Guess what? Straight men aren't attracted to women who are anorexic and look like teenage skateboard dudes.

@Natty-J: Loved the comment about Preparation H eventually becoming hip. Spot on.

Sorry, but a pot belly is still ugly. But, hell, if it opens the dating field for people like me with flat stomachs, and kills off a few annoying hipsters with premature heart attacks, who am I to complain?

Frankly, I've never understood the hipster phenomenon, except maybe as the fatal collision of narcissism, low self-esteem, and no actual talent. I've always done my own thing, without attaching a label to it. I'll give this to them, however: hipsters definitely are the embodiment of irony. After all, they love to proclaim their nonconformity but then go around like such a pack of mindless fad-chasers that they've become the flip side of country-club housewives. And let's not mention the trust-fund hipsters who buy their clothes exclusively at Goodwill stores. Gag me with some Elvis Costello glasses.

Articles like this are the reason why I stopped reading the NY Times fashion and dining sections long, long ago...

Every person, female or male, should have a say in any medical operation that will alter her or his body permanently, unless the procedure is necessary to prevent serious harm or death in a child who cannot yet consent. Infant circumcision hardly meets this standard.

Regardless of one's view on circumcision, I think this rule should be noncontroversial.

"Republican pro-lifers" care only about the lives of fetuses and brain-dead coma patients.

Seems that the last time something like this happened... oh, back around 2000, I think... the Republican echo chamber was reverbating with the refrain of "Sore Loserman".

But I guess Coleman isn't a sore loser. He's just looking to protect Minnesota voters. By denying them the Senate representation they voted for. Nevermind.

Fleischer is just trotting out the old class-warfare arguments that Repugs have been using since at least the 1970s. (Anyone remember the one about welfare queens driving Cadillacs?) Problem is, no one, except perhaps for a clueless Repug like Fleischer, feels any sympathy for all those Wall Street bankers who are going to forfeit a few bucks off their $10 million bonuses when W's tax cuts are rolled back. So, let the Repugs continue their dirge about the plight of the wealthy. It makes them look all the more out of touch.

Sure, plenty of real estate agents are parasitic scum. So are many (ok, nearly all) trial lawyers, plastic surgeons, investment bankers, politicians, celebrities, and so forth. But a parasite needs a host to survive and flourish. Face it: the American public is to blame. Yep, that's right. A real estate agent can't sell a $250K house for $700K if there aren't buyers willing to be fleeced, and sellers willing to fleece them. Just like there wouldn't be trial lawyers with yachts and private jets if there weren't plaintiffs who saw dollar signs every time they tripped over a banana peel. If it weren't for our shallow money-trumps-everything, win-at-all-costs culture, many of these parasites would starve and die, or at least they'd stay in the steno pool where they belong.

And, for the record, I am not a real estate agent. Or a trial lawyer.

Tell me, why exactly was it a good thing that the colonists won the American Revolutionary War? We could all be Canadians now, with national healthcare, boring politics, and narrower asses, not to mention Cuban cigars as well. Dammit.

The religionist right only gives a damn about fetuses and brain-dead coma patients. An actual, live person is no concern to them. Strange that they now want to define a fetus as a "person"...

Very good message, although the President lost me when he said that Iran had to act responsibly and could not attain its rightful place among the community of nations by terror and arms.

True enough, perhaps, but it sounded more than a little hypocritical coming from the leader of a nation that is armed to the teeth, with thousands of nuclear weapons on hairtrigger alert two decades after the Cold War ended, a nation that has been responsible for countless massive and indiscriminate aerial bombardments over the past half century and that spends more on its military than all other nations combined. This is exactly the sort of double standard that Americans never perceive and the rest of the world always does.

These wars are not, ultimately, about foie gras at all. They're being waged by vegans who believe that all meat eating inevitably involves torture but who are smart enough -- and disingenuous enough -- to focus on a product the average person might never eat, one that can easily be portrayed as a decadent luxury enjoyed only by fat cats who could not care less about animals.

AMEN!!!!

President Obama should pull a Harry Truman and draft every single person on the receiving end of an AIG bonus into the Army. Then, ship them to southern Afghanistan so that our regular troops come home. Sure, body counts will skyrocket, but who really cares?