Uhh … and some “lad lit.” Sue me. I like fluff.

So I was reading this article in People magazine about Jennifer Aniston — I’m sorry, “Jen” — and I noticed in one of the photos of her at Sundance that her next movie, Friends With Money, is directed by Nicole Holofcener, whom I adore. Ah. Dore. She’s the one did Lovely and Amazing and Walking and Talking, both featuring the stellar Catherine Keener.

So suddenly I’m paying a lot more attention to “Jen“‘s new movie.

Oooh! And Jon Stewart [who I would totally marry if bigamy weren’t such a no-no] had a baby! With his actual wife. Awww.

OK. Now I’m going to go read Scientific American. Did you know they have a blog? I need to offset all this shiny celebrity with … *reading* … new theories on relativity. Spacetime as a liquid? Sweet!

From LA Times’ “calendarlive” section:

Up The Corporate Ladder
The iPod helps turn the fortunes for “The Office,” which is becoming a hit for NBC.

… “The Office” has, over the last few weeks, turned into a ray of hope for the fourth-ranked network. Since the start of this year, its average ratings have jumped 69%, to 9.1 million total viewers, compared with last spring, according to figures from Nielsen Media Research. What’s more, the series is catching on among the affluent young-adult viewers who’ve made up the core of NBC’s audience for decades.

Come on, affluent young adult viewers, keep it up! We must never, ever let this show get canceled.

Ever.

I … I need Jim Halpert in my life.

P.S. Office Quotes

P.P.S. You know I’m talking about the U.S. version.

Via mamazine, a San Francisco Chronicle piece on the flimsy data that form the slippery, wiggly backbone of lifestyle trend stories in the media [particularly the New York Times]. You know, the ones that say an alarming number of career women are “opting out” and staying at home, or that your chances of getting married and having kids after 35 are about the same as winning the lottery.

We shouldn’t be surprised that some reporters go for soundbyte over “long and complicated”, but it’s still detrimental, in my opinion, to our self-concept as a whole.

As I’ve said elsewhere, women and mothers in particular are a dreadfully easy target in American media: for mockery [Mom jeans!], for scare stories [Andrea Yates!], for broad generalizations [mommybloggers!].

I have no answers. I don’t know. But I do think I’m going to start taking a lot of stuff a lot less seriously. I tend to forget the “experts” don’t always know their heads from their asses.

Toledo Blade, AP stories.

“They accomplished what they wanted,” Sheriff Telb said of the Nazi group. “They got chaos.”

Indeed.

In my experience as a Toledo-area journalist five years or so ago, these traveling White Power groups were not much to get worked up over. A handful of Klansmen shouting from the courthouse steps; 300 professional traveling protesters shouting right back; the locals going about their business, detouring around the rallies to get to the grocery store.

I’m sad this one led to violence.

Read an interesting article in the Sun today [registration required. bugmenot90@mailinator.com, bugmenot]: Molly Shattuck, 38-year-old mother of three, wins a spot on the Ravens cheerleader squad.

It becomes even more interesting as we find out that she’s the second wife of Mayo Shattuck, CEO of Constellation energy; she’s got three beautiful children [and a nanny and a housecleaner]; she’s the “sexier” version of Martha Stewart, a SAHM who bakes bread in the morning and hand crafts floral wreaths in her down time; a socialite used to hosting parties of a hundred people in her “ginormous” house.

Part of me scoffs, of course, at a woman of her age doing something so frivolous as cheerleading, even if it is for a national team, and finding it hard to be all that awed, since she’s got hired help and an at-home gym in which to have multi-hour workouts.

But part of me is tired of scoffing at wealthy moms with hired help who decide to do something they want to do, even if it’s something I loathe or have zero interest in. Sure, I can’t imagine looking as cut as she does at 38, after birthing and nursing three children [or fuck, at my age after one]. But my lower-class jealousy, laziness and apathy is no reason not to say, “Hey, good on you, Molly Shattuck. You decided you wanted to do it, and you made it happen.”

Who am I to judge? Nobody. To each mom her own.