To paraphrase Ed Lin, “c’mon white people!”

Now, I don’t read much sci-fi so I don’t know much about John Scalzi, and so this isn’t about his intellect or the quality of his writing which I’m sure are considerable. But I did notice that his post is chock-full of stuff allies like me like to read and write:

• Getting cookies. Since we’re enlightened enough to know that nobody’s going to give us any cookies for exemplary service as an ally, we use posts like these to bake them for ourselves.
• Hogging the mike. Scalzi makes no effort to lend a voice in support of the people who lack his privilege. There’s not a single mention of a book or website or blog entry by, say, a woman of color or anyone queer.
• Dipping a toe into the oppression olympics kiddie pool. Scalzi mentions that he grew up poor. Perhaps to underscore that he really “gets it” and maybe to dull the sharp edge of his own privilege just a little. If we try hard enough, we can all come up with a disability or disadvantage that we can use to demonstrate our understanding of intersectionality.
• Receiving applause. The comments feature a parade of SWCMs who chime in at length about how they get it too.
• Maintaining control. In the comments, his degree of “getting it” gives him a higher ground from which to wield his mighty discussion-ending hammer, like when someone has the nerve to point out that ‘the people yelling the loudest to “shut up and listen” are some of the most in need to practice it.’

Now, just because John Scalzi is a privileged SWCM like me, that doesn’t make him a bad person. But as friends of mine know, one of my mantras is that “everyone wants to be the hero in their own story.”

When we SWCMs are forced to confront our own privilege, one story we tell ourselves is that by educating other similarly privileged people we are fighting oppression. When in reality we have done nothing to save the life of a trans woman, or find a job for a person of color, or get an equal wage for a woman, or enact marriage equality for a gay couple, or keep an immigrant family together, or provide affordable health care to anyone, or give even a token of attention to any person who might actually have lived the experience of oppression we so eloquently and grandly denounce.

Oh, I know it’s supposed to be a good thing for us SWCMs to “get it” and to have a privileged space in which to talk with other privileged people about our Privileged People’s Problems. And yet every time I read one of these self-congratulatory “I get it” pieces (which I confess I’ve written as well) I want to gouge my eyes out with an icepick.

Updated: It’s one thing to say “my sandbox, my rules” but if you’re trying to position yourself as an ally who listens to marginalized people, then deleting the comment of someone with an icon that sure looks like a woman of color and identifies as a “Black, Jewish, Queer, Fat, Disabled Chick” is doing it wrong. At the very least it deserves a click on the gravatar. Also, I suggest perusing Derailing for Dummies. The section You’ve Lost Your Temper So I Don’t Have To Listen To You Anymore seems particularly appropriate.

Babies and toddlers are of course allowed, encouraged and even cajoled to nap. But in our American society, naps are something you’re apparently supposed to outgrow as you get older. I learned this hard way when I was on my first job.

As with most things I accomplish, I’d worked my way into full-time employment slowly. As a grad student TA, I held office hours right after my 8:30 morning class, and didn’t have my own class until after 3 pm, so I had a few uninterrupted hours to eat lunch, watch the Carrier Dome get built and put my feet up and contemplate the human condition.

I didn’t easily adjust to the lack of nappertunities in the working world. I continued to put my feet up and “read” after lunch, until the day I looked up from my reading to see my boss’ boss smiling down at me. Oops. Like a grown-up Cookie Monster, I had to make my naps a sometimes treat.

It wasn’t until the birth of my first child that I truly discovered the joy of nappertunities. Sleep deprivation had been taking a harsh toll, as I’d been using the kid’s sleep time for my “me” time. Bad move. The best advice I ever got as a new parent, and the only parenting advice I ever give, is to sleep when the baby sleeps. Naps are restorative for the adult caregiver as was well as the child.

With kids all moved out, and as I age and naturally sleep less at night, I find myself more open to nappertunity than I have been in a long time. I do still occasionally nod off at my monitor at work, but mainly I look forward to lying down for a few minutes when I get home, NPR droning in the background. And for me, the best part of taking a vacation is being able to indulge in the twisted twin pleasures of staying up all night and napping through the day.

How and when do you like to nap? On your back, belly or sitting? On a bad, on the grass, in a train or bus? Morning, afternoon or night?

EJ's imprisonment in Dubai
(source: ejroundtheworld.blogspot.com)

In EJ’s world, being robbed is like being raped and having to stay a couple of extra days in Dubai is like being in Mexican prison.

A few days ago, when the story first broke about “EJ” and the ransacking of the apartment she rented out on Airbnb, I wrote about how inadequate I found the reporting. One of the points I raised was the lack of questions about “EJ’s” identity.

Now, I never said I believed that “EJ” was a fiction, though knowing how easy it is to invent a fake identity and backdate blog entries, I certainly entertained the possibility. And even if she was a real person, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that everything she stated should be taken at face value.

One of my core beliefs is that we all want to believe in ourselves, maybe not as a heroes (because what’s a hero?) but at least to put our actions in the best possible, most sympathetic light. Much of the time I think we do this by being selective with the stories we tell about ourselves, both to ourselves and to others. With regard to her Airbnb experience, the story “EJ” tells about herself is that of a victim:

if we are going to turn the blame on me, then a woman who gets raped may as well blame herself for wearing a short skirt and heels. Victims don’t ask to be victims, and pointing fingers back at them is less than helpful. (source)

This raised a red flag for me, having been told by people who have lived that experience that nothing is like rape except rape. But looking through some of “EJ’s” previous blog entries reveals a pattern of a very privileged person seeking sympathy through the appropriation of other peoples’ oppression any time she’s as much as inconvenienced.

For example, though she refers to herself as homeless several times, “EJ” is a world traveller who doesn’t really seem to care much about people who are actually homeless, viewing them instead as something of an inconvenience:

But when a homeless man on the street approaches me and asks for money – something, I might add, which seems to occur on an hourly basis – I stumble over myself and can’t think of a proper response in his language. Instead, silence prevails and I just smile apologetically, as I am quite certain that telling him to fold into downward dog and press his heels toward the floor is not the answer he is looking for. (source)

And when the Iceland volcano ash cloud delayed her flight back to Paris, she wrote of being “imprisoned” in Dubai for five days:

I would make a really bad prisoner [...] The hot story on the news is about a young French national named Florence Cassez. The 35-year-old has been held in a Mexican prison for the past five years on questionable kidnapping charges; today the effort was renewed to fight for her release. I was in Dubai for 5 days longer than planned, with access to all the creature comforts I could possibly need: a bed, a hot shower, a treadmill, lip balm, peanut butter… All this, and I couldn’t handle it. After only 5 days, I snapped.(source)

She has also written of enduring “a week of Luxury Imprisonment behind the concrete walls of The Ritz-Carlton Rose Hall in Montego Bay”. And when her purse was snatched in Havana, she again summoned up the spectre of imprisonment to describe the behavior of the police whose assistance she sought:

I recounted my plight, and next thing I knew I was thrown into the back of a police car, bars on all windows blocking my view of the world outside. My mind started to reel with thoughts of Cuban prison cells and torture chambers…(source)

I’m not questioning “EJ”‘s right to feel uncomfortable and frightened at times, regardless of the degree to which the situations she’s found herself in were of her own creation. But what I do find troubling is her inability to recognize her own privilege and how much better off she is than the people whose legitimate experiences she’s appropriating in order to garner sympathy.

Her narrative continues to be one of herself as a victim, as in her latest post:

I was at one time a victim of an awful crime, doing my best to cope. Today, in addition to that, I have unwittingly and unexpectedly become the target of an onslaught, being called a liar and much, much worse by both public and anonymous figures who have no first-hand knowledge whatsoever of the very decent person I am, nor any knowledge of what has transpired in the past several weeks. (source)

Responses on her website and around the internet seem to be running overwhelmingly in her favor; I’d hardly call that an “onslaught.”

And as for the “anonymous figures” who don’t know what a decent person she is, all I can say is Brian Chesky has as much right to that territory as you do, attacked as he and his company have been in public by someone who also prefers to remain anonymous.

The “-gate” ending suggests that there’s some kind of scandal going on, something unethical, some kind of coverup. We don’t know yet who’s covering up what, but now that Airbnb investor and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham has weighed in, it’s clear there are some differences of opinion. In his statement on his Hacker News website, Graham essentially said that Aribnb has been offering to help “EJ” all along, as she initially stated on her blog:

I would be remiss if I didn’t pause here to emphasize that the customer service team at airbnb.com has been wonderful, giving this crime their full attention. They have called often, expressing empathy, support, and genuine concern for my welfare. They have offered to help me recover emotionally and financially, and are working with SFPD to track down these criminals. (source)

However, in her followup post (the only other comment she has made to date), “EJ” appeared to backpedal on this recognition of Airbnb’s support:

But the staff at Airbnb has not made a positive contribution to me personally or my situation in any way, particularly since June 30. (source)

For the record, I’m not taking any stand as to whether “EJ” is real, or whether anyone robbed her. My beef is with the way this story is being reported. For example, TechCrunch from the start seemed to accept “EJ’s” story at face value:

The facts: Last month “EJ” wrote a long blog post about how a renter spent an entire week carefully robbing and trashing her home. Walls were cut through to get to locked valuables, including her grandmother’s jewelry. (source)

Nowhere in the story is there any questioning of “EJ’s” facts. And followup reporting in TechCrunch does nothing to acknowledge the inconsistencies that Graham points out between “EJ’s” original and later post. Instead writer Michael Arrington chooses to get into a pissing match with Graham.

So far, some of the best reporting I’ve come across is still from the “traditional” media (as represented online). In their original story and latest followup, USA Today contacts primary sources (not just “EJ” and Airbnb, but also the SFPD) as well as other interested parties. They raise questions and attempt to corroborate statements and — most important — generally avoid the echo-chamber like environment of the blogs, which tend to quote (and misquote) each other as a substitute to providing either facts or analysis.

As it stands, in my opinion there are still more questions here than answers. For example, I assume from what I’ve seen that “EJ” is herself a renter. Where’s her landlord in all this? Who is 19 year old “Faith Clifton” who was supposedly in the SFPD’s custody in connection with the robbery? Does she have any connection to “EJ”? Have any of “EJ’s” neighbors (supposedly there were witnesses) come forward to talk about what they heard and witnessed? How did renter “Dj Pattrson” get the key, and did “EJ” ever get it back again? Where are the pictures of the robbery and cleanup? And finally, where’s the timeline of events: was there any gap in time between the dates “Dj” was supposed to be renting “EJ’s” loft and when “EJ” returned from her trip?

Because as any student of scandal knows, a good gap can make for a juicy -gate.

Or do we?

A month-old story, about a woman named EJ whose apartment was allegedly trashed by an Airbnb user, just went viral, but I think most of the commentary is getting the story totally wrong. And it’s not just the citizen journalists; big-time names like WaPo, perhaps not wanting to be left behind or perhaps due to lax editorial oversight in their online offerings, are also being negligent in terms of some really basic reporting.

What do we really know?

A blog entry, dated about a month ago, details a story about how a freelancer returned to her SF home to find it trashed and ransacked after she’d rented it out via the online service Airbnb. By her own account, she didn’t take the time to actually meet or even phone her renter. She just let the person know where to find the key.

She goes on to tell us that she contacted the SFPD, who investigated the crime scene. And that after several days she got through to Airbnb, who offered assistance of only a non-monetary variety.

A subsequent statement from its CEO suggests that Airbnb has cooperated with the SFPD, who have a suspect.

And what don’t we know?

It would be natural for anyone reading this first-person account to fill in a few blanks, and here’s where I think the early bloggers on the scene — TechCrunch, ZDNet, WaPo and SFGate, among others — are slipping. Namely, in a rush to get in front of your eyeballs, a lot of key questions are going unasked. Here are a few I can think of:

1. How much of what happened was EJ’s responsibility? Clearly, she didn’t heed Airbnb’s advice to meet with the renter or get a security deposit. And did she even have a legal right to use their service? If she’s a renter herself — she refers to her “apartment”, not her loft or condo — then she may be violating her own lease by subletting without the landlord’s permission. Perhaps for fear of being said to be “blaming the victim,” none of the early bloggers have addressed how much might be EJ’s fault.

2. Where is EJ now? Since posting of her ordeal on June 29, she hasn’t written anything else on the subject. No follow-up blog entry, no replies to any of the hundreds of commenters, most of whom offered support. There are a few comments that seem to be from writers seeking interviews. But no accounts say anything to the effect that “EJ could not be reached for comment” which in traditional stories would be a warning sign that things may not be what they seem.

3. Is any of this Airbnb’s fault? Maybe EJ’s guest left the door unlocked, or maybe someone observed her returning the key to its hiding place. Even assuming EJ is 100% trustworthy herself, there’s no way she can be sure who committed the crime. Considering the lack of facts, assuming any of this is Airbnb’s fault is pretty sloppy.

4. Was a crime actually committed? Where is the corroborating evidence? The original blog mentions the SFPD doing an investigation. Has anyone bothered to contact them concerning break-ins on the day (or during the week) in question? Getting an official statement from a government agency would seem be a pretty basic Journalism 101 move that none of the “nontraditional media” have taken.

5. Is there even an EJ? There are dozens of entries on her blog, but these could have been back-dated. Only one other post mentions SF. It’s dated January 2, 2011 and has only one comment, from someone named Lee Bob Black whose Blogger profile no longer exists. The font on the latest blog entry doesn’t even match the others. I’d think a decent journalistic effort would involve checking out at least a portion of the writing on her site to see if it tells a consistent story.

6. Where are the other voices? Where were the reactions from chambers of commerce, convention and visitors bureaus, and competitors like Craigslist and couchsurfing.org? Good reporting looks for more perspectives beside the one being offered them.

7. Who benefits from this story? I can accept that Airbnb is suddenly attracting a lot more attention, what with raising more capital and being valued at over a billion dollars and all. Still, I would think a good journalist would at least consider who might gain from all this attention, especially a month after the fact. Airbnb? Competitors? EJ? Her landlord?

I’ll tell you what I’m blathering about

Just to be clear: my point here isn’t that it’s okay to use a service like Airbnb to rip off inexperienced hosts. But if we’re entering an age when stories like this one get covered by citizen journalists — and I’m not entirely against them, having occasionally served as one myself — we as consumers are going to have to be a lot more skeptical about what we read. Or be willing to go back to the “old” way of getting our news: paying for it.

UPDATE: I’m much happier about USA Today’s reporting of this story; see the comments below.

UPDATE 2: They call it “ransackgate”

UPDATE 3: EJ’s Oppression

My MLP avatar courtesy generalzoi's My Little Pony generator

Bill Clinton’s stellar performance this morning — 3 out of 3 My Little Pony questions right on “Wait Wait” — is the reason for this slightly pony-themed entry in my “ditching the landline” series.

Once I knew my port was in progress, I was refreshing my Google Voice status page faster than Applejack at harvest time. And here’s one of many things Google got right: even when there was no news, the status messages about my port got a datestamp that reassured me that somewhere, somepony was taking care of things for me.

This morning, I was excited to find the status message replaced by an honest to goodness dashboard. And while perusing all those options, and trying to decide whether to enable call screening (and have unknown callers leave their names), I got my first call to my old landline number on my cell. I was sold on the feature — I doubt telemarketers and robocallers will play the home version of the game.

So far my favorite feature is the ability to set a schedule for when calls will go through to my cell (weekends and evenings) and when they’ll go to voicemail (when I’m at work). And when I’m not taking the calls, I can still monitor them and read the transcriptions via email, just like I could with Vonage.

In all, it took me 9 days and $50 to get my landline moved from Vonage to Google Voice, and despite my antsiness the process was actually pretty seamless. My main recommendations to anyone else wanting to move their landline from Vonage to Google Voice are:

• Do your homework. Everyone’s experience is a little different, but reading enough of the horror and success stories gives you an idea of what to expect, and the more prepared you are the fewer surprises there will be.
• Be patient. I know some people report the whole thing being done in a few days but it could take a lot longer — up to a month by some accounts.
• Know thy enemy Vonage. Be aware of your billing cycle — if you can, start the process at the beginning rather than the end — and contact them to cancel at 9:00 am eastern time the next business day after the initial port is complete.
• Use a cheap no-contract provider. I used Net10 but others are probably just as good. The high degree of automation that makes them cheap means you can run the whole game without having to spend any time listening to elevator music whilst waiting for the next available operator. And while it might mean a tougher time if something goes wrong, this will be less likely if you’ve done the hoofwork.

Now if you’ll excuse me… I have some more options to play with. Geek out!

But seven days after activating my Net10 phone, I still didn’t have the number fully ported and it was looking like Vonage might be able to nick me for another monthly fee (today would mark the start of my Vonage monthly billing cycle). In a bit of a panic, I fired off a second email to Net10 tech support asking what was going on. A few hours later I got a response to my first email (just 4 hours later than their 24-48 hour target for replies) telling me I could call them today to get a ticket number to find out the status of my port. Why do I need to call them for a ticket number? Why couldn’t they just have emailed it to me?

Anyway it was a moot point. At six minutes past midnight, I got a text on my Net10 phone informing me that the port was complete! Sure enough, it was now taking calls on the old landline number. But I could still make outgoing calls on Vonage, and seeing how Vonage hadn’t yet charged me for the new month, I decided to go ahead and cancel the service just to be sure. Prof. Google took me right to the appropriate page on Vonage’s site (I’ve learned not to wade through a site’s menus when trying to cancel anything online) where I found this:

Okay, I can understand why they’d want me to talk to a person — someone who could tell me about the secret, lower-priced “keep the customer” deal which it was clearly too late to offer me. At least the line was 24/7, right? But after several minutes with the perky voice menu, I got a decidedly less-friendly recording telling me that if I wanted to cancel my service, I would need to speak with someone in their billing department. Which wouldn’t open until 9:00 am. Grrr.

This morning I checked my Vonage account and sure enough they had charged me for another month. I called them at 9:02 (hi again, perky voice menu) and after an ominous warning that they were unusually busy, I got right through to a real live person who did, in fact, offer me an option that would cut my bill in half. I politely told him that if he could make it free he was on, but barring that I wanted to continue with the port and oh yes did he really think that six minutes of service was worth a full month’s bill? After reading many horror stories about people’s efforts to cancel their Vonage service I was prepared for trouble. Which never materialized: in less than 10 minutes, the service was canceled and a refund promised.

Satisfied that I now had an honest-to-goodness wireless number, I marched right over to google.com/voice and after reading and checking off all their dire warnings about what would happen if I ported my number to them (no cell phone! no text messages! dogs and cats living together!) I plunked down my $20. There’s no way to know if things will go smoothly from this point on, but after the folderol of the past week, seeing this message at the top of my Google Voice page

made me downright comfortable, I’ll tell you what.

Years later, some in my college cohort had other cravings that could be satisfied by nickles and dimes, though under these circumstances it meant getting set back by $5 or $10.

Now it seems our collective hunger for data and communication services are getting us nickled and dimed to the tune of $50 to $100 month. My Road Runner bill from Time Warner is about $50, but they’d like to get me up to $100 with digital cable, video on demand and phone service. My cell phone bill from Verizon is about $50 but they’d love to sell me 3G for only about $30-$50 more a month. And Verizon would also like to get me to ditch my cable for a FiOS bundle, for a low introductory rate of — wait for it — $100 a month.

So far, I’ve managed to resist their schoolyard-dealer introductory offers. In fact, I’m actively trying get clean of some of my recurring monthly expenses. And since nearly all of my phoning is done either on my cell phone or at work, I’ve decided it’s finally time to ditch the home phone (a former land line I converted to a Vonage VOIP). But even though its main use now seems to be building a voice mail archive of telemarketers’ and candidates’ recorded messages, I’m hesitant to give up the number completely.

I confess to having the fantasy of being pleasantly surprised by an old friend finding that number on a scrap of paper and calling me on a whim. And who knows, there might be some financial interest I’d forgotten that’s linked to that number.

Yes, I know the odds of my ever actually needing that number are slim to none. Still, I thought, if there were a way to keep it cheaply then why not? After some research and reading on the subject, I decided it was worth the one-time fee of $20 to port my old home number to Google Voice, which would still be able to notify me when calls came in and transcribe them to email messages, which is basically all I was doing with Vonage.

The catch (of course there’s a catch) is that, owing to the vagaries of regulations governing number portability, Google Voice will only let you port a number from a wireless provider. Which means I needed to find the cheapest way to convert my Vonage line to a cell phone before I could then move it on to Google Voice.

While I located enough information (like this) to develop a general plan, I don’t feel like I was ever fully prepared for how this process would work. And while it’s far from over, I think I’ve got enough ground covered that it’s worth documenting what’s happened so far:

• I got a new phone. I settled on Net10, which appears to be a slightly more upscale branding of TracFone. I bought a Net10 LG-320G from Best Buy for $15, and spent another $15 at Net10.com to get the smallest amount of airtime to activate the phone — 200 minutes. Had I finished my homework I might have saved myself $10 by going with TracFone (a $10 phone and 50 minutes for another $10), but I confess that reading about all the plans and bundles was making me dizzy. Anyway the $50 total is still less than 2 months with Vonage.
• I activated the new phone. It was pretty easy at Net10.com, using the option labeled “Transfer my number from another company to NET10.” However when I was done, it looked like Net10 had assigned me a new number. Okay the documentation said it might take a few days, but after two days had passed I started getting antsy so I fired off a tech-support email (rather than spend 30 minutes on hold). I still haven’t gotten a response but I think that’s okay because…
• Net10 FedExed me a SIM card. I had no idea this was going to happen. Following the enclosed instructions, I replaced the existing SIM card and magically the phone reported that it had my old number! And calls placed from the Net10 phone showed up on caller ID the same way! Unfortunately, calls made to the old number are still being answered by the Vonage phone. Eventually I found some info on Net10′s site that suggests the process could take a month.

Sadly unless the planets align and my number switches over today, it looks like I’m going to have to pay Vonage for another month. The good news is that everything I’ve read says that porting your phone away from Vonage appears to be the easiest and surest way to cancel that service (which I learned you should not do before porting, or you will lose your number). Also it’s the only way that doesn’t require you to talk to a Vonage rep.

Interestingly, in the process of checking out how I would cancel Vonage (in case I actually needed to do it myself, which doesn’t seem to be the case) I discovered they offer an online-only, 300-minute “keep the customers who want to leave us” plan for $12 a month. Not that I would have stuck around, but I’m a little miffed that this doesn’t show up as a “Change My Plan” option.

I guess they figured I was already hooked.

I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

has learned that it wasn’t exactly a quote by Martin Luther King, Jr. who apparently is right up there with Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi, Kurt Vonnegut and Bill Gates in terms of false attributions. To be fair, the original facebook post had it right: the author’s own words, followed by the quote. Which then got combined and re-posted.

There was a kerfluffle on my own facebook when I pointed this out after a friend quoted it as a comment on a related post of mine.

Now, I agree with the sentiment, the whole thing. And while I didn’t join in the repost of this particular misquote, I’ve participated in such post-fests before. And when I get called out I feel foolish, defensive or embarrassed (or some mixture of the three). Some of the reactions I’ve seen this time around are “well it’s not like this is an academic paper” or “well it’s a good message anyway.”

But I think dismissing the misquote problem by saying “hey, it’s just facebook” misses a big point: that quote wouldn’t have been so widely passed around had it not had “MLK” attached to it. To me, that’s a form of cultural misappropriation just as egregious as the rewritten African American spirituals included in the UU hymnal Singing the Living Tradition.

As a white person I’ve been conditioned to think my good intentions will insulate me from criticism when I try to earn points by appropriating the words of people of color. Turning this kind of criticism around and making the issue about my own hurt white feelings is not the kind of behavior that’s going to make anyone want me as their ally.

Snarky’s Machine pointed out to me that Damon Brown tells how to recognize fake quotes like this in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Memes. Until I read this, I vow to be a little more discerning about reposting and retweeting things attributed to others, and sticking to using my own words.

Even if they aren’t going to make me Internet-famous.

Now of course it’s your right to be disgusted by whatever disgusts you. And to talk about it. And to receive the natural consequences of picking a portion of the population to “other.”

What’s I find missing in the discussions is any reference to the idea that there may just be people out there who enjoy seeing larger folks on TV.

And I’m not just talking Christina Hendricks full-figured, but still: the fact that her Mad Men character Joan Holloway is so wildly popular suggests to me that there are folks out there who’d go even a little larger.

I remember when I was a kid, and used to watch the Spanish language UHF stations 41 and 47 in New York. I’d watch for the wrestling, sure, but also to see Iris Chacon wiggle her — well, large — butt.

Now, I’m a hetero male, so I’m really not that interested in seeing big guys on TV. But I have it on good authority that fat actors like John Goodman, James Gandolfini, Paul Sorvino and Raymond Burr have all been considered extremely sexy by a large portion of the guy-appreciating population.

So my reply to Maura Kelly is to look elsewhere when fatties attack her TV. It will never be “fatty free” as long as there are people who don’t mind — and even enjoy — looking at people who are the opposite of skinny.