Click the photo to find out how...

• Massive Monkees Dance Studio "The Beacon"

Sent late last night to I, Anonymous:

I am fucking tired of this bullshit victim blaming you straight “liberals” try to make me swallow. Fuck you. Quit blaming the victims and saying that all homophobic gay bashers and people that commit hate crimes against the gays are secretly homosexual. FUCK YOU! That’s like the bullshit where people claim Hitler was secretly a Jew. The truth is that there are some sadistic assholes out there that look for anything they can to torture and inflict pain on other people because they get a hard-on from the power. You displacing the guilt that you share because you are a part of the dominant paradigm which reinforces the notions that gays are easy targets and no one is going to stick up for them because “they’re the ones causing it” or “bringing it on themselves” just furthers the cycle. Get this straight, the KKK aren’t all secretly black, the Nazis weren’t all secretly Jews, and gay bashers aren’t all secretly gay. Quit blaming the victims for the bullshit being perpetrated by the heterosexual community!

I'm confused.

Subject Line: Wisdom from some guy at Tommy Doyle's in Harvard Square

"I've been smokin cigarettes at a record pace."
"Coors Lite? You're tappin' the Rockies?"
"If you don't have Jäger, I'll do a Jim. That's my go-to. Every time I go to Wendy's, they have my PBR and shot of Jim waiting."
"I don't even know what a hangover is; I'm always at work at 10 am"
"Annalise—yeah she likes to get naked. I've seen that girl's boobs more than I've seen some porn stars' boobs."

Required viewing:

Amazing.

I hadn't been back to Scratch Deli, formerly People's Republic of Koffee, since co-owner Tristan Devin died in November. Then this morning, it was suddenly time to return. Next to the door was this, and it made me really happy, and kind of sad. As it should.

• ANNA MINARD

From his obituary in City Arts:

Devin stood out as a stable and benevolent presence. Surrounded by fledgling talent and fragile egos, he made the café a welcoming, all-inclusive hub for comedians. Onstage, he excelled at creating characters that were absurdly, tragically flawed, invoking compassion for the most broken souls in a way that, in heartbreaking retrospect, suggested a deep personal familiarity with suffering.

His friends are gathering next week to celebrate what would have been his 33rd birthday. More info is here.

In the end, the answer is probably no:

WASHINGTON — For the first time since the New Deal, a majority of Americans are headed toward a retirement in which they will be financially worse off than their parents, jeopardizing a long era of improved living standards for the nation’s elderly, according to a growing consensus of new research.

Happy Presidents Day! The guy who created that decaying New Deal? Franklin D. Roosevelt.

A recent arrival in the I, Anonymous mailbag:

Dear Smokers-Talking-About-Smoking,

We met again this week, and again you blew so much smoke up my ass my farts will keep me fixed until we meet again next week. You’re a specific kind of smoker. For the most part you’re not addicted, yet your belt is full of notches for every time you’ve tried to “quit.” You bond over hackneyed chronicles of falling victim to the service industry’s oppressive policy to only grant breaks to those who return to work reeking of teenage rebellion; or to the imposing pressure of the smoking habits of your roommates in that one house that one year when you finally discovered that you could own your body, and thus your independence (aka adulthood), by being fucking shitty to it. Every conversation starts the same: “I want a fucking cigarette.” One person then casually agrees before another declares that that sounds great, but alas, he or she is trying to “quit.” Then a tried-and-true dialog ensues in which all involved bond over how lame smoking really is. Brands are compared, someone comments on the health consequences, but most importantly they all agree that smoking isn’t even cool. And then of course the person trying to quit remarks on how nice a cigarette sounds after that thoughtful conversation. Queue GROUP LAUGH HAHA I KNOW IT’S SO BAD! But really, shut your fucking smokeholes you sheep. You DO think it’s cool. You so transparently think smoking is cool that you WON’T FUCKING STOP TALKING ABOUT SMOKING! Or maybe you’re just looking for affirmation that your neo-hypocritical “I’m cool because I begrudgingly do something that isn’t cool” stance is still cool to someone. I realize you think you’re making a decision free of influence, and that’s the real appeal of being an adult… it’s also the single biggest and most lasting success of tobacco marketing (RIP). If you’re going to smoke, smoke because you like it (or even because you’re addicted, I guess) – not because it’s a badge of honor you think you’ll carry through adulthood. Be yourself either way, but I hope I don’t see any of you insufferable pawns at next week’s smoke breaks.

...rough:

"No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job," Barack Obama said last Veterans' Day, "or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home."

But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:

Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.

Twilight Exit will have a karaoke benefit on Sunday Feb 10th to raise money for the bouncer injured by gunfire in the January 27th shooting. There will also be a jar at the benefit for individual donations to him, and family have arranged a donation site on his behalf, via PayPal. You can donate here.

Call me old fashioned, but the prospect of taking a drug to prolong feelings of love—or mute the pain of a breakup—sounds like a creepy, high-minded cop out to avoid experiencing the full panoply of human emotions. However well intentioned it may be, technology like this would be ripe for abuse:

Perhaps we could design "love drugs," pharmaceutical cocktails that could boost affection between partners, whisking them back to the exquisite set of pleasures that colored their first years together. The ability to do this kind of fine-tuned emotional engineering is beyond the power of current science, but there is a growing field of research devoted to it. Some have even suggested developing "anti-love drugs" that could dissolve abusive relationships, or reduce someone's attachment to a charismatic cult leader. Others just want a pill to ease the pain of a wrenching breakup.

... At first blush, love may seem like a poor prospect for pharmacological intervention. The reflexive dualist in us wants to say that romantic relationships are matters of the soul, and that souls ought to be free of medical tinkering. Oxford ethicist Brian Earp argues that we should resist these intuitions, and be open to the upswing in human well-being that successful love drugs could bring about. Over a series of several papers, Earp and his colleagues, Anders Sandberg and Julian Savulescu, make a convincing case that couples should be free to use "love drugs," and that in some cases, they may be morally obligated to do so...

Go read the whole thing, which includes a fascinating Q&A with ethicist Earp about other potential uses for love drugs, including helping apathetic mothers bond with their offspring. Then tickle me perturbed.

This is the flip side of those maddening stories about people from New Jersey who name their kid "Hashtag" or "Pepsi" or "Pilot Inspektor."

An Icelandic teenager referred to as “Girl” by the island nation’s authorities was finally given the right to use her own first name by a court Thursday, according to reports.

Blaer Bjarkardottir’s first name means “breeze” in Icelandic and was not on a list of approved names or otherwise permitted by the authorities.

The English-language website News of Iceland reported that the Icelandic Naming Committee had previously ruled that Blaer was only a man’s name.

Because Blaer's name wasn't on the government-approved list of names, she wasn't allowed to have her own name on her passport. First names are vitally important in Icelandic culture—your first name becomes your child's last name—but I still think I'd rather know a million JayDinnhs and Jeneighfurrs than force something like this list of names onto everyone.

Buried in this article on how love doesn't really exist (or at least, not in the form we romanticize it), there's this depressing gem:

With Valentine's Day around the corner, many Americans are facing a grim reality: They are love-starved. Rates of loneliness are on the rise as social supports are disintegrating. In 1985, when the General Social Survey polled Americans on the number of confidants they have in their lives, the most common response was three. In 2004, when the survey was given again, the most common response was zero.

According to the University of Chicago's John Cacioppo, an expert on loneliness, and his co-author William Patrick, "at any given time, roughly 20 percent of individuals—that would be 60 million people in the U.S. alone—feel sufficiently isolated for it to be a major source of unhappiness in their lives." For older Americans, that number is closer to 35 percent. At the same time, rates of depression have been on the rise. In his 2011 book Flourish, the psychologist Martin Seligman notes that according to some estimates, depression is 10 times more prevalent now than it was five decades ago. Depression affects about 10 percent of the American population, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Not to brag or anything, but put three drinks in me and everyone becomes my confidante. Ole!

(No, but seriously: I never knew life could be so wonderful until I acquired my first best friend, Ryann, at the advanced age of 14ish. Ryann was the first lady aside from my mother who embraced my weird head on, unblinking, and then goaded me into taking it up a notch, most notably through our collaboration on Deathcock 3000, a sciency, g-rated porn we wrote when we were 17—and based on the hypothesis of kamakaze sperm—and starred in together. As you'd expect from nerd virgin best friends, the "porn" involved waaay too much talking about science and absolutely no nudity or even touching. Everyone needs a best friend with whom to film non-erotic porns together.)

If middle class Americans don't really lack for stuff, Krugman says, they certainly lack for time:

What we have is a situation in which American families have more stuff, but they have managed to afford that stuff only by being two-income families, with ever less family time — unlike their European counterparts, who have gained in shorter hours and vacations what they lost in stay-at-home wives.

Sorry, "family values" Republicans, but Krugman's example of getting gender equality and family time right? France.

Watching this video because my brain needed a break...

...and, yeah, people are awesome. There are lot of these videos out there, and they can make you numb to how awesome people can be. Even cynical. And then 1:30 comes along. (Via Sullivan.)