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Welcome back to "Ask Alex", where I answer all of your stupid questions with even dumber answers. Have a question you need answered? Tweet it, email it or submit it here and I will get to it (maybe) next week.
-------------------------------- Honestly, I don’t know how any of you are concentrating, what with the titanic showdown between the two remaining undefeated Misfits Football teams this weekend. @Marcannem96’s #1 ranked WashedUpGraveDigger, led by Touchdown Tommy and rookie sensation Kareem Hunt bring their league-leading point total into the clash with my #2 ranked Mariota Kart. Marc is going to go off as about a 10 point favorite, benefiting from the absence of Ezekiel Elliot (bye week) and Marcus Mariota (injury). Most interesting dynamic: Alex has to root against Tom Brady and Marc has to root against DeAndre Hopkins...that is some serious Fantasy Conflict! On to less pressing matters...you are getting a somewhat R-rated #AskAlex this week. Buckley Roberts follows up on last week’s question about the c-bomb with a question about the use of slang for genitalia. Then Rebecca’s question about film vs digital cameras gets me off onto a lengthy talk about sexting. It’s not all adult, though...Daryl has a history question, Fastfreefall needs to know what makes a burrito and Lady Catherine thinks carrot cake is terrible (and she is right). Mike can’t figure out why Sally didn’t move her seashell selling business away from the seashore, and Ingenious Firebrand wants to know about conservative infighting. Let's get to it! Submitted by: Daryl Why were Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams kicked out of Massachusetts? Cuz they didn’t love Jesus the right way. Or possibly for not taking injured players out of their fantasy lineups and replacing them with healthy ones! Roger Williams got kicked out in 1635, got a charter for his own colony from the Crown, moved to Providence and founded The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. As best as I can tell, he appears to have been thrown out for liking polo, grass court tennis, red chickens and coffee milk. He also, more accurately, got thrown out for espousing crazy ideas like paying Indians for their land, freedom of speech, religion and public assembly and insanely high concentrations of Dunkin Donuts. Anne Hutchinson was a similar story. A mother of fourteen children who found time between having fourteen children to rouse some rabble in Massachusetts over the teachings of the existing ministers, she got tossed in 1637 for being entirely too uppity for a lady. She espoused a covenant of grace and accused the local ministers of espousing a faulty covenant of works. She also headed south after being thrown out, although her sense of real estate was much better than Williams’ - she ended up in the very charming ocean-side town of Portsmouth, while he settled in the oversized municipal meth clinic of Providence. Always trust women on matters of the home, guys... {Warning: we are entering the heresy portion of this week’s column} Theologically, I like her version a whole lot better. She tells me that all I have to do to get into heaven is accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior, and I am pretty sure that, according to the rules, I have until my deathbed to do. This is convenient, since I am really a pretty terrible human being and, should I decide that I’d like to go to heaven, it provides me the easiest path. I won’t know until I get there, but I have to feel like the bright lights at the end of the road will be enough to convince me to come to Jesus. I’ll even take back all of the jokes if I need to! Meanwhile, those other guys tell me that eternal life depends on being obedient to God for my whole entire life. That sounds like WAY more work than I am willing to devote, and it really casts into doubt how much I even want to go to heaven. Is it just going to be full of people who were super nice their whole lives?!? Dante tells me that I am probably headed to the seventh circle of hell, which puts me in with the gays and the investment bankers...and that is going to be a WAY better party than whatever stupid cotillion with finger sandwiches and sparkling wine they are throwing in heaven. [My favorite part of The Inferno is the very end, where Brutus, Cassius and Judas are held. How typically Italian to have two guys for killing Caesar and only one for killing Jesus.] Submitted by: Fastfreefall Dear Alex, My question relates to food. Do you believe an objective standard should exist for a certain dish to qualify as that dish? E.g. if stuff is put in a flour tortilla, it's a burrito but if it's in a corn tortilla, it's a taco. 2nd e.g. if peas are mixed with avocado, there's ZERO way in hell it'll ever qualify as guacamole. Or do objective standards in this area reek of tyranny, provincialism, etc. Your thoughts ma'am. Well, there has to be some kind of a definition, otherwise you get people putting a patty of ground beef on a bun and calling it pizza. It’s kinda like that guy who used to play baseball whose name was spelled Chone but pronounced like Sean. That’s like half a step away from someone telling you “My first name is Ray. That’s M-I-K-E, Ray.” {Wait...have I told you about A-ia…?} For the most part, I think the preparer gets some leeway in making whatever it is they are making, but the amount of leeway is going to vary by dish. A Caesar Salad, for example, is no longer a Caesar Salad if you add anything other than Romaine lettuce, croutons and Parmesan cheese. You get a little bit of wiggle room on the ingredients in the dressing, and you can obviously serve it with chicken, salmon, steak or really any kind of protein, but you can’t just go throwing grapes or bell peppers in there. It stops being a Caesar Salad. It is still a Caesar Salad if you add anchovies, but you are a terrible person who should be electro-shocked and then shunned from polite society. Move to Rhode Island with the rest of the heretics, you terrorist. Then there is a whole class of foods that are inherently flexible. In fact, most every cuisine in the world has some kind of a meal that reduces to “whatever you have in the kitchen”. In China they have lo mein and various fried rice concoctions. The Mediterranean is chock full of seafood medleys that are never made the same way twice…in Spain they make it with Saffron and rice and call it Paella, and in Marseille it's Bouillabaisse (which is also maybe the best scene in A Gentleman in Moscow, which you should absolutely read because it is the best book written in the last year). In Italy they make a wine and tomato based fish stew called Cacciucco which (like most things) got better when it came to America and people in San Francisco turned it into Cioppino. Cajuns have two of these dishes: gumbo and jambalaya. I guess it depends on whether or not they have any rice laying around. The French also make ragout, Hungarians make goulash and the Irish invented Boiled Dinner after they got to America. I bet that, like any good Sconnie, @molratty could whip up a 50 gallon kettle full of Booyah and feed half a football stadium with a couple of days notice. I think you get the point, wherever you go, there is a standard dish in every cuisine that is just a combination of whatever meat they have laying around, whatever vegetables or cereal grains are their basic staple and whatever spices they tend to put into everything Also...amazing fact of the day: according to the census, there are 34.5 million Americans of Irish descent. There are less than five million people in Ireland (about 6.5 million if you count Northern Ireland, which you should until we drive every last one of those heretic royalist Limey Anglophiles straight into the Irish Sea where they belong!!!) So, yes, food needs definitions. If you don’t define things, then crazy people try to tell you that hot dogs are sandwiches, that you can put non-tomato fruit on pizza or that vegetables belong in dessert. Speaking of... Submitted by: Lady Catherine This is me asking you about Carrot Cake. My opinion: vegetables have no business being in a cake. You and I are simpatico on this, Cat. Can I call you Cat? I think Cat is a pretty cool name for a girl, so I am going to go with that unless you tell me it drives you nuts and then we can go back to Catherine. Or Cathy or Catie if you want one of those...or, like, Samantha...you just let me know, I can be flexible on this. Carrot cake is fucking disgusting. “Hey, guys, I am going to bake a cake! It’s going to be sweet and dense and utterly delightful. What do you think I could do to completely ruin the flavor AND texture? If it were a cookie, I’d just add walnuts or raisins, but those don’t work as well in cake. I don’t wanna add tree bark, because that might dry it out too much. And motor oil will really ruin the structural integrity. But something like that...wait, I know...I will add carrots! Because they are bland, tasteless and bring an unpleasant woodiness to the table, they will be the absolute perfect way to make this perfectly good dessert inedible!” As far as I can tell, rhubarb and sweet potatoes are the only vegetables that have any place in a dessert, and both are pretty expendable. No one is spilling a whole lot of tears of the loss of strawberry rhubarb pie. Sweet potatoes make for a decent pie as well, but they make for a better side dish than they do a pie...frankly, anyplace you can use sweet potato in dessert, you’d be better off using pumpkin (which is a fruit). I guess you can make zucchini bread with chocolate, but again, these are unnecessary and easily eschewed desserts. You may be asking yourself why we ever made much carrot cake in the first place? There are all kinds of terrible things that were invented but quickly ignored when something better came along...Laser Discs, Yugos, the Macarena...why has carrot cake stuck around as long as it has? The reason is, in hindsight, pretty obvious, but makes the continued existence something of a mystery. The only justification for carrot cake, ever, has been cream cheese frosting. As terrible as carrot cake is, it served as our only reliable delivery method for cream cheese frosting for a very long time. It is kind of like AOL...sure, it sucked and everybody knew that it sucked, but how else were you supposed to get to the Internet in 1996 if you didn’t get your free CD-ROM from AOL? Or like muffin stumps...no one wants your stupid, dry stump other than it being necessary to deliver the crispy, sugary top (first Seinfeld reference...one more to come). Sometime in the 1990’s, we developed the technology to put cream cheese frosting on Red Velvet and Spice cakes. Those are far superior delivery vehicles for cream cheese frosting, so I kind of wonder why carrot cake is even still a thing. It has become a functionally obsolete dessert. It’s like the CD of desserts...it’s useful for old people who are reluctant to change things they have done for 30 years, but it’s objectively pretty useless (analogy bonus...that goes for both kinds of CD’s!!!) Submitted by: BuckleyRoberts (in followup to last week) Why are slang terms for male genitalia heard more often on network television than those for female genitalia? That’s a really good question, and I am not entirely sure. I can think of a bunch of reasons, but I am not sure that any of them make sense. First, there is a whole lot more mystery around lady-parts than there is around dude-parts. Every guy has a penis and he spends a good portion of his life trying to get as many people as possible (preferably, but not necessarily women) to look at or touch it, and if that goes well, to let him put it in various warm and inviting places. Or, that failing, a particularly cute ficus plant. Vaginas, on the other hand, are substantially more mysterious. That same guy spends most of the rest of his waking hours trying to see, touch or otherwise get acquainted with them, in some cases (as I wrote about several weeks ago) paying significant money for the privilege. Add in the feminist suggestion that there is some magical power attached to the vagina, and you get a recipe for worship that elevates them to a higher plane than penises. Penii? Also, the words for penises are better, more dramatic sounding and easier to use. Dick. Cock. Prick. The words are short and full of hard syllables that make them flow easily in conversation. The slang words for vagina are not nearly as fun, and they tend to be longer. Pussy. Cooter. Cooch. Beaver. Or they are other words that have been appropriated for vaginal naming. Gash. Box. Twat. Those words aren’t as fun because they are euphemisms and not standalone words. I also think there is also a lot more variation...if we take a poll of users, I am guessing that almost all men refer to their own junk primarily as either dick or cock. Women are not nearly as uniform in how they refer to their own genitals, and really we vary pretty dramatically based not just on personal preference but also the situation. I probably use four different words depending on what the context is, and I think most women are probably pretty similar. Not sure it’s related, but if I put out a question asking people to comment and tell me how they refer to their own genitals, I’d make a casual wager that at least 85% of responses are from men. And if I did an off-the-record survey, I can’t imagine I’d find many guys who wouldn’t answer, but a bunch of women who would decline. I mean, I’m not saying that I am doing those things, but if science demands it… So, that’s the best I’ve got. You’re definitely right...we talk about guys’ junk a lot more on TV and in movies than about lady junk, even if we show naked chicks an awful lot more than naked dudes. Submitted by: Mike Out Yonder 1) Why is it called a tongue twister when you can't twist your tongue? 2) Wouldn't she make more selling seashells away from the seashore? Given that I just finished writing a whole section about vaginas, I want you all to recognize the great personal discipline that I am showing here in not making any jokes about tongue twisters...CUZ I’M A CLASSY LADY. Some people actually can twist their tongues, at least if you are willing to accept that multiple folding (or “cloverleafing”) of the tongue is twisting, which I do. And somewhere near about ⅔ of humans can roll their tongues. I also just learned that all of that shit your fifth grade science teacher told you about tongue-rolling being a recessive phenotype is absolute fabricated rubbish. There is no scientific evidence that the existence of the muscles that allow for tongue-rolling is genetic at all. WE’VE BEEN LIED TO BY TWO GENERATIONS OF SCIENCE TEACHERS!!! As for Sally the seashell saleswoman, I can see where you are coming from on her business model, but I don’t think it is that simple. The price of seashells is going to be driven by supply and demand, and while we know that supply of seashells is going to be higher along the seashore than it is in, say, Denver, we can only speculate about demand. Near the ocean, people tend to decorate more with nautical themes and therefore use a lot more seashells. Is this because the supply is greater and the price therefore lower? Or is the demand driven by a desire for contextually appropriate decorations and not the cost of decorating materials. I tend to think that it’s about the context and not the cost. Nobody decorates their beach house with a stuffed deer head, even though the cost and difficulty of getting a stuffed deer onto your wall is not really that much greater in LA than it is Denver. Sure, it is a little easier to get the deer head in Denver, but once you trek out into the woods, track it, shoot it, field dress it and then drag it back home so it can be butchered and brought to the taxidermist, the added trouble of getting it to LA is pretty minor. Add in the relatively insignificant cost of transporting seashells, and it is hard to imagine that there is some great unmet demand for seashells in North Dakota. She may make more selling them away from the seashore, but I am going to need a more comprehensive market study before I am ready to accept that as fact. At that point I will probably borrow a bunch in the junk bond market, offer her a good price for 50% plus one share of the company, run her out, sell off the operating assets, lease the brand name to a bigger (literal) shell conglomerate and then IPO the new, leaner “Sally’s Seashore Shells" (NASDAQ:SHEL). Kaching! Other interesting thing I just learned? The sign-language equivalent of a tongue twister is called a finger-fumbler, and “good blood, bad blood” is reportedly the toughest one. I blame Taylor Swift. Submitted by: Ingenious Firebrand Conservatives can’t agree on a proper definition of conservatism and just snipe each other on twitter. Is this why we can’t have nice things? Self-professed conservatives can’t agree on a definition of conservatism. Conservatism has (or had) a pretty clear definition: political views that favor free enterprise, private ownership, personal accountability, a minimum of coercion and the power of individuals over the state. There are, however, large numbers of modern day “conservatives” who have stretched that to include very un-conservative ideas like economic protectionism, surveillance, military intervention, centralized management of the economy and restrictions on inconvenient parts of the Bill of Rights. Or, you know, outright racism. That there is disagreement, though, is not a huge problem. When we boil the whole country down into two political parties, each attached primarily to one political ideology, you are going to find that very few people fit exactly into either camp. There are some people, like me, who don’t really fit into one camp much more than they do the other, and therefore spend their time simply making snide comments about everyone who does belong without serving a whole lot of purpose. The good news is that I am adorable, so I make that criticism fun, even if it is not helpful! The real joyless scolds do something similar, only they are not cute and they find it most important not that you agree with them, but that you know they think of you as being morally inferior and that they own the rights to the RealCon brand. They also often have terrible facial hair and pick fights with people objectively smarter than then...but I digress. This is not unique to the right, though...the same is true on the left. There was a massive schism on the left between the Bernie Sanders socialist wing of the party and the Hillary Clinton “baby boomer progressive” wing, and that rift has yet to fully be healed. It has been glossed over a bit by their shared hatred of Trump and their status as an obstructionist minority party, but it still exists (this is not dissimilar to the GOP of the 1990’s...they were much more effective and unified when they were the minority, and all the conflict came out when they were finally in position to govern). The Sanders people criticize the inherent biases and oppression of government as a reflection of moneyed, entrenched interests, and suggested that the solution was to make that oppressive and flawed government much bigger, more powerful and more intrusive. But putting modern hippies in charge. The Clintons worked with the traditional progressive idea that the Yale-educated enlightened elite can best determine what is good for you without your input, thank you very much. And that original hippies should be in charge And yes, it is why we can’t have nice things. We have a government that is run by children who have no objective other than remaining in office, and who will fight over absolutely everything except the idea that, whatever you want, they can give to you and make your children pay for. Submitted by: Rebecca de Winter I think that things were better when we had to get pictures developed, like at a photo place, before sharing them. Discuss. Gen Xers...am I right?! OK, I will admit that there were clearly some advantages. For one, people took a lot fewer pictures, which means fewer chances of being caught doing something you’d rather not have on camera. I am eternally grateful that camera phones weren’t really prevalent until the end of my time in college...that saved me from a LOT of stuff that I am glad to have been saved from. Taking fewer pictures means that vain teenage girls didn’t get to take 32 pictures of themselves before they got just the right angle for something so they could post it to Instagram. Nobody got to to take 4,000 pictures at any event, guaranteeing that there is one of you shoving cake into your face or scratching your ear or something. And nobody took pictures of their food!!! But, overall, digital photography is a huge leap forward and makes capturing and preserving memories much easier and more effective. We can take many more pictures, save them more easily and share them without having to print more copies on special paper. And think of this, Most Literal Becky, if we were still stuck with physical photographs, there would be no memes coming from your dear husband. Twitter would be essentially useless!!! Before, you had to buy film every time you wanted to take a picture, protect that film from x-rays and sunlight and ration your pictures so you didn’t run out. And you were flying blind on every picture...you didn’t know what it would look like for a couple of weeks after you took it! Before you could get them, you had to let some pimply-faced perv in a one-hour photo hut look through your pictures before you even got them!!! I mean, sure, maybe you could try and take some suggestive photos and hope the cute girl developed them, but that is a pretty big risk, Costanza… Practically speaking, think about how hard it would be to sext! You’re telling me that every time I want to send a suggestive picture to my husband, I need to get a camera, take the picture, have it developed and then mail it to him? Kinda kills the mood...no? “Wow...honey, that underwear you were wearing 12 days ago sure was hot. Please make out with my face.” Speaking of...if you’re not taking advantage of technology to spice up your love life a little bit, girls, you’re leaving a LOT of fun on the table. I’m not talking about making porn on your phone (although...um...you can do that, or so I’ve heard), but the odd picture that shows just a little bit of something fun can go a LONG way towards letting him know what is on your mind, and making sure that it is on his mind, too. Memo to guys: this doesn’t work both ways, sorry. You can respond to her, but if you start it, you’re not going to get the same reaction... To be serious for a second, though: the ease of taking and distributing pictures is exceedingly dangerous for your teenagers, especially girls. We give them cell phones for lots of good reasons...primarily safety and ease of communication. And those phones come with cameras that let them take silly pictures, make funny memes and send snaps of things they see throughout the day. They can be a fantastic way for parents to maintain a constant stream of communication with their kids...you should see some of the hilarity that Rebecca’s daughter sends her! But they also make it really easy for kids to make minor mistakes that haunt them for years. Whether it is a “playful” picture that turns out more indecent than intended, or an intentionally risque one that goes to a boyfriend or girlfriend, once the picture has been sent, there is no getting it back. Friends turn on each other, or share things with their other friends, or relationships end and kids get mad at each other. Whatever the reason, the picture that seemed like a good idea is suddenly a thing that makes school a terrifying place to go. Not to mention, 15 and 16 year olds swapping pictures of each other is increasingly becoming a prosecutable felony...just try applying to Brown with a felony on your record and see how that goes. I was incredibly lucky in going through this with my sister, but it was a really eye-opening experience. I had a different relationship with her than most sisters do, and very different than other “mothers” do...I was always a lot more plugged into what she and her friends did than any of the other parents were. And I can tell you that the social pressures/temptations are really strong to constantly push boundaries - physical and digital - in their developing relationships. My sister has always been objectively gorgeous. She matured very young, and she was “the hot girl” in pretty much everything she did from age 13 onwards. She has also, thankfully for me, been emotionally and intellectually mature beyond her years since she was about 6. She spent most of her teen years living with two twenty-somethings that she was extremely (sometimes awkwardly!) comfortable consulting on social and relationship issues. And she had a good friend, a girl who was a senior on the soccer team when she was a freshman, that sent a boyfriend some pictures that became everyone’s property when they broke up. In other words, there were a lot of extenuating circumstances that helped her NOT make bad decisions, and yet I know that she and her boyfriend (who she has had since she was 14 and lived on the other side of an ocean until college) sent each other pictures that her legal guardian over here would have advised against. Just because nothing bad comes from something doesn’t mean it was a good idea! Much of that pressure comes from boys, who are generally the ones trying to push the relationship forward sexually, but there is absolutely pressure from other girls as well. Some of that is a means of justifying their own behavior (the second girl to lose her virginity doesn’t get branded as “The Class Slut”), some of it was about impressing the boys and some of it was just them being teenagers and growing into their new urges. The net result, though, is a lot of pressure on girls to do things that they may or may not be totally comfortable with, and that can cause them intense emotional pain for a very long time. So, my advice for anyone with kids approaching “cell phone age” is pretty similar to all of my other parenting advice. Talk to them. Do not talk to them with the assumption that they will never do things like this or that you will punish them if they do. There is nothing that makes kids more likely to do something than adding danger. Just acknowledge that there is probably going to be a time when they think it is a good idea to send someone a risque picture, either of themselves of of someone else. Kids they know, kids that are their close friends, are going to be doing this and your kids are just as likely as those kids are to want to do it. When that time comes, you are not going to be there to remind them how dangerous it is, they are going to have to make the decision on their own. In making that choice, they need to remember a few things:
I’d have that conversation as early and as often as possible. Don’t ask what they are going with their phone, don’t ask what their friends are doing. Don’t yell at them about how they use their phone. If you let them have the phone (which is hard to avoid), you are not going to be able to stop them from doing these things. Your best approach is to talk about the way that they can make good decisions, and then hope that they use that framework when the time comes. Just remind them that pictures are more permanent than tattoos. OK, that was long and overly serious...sorry about that;-). Why don’t you all go get drunk and DM me some nudes to feel better!
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MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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