[LINK] Anthony Weiner links: Sex and the Internet and queer history

Anthony Weiner photo scandal

At Salon, Thomas Rogers asked an obvious question: "How would Weiner do on Grindr?"

We uploaded Weiner's shirtless shot to a phone, and logged on in midtown Manhattan. Almost immediately, men started sending him messages. "More pics," one 31-year-old man, wearing an oversized baseball cap and standing on a beach, asked immediately. When Weiner responded with the image of himself posing with his cats, and then the picture of his bulging gray briefs, the man answered by asking Weiner's age, and sending a shirtless photo of himself in his underpants.

Over the course of the next 24 hours, Weiner's Grindr profile received six more messages from people who were intrigued and interested in potentially meeting up. Their entreaties responded from a straightforward "hey handsome" to "where you at?" to a man sending a picture of himself upside down on a trapeze.

So why are gay men so much more receptive to these kinds of photos than straight women? It might be because men are simply more turned on by visual cues than women. (A point made by Cindy Meston in this interview with Tracy Clark-Flory.) It might be because gay male culture has always had a much greater emphasis on casual sex than the straight world, and if you're going to hook up with someone and never talk again, you're probably going to be more interested in what his chest looks like than how he feels about current events like, say, Anthony Weiner. Throughout much of gay history, men were only able to connect through furtive glances, behavior that remains firmly ingrained in the way we interact.

Ironically, one could actually also argue that Weiner's conspicuously hairless, gym-built torso is also the curious end result of this particular aspect of gay culture. The obsession with hyper-muscular torsos that emerged in gay culture in the 1980s helped foster a widespread obsession with the body that fed the metrosexual craze of the 1990s. Weiner's carefully sculpted, quite possibly waxed, torso belies a male vanity that would not have been acceptable before gay men managed to convince straight men that it was a good idea to spend $200 a month on a gym membership and go to a tanning salon.

Slate's Farjad Manhoo, meanwhile, enunciates "Weiner's Law": "The Web makes it easier than ever to cheat—and easier than ever for cheaters to get caught."

Is it possible to send out photos of your body parts in a secure fashion, such that they're viewable only by the many, many objects of your affection but not the public at large? More generally, how can you—whether you're a Democratic congressman from New York, a Republican congressman from New York, a pro golfer, or an NFL quarterback—set up a liaison online without getting caught?

Short answer: You can't. The Internet was built for sharing, and if you send pictures, videos, or text to one person, you might as well cc: Andrew Breitbart. This is the paradox of the Internet-abetted illicit hook-up. Digital technology has made setting up a secret relationship easier than ever before. You can find someone to love on Craigslist, use your cellphone to snap and send her photographic evidence of your deep feelings, and then log on to Hotels.com to book a place to meet. Best of all, you can do it all from the privacy of your home or congressional office, all with your wife in the next room.

The trouble is, all these tools will record a trail of your misdeeds—there's your browser history, your phone's archive of photos and text messages, your damning e-mail inbox. If you're careful, you can minimize the danger that any of this stuff will leak. But being careful is inconvenient, and it's likely a turn-off to your paramours. Plus, however careful you are, you'll never eliminate the chance of getting busted. Call it Weiner's Law: As the volume of your X-rated tweets increases, the probability of your genitalia ending up on TMZ approaches 1.

[URBAN NOTE] "Cop unmasked: Meet Const. Glenn Weddell, the officer ID'd in G20 assault"

The Toronto Star can do a better job of identifying apparent miscreant police officers than the police can. I wonder why.

Police Const. Glenn Weddell has been identified as the officer who allegedly slammed Dorian Barton with a riot shield and hit him with a baton during the G20, the Toronto Star has learned.

Weddell is the subject officer at the centre of a Special Investigations Unit probe, which in turn is at the heart of a public bickering match between Toronto police and the civilian agency charged with overseeing them.

Investigators have asked 11 witness officers to identify the colleague accused of beating Barton during last June’s G20 summit. Eight of them were within the immediate vicinity of Barton’s violent takedown; one of them was also the officer’s roommate during the summit, according to the SIU.

None of the officers were able to offer a positive identification, leading many critics to suggest a “blue wall of silence” was at play.

“I don’t know if they’re telling the truth or not,” Ian Scott, head of the SIU, told the Star last month. “I really don’t know.”

On Thursday morning, a Star reporter approached Weddell outside his home with a large photograph of the officer under scrutiny in Barton’s case and asked: “Is this you?”

“I have nothing to say,” Weddell replied several times. When asked whether he could confirm that the officer in the photograph was him, he said: “I said I’m not saying anything. Am I clear?”

Weddell works out of 11 Division in the city’s west end, according to a desk officer there. The badge number listed on his voice mail is 99944.

Barton’s case has been opened three times since last June.

The SIU has never had enough information to identify the officer in question — even after bystander Andrew Wallace came forward with pictures of the incident.

[. . .]

In late January, police provided the SIU with the name of a subject officer. Police spokesman Mark Pugash said police zoomed in on the badge number in Wallace’s photograph in order to identify the officer.

For their part, the SIU said they couldn’t get that information using their own investigative technology.

[LINK] "Giant Squid Could Become Ocean’s Panda Bear"

It's a no-brainer--forgive the joke--that the giant squid, so very alien and rather bright and notably large--to make the giant squid a mascot for world ocean conservation.



And no, it's not only because we need to placate our future masters.

The WWF’s iconic panda logo has long been associated with the preservation of endangered species, and it’s one of the most instantly recognisable logos of a global charity. As a result, you can argue that it’s directly contributed to conservation efforts for land-based species to an enormous degree.

But what about the oceans? 75 percent of the planet is oceans, and 92 percent of species on Earth inhabit those oceans. Of those species, however, only a precious few have ever garnered much attention from a concerned public — dolphins, whales, seals, and coral, of which three are mammals. Invertebrates, which account for 90 percent of known species, get very little attention.

So a team led by Ángel Guerraa have put together a research paper proposing that the giant squid become the emblem of ocean conservation, for a number of reasons. Firstly, the creatures fascinate the public. Amazon.co.uk returns nearly 3,000 results for giant squid, and Google News has 127 stories about the creature from the past month.

Then there’s the species’ ability to reflect key concerns facing ocean ecosystems — overfishing, pollution and climate change. Almost a third of all records of giant squid originate when one gets caught by a deep-sea fishing trawler, and the frequency of such finds has increased notably since the expansion of deep-sea trawler fisheries. Similarly, due to their long lives they accumulate toxins from pollution, and mass beachings have been linked to underwater surveys using compressed air guns generating low-frequency sound pollution.

Climate change is a particular issue for the creatures for two reasons. Firstly, like other cephalopods, giant squid have calcium carbonate structures inside their bodies, making ocean acidification a problem as it’d begin to dissolve those structures. Secondly, giant squid are limited to the colder areas of the ocean due to their energy requirements and oxygen needs. A warmer ocean means fewer [habitable] areas for giant squid.

So for these reasons, Guerraa et al argue that the giant squid can represent concerns for a number of vulnerable ocean ecosystems. Sure, it might not be quite as cuddly as a panda, but it’s iconic enough, and there’s enough interest from the public in the species for it to be adopted as an emblem of ocean conservation.

[URBAN NOTE] "Nature gets angry with Toronto (pics and video)"

blogTO features a great post featuring video and photos taken by different people during last night's surprise massive storm. This one is a favourite of mine.



All are recommended.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On nostalgia for Communist Czechoslovakia

Nostalgia for the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic? That’s what the Economist blog Eastern approaches claimed to describe in a recent post.

A survey conducted in 2009 to mark the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution found that most Czechs (68%) and Slovaks (53%) thought that capitalist democracy had given them more than the “real-existing socialism” they enjoyed before 1989.

But remnants of the old ways are still to be found everywhere. Czechs and Slovaks continue to nibble on Horalky wafers and wash dishes with JAR detergent. Why? In some cases, simply because they are used to them.

Other communist-era products have reinvented themselves with shiny labels and catchy slogans. A few have even become chic enough to appeal to youngsters with little or no memory of their previous incarnations. Kofola, once a socialist substitute for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, is a star among Czech brands on Facebook. It beats Pilsner Urquell, the showcase Czech beer, by some 80,000 supporters.

Also sought after are “jarmilky”: ballerina-style gym shoes. Since the 1960s, girls and women have worn them to sports events, including the mass athletic meets known as “spartakiady”. These days, scores of websites offer varities of jarmilky, for about €8. For some young women, of an " emo" bent, they have acquired a certain cachet.

Altogether weirder is the revival of the collective package holiday. In the pre-'89 days the Communist Revolutionary Trade Union Movement (ROH) used to offer workers a break as a reward for a year’s toil in offices, factories or mines. Today, in return for a modest sum, Czechs and Slovaks wishing to rekindle those memories can stay at the gloomy Hotel Morava in the High Tatra mountains, featuring a bust of Stalin in the lobby. There they will be able to enjoy such attractions as a 7am open-air exercise workout to revolutionary songs or a mock May Day parade. This year the hotel will accept four groups of holidaying masochists throughout the summer months.

The phenomenon of Ostalgie is something I've touched on when I've blogged here about East Germany, as many East Germans feel belittled and disenfranchised by the scale of the West German's takeover of what's now a peripheralized area. In my posts about the former Yugoslavia I've sometimes mentioned ”Yugo-nostalgia”, the nostalgia for a relatively successful and pluralistic and globalized Yugoslavia now manifested in the idea of a "Yugosphere" that groups together the various Yugoslav successor states in as tight (and loose) a cultural and economic and geographic zoning as they liked. So, perhaps, why not a nostalgia for a Czechoslovakia that was as relatively high-achieving as, well, East German and Yugoslavian neighbours which were each as accomplished in their own ways?

It's mostly a protest nostalgia.

Analysts insist that this is nostalgia for youth rather than for communism. But Oľga Gyárfášová, a sociologist at IVO, a Slovak think-tank, describes the phenomenon as "retroactive optimism", suggesting that some selective memory may be at play. The fear is that reducing four decades of dictatorship to a bunch of retro fads risks distracting the younger generation from the darker aspects of life under a system of which they have few or no direct memories.

In 2009 Václav Havel, the hero of liberation in 1989 and the first president of post-communist Czechoslovakia, said that it might take decades for central and east European societies to come to terms with the trauma of their communist pasts.

Prague and Bratislava seem to be aware of that. “Strictly Confidential”, Slovakia's first comprehensive exhibition on the methods of the secret police, has just opened in the Slovak National Museum. The government has also been contemplating a new museum of communism. The Czechs have taken the path of education through entertainment: last year “ID Card”, a film that mapped the adolescence of four boys in the 1970s era of "normalisation", achieved stunning box-office success in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The specific factors relating to East German and Yugoslav nostalgia for the Communist past don't operate in Czechoslovakia's successors as much, since Communism ended in Czechoslovakia without the successor states being taken over by larger neighbours or wrecked by warfare, instead making comparatively uneventful transitions to normality as successful high-income European democracies.

As much, mind: the poll quoted above shows that very large proportions of Czechs and Slovaks--a near-majority of the latter--felt they lost from the transitions from Communism.