Having become similarly dependent on Hulu ever since Duncan Black sent us all there last summer to watch Bedazzled, I'm often yearning for a TV show/film that hasn't made it onto their list. And the way they organize the site, as with YouTube, feels more like the old days of BitTorrent or IRC, with their simple search functions not quite doing the job. (And I, like you, am a professional searcher of sorts: I often wonder if my practiced Boolean/Google skills aren't far more salable than journalism.) The false positives that come up, like the homepages own display, are far more along the lines of "50% Off on Organic Tempeh This Week" at a food co-op than a consumer product.

But in many ways, those vestiges of supposed escape from the Viacom world are part of the charm. And even as I resist paying $ to watch television, as a content producer, don't you shrug while the Viacoms get their share of the ads you don't watch?

-- Chris Lombardi

Just wanted to mention as a resource the fabulous http://www.4exhale.org/ -- founded by my dear friend Laura, a fierce feminist activist in San Francisco. They offer non-judgmental after-abortion counseling in numerous languages, without any theological or even political baggage. - Chris Lombardi

At a forum at Columbia University (which as the former King's College knows from royalty) on political reporting, I asked the NY Times' Elizabeth Bumiller what effect it had on her or anyone's reporting when reporters and government officials live in the same neighborhoods, send kids to the same schools. She paused in disbelief. "There are only a few neighborhoods you can live in, in D.C.," she explained patiently. Bumiller was then deep in writing a bio of Condoleeza Rice -- who might, I have to think, have taken offense at Bumiller's implication.

But the impossibility of not having playgroup with the folks you're supposed to be covering was obvious to her - and to many others in the room, who found the question kind of fringe-y. But marrying the people you cover likely doesn't feel so odd if you've convinced yourself that the world really sits in half a square mile near Dupont Circle.

TNC is probably my favorite Atlantic blogger, and he's a WoW regular currently playing as a female belf. (Don't bother explaining to me what it means; it all sounds like too much work to me....) And he noted on Thurs (http://tinyurl.com/6dpzvz) that it could be educational in other ways:

The other day I was doing some PvP in Alterac Valley, when I got into it withe a fellow hordie who kept whining about paladins. It got pretty heated, to the point that I told him I wish I was till Alliance so I could come and kill him. Yeesh. He was prolly a 13 year old kid--at least judging by his response, which was "Get back in the kitchen. Hoes don't play Warcraft!"

It then occurred to me that I, for the first time in my life, had been the target of a sexist remark.

As a fan of Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook, I also like the idea of playing with gender online first. I've also no doubt that many dissertations have been written about the intersection of technology and gender transitions: anyone note how popular such transitions are in, say, Silicon Valley?

I found The Smoking Gun.com's helpful repost of the grand jury testimony (http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/polanskicover1.html). Otherwise I found reams of articles referring to his arrest "for having sex with a 13-year-old girl." That lie alone needs to be slapped.

As a precocious teenager who knew girls dating older men, I sniggered at the scandal myself back in 1977, to my eternal shame now. Every article minimizing it now re-offends, with a twist of Miley Cyrus and Michelle Phillips added.

It made me think I'm going to have to write about this, and all the confused ways our society thinks about sex, and about - God forbid! — about women, for the much-less-august publication I edit.

I still might - but I was so glad to see this front and center. Now I can add to the chorus of thanks, Kate, for beginning and ending with "Roman Polanski raped a child." And for everything else you do.

Chris Lombardi

This willingness to place women early on the come-hither category, I mean. 1970's? http://womensvoicesforchange.org/roman-polanski-its-not-the-1970s-anymore-thank-god.htm

It's easy to argue that it's gotten worse - Internet porn, Miley Cyrus etc — but at least we have a generation of writers like those here to call attention to it. Not to mention 20+ years of jurisprudence that stands on very different assumptions, even if producers haven't gotten there yet.