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Anil Dash

A Blog About Making Culture

Three years and one day ago, I got married. And then shortly after that, I wrote a post about getting married, which has become one of the most popular things I've ever written. If I have to be known for something, I'll definitely take that as a good representation of my work.

But one of the ideas that I didn't talk about back then was what a terrible reputation marriage has. Having had most of my impressions of marriage and weddings informed by popular culture and the examples of society around me growing up, I got a rather skewed vision of what married life is like. This is especially true because my marriage started in a way that was necessarily very different from that of my parents. (Theirs was, by western standards, an "arranged" marriage, though I wouldn't describe the situation quite so glibly.)

At any rate, here's what nobody ever told me about being married and having a wife and maintaining a marriage, based on (an admittedly rather limited, compared to long successful marriages) a great three years.

It's fun! You've got somebody you like who goes with you wherever you go, and it's someone who knows your sense of humor and what kind of food you like and what makes you laugh. BFF!
It doesn't have to be full of bullshit and drama like your single life. None of that "I don't know if this is what I really want." or "It's not you, it's me." idiocy. You're in

What Sarah Palin Is SayingOctober 28

Sarah Palin has been unsurprising in her criticisms of Barack Obama's credentials and policies, fulfilling the traditional role of the vice presidential candidate being the most aggressive and pointed rhetorical attacker in a campaign. But a closer look at her deliberate use of vernacular and language reveals that she has gone far beyond any other candidate in vice presidential history in the dangerous and irresponsible implications of her attacks. She has phrased her attacks on Obama in a way that avoids accountability to the press while specifically addressing the subset of her audience who are most likely to advocate extreme actions against Obama.

I don't usually write about politics here; I leave the ugliness to those who seem to revel in it. But I think a lot about language, usually in a more lighthearted context like talking about yo mama jokes or lolcats. What's striking to me this election season, though, is that Sarah Palin has chosen to abuse her command of language so obviously without suffering any serious criticism for it thus far.

The crux of the issue is simple:

Sarah Palin has unequivocally associated Barack Obama with the idea of terrorism and specifically with "terrorists".
Republican President George Bush has defined in our

Yo Mama's So Fat...October 22

I've long been a fan of playing the dozens, as is to be expected from anyone who loves language. Last night, in a fit of my usual insanity, I thought it'd be fun to throw out some "Yo mama" snaps themed around this year's election on my Twitter account:

Things took off pretty quickly from there. Lore Sjoberg (you remember him from Brunching Shuttlecocks and his writing for Wired) picked up the meme and ran with it. His were some of the first, and funniest responses:

Yo mama so fat, McCain refers to her as "Those Ones."
Yo mama so fat, she got an endorsement from General Mills. (I would have gone with Colonel Sanders here; That's why Lore is a genius!)
Yo mama so fat, her other biography is called "The Audacity of Hardee's

Around the same time, a number of other fantastically funny

Seven is Angry, SadlySeptember 11

Each year, I try to write a memorial post on the anniversary, to remind myself, and as a record of where I am compared to where I was that day. As I read back over them, what I see nearly ever year is that I wanted to cling to the sadness of the day, the very real sense of grief and loss that I think colors the day for those of us who were in New York City then in a slightly different way than it did for people who were more distant.

If you could smell the smoke, I think, it was a different experience.

And as a result, I never had as much of the anger that so many others, who were more distant, felt as a reaction to the attacks. "Let's grieve first", I thought. "There will be plenty of time for being angry."

In 2002, I wrote On Being an American:

Get annoyed, get angry, be incensed as you are with your sister who always votes the opposite of you, as annoyed as you get with your father who never quite got where you were coming from politically. And come back, shaking your head but still smiling, and enjoy the chance to appreciate those Americans that your reflexes tell you to resent. Be thankful for the chance to have neighbors or fellow citizens who raise your ire or offend your sensibilities. Be thankful that we can sit in a quiet small town and roll our eyes at the inanities of a visitor from a big city.

In 2003,

I Will Cut YouSeptember 11

Last Friday was my birthday. Hooray! I have a fantastic wife, so she treated me to a pig-butchering class at The Brooklyn Kitchen. I like meat, and I like being educated about what I eat and respecting the animals I consume. So Tom Mylan was a fantastic person to lead the evening: Knowledgeable and passionate about his work as a butcher, and (as his blog demonstrates well) able to articulate that in a way that's approachable even to rank amateurs like me.

Even better, my wife posted a great writeup over on Serious Eats. There's lots more info on other Brooklyn Kitchen classes and on Tom there. And as I've mentioned before, I love displays of true competence, especially in regard to knives. And Tom has a stellar post about choosing knives which shows off exactly that kind of expertise.

There's a lot of cuts of meat in a pi