Author: Ophelia Benson

How to get more traffic on your blog…write about elevator guy. Ha! That’s a good one. That’s a real thigh-slapper.

Steve Caldwell makes a different suggestion.

Apparently, the secret for a successful website (aka “blog”) is misspelling a person’s last name so the misspelled name includes a slang term for female genitalia.

That will get one over 1240 comments …

Quite, with the addendum that as of this moment the count is 1283. What fun all this would have been if Watson had had a couple of confederates, Rachel Unt and Rosalind Ussy. But then again what if the confederates had been named Rachel Igger and Rosalind Pade? Would the count have been higher, or lower, or the same?

Punishing people for not having a car. Prosecuting people for not driving. Teaching a lesson to pedestrians and bus-takers.

Nelson, 30 and African-American, was convicted on the charge this week by six jurors who were not her peers: All were middle-class whites, and none had ever taken a bus in metro Atlanta. In other words, none had ever been in Nelson’s shoes:

They had never taken two buses to go grocery shopping at Wal-Mart with three kids in tow. They had never missed a transfer on the way home that caused them to wait a full hour-and-a-half with tired and hungry kids for the next bus. They had never been let off at a bus stop on a five-lane speedway, with their apartment in sight across the road, and been asked to drag those three little ones an additional half-mile-plus down the road to the nearest traffic signal and back in order to get home at last.

They apparently operate on the assumption that responsible people have cars and people who don’t have cars are irresponsible and reckless.

Why is this familiar?

Because we saw the same damn thing just before and during and after Hurricane Katrina. I remember it vividly – that Sunday afternoon, the day before Katrina hit, the news was full of warnings about the hurricane and officials saying urgently, “Everyone get in your cars immediately and get out of New Orleans”…with no mention of what people who didn’t have cars were supposed to do. I remember fuming and ranting about that on Sunday; fuming and ranting that nobody in charge even seemed to have formed the idea that some people actually don’t own cars and that perhaps they should not just be abandoned to drown. I ranted and fumed a lot more in the days that followed, as lots of people fumed and ranted about the reckless irresponsible fools who stayed in New Orleans, overlooking the fact that most of them had no way to get out.

What about the highway designers, traffic engineers, transit planners and land use regulators who allowed a bus stop to be placed so far from a signal and made no other provision for a safe crossing; who allowed – even encouraged, with wide, straight lanes – prevailing speeds of 50-plus on a road flanked by houses and apartments; who carved a fifth lane out of a wider median that could have provided more of a safe refuge for pedestrians; who designed the entire landscape to be hostile to people trying to get to work and groceries despite having no access to a car?

What indeed.

Jesus.

On April 10, 2010, Raquel Nelson lost her 4-year-old son. Nelson was crossing a busy Marietta, Georgia, street with her son and his two siblings when they were struck by a hit-and-run driver. Police were able to track down the driver, Jerry Guy, who later admitted he had been drinking and had taken painkillers the night of the accident. He was also mostly blind in one eye.  Guy had already been convicted of two prior hit-and-runs. He pleaded guilty, served six months of his five-year sentence, and was released last October.

…Last week Nelson herself was convicted on three charges related to her son’s death: reckless conduct, improperly crossing a roadway and second-degree homicide by vehicle. Each is a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 12 months in prison. Nelson could spend up to six times as many months in jail as the man who struck her son and then fled the scene. Nelson’s crime: jaywalking.

“Jaywalking” – because the bus stop is on the other side of a busy street from Nelson’s apartment building, and there is no crosswalk nearby, so people who get off the bus at that stop cross outside a crosswalk, in other words they “jaywalk.”

And then they get prosecuted for it, and convicted (by people who never take the bus). The rich hate the poor; whites hate blacks; everybody hates women.

Unstinkingbelievable.

There’s a petition you can sign if you want to. It asks the judge not to send Nelson to jail.

Seen Rebecca’s dating advice? I think it’s pretty damn funny, and apposite. More apposite than I’d like it to be.

I don’t exactly see myself on either “team,” to the extent that there are two “teams.” I don’t think absolutely every single thing said and done on either side is 100% correct and perfect and right, so I’m not really on either “team” if that’s what it takes. But I don’t suppose anybody on either “team” really thinks either “team” is 100% correct and perfect and right any more than I do, so maybe that’s not what it takes.

At any rate I’m not on any team that calls Rebecca “Twatson” or thinks that her dating advice is a reason to declare that she’s a fucking bitch. And I think her dating advice is funny.

Someone did a transcript there, so I’ll give you a couple of highlights in case you don’t have time to watch it right now.

And I just wanted to, ah, to address some of the questions you’ve all had.  Um, I don’t really have a lot of time right now, but I thought I would just address the one BIG question, (serious look) the one that I keep seeing over and over and over again.  Which is something along these lines:  “I’m a man, and I don’t see, uh, the PROBLEM, in cornering a woman in an elevator and inviting her back to my room, despite the fact that she said she’s tired and going to bed, despite the fact that she said she didn’t want to be hit on (shrug) and, despite the fact that I’ve never talked to her before;  I don’t see a problem with the situation.  So if you say I can’t do THAT, then, HOW can I possibly get laid?”

And (headshake) the answer to that, is that… you probably can’t.  (wry look)  You probably can’t get laid.  Because, I think most normal people see that situation, and they realize “Oh okay, yeah, that’s not an appropriate time to, uh, ask a woman to come back to my hotel room.”  And those of you who didn’t see that right away, y’know, there’s another subset of normal people, who said “Oh, well, it didn’t occur to me that that would be seen as creepy or weird or undesirable.  So thank you for pointing it out; I will not do that in the future.”  So y’know, most normal people get that, and they can then go forward and flirt with members of the opposite sex in a normal manner that may or may not result in sex for them.

But y’know, those of you who are asking that question obviously can’t do that.  So, I would recommend that you look at OTHER ways to maybe get your rocks off.  Like, I dunno, maybe one of those dolls?   They, they sell those… (indicates vague shape, wry-faced)  They’re kind of expensive I think, I dunno, I’ve never priced one myself, but I’ve seen a documentary on it, and they’re really… They’re LIFELIKE, but… their mouths are only used for sucking (pinchy hand gesture and chuckle)  y’know, so no worries about them… very calmly… giving you advice on how to approach a woman or how not to approach a woman.

When I was a zookeeper, I had a folksy supervisor who hailed from Oklahoma. One day he remarked apropos of I forget what, “I have the kind of luck that if somebody cut a woman in half and gave me half, I’d get the half that talks.” Rebecca’s joke is kind of like that…except that hers is funny. Her delivery is funny, too. She’s good at the wry deadpan thing.

Y’know, the point of me uploading the video previously wasn’t necessarily to GIVE sex advice, but to give advice on how we, as a community, might go about making our community a more inviting one to women.  But, a lot of you just have no interest in that (headshake)… you just wanted the sex advice.  So there it is, my advice to you is to buy one of those really expensive dolls, and… fuck that!  (smile)  So I hope that helps.  Thank you again to everybody who’s commented.  I haven’t really read any of them, in the past, uh, few weeks, but hey!  Keep it up, because you seem to… You seem to really enjoy it.  (warm smile) So, thanks.

Judith Martin herself couldn’t have done it better.