Facebook, Stop Sucking Ass

As pretty much anyone who uses Facebook semi-regularly knows, the site keeps changing its privacy rules. Not only is this confusing and downright maddening, but it's pissing off a helluva lot of people. I track Facebook's moves somewhat closely, and I've been fed up with them for a while. And I'm a very heavy user. I know the ins and outs better than most, and I've been having trouble wading through this recent mess.

I want better ways to complain, I want to be able to have choices, to control what I want, and I want some of the old features back (I won't list them all). Mark Zuckerburg went from being this wunderkind to this reviled, amoral overlord. Facebook is too wound up in my daily existence, my way of life, for me to just zap it out completely--like destroying the Internet!--but Zuckerburg's vision of the future is not compatible with how users want it to be, and he no longer cares about the vast network he's built. He's transforming the Internet with his conceptions of privacy and openness, not understanding that everyone needs and has the right to privacy. Hell, even when Gawker exposed him, he quickly took control and put his stuff behind privacy walls!

So I am very glad that, among many other website, the Times is on this and has compiled a list of questions they will present to Zuckerburg and Facebook to answer. A response should be up in a few days; I eagerly await it. In the meantime, check out this timeline of privacy changes to the site, and please, check and update your privacy controls! Too many people stay ignorant and they ruin it for the rest of us.

Update: Here's an interactive pie chart, using the same data as the EFF.

"It Ought to Be a Law to Start Christmas Before December"

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I am very much a traditionalist--I like my holidays to have the same foods and rituals as they always have, with no interlopers, no drastic alterations. But recently I've wondered why the meanings surrounding these holidays have increasingly meant little to me.

I cannot remember the last time I had real holiday spirit. I try to get into it every year, and occasionally there's a glimpse, but I feel it's been sucked out of me just by the relentless commercialism. Like Easter in March, I find Christmas before December--even early December--distasteful. It's just too soon. Christmas becomes all about presents--what do you want? What does everyone else what? When will you have time to get it? Is it too much? Ahh! Enough with the hassle! Rarely does anything seem worth it; even with the best of intentions it's just another check on a list. I tend to think of the best gifts in March for people who have birthdays in October, and of course I have no clue by the time December rolls around. I should just get gifts whenever I think of them.

Presents, like many of the things surrounding Christmas, have become oppressive. The saccharine, omnipresent music that only passes muster because of the season, the constant wonderings of what to buy, what to wear, what to give obscure nearly any meaning attached to what makes the holidays special and just makes it a month to get through.

Dragging out Christmas only intensifies the antipathy. Instead of eager anticipation, the days become merely rote, banal—plain ol’ January, February or March, another dark winter day with tacky decorations and music. Thanksgiving is a holiday that gets bypassed between Halloween and Thanksgiving, lumped in as another food-heavy day that dieters should be careful of. The decorations are warmer, the break a respite. Christmas is all-empowering, suffocation.

I hate being asked what I want for Christmas. I hate not being surprised, and going, “Yep, that’s exactly what I said,” because I rarely truly, truly want something, and even then it’s usually not material goods. I want people, as silly and unrealistic as it sounds, to just know that I like something and get it for me, because they know I’d never buy it for myself. I want Christmas to feel special again, to make it really exciting and worth looking forward to, instead of just another chore.

Why?

I don't really want to comment on John Edwards, except for the fact that I really liked his platform and was sad when he had to drop out of the race. I don't believe his political career is over; he'll find some way someday to get back in the limelight.

I'm sick of these scandals, as I'm sure everyone else in America is. But there's one question I haven't seen addressed:

Why would a woman start a relationship with a married man running for president? And then keep his baby?*

I just don't get it. Seems like you're putting yourself in a terrible situation that's only going to get worse. The only thing you'll get out of it is a large check. But then again, tons of other women have gotten involved with high-profile political married men, caught up in the illicit sexiness of it all.

But why is it so important to tell the truth to the media? Did the world really need to know of his infidelity, especially now? No. All it served to do was to make Elizabeth look even more saintly and for her husband to completely lose his reputation, and for the public to be disgusted at large. He would have been better off if he kept it quiet, dealing with his own problems privately without feeding Entertainment Tonight and People, which are not dying for content. John Edwards does not need our forgiveness; he just needs our attention.

*Assuming the baby is his.

You look ugly

Why do girls feel the need to put lots of tiny blonde streaks in otherwise boring brown hair? It doesn't look cool, chic, or make you prettier. It turns your hair a shade of ash-blonde gray.

For those girls who have mousy brown hair, forgo the streaks, the "highlights". You paid a lot of money to look gross. Make it look nice (you'll stand out because your hair is normal) or figure out another way to wear it.

Come On

Again with the candidates and their eating habits, this time courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:

Political commentators are busy analyzing and psychoanalyzing the presidential candidates' words for hints about the real Barack Obama and John McCain. We gastronomers have a better way of penetrating the campaign spin. We take the time-honored approach of that proto-food-blogger Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), who said: "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are."

At the very least, we believe that a candidate's taste in food is a more reliable indicator of character than the carefully strained statements issued in the current atmosphere of gotcha and gotcha back. So we have worked our sources and come up with the names of the candidates' favorite restaurants in their home states. We have tried them out and assessed what an appetite for their particular offerings might mean about two men with a 50-50 chance at spending the next four years ordering meals from the White House chef.

Can we move off this subject now? Why on earth would I pick a candidate based on--or even be interested in--their taste in restaurants?

I already know that John McCain likes to grill and that his campaign lifted a cookie recipe from the Food Network's website, and that Barack Obama is a fussy eater. Now both of them are pizza fans. Wow! That's so unusual. The only good thing about this article is that I now know some good restaurants in Chicago and Arizona.

Shut up and try it

"I’m scared.”

I heard this today in response to a vegetable. Yes, a vegetable. Collard greens, to be exact.

Today it was Soul Food Day at work (we get free lunch every Wednesday), and in addition to the fried chicken and corn bread, there was collard greens. Standard southern soul food fare.

But a twenty year-old intern was scared of the food.

This isn’t the first time I heard "I’m scared" in response to a vegetable. At my cousin’s graduation party, I heard several teenagers say the same thing upon a pasta dish cluttered with vegetables. One girl nervously took a spoonful and asked me what the yellow wedge nudged between two white oblongs was. “It’s a piece of zucchini,” I said, appalled.

I realize these kids were being flippant. But scared? Not only are they using the wrong word, but they’re "scared" of food? Of vegetables? Clearly they lead incredibly sheltered lives. The intern hails from the Midwest, but she’s not giving a good impression (although we were all amused when she had never tasted cannoli, pronouncing it a “Jersey thing”).

There are very few things in the food category that anyone should be scared of. Being scared indicates that your heart rate is rising and you have some sort of fear of the outcome. The worst that could happen when eating collard greens or tasting a piece of cooked zucchini bathed in olive oil and garlic is that you don’t like it, and so you don’t eat it again. The only time, in fact, that it’s acceptable to say “I’m scared” when eating is if A) you are on Fear Factor, Survivor, or another reality show where you are forced to eat something slimy, raw, alive, or not meant for human consumption; B) you are afraid of throwing up, especially if in front of people; C) the food in front of you is or has a strong chance of being poisoned, sour, moldy, rotten, or filled with bugs; D) the food has tentacles, claws, strange bumps, odors, colors, or textures and no, ethnic food does not count.

Basically, if you are served food, especially catered food, and the dish seems normal, it probably is. I could understand being worried about recalls. Fine. Understood. But being scared of cooked vegetables is ridiculous.