Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

10 Apr 2009, 9:58 a.m.

The Latter Link Includes Dick Van Dyke Non-Pun Joke

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2009 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Today, looking at the tax documents, I saw Leonard's name next to mine and felt awe again that we're really seriously married. Mega-married! proclaimed Leonard. We conjectured that maybe the government should let same-sex couples get married but reserve MEGAMARRIAGE for heterosexuals couples. This is in keeping with John Holbo's thinking. By the way, here's a great comment in that thread that explains the rhetoric of same-sex marriages "contaminating" the shared marriagestuff pool.

And one of my new favorite blogs does a good Sarah Haskins impression in taking apart advertising narratives for laughs:

Oh, and do complete the circle of gender obliviousness, let's not forget the countless "home security service" ads pitched, hard, on men's programming about how your hot-looking but down-home wife is by herself in your big house with all the glass windows and no curtains and she's lovingly wiping invisible crumbs off the some-kind-of-expensive-substance counter and there's a man behind her, and because she's cleaning the kitchen with no lights on it's too dark for her to notice, and he's got ropes, or an ax, and he's really big and the music's getting all dumm-dumm-doom-y... and... oh if only you had locked her inside a secure perimeter before you went... wherever it was in that big SUV and/or first-class plane seat and you keep dialing and dialing to warn her about the big guy who's right behind her right now only she's deaf and... and...

And meanwhile on average women are safer when there aren't men there to protect them. Because ... the number of 911 calls about home-invasion injuries is dwarfed by the number of plain old-fashioned domestic violence calls.