Happy Hour Topics of Conversation – 3.8.13: More Meaningless Chatter

Below is a roundup of the articles out this week making broad, sweeping generalizations in the name of journalism and page views, but mostly page views. Grab your cosmos, ladies. You’re gonna need them.

(Relatively normal twenty-something women, BEWARE: reading these articles may cause serious side effects including excessive drinking; scoffing; choking on your own spit while scoffing; existential bewilderment that there is apparently a parallel universe of other “relatively normal twenty-something women” who aren’t like you at all and perhaps you are not, as you previously thought, relatively normal; snorting latte through your nose if you happen to be drinking a latte; chocolate fits; giggle fits; giggle-chocolate fits; paleness because it’s March and you don’t get spring break anymore; nausea and vomiting.)

• Feminist is a dirty word (again!). (Slate)
• Why does no one like Female CEOs even though we want more of them? (The New Yorker) ((Ok, this article is fine and not at all grasping for page views, apologies.))
• Residual guilt from the Patriarchy collides with new wave of post-Feminism guilt resulting in shame over desire to fulfill basic human needs! (The Atlantic, Slate)
• Introverted little girls need heroines, too! (The Atlantic)

Mostly I blame The Atlantic and Slate. Don’t we have better things to do than needlessly categorize each other, ladies? Drink, discuss, be happy!

Five Things We Will Wish We’d Done Differently – A Rebuttal

My friend posted a link to this online ‘zine post titled “5 Things We Will Wish We’d Done Differently” and, well, one thing the author will probably wish he’d done differently is spent less time thinking about what he would probably be thinking about wishing he’d done differently sixty years from now and more time doing constructive things. (Also, maybe spelling out the word ‘five’.)

Good grief.

Now, I am as guilty as the rest of my cohort when it comes to the whole forgetting the moment, living for the future thing. Do I love my current job? No, but I might love some future job for which this current job is giving me skills, and at the very least I get banging retirement benefits.

But let’s leave our regrets where they belong – in the past of the future (i.e. the now).

Here’s why:

1. “Most of my spare time was sacrificed to social media.”

First, dude, you are writing a post for an online magazine. (Joke break:

Reasons enough to keep reading non-digitized books

“[N]ow the circuit that once enclosed us within a larger sense of self and place—that brought us into contact with God, as it did for Augustine—has become purely solipsistic: we see ourselves collecting words with our hands, as we become the new gods. But the words of Text Rain can never truly be grasped by our hands. They are like Platonic forms. They remind us how fragile our hold over words is, that we are only ever godlike.”

Today on Slate, Andrew Piper presents a thrilling defense of the book as an object and reading as a tactile experience.

Vindication is mine!

Burnable Books: “Binders Full of Women” – Mitt Romney’s Theology of the Book

This. Is. Awesome.

By far the best analysis of “Binders Full of Women” we’ve seen.

Go read it.

“While Hildegard never tells us about the invention of the binder itself, one of her more obscure letters (yet to be edited from the autograph manuscript in Cologne) makes great theological hay out of the holy binder she claims to have seen in one of her many visions. Drawing on the venerable medieval tradition of interior writing, Hildegard rather gruesomely imagines the binder as a thousandfold stack of parchment folios, all rendered from the skins of women martyrs (the specific allusion is to the 11,000 virgin followers of St. Ursula beheaded by the Huns in the fourth century). Particularly intriguing are her glosses of the binders’ holes as the three persons of the Trinity and of the rings as the Three Marys.”

 

Expensive wine about to get more expensive. Sigh.

European 2012 vintages are going to be scarce due to a poor harvest. According to news sources, “drought, frost and hail have combined to ravage Europe’s wine grape harvest, which in key regions this year will be the smallest in half a century, vintners say”. (Climate change! It’s happening, people!)

The upside for European vintners? There may not be many grapes, but the grapes they managed to harvest are Quality. According to a winemaker interviewed by Businessweek: “It is not a bitter [year] when it comes to taste. The quality of the wine produced will be good as it is expected to be more concentrated. ‘When it comes to quality, we are looking at a good year,’ Coste said”.

This is simple supply and demand, dear readers. When supply goes down, price goes up. Add to this rarity the cachet of a particularly good vintage… well, here’s to hoping you land on Park Place.

(Note: We here at P&P fully support wine snobbery, but we tend to be snobby in the $15-$25 a bottle range.)