The web is *on* today! Here’s Dana Stevens at Slate reviewing the latest rom-com black cat to cross her path:
The Back-up Plan (CBS Films), with Jennifer Lopez as a would-be single mother surprised by love, is by any reasonable standard a bad movie: predictably scripted, sentimental, with laughs that rarely rise above a gentle sitcom chuckle. But at least it’s not reprehensible, misogynistic, or cynical, and the lead couple isn’t made up of a shrill female narcissist and a proudly slovenly male lug. I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend this movie, but if you were tied down and forced to watch it, you wouldn’t necessarily have to chew off your own leg to get away.
Damning with faint praise has become an internet art form.
And here’s the Washington Post on the porn scandal rocking the SEC:
In one instance, a regional office staff account admitted viewing pornography on his office computer and on his SEC-issued laptop while on official government travel. Another staff account received nearly 1,800 access denials for pornography Web sites in a two-week period and had more than 600 images saved on her laptop’s hard drive, the report said.
A senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington admitted he sometimes spent as much as eight hours viewing pornography from his office computer, according to the report. The attorney’s computer ran out of space for the downloaded images, so he started storing them on CDs and DVDs that he stored in his office.
I do not envy the cleaning lady in that office. In fact: For the love of god! Will someone please think of the cleaning ladies?
Leaving aside the fact that these folks were fiddling with themselves while Rome burned, I just don’t understand the appeal of porn in an office setting. Isn’t the office the least titillating place on earth? I mean, we’re talking about federal government buildings, not Sterling Cooper.* And did these lawyers signal to each other not to interrupt their marathon sessions of self-love? Did they put socks on doorknobs, or what?
Lastly, the Internets provide us with this self-glorifying thread at Shapely Prose, where Kate-fucking-Harding encourages everyone to brag about why they’re awesome. The comments have been brightening my mood for an hour already like bloggy Windex. Thanks, folks!
*My friend Nomi suggests that offices are unsexy to me because I *don’t* watch porn on my computer, which is a cause-and-effect I had not considered.
i think PORN is sort of unsexy, so what does that say about me? …not sure that people watch porn out of any actual sexual impulse but boredom, morbid fascination, and the insatiable pull of a weird commodity culture. which is exactly what the SEC is all about?
I think porn is unsexy too, on the whole, but then, I'm not its target audience. (Which is not to say I'm a prude: "It's a myth about feminists that we don't enjoy sex. Sex can be a natural, zesty enterprise." — Maude Lebowski.)
You raise a good point. I tend to forget how much sex is about power, and the fact that it's a taboo thing to look at on a work computer I guess makes it more exciting. Especially because it gives you, the government lawyer, a rather literal way of saying, "Fuck you, Uncle Sam."