Can I just start by saying that I’m planning on making pulled pork sandwiches tomorrow for dinner and I’m going to have to get up early to get the meat seared and into the crock pot and that I could not be more excited about the prospect of getting to eat pulled pork? I can’t explain it. I’m just glad I’m married; my wife, who is smarter than me, pointed out that we absolutely needed to hit the grocery today if we wanted to get all the ingredients, since one of them is beer. I don’t drink– at all– and the fact that you can’t buy beer in Indiana on Sunday because the same god who turned water into wine once will get angry or something had temporarily slipped past me.

Anyway, point is pulled pork sandwiches tomorrow, mmm.

Interesting phenomenon the last few days; hits on the blog fell through the floor for no clear reason. I go back and forth on why I write online; some sort of engagement with people is certainly a good thing (at least, most of the time) and the fact that I was regularly getting thirty or forty views a day (spiking at one point to 59) after only a few weeks of the blog’s existence certainly seemed to indicate that sooner or later comments would start showing up from people I didn’t already know. Granted, yesterday’s post was a one-liner, but I went from an average of 39 views a day last week to, in the last three days, less than ten.

In the long run, of course, it makes no difference at all, but it’s curious.

We took the boy to the zoo today. One of these days, the emus are going to boom while I’m there. I’ve heard the lions roar from fairly short range, but the emus have been annoyingly quiet every time I’ve been out there. An emu boom is supposed to be audible from a couple of kilometers away so you ought to be able to hear them from anywhere in the zoo if they’re bothering to make noise.

The boy’s favorite animals? The birds, interestingly. And the turtles. He thought the alpacas were geese, which entertains me; it suggests that the neck is the most salient characteristic of each of them for him.

And now, from the I Don’t Feel Like Talking About It But You Should Read These files:

• On Bert and Ernie (the comments, mostly); and
• On Paula Deen (Rude Pundit): and
• The Guileless ‘Accidental Racism’ of Paula Deen (Ta-Nehisi Coates)

Actually, one thing on Deen: I had an interesting conversation with my wife this morning where she suggested that sexism forms a nonzero portion of the reason for the truckload of shit that Deen’s taking where other male celebrities, Michael Richards, Mel Gibson, and that not-Howard-Stern radio idiot– Don Imus!– got away with similar outbursts with less of a massive impact on their careers. I don’t want to discount the idea, but I can’t think of another example that quite fits the same situation that Deen has; Imus lost his job, Richards and Gibson don’t have endorsements to be fired from, and all three handled their respective PR disasters with something less than the complete idiocy that Deen’s been putting on display lately. I said something on Facebook recently about how Deen seems to have managed to find a way to shove her foot into her mouth and her head up her ass simultaneously, which is a pretty impressive feat; literally every time she opens her mouth she makes shit worse, which I don’t quite feel like the other three did. Plus, as the Rude Pundit points out in the link above, Deen’s not in trouble for what she said however many years ago so much as her unbelievably poor treatment of her employees and complete inability to figure out why people are mad at her. There’s more to this than just language.

I dunno. I hate the word “mansplaining” a lot; maybe I’m doing that here. Sexism probably does have something to do with it insofar as it’s a woman we’re discussing and it’s always going to be difficult to tease out this-is-sexism-and-this-is-not whenever we’re talking about an issue this complicated. I’m just not sure at all how much.

(Also: you don’t get to use “from a different generation” to defend yourself when you were in your early twenties during the Civil Rights movement. Your ass has had plenty of time to learn better.)

Anyway; I gotta go to work. It’s raining; we’ll see how busy I am tonight. Last night was completely dead until 8:00 and then batshit bugfuck insane for two hours where we made as much money as we usually do on a Friday night except in 1/3 the usual amount of time. I came home freaking exhausted last night.