Lance Armstrong Sucks at Not Being an Asshole

Here's my latest post on Cheating Culture, about Lance Armstrong and steroids. Armstrong is one of those athletes who has accomplished these great feats-beating cancer, dominating the Tour De France--while being a jerk, i.e., getting people around him to tell lies that go on for decades, and smearing the reputation of anyone who accuses him of using banned substances. Successful athletes have been held up as paragons of virtue for so long that it's hard to imagine that they are vile people in private. But clearly Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Brett Favre, Ben Roethlisberger et al. are jerks at best and deeply immoral at worst. It's as if having a lot of money and fame and power come to you for playing a game in your mid-20's is somehow a bad thing. Read more!

Abe Sauer's Great Piece on Why Christian Aid in Haiti Sucks

I don’t read everything that appears on the internet, but surely Abe Sauer’s long, exhaustively-researched hit piece on Christian aid groups in Haiti illegally using government money from USAID to proselytize to the voodoo-practicing Haitians before giving them aid was just about the best thing that flashed across anyone’s monitor last week. The law states that the US government can give money to Christian groups as long as they in turn spend that money caring for the needy and don’t thrust Bibles into native hands at the same time they, the Christian groups, are bandaging up those hands. Because, y’know, if the US formally funded groups devoted spreading evangelical Christianity in the third world it would violate the Constitution in a pretty direct way.

I don’t have anything really to say about the piece itself, other than you should go read it, right now, the whole thing, but I will say that whenever the religious right (and the organizations mentioned in this article are undoubtedly right-wing; they have Sarah Palin’s support and some are overseen by the Graham family) gets the government to bend backwards to appease their agenda, I get visibly angry. Not at the Christians, necessarily, but at the atheists, agnostics, and others that generally oppose the Christians’ goals but aren’t motivated or organized enough to stop them.

Look, I know the United States is a Christian nation--not “founded on Christian principles,” but clearly, dominated demographically by Christians. Furthermore, a lot of these Christians have no problem just standing up and yelling, “Stop teaching my children evolution!” or “Put the Ten Commandments outside of this motherfucking courthouse!” (They don’t say “motherfucking,” but the tone is close enough.) A lot of people who disagree with these statements—which are fucking insane, by the way—are more or less happy to ignore the Christians, or laugh them off, and basically go about their merry, non-spiritual business as organisms.

The problem with this is that the Christians win this way. As an atheist, I’m having more and more of a problem with that.

For years, I didn’t want to argue with any Christians, or be vocal about my non-belief. Because no one wants to listen to that smug asshole atheist yammering about the inconsistencies in the Bible and treating Christians like brain-damaged infants. But there’s a difference between letting people believe what they believe and having a situation where a US-funded aid group refuses to give a job to a Haitian man until he converts to Christianity. That shit is not okay, and it’s not anti-Christian to say so. We don’t have to fruitlessly debate the existence of God to point out that turning USAID into a Christian organization is terrible foreign policy.

Of course, some Christians believe that it is their duty to convert the unbelievers, especially the brown, downtrodden unbelievers who have just gone through a disaster and are emotionally fragile and have more immediate problems than a lack of Jesus, such as, their entire families are dead and they have no food or medicine. If you’re one of those Christians that believes that telling those people about Jesus is “helping” them, fuck you. Read more!

The NCAA Sucks

I have a new post (new-ish, anyway) post on CheatingCulture.com, if any readers are getting tired of joke posts and pop culture. Politics coming soon--the 2012 Presidential News Cycle is just beginning to spin! *Vomits blood* Read more!

Why the NCAA Sucks

Hello, internet people! I have a new post on CheatingCulture.com, where I am going to be posting regularly about cheating in sports as long as cheating (or sports) exist. This in my favorite sentence from it:

"Cam hasn’t been punished for his dad’s actions (so far) because like Richard Nixon, he can claim “plausible deniability”—the NCAA forgave him, for he knew not what his father did." Read more!

Why the Anti-Drug Movement should Suck on an Exhaust Pipe and Die: Fact-Checking an Evil Pamphlet

The one subject that pretty much everyone who goes to college learns about is marijuana. Even if you’ve been sheltered from any knowledge about bongs, joints, and hemp in high school, even if you’ve never watched the Dave Chapelle Show or seen a movie Seth Rogen was involved in, by the time you graduate from (or drop out of) college you’re no doubt in possession of a lot of information about pot. You’ve probably smoked it at least once, and maybe have gone through a period when you were smoking a lot, to the point where there’s a towel permanently placed against the bottom of your dorm room door to prevent smoke from leaking out. Even if you didn’t smoke that much, you know that pot won’t kill you, it isn’t that addictive, and after the first few times you get high, it isn’t all that big of a deal. It can make you lazy, it can make you sort of boring to be around (you know this if you’re friends with stoners), and it can make terrible music sound interesting. It doesn’t make you cool, but it doesn’t kill you. After you find all of this stuff out, you either continue smoking pot or—more likely—you grow up and get a job where you can’t get high all that much, or they drug test you, and then you only smoke weed when your kids are out of the house and your old college buddies come over.

It’s easy to forget, after you grow up, all those "Drug Free America" messages that we were bombarded with as children. Remember how they told you one puff of pot would leave you dead in a ditch? Remember the “gateway drug” stuff? That time the retired cop came to your middle school and showed everyone photos of emaciated meth addicts? That stuff is still going on, and the anti-drug crusaders are just as crazy as ever. The proof of this is evident from the pamphlet, "The Truth About Marijuana," which is printed by the Foundation for a Drug-Free World.

Because I had some time to kill, I decided to do some fact-checking on some of the "truths"contained in the pamphlet. All of these are screenshots from the online version of this document, which is handed out to children at schools. I’ll start from the beginning. On page three:



That’s pretty much a commonly accepted fact. Pot is more potent now than it used to be. Is that a bad thing? On page five:


We learn that one joint equals five cigarettes. If that’s true, than the Drug Free World should applaud the increased amount of THC in marijuana, since it takes fewer joints to get you high now, and therefore fewer stoners are getting cancer. But does pot give you cancer? A major study from four years ago said no, and the study’s lead researcher is in favor of legalizing pot. And of course, you don’t have to get high by holding smoke in your lungs. You can cook using marijuana, or you can use a vaporizer to get high. Also on page five we get this embarrassing feature:


Due to bad layout design, schoolchildren will think both “White” and “Widow” are slang terms for marijuana. Actually, “White Widow” is a very potent strain, or sub-variety, of pot. And a “J” is a joint, and a “roach” is the last remnant of a joint or a blunt. None of these are synonymous with “marijuana.” Small errors, but they add up. On to page seven:


Alcohol contains only one chemical? Only if you are drinking pure ethanol, which is a good way to die. If you’re drinking beer, you’re drinking a bunch of different chemical compounds and carbohydrates, not just ethanol, duh. And while it is technically true that weed contains 400 chemicals, everything in the world is made up of many, many chemicals. Coffee has 800 chemicals in it. Does this mean you shouldn’t drink coffee? Just so you know, the 80 chemicals that are unique to Cannibis are called Cannabinoids. Pages eight and nine feature some ominous-sounding statistics. First up:


Because none of these studies are cited by name or date, it’s pretty hard to verify them. (Is that intentional?) But at least one study showed that marijuana was not a commonly-used drug among people who had to visit the emergency room. (That article is from NORML, a pot-advocacy group, so it isn’t unbiased, but still.) On the next page, we start to get to the stuff that makes my blood boil:


For that first “fact,” I could ask what percentage of people is arrested solely for possession or use of marijuana, but instead I’ll just state the obvious: Correlation does not imply causation. A large percentage of robberies is committed by black men—does that mean being a black man makes you rob people? No, and neither does marijuana make you break the law. (Although, given weed’s effects, it probably makes it more likely you’ll get caught by the police if you’re high.)

That second statistic makes sense, since people who drink or do drugs before they’re 15 are likely to become drug addicts. Don’t do drugs if you are a child—your brain is still developing and older teens and adults can take advantage of you if you get messed up. That does not mean adults shouldn’t drink or smoke pot.

Also, don’t smoke pot and drive. Being high means your reactions are slowed. But while driving stoned increases your chance of injury of death, it doesn’t come close to the dangers of drunk driving. This study notes that 2.5 percent of fatal crashes are caused by pot, but 29 percent are caused by alcohol. The two are simply not comparable.


Don’t smoke pot when you’re pregnant. That should be sort of obvious. I have no problem with this page. This page, on the other hand…


Jesus Christ, where to start? Firstly, it should be obvious that those who used cocaine used pot first. Pot is easier to find and much, much cheaper. You don’t go straight to cocaine without having used “softer” drugs. Does that prove that marijuana is a “gateway?” No. And the high you get from cocaine (or heroin, or PCP) is different enough from the marijuana high that not a whole lot of stoners go on to use those drugs as their tolerance builds. They just smoke more pot. As for the last line on the page, the one that says that joints can be dipped in PCP, is just naked fear mongering. Sure, some people sprinkled PCP on joints, but hardly anyone does that, and when you smoke a PCP joint, the problem isn’t that you smoked pot, the problem is you smoked PCP! That’s not as bad as the “testimonial” on the facing page:



Fuck. This. Assuming this is a real testimonial and not fiction, it implies that weed leads to heroin. They can’t make this claim using statistics, so they find a heroin user to make this claim. Plenty of people smoke pot and don’t become heroin addicts. Like Carl Sagan, for instance. Remember him? The famous scientist?

Finally, we get the capper:


The Foundation for a Drug-Free World is unbiased. If someone tells you marijuana is okay, they’re probably a drug dealer with a vested interest in hooking you on pot. Like the pamphlet as a whole, the logic makes sense in a vacuum—unscrupulous drug dealers looking to hook new customers would lie, wouldn’t they?

Maybe some of them would, the scumbags who sell pot to middle schoolers or the guys whole sell crack and heroin. But—take this from someone with, ahem, some “experience”—marijuana pretty much sells itself. A lot of people like getting high, and if you have good weed at good prices, you don’t need to tell a bunch of complicated lies. All you need to do, to sell weed, is to say, “Hey, I have some weed.”

But the pamphlet is right in one sense: When someone tells you some information that sounds suspect, you should look into their motives. For instance, who funds the Foundation for a Drug-Free World? Oh, right, the Scientologists. The people who tell you you have aliens in your head.

No matter the source, this pamphlet is full of lies and half-truths, and it’s targeted at children. It seems to me that honesty, intellectual rigor, and skepticism are good traits to instill in kids, especially in kids who we don’t want using drugs. But this pamphlet, along with many other anti-drug programs, teaches the opposite of those things. It tells children that marijuana leads to heroin, crime, car accidents, and cancer. It tells them they’ll be stupid and have deformed offspring if they smoke pot, and they’re supposed to accept all of that just because the Scientologists told them so. Never mind all of the movies, TV shows, and books that depict marijuana use, rightly, as being not all that bad, the pamphlet must be right, since it’s given to them by their teachers or some other important adult, right?

I hope no school is actively handing out this pamphlet, unless it’s as part of a unit on propaganda. To ask children to believe this is to lie to their faces, and the only thing you’ll end up teaching them is to not trust anything an adult says. Which, actually, might not be that bad of a lesson.
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Why Elected Officials Suck, According to Hitchens and Adams

Lovable scamp Christopher Hitchens (not pictured) wrote a column for Slate this week about how odd it is that very few of the intelligent and informed people he’s known in his long career as a public intellectual and drunk have ever though about running for political office. Many of them might do a pretty decent job running the country, but they’re put off by the insane slaughterhouse that is contemporary electoral politics. Quoth Hitch:

What normal person would consider risking their career and their family life in order to undergo the incessant barrage of intrusive questioning about every aspect of their lives since well before college? To face the constant pettifogging and chatter of Facebook and Twitter and have to boast of how many false friends they had made in a weird cyberland? And if only that was the least of it. Then comes the treadmill of fundraising and the unending tyranny of the opinion polls, which many media systems now use as a substitute for news and as a means of creating stories rather than reporting them. And, even if it "works," most of your time in Washington would be spent raising the dough to hang on to your job. No wonder that the best lack all conviction.

That reminds me of a line from another famous atheist, the late Douglas Adams, who penned this line about the paradox of government: “Those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.”

With all the media scrutiny and waves of negative publicity, in order to want to run for office you’d have to be an emotionally damaged narcissist, a delusional reformer who believes it’s possible to change the system in a meaningful way, or an out-and-out power hungry sociopath. Come election time, we’ll all be voting for candidates who are corrupt at worst, relentlessly bland at best, and most likely have something dark and twisted rattling about in their skulls.

Thankfully for us, the United States has a system that, though designed to elect people uniquely unsuited to have power, is also designed to make sure that those elected officials can’t do anything once they sit down in Washington. With massive majorities in both houses of Congress and one of their own in the White House, the Democrats managed to accomplish some reforms that—despite all the Beckian screaming about Nazis—aren’t exactly earth-shattering. Some companies were prevented from going bankrupt, some more people will have health insurance, and these modest shifts in policy will cost a lot of Democrats their jobs. The struggle for the rights of homosexuals to marry one another and join the army to get shot at (why would one want to do either? some straights ask) is proceeding in the courts, where elected officials can’t get in the way.

Considering the quality of politicians we have on hand, deciding things in the courts, where intelligent people debate with one another using a lot of big words, is probably for the best. And it’s probably for the best, too, that however many Republicans get into office this November, no one will be able to pass or repeal any legislation at all, thanks to the labyrinthine rules of the non-robot Senate.

In Douglas Adams’s universe, the problem of government is solved by turning the president into a democratically elected figurehead, someone who is “always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention from it.” The people who run the universe are a sextet of shadowy figures who in turn (spoiler!) make their decisions based on the advice of an insane autistic old man who lives alone with his cat. The system described by Adams seems sinister and despotic on its face, but it’s probably not a bad way to make policy decisions. Not worse than ours, anyway.
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Why the New Anti-Poker Law in Washington State Sucks

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court in my old state of Washington ruled that a law passed in 2006 banning online gambling was perfectly constitutional. It was a 9-0 decision, and thus a pretty easy one for the justices to make, but the ruling carried enough weight for PokerStars, a popular online poker site, to ban anyone with a Washington State IP address from playing on it.

This is the kind of news that affects maybe only a few thousand people seriously, but for professional online poker players in Washington—some of whom I know personally—this was the worst possible news. Online poker has existed in a legal gray area for some time now, but this court ruling eliminated all shades of gray; playing poker on your computer, as opposed to in a casino, is a Class C felony. If all poker sites take this ruling as seriously as PokerStars had, it will become impossible to play online poker in Washington, meaning that online poker players who rely on poker to pay the bills will have effectively lost their jobs.

The more you consider the law, the less sense it makes. There is the old argument, “gambling is evil, all evil things should be illegal,” but gambling is legal in Washington State, and not just on Indian reservations. When I lived in Seattle, you could drive just outside the city limits and play poker in a number of card rooms. This document from the Washington State Gambling Commission says, “Gambling has a history of connection to crime and corruption and as a result is strictly controlled virtually everywhere. Just because gambling occurs on the Internet doesn’t change this potential or the concern.” But surely the converse of that last sentence is true too—just because gambling occurs in a brick and mortar casino or card room doesn’t make it any less addictive or prone to corruption.

So why was this law, which deprives a bunch of people of their formerly (semi) legal income, passed in the first place?

Well, duh, it was passed because a bunch of rich casino owners wanted it to be so. When people gamble online, presumably, they aren’t gambling in a casino, and this understandably outraged the Native American tribes who run large gambling enterprises like the Tullalip Casino. These tribes have boatloads of money and they’ve invested a lot of it in the one enterprise in America guaranteed to give you a good rate of return on your investment—campaign contributions.

The sponsors of the original bill--Margarita Prentice, Karen Keiser, Daniel Kline, and Paull Shin—all received substantial contributions from groups like the “Campaign for Tribal Self-Reliance” which have close ties to the Indian casino business. The Congresspeople did what politicians always do and help out the people who helped them out and introduced the online gambling law, which was quickly passed because the other Congresspeople likely wanted contributions from the tribes to keep coming, and also because passing laws against “immoral” activities like gambling is a fun and popular thing for politicians to do. Never mind that the anti-online gambling law was bankrolled by a bunch of people who make their living off of gambling addicts and suckers, and never mind that it hurts the professional and semi-pro poker players (who are the small businessmen of the gambling world). Gambling is bad, so anti-gambling laws must be good, right?

Gambling addiction is a serious problem, yes, but gambling addicts aren’t going to stop gambling because they can’t play online. They’ll just go to the casino instead—which is of course why this bill was passed in the first place, to benefit big in-state casinos at the expense of international poker sites and the people who make money by playing on them. (Not all professional online poker players can simply switch to playing in the casinos and the card rooms—that’s a long car ride for many of them, and many card rooms don’t offer the variety of games that the online sites do.)

The truly maddening thing about this law is not that it’s an arbitrarily oppressive law passed at the request of big-money interests. It’s that this law is an example of the system working pretty much perfectly. A special interest group wanted a law to be passed, they made the necessary (and legal) donations and the politicians did more or less what those groups wanted. Everything was documented, and although there was clearly a quid pro quo exchange, no one can be said to have done anything technically unethical. Everyone cooperated, and we got a law that puts people out of work so large moneyed institutions can thrive. Good job guys.
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Why A-Rod Sucks

Alex Rodriguez, he of perhaps the lamest nickname in the world, just hit his 600th career home run. This was reported as being important because baseball people have an obsession with large round numbers. Because of this “milestone,” we are forced to face the fact that statistically, A-Rod/A-Roid/the smooth-foreheaded one is one of the best baseball players of all time. As this blogger said, “He’s up on Olympus with the rest of the gods.” Which brings up the question, what is he the god of?

The old-time baseball players have acquired a folk-hero status in American lore. Babe Ruth was a Paul Bunyan-esque figure whose appetites for home runs, liquor, and whores exceeded those of mere mortals. Ty Cobb was born in hell and likely returned there after his death. Shoeless Joe Jackson was the disgraced hero who shattered a little boy’s illusions (“Say it ain’t so,” etc.). Lou Gehrig was the Iron Horse who, alas, had to be put down. Wille Mays was the genius of center field. Mickey Mantle was an amiable bacchanalian giant who was an alcoholic back when that was okay. Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio were ciphers with perfect swings. Yogi Berra came from another planet. Mickey Rivers was insane. Carl Yastrzemski made success look like failure. Carlton Fisk pushed a foul ball fair by sheer force of will. Pete Rose had an all-consuming passion for winning, and a fatal flaw. Sandy Koufax had an arm made of rubber and took Yom Kippur off (Don Drysdale was his goyish partner). Dock Ellis pitched a perfect game on acid. Hank Aaron cranked out home run after home run like a true workman. Reggie Jackson was Mr. October. Rickey Henderson was a tower of pure ego. Who else? Ken Griffey Junior was a permanent teenager, beauty and mood swings and all. Barry Bonds hit the hell out of the ball because he seemed to hate the game. Derek Jeter is living proof that ballplayers can have an old-fashioned cool.

What can be said about A-Rod?

He started out as a kind of prodigy in Seattle, where he suffered under Griffey’s shadow. Then he left for Texas, in a decision that seemed to be based purely on economics. (Mercenaries make for lousy heroes.) The team he left set a (steroid-assisted) regular-season win record and made the playoffs a few more times, while he spent three years of his prime on a last-place team. He went to the Yankees, where he was no longer the big fish in the little pond, and got raked over the coals for underperforming in the playoffs until last year. He’s not the center of the team, and he even moved to third base out of deference to Jeter. (Would DiMaggio, Mays, or Rose show deference to anyone?) He was romantically linked to Madonna, which would have been fashionable a couple decades ago. Oh yeah, and he said he didn’t use steroids until he said he did—even if you don’t mind the steroids, you have to admit that came off as cowardly. How do you sum up that scattered career in one short sentence?

It’s not that A-Rod has no “aura,” or “mystique.” As the philosopher Curt Schilling once said, those are dancers at a strip club. A-Rod’s problem is that his narrative isn’t compelling. He’s really, really good at hitting a baseball, but what else? What stories can you tell about him? If he passes Bonds as American Home Run Champ, he still won’t be as interesting a figure as Bonds, who has the reputation of being a ‘roided-up monster who doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him, which is in some ways better than being a nonentity like A-Rod.

The stats and the three MVP trophies say A-Rod is an all-time great. But stats don’t make me care about him the way I care about, say, Jeter. Now, I don’t like the Yankees, and Jeter represents everything I don’t like about the Yankees—the apparent sense of entitlement, the clean-cut, country-club aristocrat look, the pride that, okay, maybe is deserved but still goddamned annoying. But I care about Jeter, I can muster up some dislike for Jeter, but A-Rod inspires no feeling in me. If A-Rod has ascended to Mount Olympus because he hit an arbitrary number of home runs, then he’s the God of Bland.
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Making Monday Worse: the Failure of Americans, Englishmen, and the Washington Post

Another week has arrived, and with it come a host of reasons to stay in bed with the lights off, quietly weeping. For US soccer fans, there was the 2-1 overtime loss to Ghana, which came days after maybe the most exciting goal in team history. Just when we were flapping our mouths about how this is going to be our year, how we could get to the semi-finals with wins over Ghana and Uruguay, we got dissected like a frog in an 8th-grade biology class by the Ghanaians, who played the kind of beautifully precise, technically perfect soccer in the first half that Americans have never been able to pull off for more than a minute at a time. Yeah, we—and by “we” I mean, “those 11-odd guys I have no relationship with whatsoever”—played better in the second half, but all of those missed chances will be haunting the dreams of soccer fans for four years, while non-fans like Glenn Beck and Rick Reilly mock us for caring about a sissy sport.

It could be worse—we could be English. At least we Americans can take some pride in finishing first in our group and nearly advancing to the quarter-finals. The English, on the other hand, really, really cared about the World Cup, thought their team was good enough to make a deep run, and ended up barely escaping the group stage before getting dismantled by historical rivals Germany. It's a bad sign when your fans are recapping the games and conclude by saying, “Americans will never completely understand how crap it is, most of the time, to be English. We might have cute accents and be good at cocktail parties. But we are mostly losers.”

Of course, at least the English can have cocktail parties and have a soccer team, unlike, say, Haiti, where their refugee tents would be unsuitable to host cocktail parties even if they weren't collapsing due to the wind and the rain. Everyone wants to build more permanent shelters that actually have walls and a ceiling, but the land ownership issues are “complex,” so little is getting done.

Speaking of institutional incompetence, the Washington Post has been in the news lately, this time for firing Dave Weigel, a liberal-leaning blogger who was reporting on the conservative movement. He lost his job because of some comments he made on a mass emailing list about wishing Matt Drudge would light himself on fire and Rush Limbaugh would die—which, of course, reinforced the belief among conservatives that the Post is just a bunch of sneering liberals who hate anyone to the right of Ralph Nader. Some, like Tyler Cowen, bemoaned the total lack of privacy that media figures have nowadays, while others blamed the Post for not defining what Weigel's job was supposed to be—was he supposed to offer a conservative point of view, or act as a kind of anthropologist studying the strange ways of the “Paultards,” as Weigel called them? The Post's own ombudsman noted, “His departure...raises questions about whether The Post has adequately defined the role of bloggers like Weigel. Are they neutral reporters or ideologues?”

Another question might be, are those the only two options? Couldn't a reporter who has a different point of view than the subjects he's covering make some interesting observations as long as that reporter makes his biases clear and makes an effort to withhold judgement? Clearly, the man for the job wasn't Weigel, but I'd rather see liberals reporting on conservatives, and vice versa, than Tea Partiers covering themselves. The notion of “objective” reporting is thankfully pretty much dead, but journalists who disagree with their subjects (but are willing to hear them out) can offer an interesting perspective. Unfortunately, most of the criticism of Weigel boiled down to “He's a liberal! He can't write about conservatives!”

Then there are the times when journalists just need to call a spade a spade, or in this case call a hate-filled rally a hate-filled rally: some Brooklynites recently decided to protest a mosque because, basically, they didn't like Muslims. The protestors didn't even feel the need to hide their anti-Islam sentiment behind coded language the way most racists do. “If they build a mosque there, I'm going to bomb the mosque,” said one protestor. All we can hope for is that like many Americans, that man is not only filled with hate, but also lazy.

You know who isn't lazy? Government officials in Afghanistan, at least when they have to protect one another from corruption charges. That's what those liberals at the Washington Post say in the latest article about corruption in Afghanistan, just another in a long string of pieces indicting the guys that the US is supporting with aid money and military support. It's becoming increasingly clear that, just as we're not particularly good soccer players, Americans don't make good neo-colonial overlords. It might be time to take a page from England's playbook: forget ruling the world and work on our cocktail-party charm. Read more!