Jackie Danicki

I don’t get much time to blog, but I do go through the non-work feeds in my RSS aggregator a couple of times each week. I must get more disciplined about clearing out my Newsgator clippings, but in the meantime, here are a few great things that you may have missed this week:

Let the legalisation of prostitution commence - please? As Perry de Havilland - whose Revenge is a reasonable motivation is also spot-on - writes: To recycle a well known quote: prostitution combines free enterprise with sex. Which one are you against?

Alex Singleton hits the nail so squarely on the head with his piece on the true nature of globalisation that it should be required reading for every person who signs up to efforts like Make Poverty History because, gee, how could it possibly be harmful?

Hillary Johnson, my partner in crime on our makeup blog, started a new blog this week: Does My Ass Look Fat in These Pants? It has to be seen to be believed. Anyway, this led to Nancy relating this anecdote about how to respond to public rejection:

[M]y buddy Dario, a number of years ago, was at a bar when a buddy of his noticed a tall, leggy blond.
“Excuse me,” said the buddy. “Would you like to dance?”
The blond looked the guy up and down. “Uh, sorry, I don’t think so,” she said, and gave her girlfriend the eyeroll.
“Um, I don’t think you heard me,” the guy told her. “I said, ‘Your ass looks fat in those pants.’ “

Speaking of Nancy, she is re-posting all of the vanished posts from her old blog, which are just a pleasure to read. It’s basically a memoir in blog format, and as Nancy has led such an interesting life, it’s a memoir I am thrilled to have the chance to re-read. The latest post is about when Nancy and Hillary (yes, my Hillary - she was Nancy’s first, back when I was still in high school) were sharing an office:

It was spring 1995. Hillary and I both had columns at Buzz, and were also writing for the Times. She was also passing on to me stories/venues she’d outgrown, including for a magazine called Sassy, where I became a contributing editor in something like three weeks, and for which I was writing so many pieces I needed two pen names, for squeamy teen-fare like, “I Had an Affair With my Teacher,” ostensibly written by a seventeen-year-old, and a monthly series called “50 Questions About…” The last one was “50 Questions About Masturbation” (Hillary’s question: Do animals masturbate?), which my editor thought a great public service but which the powers-that-be at Petersen, which published Guns & Ammo as well as Sassy, became apoplectic over. The editor was soon fired, and I was out of a gig.

Sassy was my bible as a teenager (before I realised how it was poisoning my mind with preschool-level politics), so you can imagine how thrilled I was, when Nancy and I became friends, to find out about her time there. The other girls at school thought Sassy was nerdy and weird, and they were into Cosmopolitan, which I also read as it was passed around English class. Nancy writes:

Every woman writer I know has a horror story about Cosmopolitan–the nineteen edits, the checks that never come, the smarmy, supercilious editors. Why are women’s magazines in particular so hellish? Because the offices are full of women; women who really and actually care about Kate Hudson’s maternity fashions and who contemplate Botox at 28 but admit only to 25 because they’re not yet married, boo hoo hoo, and did you see her ass? my god you can see the cellulite right through the fabric… oh hi! You’re crazy, you didn’t gain an ounce! Kiss! Women who all start to ovulate at the same time in the same overheated offices and work late to get ahead to make money so they can afford $950 Narciso Rodriguez suede boots which will be ruined during the first big slush in New York, boo hoo hoo, but it’s okay, because Coolie slippers are the new must lust.

There’s also stuff about the time Nancy spent with John Wayne Gacy - while Gacy was on Death Row. Like I said, interesting life. I’m lucky it has intersected mine in such a lovely way.

Filed under: Arts, Business, Friends, Life, Magazines, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend