in response to all the hubbub around the blogosphere the past couple of days regarding larry summers' remarks about women and science, and whether nor not women and men have different talents and inclinations due to genetics and gender, etc, i'm taking on a challenge that i've thought about doing for a good, long while. one that i was always told at which i would never succeed. one that i've never thought i'd be able to do, most likely because my mother dressed me in pink and the social constructs of my environments have been keeping me down. man.

i am going to do a fucking pull up.

i still remember clearly the last time i was able to do a pull up - three of them, in fact. i was a 4th grader at wolftrap elementary school, and we were going through the motions for the presidential physical fitness awards. i got up in front of a huge crowd of fellow nine year-olds, boys and girls, and gave it my best shot.

i ended up getting more pull ups than any girl in my class, and more than many of the flabby, underdeveloped munchkin boys that were my friends. it was a triumphant moment. in fact, i performed well on all the other fitness challenges - the mile, that terrible back-and-forth-shuffle-run, sit ups, etc.

but then as the years went on, probably because my series of lesbian gym teachers were misogynists, i lost interest in physical fitness. i couldn't run as fast, i couldn't throw balls as far, and i could never again do a single pull up. this might also have something to do with the fact that i gained like 120 pounds, but i'd rather blame it on the unconscious discriminations of society.

anyway, in general i'd consider myself to be fairly in shape, but the arm strength thing has always eluded me. i mean, lately i'm even having trouble lifting bottles of wine to my lips. so i decided that something had to change.

tommy and i joined the Y a couple of weeks ago, and i've made it my mission to a) start running again and b) be able to do at least one dead-hang pull up. so far i can do several sets on the assisted pull up machine-thingy, but i haven't yet attempted the holy grail. but soon, grasshopper, soon enough. i will be strong. i will have unholy shoulders a la jennifer garner's. and then i can go kick larry summers' ass.

noted over at the campaign desk blog: a useless post critiquing the fake background from a recent bush speech about education reform.

bush gave the speech at a falls church high school in front of a set that was made to look like a row of lockers (though they didn't do a very good job); the author is concerned that the washington post both wrote an article about the speech and took a picture of bush in front of the fake lockers, but never mentioned that the lockers were in fact fake:

As it turns out, Bush was standing in front of a painted backdrop. The Post's photo doesn't make that clear, but the Associated Press photo featured above -- which shows the whole stage -- does (click on the image for a larger version). This administration is well known for using carefully chosen backdrops to put forth its message, of course. But here they're playing a visual trick -- fabricating a backdrop to make it look as if Bush really is standing in front of a row of lockers, not in a generic hall. And the Washington Post simply plays along.

Now, contrary to suspicions in some quarters, we don't typically ask a lot of our press corps -- simply an accurate recounting of an event would be good, for starters. But by providing a misleading visual to its readers without elaboration, the Post fails even at that very basic task. As one of our readers put it, "if a paper can't run a photo which truthfully captures the nature of an event, it shouldn't run one at all."

i mean, i agree with that. but with all the other fallacies bush feeds to the media, can't we all agree to let the fake locker thing slide and concentrate on important stuff, like, oh, any of the other information in the post article? really. who gives a shit?

Good news: Google, Yahoo and MSN have announced an initiative to end comment spam. From now on links with the attribute rel="nofollow" won't be counted by search engines. Blog software will intercept submitted comments and alter all links so that they include this attribute.

For Movable Type users, SixApart has a page explaining all this here. They've issued a plugin that implements nofollow for MT versions 2.661 and 3. Download it here and unzip it into your plugins directory. That should be it! I'll have this implemented here sometime later today.

Well, it's snowing in DC. Hard. So, to my friends and family: I love you all. We had a pretty good run. See you at tha crossroads.

Snow in DC area is less about meteorology than eschatology. Half an inch and school gets cancelled. Much more and discussions begin about whether we've reached the end of human history, or just the end of our particular civilization. Across the region stores are now out of bread, milk and toilet paper. If they sold ammunition they'd be out of that, too.

Well, good luck to everybody -- it's getting slippery out there. Walking back from the convention center metro this morning I slipped on a snow-covered metal plate and fell soundly on my ass. Between the irritatingly dangerous conditions and the dangerously irritating inaugural festivities, staying inside is looking better and better. Say, how do cowboy boots perform on black ice, anyway?