CatherineRhodes.com

I was flipping through a magazine and saw a photo of Madonna at the Venice Film Festival, and stared in horror at her face. She looks dreadful, barely recognizable. She has what cosmetologists call “pillow face” from overuse of injectibles like Botox, Juvederm, collagen. The swelling also comes from laser treatments and other “work” done.

While I’m no purist about beauty treatments, not by a long shot, there was something about these pictures that made me sad. I came of age in the early ‘80s when Madonna ruled. For a repressed Mormon girl new to the big city, the singer’s confidence and individuality were an inspiration.

Around 1983, nude photographs of Madonna were rumored to exist and were going to be sold to Playboy and Penthouse. Turns out she had posed nude at an art school and someone had taken pictures. They obviously decided to cash in on the snaps when she became famous. This was before the Internet, before you could easily see nudity, and during a time when images of stars — especially in compromising positions — were tightly controlled.

Then she did something amazing: she shrugged it off. “Posing nude was something I did when I was young. I needed the money. So what?” They were published, people bought the magazines, but because of her super-confident handling of the event, there was no scandal.

So you would think Madonna is the kind of person who would just kick expectations about aging right in the groin. “I’m 53, I have wrinkles that are evidence of a life lived at full-tilt, so what?” So much better than pillow face.

It’s one of those depressing stories over at Kos today shows in a microcosm exactly what is wrong with our value structure in this country.

The story is how scientists doing cutting-edge research in particle physics are abandoning the effort because they cannot find the $35 million to keep their telescope operating. By contrast, this is where the money is spent:

In the first three months of this fiscal year, the war in Afghanistan alone cost $4.3 billion a month. Which comes out to nearly $139 million a day. Which comes out to over $5.75 million an hour. Which means we’ve been spending more on the war in Afghanistan just over every six hours than is needed to continue searching for the most coveted particle in high-energy physics. For a year. Does this sound like a nation looking toward the future, or a nation in decline?

My trophy wife upholds family values

Conservative radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh, 59, is taking a fourth stab at marriage with a weekend wedding to Kathryn Rogers, 33, an events coordinator 26 years his junior… and will presumably continue to crusade against gay marriage in defense of the sanctity of traditional marriage without even sensing the irony

This brilliant piece of writing from Joe Klein over at Time.com.

Sean Hannity called the spill “Obama’s Katrina,” but it was actually George W. Bush’s second Katrina. Vice President Dick Cheney, fresh from his days at Halliburton, had presided over the weakening of drilling regulations, including the exclusion of remote-shut-off switches (commonly used in the North Sea oil fields), which might have prevented the disaster.

The Bush Administration’s petro-bias and antigovernment sensibility soiled the Minerals Management Service (MMS), the agency charged with regulating offshore drilling. Indeed, the MMS soon emerged as a caricature of bureaucratic lassitude and corruption. A 2008 report found that the agency’s regulators were taking gifts from, and having sex with the employees of, the companies they were supposed to be monitoring.

Another report, about MMS activities from 2005 to 2007, will show, among many other things, that MMS staffers allowed oil companies to fill out their own inspection reports in pencil, which were then committed to ink by stenographic MMS regulators. Other studies found that the MMS was remarkably, perhaps criminally, lax in collecting the royalties due the government for the right to extract oil from public lands, nor was it fulfilling its rig-inspection responsibilities. The encyclopedic catalog of the agency’s sleaziness boggles the mind.

They have 131,427 followers

Faced with a travesty of these proportions, the best volley back is always a satirical Twitter page. Behold, the power of 140 characters. Sample posts from @BPGlobal_PR:

Safety is our primary concern. Well, profits, then safety. Oh, no- profits, image, then safety, but still- it’s right up there.

Words can not express how sorry we are. So we are going to stop apologizing and just give our investors 10 billion dollars. 

Site of next Winter Olympics

One of my readers watched video from a former post where I referred to people as stupid when the proper word should have been ignorant. Sure there’s a semantic difference but in some ways the two are interchangeable. In my experience, people who are stupid don’t care that they’re ignorant. In fact, they’re gleeful about it, like the teabaggers who are proud to be anti-academic. People who are smart want to educate themselves and fill their brains with knowledge. Just as an athlete is compelled to move, a smart person is driven to feed her intellect, to express ideas.

As for people who are ignorant and/or stupid, the examples abound. Stuck in traffic, I flicked through the radio dials and came upon a major Los Angeles station doing a quiz show segment. The question was “What country has hosted the winter Olympics that is not in North America or Europe?” One of the disc jockeys rang his buzzer and said, “Canada.” That was obviously wrong. Then the guest participant, a listener, buzzed in. Her answer: Bangladesh. I am not making this up. (PS: The answer they were looking for was Japan.)

Thanks to Amy Wilentz for the passalong on this one.