Not to detract from your otherwise on-the-mark comment, but Sidney Poitier and Lawrence Olivier *are* in the pantheon. Olivier in particular, having definitively incarnated Hamlet, Richard III, and Henry V on screen, is Zeus. Which is not to say that Streep doesn't belong Up There too, oh, no, she absolutely does.

Julia Child is my hero for breaking into a highly competitive, male-dominated field in midlife and making it more accessible to other women while never compromising her integrity. Streep is perfect to play her. I was overjoyed at this casting, and very gratified to find that she has been exceeding expectations.

As women assert more and more power and equality, more and more ugliness and hostility is going to get flushed out into the open. It's a detoxification process. Deal with it, guys. We're not taking crap from you anymore. Oh, and by the way, for all you male bloggers with endless time to post whiny screeds about women not knowing their place because you're unemployed, dinner's in the freezer. You know how to operate an oven. We expect it on the table when we get home from, you know, our paying jobs.

Oh, poor wittle wepwessed WASP. My heart bweeds.

Look, getting drunk and acting unreasonable--or passing out--or whatever--is one thing. It causes people to lose respect for you. You might say things that hurt other people, strain relationships, etc. If he or she is sensible enough not to attempt to operate a moving vehicle, however, the alcoholic is the person who is most damaged by his or her own behavior.

That is very different from putting the lives of others--including one's own children--seriously at risk.

I'm sorry for people who suffer from alcoholism, although the circumstances are largely of their own making. I am not sorry for drunk drivers.

Tell that to the other people who were killed in the crash, that they should be sorry for their killers. Tell it to people who have lost innocent loved ones--spouses, children, siblings, parents, friends--to drunken strangers, that they should somehow feel compassion and pity for the people who RUINED THEIR LIVES FOREVER.

I would hope that a former alcoholic would be willing to face up to the potential ugliness of this disease/personal failing--for it is both. Not knowing oneself well enough, being willing to give in to the siren song of pleasure and self-medication at the expense of the welfare of others whom one does not love enough to try to protect from oneself--well, all I can say is, that sort of thing comes from your crappy 12-step programs, which don't force you to live with the consequences of anything you do.

Try living in the real world, where actions have consequences, and the only way to defeat the beast is to just kill it off, not try to coddle it into submission with sugary platitudes. No ifs, ands, or buts. Kill it. It is not your friend, and if you are taken in you deserve only contempt.

Jesus, I get more and more cynical every passing year.

Reminds me of a hilarious column by Gloria Steinem (linked in my sig) about how, if men could menstruate, they would brag about how long and how much.

I love the last line, though:

If we let them.

oh, god, did we ever dodge a bullet.

No kids here. Love Miyazaki movies. Finding out that one was out in the U.S. yesterday was like Christmas in August. I was all set to get huffy and indignant and scream "Poseur!" at Zacharek, but you know what? Not worth it. It's like saying you just don't get Da Vinci. That's not even posturing; that's just the cinematic equivalence of colorblindness. I'm sorry.

And I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one who thought there was something off about this reviewer.

You guys who don't get Miyazaki, though: you might try *Paprika.* Dark, hallucinatory, and still visually flabbergasting. And the soundtrack will haunt you.

The URL skanksnyc.blogspot.com is now available!

Just thought you all would like to know.

To be fair, something really should be done about dontdatehimgirl.com. Someone I know was really horrified to find his name attached to a comment that said poisonous, untrue things about both him and his family, and he can't get it removed. He's not even sure which woman of his acquaintance could have been batshit enough to leave it.

I'm not denying that marriage isn't challenging. We all hit rough patches, especially with the economy the way it is right now. And I've vented in previous letters about Dr. Trench's refusal to do housework (he's definitely improved over the last several months).

These women seem to be assuming, though, that because they had bad experiences with marriage that the whole institution must be useless, and I find that arrogant and narcissistic. (Flanagan's defense is particularly meaningless to me, as I have no children.)

The institution really does need to change overall to reflect equality between partners, change in function (companionship rather than childrearing), and the increasing likelihood that if one partner is dominant, it could as easily be the wife as the husband, but the only way for this to happen is for people to take it upon themselves to redefine both their expectations of marriage and their marriages in practice.

Fact is, there are lots of people in perfectly good working marriages who don't feel the need to write about them. Perhaps there should be more, to demonstrate how a healthy, secular marriage is sustained and to show that it can be done. Perhaps I should write a book about mine...except that it would bore everyone to tears, including me...and Dr. Trench and I kind of like our privacy and don't really want to air the occasional quarrels we've had and resolved over the years.

As Tolstoy went on to say, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Which makes for great fiction, or even a good memoir, but not for good sociology.