Jan 04 2018

Paul Sorvino Has Words For Harvey Weinstein

I always wondered why Mira Sorvino didn’t work more as an actress after winning the Oscar for “Mighty Aphrodite“. Allegedly it is because Harvey Weinstein did everything in his considerable power to keep her off the silver screen.

Cover of "Mighty Aphrodite [DIVX]"

Cover of Mighty Aphrodite [DIVX]

TMZ asked Mira’s father Paul Sorvino what he thought of all this. Mr. Sorvino did not mince words.

Would you want Paul Sorvino pissed off at you? I wouldn’t. And yes, I know this is a scene from a movie.

One thing that has made me nuts with regard to the current wave of deserved firings and comeuppances of powerful men is the response some guys have made — “if it was my daughter/sister” etc. Actually… no. Whether or not you are related to a woman does not matter. No one deserves to be treated this way. Hell, if it’s true that Harvey Weinstein kept Mira Sorvino from being cast in movies because she wouldn’t sleep with him… jesus.

HOWEVER. If the woman wronged *is* your daughter, I think it’s fair to expect, shall we say, an extra level of outrage. Look at it like this — “imagine if it was your daughter”? No. It’s bad no matter what. But when it actually is your daughter? I don’t blame you for getting more mad. On the TMZ video, Mr. Sorvino is rather calm in my opinion.

Also, make sure to read through to part 5 of the tweet quoted above, which features video of Ms. Sorvino at a 2011 Senate briefing about sex trafficking. I will attempt to embed said Tweet here but as I admitted online I can thread a needle but tweets, not so much.

h/t Yashar Ali


Jun 23 2017

Skirting The Dress Code

Fun story about a group of kids who protested their school dress code by wearing skirts, hence my enormously clever “skirting the dress code” headline. Bam!

(The pic below is because this is a LINK to story elsewhere. Get it? A LINK? Have I over explained it yet?)

Worthington Super Links

Based on the other links below, this is not a new idea. Regardless, I like it.

They wanted to wear shorts, but were told that breached their school’s uniform policy.

Source: Boys at Exeter academy wear skirts in uniform protest – BBC News


May 04 2015

Age of Ultron Hard on Joss Whedon Because He Has a Family

Avengers: Age of Ultron ruled the box office this weekend. And before that, it ruled director Joss Whedon‘s life. This was, according to the director, difficult on him because he has a family. Here’s what he said in an interview:

English: Joss Whedon at the 2010 Comic Con in ...

English: Joss Whedon at the 2010 Comic Con in San Diego (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“When I watch it, I just see ‘flaw, flaw, flaw, compromise, laziness, mistake,’” said Whedon. “The reason I set out to make another film is because I wanted to make one that was better, and I wanted to up my game as a shooter and work harder on every aspect of it and sort of give myself up to it in a way that’s hard for me, because I have a family. I started as a writer in low-budget TV, and there was always this element of, ‘This is good enough.’ And with this movie, I never wanted to say, ‘This is good enough.’” (emphasis added)

And now the explanation. Read more »


Aug 06 2014

Male CEO Opts Out

Via the New York Times, a story (really a personal blog post) from Max Schireson, the current CEO of MongoDB, who decided to step down from the position in order to spend more time with his family. In other words, he opted out.

DaddyTips—Thoughts on Dadding

The blog post is fairly straightforward and worth reading, but this is the line I decided to share:

Friends and colleagues often ask my wife how she balances her job and motherhood. Somehow, the same people don’t ask me.

I’ll take it a step further. People don’t ask women who are married to successful men “what do you do?” Men, at least this man (I’m referring to me), are always asked what they do. “Father” isn’t enough. SAHD WAHD is the real answer, but it requires explaining. I usually answer “writer”, “primary caregiver”, or both, depending on the situation.

At the risk of tooting my own horn (note: I don’t even own a horn), this is a topic I’ve been talking about for years. I wrote about it on ForbesWoman, AOL ParentDish, and anyplace else I had the opportunity. It’s a very important thing to point out. Every parent makes choices. The expectations, however, are drastically different for men and women. I’ll quote myself again: there is a magazine called ‘Working Mother’, but there will never be a magazine called ‘Working Father.’

In an ideal world, Schireson’s tale wouldn’t be a major story. He’s making a choice that working women (a really annoying term that we really should be past but we’re not) are expected to make every single day. Women are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Men, on the other hand, tend to receive praise for opting out.

Obviously not everyone feels the same way. There were some seriously negative comments posted on the AOL article I wrote in 2009. A lot of people believe that men should go to work and women should stay home and focus on raising the kids. That is still the way things work in the majority of households in the United States, at least as far as I know.

To clarify, my points on this matter are the following:

Men do not have to be the primary bread-winner. They can be primary caregivers. I don’t know if that’s what Max Schireson’s role will be in his family; his children aren’t babies. Still, he made a choice, and it’s a valid one.

This should not be such a big deal. Think about the story for a moment. As you can see below, every media outlet from The Today Show on down covered what is essentially a personal decision made by a parent who happens to have a job. Why does this matter? Why, in the 21st century, are we still so stuck on traditional gender roles?

– None of what I say here should be construed as being disparaging to Mr. Schireson in any way. This should go without saying, but since the Interwebs is where nuance goes to die, I want to make it clear that I respect what this particular parent decided to do. I would also respect him if he stayed on as CEO because he saw it as a way to make a lot of money and secure his family’s future. In fact, I would feel the same way if a woman were to make either decision. These are personal matters. Not everything works for everybody else.

Not everyone has the luxury of being able to make this choice. This is important. Single parents generally need to work full-time (unless they have a lot of money socked away; if so, good for them). Again — nuance. Not all situations are the same.

Personally, I think it’s great that Mr. Schireson decided to pull back from what sounds like a hectic work schedule in order to be around for his kids. I think it’s great that he is in a financial position to do so. I wish him and his family nothing but the best.

And I really, truly wish that we didn’t have to talk about this topic any more. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in.

via Why I am leaving the best job I ever had | Max Schireson’s blog, h/t the New York Times


Jun 26 2014

Google Exec Wants People To Watch Their Kids Graduate On Their Phones

Buried within a New York Times article about cloud storage for businesses is this rather odd quote from Amit Singh, the president of Google Enterprise.
Android logo
Android logo via Wikipedia

“You’ll be videoconferencing with someone, while editing a supply chain document with someone else in Hong Kong, while he watches his son graduate on his phone,” Mr. Singh said, noting, “you’ll need a lot of infrastructure to do that.”
(emphasis added)

No disrespect meant to Mr. Singh, but, um, what the hell? Is he actually comparing “editing a supply chain document” with a child’s graduation?

What Mr. Singh was attempting to explain, as far as I can tell, is how a businessperson (I’m going gender neutral here; apologies to Caesar and any other intelligent non-human creatures of the future) could make use of the Android operating system on multiple devices at once. But if his idea of quality parenting is not only working while your kid graduates but squeezing it in as if it were just another activity in the stream of a business day, I have to disagree. Strongly.

Google, Microsoft and Others Delve Deeper Into Cloud Storage for Businesses – NYTimes.com.