Friday night roundup, response to comment, and ramble

Hamburgers are bad for Iowa and its water. Don't even get me started on Big Beef.

Myers-Briggs is kind of a crock.

It’s about belief much more than scientific evidence. And it’s administered by leadership coaches who, by and large, have no formal education in the science of psychology.

“People like it because it reveals something they didn’t know about themselves or others,” says Wharton’s Grant. “That could be true of a horoscope, too.”

Even Katharine Downing Myers concedes that “psychologists had no use for the indicator; they felt that Jung was a crazy mystic.”

This is so true, and yet it's thankfully very far from my experience. I almost expect people to think there's something wrong with me because I'm single, and I'm almost surprised when people don't. I mean, am I a dating mess? Sure, but not any more so than many non-singles.

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Thank you for the warm welcome! It's good to be back, it's good to be blogging, and it's great to know that the blogging has been missed.

"The Mindy Project" is absolutely one of those shows that I feel the need to watch immediately, I was thinking this weekend. I guess I'll get Hulu Plus. It would have appealed to me in any context, and in its own right--not just because it was a strong, real female lead--but it especially appealed to me in contrast to "Ruby Sparks," which I watched beforehand. What a pile of misogyny--a male adolescent fantasy film, written by a woman. And it was as terrible as it was offensive; a few witty or insightful lines couldn't save it.

But back to "The Mindy Project": I found the very joke that these The Frisky writers find convoluted and offensive spot-on (even though I agree with everything else the first writer wrote). As Tina Fey would say, has said, pushing into uncomfortable territory is what makes things funny. The uncomfortable reality about our health care system is that doctors have incentives to take wealthy and/or insured patients, and wealth is somewhat correlated with race. That's why "more white patients" is funny, and why the character's discomfort with it is funny. That's the role of satire in society: to make jokes about what's f*ed up in the world.

What makes me an authority on this? I've blogged for years about my mother's calling me fat and unlovable. And--like the first writer--I think we need to be able to discuss things that make us uncomfortable without being squashed by 'bad feminist' or 'racist' stamps. Am I racist for calling out Junot Diaz for his misogynistic Dominican sh!t, when he's the one who justifies the misogyny by claiming it's authentically Dominican? (The sh!t designation is mine). It's, by his own designation, misogynistic-Dominican (and by mine, sh!t). Does it help if I designate Julia Alvarez's work as Dominican but light-years from either misogynistic or sh!t? As for Lena Dunham: from what I've seen of "Girls," I don't think it's that good, but I agree with Lena Dunham: her job is not to write characters of color; her job is to write from her own experience.