THE GURGLING COD

A heartwarming story of an old rich guy divorcing his wife and marrying a much younger employee!

Kittens. Puppies. Sunsets. The knowledge that if you are rich and powerful enough, you can trade your wife in on a newer model. I am not tight w/ Chris Kimball. His magazine comes to our house, in spite of our best efforts. Perhaps wife #1 was a terrible harridan, and Kimball is grabbing a few years of happiness before he dies. But to present the story of a wealthy boss marrying a much younger employee as if it were the feel-good story of the summer is a head scratcher:

In the fall of 2010, when he officially separated from his wife, Ms. Baldino said that the boundary that had kept her from thinking of him as something other than a friend suddenly vanished. “It was like, ‘Whoa, boom!’ ” she said. “It was very sudden that I understood how I felt. I was completely overwhelmed.”

Friends advised her to wait for him to come to her, but in January 2011, after several months of doing so, her heart, she said, felt as if it were going to explode. She couldn’t hold back anymore.

“It wasn’t planned,” she said. “One day at the office, I called a meeting with him, and I said, ‘Um, you might want to fire me, but I love you.’ ”

He did not want to fire her. He said he loved her, too. His divorce became final in December 2012, and he proposed the following March.

One wonders if Ms. Baldino will slide into the role of wife #1 in future entertaining w/ the Kimballs pieces, like this, this, and this. People get married and people get divorced, but it's an odd wedding for the Times to highlight, and it's tacky to use your wife as a prop right before you get separated. In any event suggest celebrating the day with some potato salad. Play us off, George Michael! 

 

The Paula Deen affair - what happened on Saturday?

One funny thing about the aforementioned Severson Lady & Sons reax story. The lede: 

SAVANNAH, Ga. — The line of Paula Deen fans waiting for her restaurant here to open grew throughout the hot, muggy morning Saturday.

And there is a picture, see left. Meanwhile, on the same day, the folks at Eater ran this lede: 

The media firestorm continues to swirl around the now ex-Food Network personality Paula Deen, and the usually bustling scene at her Savannah, GA restaurant The Lady and Sons is nonexistent. Eater sent a photographer to scope it out, and above and below are photos from mid-day on Saturday. It is a ghost town.

And a picture, see right. Did folks suddenly have a crisis of conscience around lunch and decide to eat elsewhere (there are better restaurants in Savannah than Lady & Sons, but it has an Ozzie Cansecoesque relation to its sibling up the coast). Something seems not to add up. Were both pictures taken on the same day? 

The Paula Deen affair - some tips for journalists, esp @kimseverson

Speaking of  Paula Deen, the NYT reaction piece was a disaster. The way Kim Severson chose to cover this story was to interview people waiting to get in to Lady & Sons. On its own, this is a sort of interesting sidebar, but not the way to, you know, gauge a broad response to the Deen kerfuffle. It is tantamount to covering PEDs in baseball by hopping in a boat and interviewing the kayakers in McCovey cove hoping to snare one of Barry Bond's taters. 

And the Times social media crew did Severson no favors. The headline in the paper was 

On social media, it became 

Because the line outside Lady & Sons = the South. I'm no Foghorn Leghorn, but there is more to understanding the South than interviewing obese Ohioans waiting to get at the fake Southern buffet.

The Paula Deen Affair- some tips for white people.

So when one of America's most notoriously bad companies fires you because you are bad for the brand, you are having a bad week. The Cod is on the record as not being a fan of Paula Deen, or of Smithfield, for that matter, but there is much that is troubling. To be sure, using the word "nigger" as she did is hurtful, as is the idea of the plantation-themed wedding. But this is her undoing? Not her partnership w/ Smithfield in the first place, not her attempt to monetize her own diabetes, not her entire persona as a grotesque charicature of something that does not exist? (It's always seemed to me that the essence of Deen's success was a perverse kind of minstrelsy, where she was a white, and thus acceptable version of Aunt Jemima, but I digress.) 

However, the national media has done a bad job with this story, says me. I may be more aware of this than some, but having been raised on one place famous for its own brand of racism (Boston), and living as an adult in another place famous for its different brand of racism (South Carolina), I am often struck by how easy it is for a certain kind of non-southerner to identify racism as a southern phenomenon. Park Slope Mom can forget that there's only one Black kid at little Hermione's pre-school, because there are no cotton fields in Prospect Park. Boston Food Blogger can tut-tut at Deen's language and not notice that the only Black folks he sees when he dines are washing dishes. And so on. 

If you don't live there, and you don't say that word, the thinking goes, then you are not part of the problem, no matter what percentage of Black men are incarerated in your home state. Allow me to suggest humbly that not using that word is great, but it is the beginning, and not the end, of what white folks need to do. 

Indulge me in a diagram: 

	People who say “nigger. “	People who don’t.
Racists	A	B
Non-Racists	C	D

There are certainly folks who fit into category A, and also category D (we will ignore for the moment the tricky business of defining "non-racist"). But allow me to suggest that we all meet plenty of category B people every day, and I can even think of a few folks who might claim category C. 

 

Worlds collide... Or Gael Greene needs a free personal assistant.

So the Cod saw where Gael Greene is advertising for an intern. The burgeoning culture of internships is problematic, and as internship coordinator for my dept at my day job,* the Cod's corporeal host is part of the problem. The tricky thing with internships is that they are working for no pay, so there must be some other compensation, or it's, you know, slavery. Typically what interns get instead of money is college credit. However, college credits cost money, so in addition to working for free, the student is often on the hook for summer tuition. 

In these desperate times, folks will make that bargain, even after graduation -- I've had students mad I did not sign off on "custodial internships" at Disney World, and I've read horror stories about retailers hiring "merchandising interns." However, the GG internship seems to mark a slide down a slippery slope.  A good bit of what an intern gets for his or her labor is a claim on an institution -- a magazine, a website, a lawfirm, etc. The idea, not surprisingly, is that this experience will create advantages on a real employment market in the future. However, being able to say one did an internship at Us, or a university press, or Eater, or something like that, seems like a tanglible Thing that an intern can draw on. Working with an individual, less so. To her credit, GG is offering $40/day for expenses. On the downside, working for an entity that is, essentially, an individual person, seems harder to leverage as employment-worthy experience. I'm sure ol' Gael would be full of stories, but I worry that individuals less famous and fabulous than Gael Greene might follow suit, and a serf from Vassar might become the next must have thing for rich folks in NYC.  

*Do you need an intern? If you have a worthwhile experience, I have a line on smart young folks w/ good manners who can write the doors off your local talent. 

Would you like a sticker that says "ENTERING BOSTON EST. 1630 THIS IS OUR FUCKING CITY"? Here is how:

So these stickers exist. They are real, thanks to some peerless photoshopping from Penny Pascal.  

Here are the remarks by Mr. David Ortiz that inspired me to make these:

“All right, Boston: 
This jersey that we wear today, it doesn’t say Red Sox. It says Boston. We want to thank you, Mayor Menino, Governor Patrick, the whole police department for the great job that they did this past week. This is our fucking city. And nobody gonna dictate our freedom. Stay strong.”

-David Ortiz, April 20, 2013

The Gurgling Cod is not selling these, but is happy to send one to you. You can twitter at thegurglingcod, or email fesser at the gmail dot com, or comment below. Give me an address, via Twitter @thegurglingco or at fesser at gmail and I'll send you a sticker or two. All I ask is that you tell me what you are doing to help. In times of crisis, helpers are important. You might be a first responder. You might keep people fed. You might have staffed a strategic Dunkin Donuts during the lockdown. You might make a point of sleeping with first responders. You might be a teacher or a bartender with jittery patrons. You might have fed distraught runners burritos. You might have sent some money to a charity. You might have explained to someone that these clowns have as much to do w/ Islam as those funeral picketing mofos have to do with Jesus. You might have kept your kids from being too scared. You could do something positive, like, right now, and then email me for a sticker with a cuss on it. Just holler, and let me know. 

Guiteau Monday - Mormon cookbook ed.

Heavy hearts around here, but the Guiteau Monday hits don't stop. Anne Romney, Mitt's wife, is writing a cookbook. Write your own jokes.