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When the New York Times headline is Avery Punished for Vulgar Remark, you don't have to know who Avery is to know that reading the article will in no way inform you what the vulgar remark was.

True to self-censorship form, the newspaper of record-ish will say only that hockey star Sean Avery "used a derogatory term to refer to his former girlfriends, saying that it had 'become like a common thing in the N.H.L. for guys to fall in love with' them."

So what unprintable term did Avery call Elisha Cuthbert et al? Bitches? Hos? Cunts? Chicks?

Nope. Thanks to less scrupulous tabloids (and YouTube), I learned that what Avery actually said was, "I just want to comment on how it's become like a common thing in the NHL for guys to fall in love with my sloppy seconds. I don't know what that's about. Enjoy the game tonight."

Enjoy the game! Such a polite Canadian!

I mentioned something like this briefly towards the end of yesterday's post, but here's an even more striking demonstration of the moral bankruptcy of the forgive-and-forget approach to America's recent history of torture. In an article on whether Bush should issue a blanket pardon for torture, Mike Mukasey says no, because that would lead people to believe that there was something wrong with the government's interrogation, detention, and surveillance programs that would require pardoning in the first place -- which in turn will cause people to be less likely to endorse similar approaches down the road:

"People are going to get the message, which is that if you come up with an answer that is not considered desirable in the future you might face prosecution, and that creates an incentive not to give an honest answer but to give an answer that may be acceptable in the future. It also creates some incentive in people not to ask in the first place.�

Um, yeah, that's called deterrence, and it ought to be one of the things our criminal justice system is concerned with. Stifling discussion is a good thing when discussion veers into the illegal and immoral. If someone's "honest" answer is, "lets induce fatal hypothermia," you're damn right I'd like to disincentivize that.

Now that we've gotten vampire films out of our system, let's tackle a new genre: the post-apocalyptic. I'm ready to start psyching myself up for Fallout 3 (and the coming 40% unemployment rate) with a romp through the most gritty, whacked-out, disturbing, hilarious, and all-around awesome survival-in-the-wasteland stories.

The essential elements of the genre are set out by io9, including but not limited to scarce resources, warlords, degraded culture, forced breeding, cannibalism and pee-drinking. The big picture, of course, is society reorganizing itself on the ruins of collapsed civilization. Sorry, On the Beach fans, but that barely makes the cut. The apocalypse can be a single sudden event or a long, slow decline, but the post-apocalyptic (or the unfolding of the apocalypse) should be the center of the film, not a brief interlude as in the Terminator series (at least until Salvation).

I've been into this genre since I was a kid, when I devoured books like The Stand, The Tripods, Z for Zachariah, Warday and the very odd Riddley Walker. For whatever reason, I was put off by The Day After, probably because it was so heavily pushed as a Cultural Event. We may even have been required to watch it for school.

Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon. Click here for details. Click here for last week's results.

First place

"I never thought that line about my red wagon, laundry cart, and suitcase business being too big to fail would ever work, but boy howdy, did it ever!" �bunsen

Second place

"I love this synagogue!" �John Tabin

Third place

"I think I have enough for a latte." �JohnnyB

Honorable mention

"As the greedy corporate executives celebrated their stolen riches and prepared to exit the building, someone was waiting outside. Someone who had been sent to do a job - one which badly needed to be done. He lurked near the door, wearing dark sunglasses, a cold, calculating look upon his face. He had trained for years, and was focused and ready for what he was about to do. That someone was the limo driver, and he took them all home." �Damon

"See, this is why I became a taxidermist. To make piles and piles and piles of money." �Deborah

"Did you catch the shitty movie with Annie Hall, Queen Latifah and Tom Cruise's daughter?" �xjvpastor

"I'm haunted by the face value of my victims." �George

9:53 AM

You know self-censorship has gotten out of hand when even Lindsay Lohan feels the need to protect the sensibilities of her MySpace friends. In a sure indication that bowdlerizing "offensive" words has become nothing but a mindless reflex, La Lohan writes that tabloid reporters making up stories about her fights with Sam Ronson "must really feel silly, embarrassed, out of stories, scr*w*d, f*ck*d, punk'd, and so much more."

Really? Firecrotch can't bring herself to say "screwed"? Or "punked"? Next she's going to be graffitiing bathrooms with the message that "Scarlett is a bloody N-word for women."

To make the whole thing crazier, Lohan actually directed her comments at "the people that make shit up." Not, that is, "the people who make sh*t" up.

Here's a message I got today from iTunes' "Genius" service.

You know what, Genius? If I bought a song called "Shit, Damn, Motherfucker," I'm probably not uncomfortable with those words.

9:21 AM

Submit the worst possible caption for this New Yorker cartoon. Click here for details. Click here for last week's results.

First place

The Worm: "Please, my little elven friend, stop gaping and get me out of this bird's mouth before it eats me!" �Ed

Second place

"Thanks, but I just had a giant omelet." �Steve_O

Third place

"The name's Magpie. Steve Magpie. I killed your hatchlings. Now feed me." � Francis

Honorable mention

"I curse the day legalized gay marriage led to legalized polygamy and legalized marriage to giant birds. You are a dreadful husband and you sicken me." � J.D. |

"You can't make me eat it. You're not my real mother." � JohnnyB

"Nice. But it's going to take a whole fucking lot more than that if you want this fucking Senate seat. Fuck." �Tim C.

"Aren't you going to chew it for me first? It's not as if I have a fucking knife and fork up here." � David

"They said that having sex with a giant bird would be a real feather in my cap, but somehow I don't think that's where it's going to end up." � therblig

"Well I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it!" �TG Gibbon

11:49 AM

Salon has a short round-up of concerns about Rick Warren's invocation at Obama's inauguration ceremony, concerns that go to reasons well beyond Warren's enthusiastic opposition to gay rights.

Meanwhile, MSNBC's ironically-named First Read blog weighs in with this blindingly stupid remark: "Where was this outrage when Obama appeared at Warren�s Saddleback forum back in August? The difference may be that the forum came before Proposition 8 passed in California."

Um, yeah. Or the difference may be between acknowledging that the representative of a large group of people has legitimate questions that you are willing to address head-on in a civil manner and giving that person a place of honor as part of the official launch of your administration.

Never trust highly-paid network political analysts to do the job of bloggers.

In a related matter, Sullivan dismantles the paranoid free-speech argument against gay marriage, and, at the end, picks up on his antagonist's claim that he's all for civil unions, just not "redefining marriage." This has become boilerplate make-nice talk for virtually all marriage-equality opponents. Even the Mormons tried it. and Sullivan asks the question that should be asked of every one of them: Really?

9:28 AM

I hadn't actually intended to disappear for a week without comment -- I even had my annual inappropriately sexy Christmas and Hanukkah photos all picked out -- but I was rushing to meet a deadline (failed!) and had to leave town and wifi without posting. During that dark period, I missed the opportunity to pay tribute to Eartha Kitt, so consider this that. Yeah, I missed Harold Pinter too, but I was never a fan. My chief association is sitting uncomfortably through a production of The Lover starring a college girlfriend. I suppose that's not Pinter's fault, exactly, but let's face it, these obits are always all about me anyway.

Anyway, I'm back now to see how 2008 ends. Let's see... Israel is killing Palestinian, virginity pledges don't work, and a party in Brownsville ended in gunfire. It's like I never even left.

12:19 PM