Weather Service Chief: The Cold Weather You're Feeling Is Precisely What Global Warming Predicted

Ah right.

Actually he said that "weather extremes" are due to global warming, but this now includes winter storms.

Nothing like a theory that predicts nothing in advance but "predicts" everything in retrospect.

Global warming now causes global cooling. Sometimes it might even cause "unnaturally mild weather."

Dr. Leo Spaceman had a line on 30 Rock I like: "Science is whatever we want it to be."

And because someone demanded it: Here's a NYT reporter going on and on about Lena Dunham and positive body image.

You might think from all the mentions of Girls in the media it's some kind of huge cultural phenomenon. It's not. It doesn't even get good ratings for HBO -- it doesn't even get 20% of the ratings of Game of Thrones, and you don't see Game of Thrones name-checked every third mainstream media culture piece.

But it does get good ratings with the only cohort that apparently matters, the Liberal Middle-Aged Women Working In the Media Who Control Your TV.

I don't even object to the show. I don't watch it, but I don't watch most things. I can (begrudgingly) concede that I can see how the show would appeal to some people, and how it must be pretty cool, for feminists, that a girl writes and stars in the show (with some help from Judd Apatow, but no one wants to talk about that). The basic idea -- an unsentimental counterpoint to Sex & the City with the layers of vapid I Married Blew a Millionaire fantasy stripped away -- sounds okay to me. And I suppose there are bonus points, from Liz Lemonist feminists, about the show's focus on Rich White Women Problems, such as negative body image.

And yet... and yet. The show is discussed and promoted far out-of-line with its actual cultural impact or penetration. This all seems terribly self-indulgent to me.

posted by Ace at 12:05 PM

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