writing about, switching from my terrible, giant banks (Chase and Bank of America) to an internet-only affair (Ally). I highly recommend it. So far, Ally has been great—easy to navigate, sensible. They give you 1 percent interest on your checking account, reimburse you for any ATM fees you incur and their customer service line is open 24-hours (says the website, I have not checked). I had to call once and I got through to a person really easily.

I just wanted to tell you that.

5. I was reading about the Obama administration’s support of giant agribusinesses the other day—”If You Eat, You Better Occupy Wall Street“—and now whenever I see things about Michelle Obama promoting home gardens or fighting food deserts, I think of someone planting a really pretty tree in the foreground with smoke stacks and bulldozers in the back, or something cartoonish like that. That is probably unfair to Michelle, but  … Dave Murphy, founder of Food Democracy Now!, writes:

Occupy Wall Street was born out of a legitimate frustration with the collusion between Big Business and elected officials of the U.S. government. And nowhere is that collusion so great as in food and agricultural production where four firms control 84 percent of beef packing, 66 percent of pork production and one company, Monsanto, controls patents on more than 93 percent of soybeans and 80 percent of corn grown in the U.S.

I’ll tell you one thing: I moved to Indiana in July, and I have never heard so many ads for farm products and, particularly, soybeans. They’re soybean-ad crazy on the radio around here. It’s strange to hear about these things this in the non-abstract (the ads are generally not for the Roundup-Ready seeds by themselves, but for different places selling them).

Scientific American blogger Scicurious, a biomedical researcher, is also sketched out by the way media, in general, cover studies relating to birth control: “There seems almost to be glee in the way people spread it.” Though the post seems to mis-peg Jezebel blogger Margaret Hartmann as totally earnest), what Scicurious gets at (and I also find most unfortunate) is that this type of melodramatic coverage is either taken as right on face, or taken as so absurd that the research it’s based on is also taken as absurd. Any valid, potentially interesting parts of the research get obscured. While I’m more inclined to think of this as an institutionally-encouraged problem, rather than rampant stupidity or laziness on the part of individual journalists, I’m not sure—nor of the extent to which this kind of coverage is exasperated by the nature of web media. IN other words, I get terribly existentialist about blogging. (Also: How is there any meaningful difference between blogging and daily web news journalism?)

[Why are we such a mess, that's what I'm trying to say here, folks. In so much of what I write about, I'm tempted to conclude: We are all Doomed. Other commentary often fails me, but We are all Doomed applies so nicely to so much of the health, food and political news I read.)

Well anyway: Here’s a really terribly funny and also ENTIRELY ABSURD television news segment and accompanying article about a couple who turn to amateur web porn to provide for their young daughter. This is what the cognitive dissonance required to cover this couple’s porn as somehow titillating and deviant while simultaneously trying to frame them as average, upright American parents ends up looking like, I guess:

Hair pulling, biting and ordering each other around are just some of the strangest things the couple said people have asked them to do during their live sessions. It’s all filmed in their bedroom while their daughter sleeps in a different part of the house.

1. There is no meaningful sartorial difference these days between “hippies” and “hipsters.” Just so we’re all clear on that.

2. Most of the people quoted are ridiculous. It almost seems the media coverage is tailor-made to make us hate them, but unfortunately I think the most plausible answer—rather than widespread media conspiracy—is that this is how the majority of these people really are and sound. To speak like a cowboy or a politician for a moment: Let’s call a spade a spade, okay?

2.5 What is funny is that, were this a conservative protest, all parties involved—its participants, its mercenaries, its political cheerleaders—would have the Lamestream Liberal Media to blame, to explain away how uninformed its participants come across. Mainstream liberals can’t really avail themselves of that excuse.

2.51 They could, of course, make a point about how most media is owned by corporations who have a vested interest in preserving the status quo, or the natural biases of reporters and bloggers at traditional (and by that, I mean anything outside the super-lefty indie press) media outlets, even those like Mother Jones and NPR. I find these arguments unconvincing, but they could be made …

2.52 In fact, I feel like a lot of people in the press are going out of their way to *try* and find some coherence, some meaning in all of this.

2.54  It is of course impossible for me or you (providing you are not there) to know whether media outlets really are cherry-picking quotes and protestors to paint a certain narrative picture. If anything, I find it likely that reporters’ natural biases run more against anyone appearing to be a dreaded Hipster (hippie) than anyone appearing to have a legitimate complaint with United States power structures. If there’s one thing we all hate more than Wall Street bankers, or at least that The Media hates more, it’s hipsters. The second more likely bias would be the Bias of the Narrative (in general), I think.

2.55 Luckily, there is a lot of ‘citizen media’ available these days. A cursory glance of said citizen media does not reveal a significantly different narrative than that being reported by corporate reporters.

3. Panning the inane or misguided complaints of uninformed protestors is not the same as rejecting the very premise that there are legitimate complaints to be made about some of the issues they’re allegedly protesting. It is not to say there are no smart, informed people there. It is not to say that even the not-smart, not-informed people there don’t possibly have legitimate reasons for anger. For the record.

4. As much as my 12-year-old heart desired to go back in time and be an establishment-protesting hippie with flowers in my hair, I would have sucked at it. I could have worn those flowers damn well, though.

5. The Occupy Wall Street protestors do not sound any more misguided, insipid, etc., than your average Tea Partier. Their contempts and complaints and scapegoats are vastly different, sure, but no more or less reactionary or vacuous, and certainly no more or less coherent. But—and I am really taking a page from my boyfriend’s blog here on this one, but one of his favorite complaints rings quite true to me here—whereas many not-insipid liberals have criticized these Occupy Wall Street protestors, have in fact publicly cringed at their Greatest Hits of Liberal Demands, their incoherant babbling, their hypocrisy — whoa to the few not-insipid conservatives who did the same with tea partiers! No matter how vacous, rascist, whatever tea partiers sounded, a lot of mainstream conservatives lept to their defense. Maybe not to defend every indinvidual thing they said—some of it needed to be cleaned up a little bit for media consumption, some swept under the proverbial rug. But still, conservative leaders were enthusiastic about framing this as part of a larger story about citizens fed up, citizen uprising, etc. Liberals are not clamoring to do the same with the Occupy Wall Street kids. You can say one is the more desirable position for party mainstreams to take—I could make a case for either position, which means I will not make a case for either. But I think the difference is marked.

 … articles like Bittman’s always rub me the wrong way, and I’ve been trying to pinpoint why. His gratuitous mention of “Brooklyn hipsters and Berkley locavores” bugs me—I know it’s an attempt to distance himself and his arguments from these people, but I think it only serves to reinforce the connection. More bothersome to me is his equation of fast-food consumption mainly with low-income folks. In my experience, eating crap is one thing that crosses class, geographic and educational-attainment lines. Middle-class suburban families live on fast-food. PhD students eat fast food. Young professionals eat fast food. And, yes, even New York hipsters eat it, too. Fast food is not a low-income problem, it is an American problem.

And, ultimately, I don’t think folks like Bittman go far enough in condemning it. Oh, sure, they’re fast to lay the blame on fast food companies and marketers. But progressives like Bittman don’t want to be accused of being elitist (or get lumped in with the mockable Brookyn hipsters and Berkley locavores), so they’re careful to couch any arguments about personal choice in sociological ephemera and resist saying anything too radical. Conservatives, meanwhile, are too reactionary, and too in bed with the idea that criticizing fast food is somehow an affront to business and a slide into ‘nanny statism’ to apply the same sort of harsh tactics to our table choices as they do to our bedroom behavior.

And yet, honestly, maybe what the fast food debate needs is some good, old-fashioned stigma and shaming, a la smoking over the past 50 years. We can talk all we want about so-called food deserts, ‘evil’ fast food marketing, the addictive properties of fatty food, etc., but none of these are really doing anything to stop individual consumption of fast food. We need to make eating fast food ‘bad’ in the same way we’ve ostracized tobacco users. People should feel bad about eating fast food regularly. People should know that in doing so, they are inviting myriad health problems on themselves. We coddle the fast food industry, and its devotees, because it’s so politically/socially volatile not to—and I think this is the root of the problem.

And here are Phoebe Maltz-Bevy’s thoughts, which at first blush I guess seem kind of antithetical to mine, but really aren’t, I don’t think:

Speaking of the Bittman article, yes, yes, socioeconomic factors, YPIS, another article telling the poor that they can totally live off lentils, etc. The class-warfare counterarguments write themselves, and are only partly fair. Fair, insofar as lentils get old quick, but plenty of people could cook but don’t. I mean, all of this Think of the People Who Can’t Afford a Saucepan is a bit much, because obviously people who can afford a saucepan and then some are also not cooking. (But to the commenter who points out that gender enters into this, why yes it does.)

But even if you’re not especially lacking in time, money, and (ahem!) grocery access, even if you like to cook, cooking remains a chore. Until food writers wrap their heads around the idea that cooking also means grocery shopping, that grocery shopping takes time, that even ostensibly cheap-to-prepare meals often meaning you buy $8 worth of some massive amount of an ingredient you only end up using twice, that planning meals for the week is either a major task of its own or you end up wasting a great deal of food (leftovers being tough if what’s left are perishable ingredients and not a prepared meal), that all of this food needs to be not only prepared but cleaned up from, that hands and surfaces need raw eggs and meat washed off them, in short, until they realized that no meal takes ‘only 30 minutes’ except possibly the meals they think take only 5, how is anyone ever going to be convinced?