Distance: @ 1 mile, take yoga class, hit bucket of balls
Sometimes it really cheers me up to read some of the readers' comments on articles. When they are in our local rag I often feel uplifted about the quality of the people who live around me. For instance, today the paper had a big front page picture of a beautiful girl with the headline: Miss Utah's baffling answer.
Turns out Miss Utah was competing in the Miss USA contest. I'll let the Chronicle take it from there:
Asked why women comprise 40 percent of household breadwinners but continue to earn less than men, (the contestant) fumbled with her words before concluding that “We need to try to figure out how to…create education better…so that we can solve this problem.” Then they ran a video of what they called 'the memorable blunder.'
Clearly the Chron writer was pulling for 'dumb blond' responses, boos, hisses, any number of put downs of Miss Utah. Instead these are a few samples of the type of comments they got from readers with a couple of edits from ciwt:
* She must be humiliated. She's probably a very bright woman who just stumbled under pressure as everyone does from time to time - just not with the world watching (thank goodness) (This written by a man)
* um...It's a BEAUTY contest.
* What is stupid is asking a complex economics question of these babes (oops, but the rest is OK) and expecting a coherent answer, particularly in a sentence or two.
Personally I don't turn to beauty pageants when I want to understand such issues.
* Ladies and gentlemen, we have a politician!
* I'll charitably say that these young women are coached to give "smart-sounding" answers that require complex sentences that are tough for most people to construct on the fly. If she'd relaxed and just said "It's a long-lasting problem that will take a long time to fix, but it's still not fair" that would have been fine.
Or maybe she's just dumb as a box of rocks and her answer should have been "Have you seen how my teeth gleam?"
* Stan Fields (moderator): Miss Rhode Island, please describe your idea of a perfect date.
Cheryl "Rhode Island": That's a tough one. I'd have to say April 25th. Because it's not too hot, not too cold, all you need is a light jacket.
And more. Anyway, what I really liked is that the most popular comments side-stepped the paper's efforts to drag poor Miss Utah through more embarrassment and took the high ground of compassion, common sense and humor.
And now we could get onto to the whole topic of incendiary media, but that's waaaay over ciwt's head.
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