Trivial Annoyances

[sozamora]

[tippy]

LOL.

Have to admit, I don't know what else to call a sleepover... Staying the night? A slumber party has to involve more than two kids. A menage... oh wait!!! that can't be right either.

[tippy]

Rita, I think on this now post Valentine's day there was an article in Modern Love about a writer loving someone with bad grammar, but I didn't have time to look at it. It did make me think of you though.

My objections to the Woody Allen article, is the Woody Allen article, rather than the sentences contained within. The whole situ makes me verily confused.

[Ron Thorne]

[tippy]

You're right. That's the phrase that sleepover replaced. "Mom, can I spend the night at so'n'so's?" "Ask your dad."

[LennyH]

[Ron Thorne]

[tippy]

Tx, Ron.

Lenny, I think it's fair to say that not many men end up with their adopted daughters, and not many women could come out of such situation gracefully (i.e., not feeling the bitterest and most enduring rancor). That's an extreme no one wants to go through. It's taboo for a reason. It would be hard for the saintliest I should think to feel motivated to continue to cultivate a parental relationship with the rest of the children. Allen has had plenty of accolades over the years, and it ends up looking like anti-Oscar press which is not befitting the seriousness of the charges. But at the same time, I simply don't know what happened, nor can I, so it's kind of frustrating. People argue against the death penalty because mistakes are made. Similarly, being tried on the opinion pages of NYT is just not good enough. Can't think of a worse accusation. Mad at myself for even talking about it. grrr

[LennyH]

Tippy and Scott, I will not defend what Woody Allen did with Soon Yi (meaning that it was stupid and wrong, based on the fact that she was the adopted daughter of his long time girlfriend) but there are inaccuracies that have been floating around on this subject for years.

Soon Yi was NOT Woody's adopted daughter. She was the adopted daughter of Mia and her ex-husband, Andre Previn. She was also not, as I hear people say sometimes, Woody's step-daughter. Woody and Mia were never married and also kept separate apartments during their relationship.

So call it gross and wrong and you'll get no argument from me but, while entering a relationship with the 19 or 20 year old daughter of your girlfriend shows very bad judgement, it is NOT the same as molesting a 7 year old girl and I don't think it's fair to say that having a sexual relationship with a woman who's young, but of legal age, makes someone more likely to molest children.

There are a bunch of reasons I think the molestation was "fairly implausible", but I won't go into it in full detail. It is pretty strange, though, that, during the heated custody battle, Woody was allowed this supervised visit to see Dylan and this was the one and only time he supposedly molested her. Weeks earlier, Mia had said what great father Woody would be and made the argument that his adoption of Dylan should be approved. This is from Moses Farrow, who is now 36 and a family therapist:

"Of course Woody did not molest my sister," says Moses, who is estranged from Farrow and many of his siblings and is close to Allen and Soon-Yi. "She loved him and looked forward to seeing him when he would visit. She never hid from him until our mother succeeded in creating the atmosphere of fear and hate towards him. The day in question, there were six or seven of us in the house. We were all in public rooms and no one, not my father or sister, was off in any private spaces. My mother was conveniently out shopping. I don’t know if my sister really believes she was molested or is trying to please her mother. Pleasing my mother was very powerful motivation because to be on her wrong side was horrible."

Moses hated Woody when everything went down but they buried the hatchet at some point. A team of specialists at Yale New Haven hospital investigated and determined that Dylan was not molested (but that Dylan probably did come to believe that she was molested and was also probably coached into that by her mother). No charges were brought against Allen. Mia, at times, displayed some strange and erratic behavior and certainly comes across as vindictive and maybe, at times, unstable.

I can only judge by what I've read and certainly don't consider all of these sources to be reliable but, based on what I see, I stick with "fairly implausible" and am currently okay with giving Woody the benefit of the doubt.

[bluenoter]

[bluenoter]

[LennyH]

[bluenoter]

[walto]

[LennyH]

[tippy]

"My problem is with making the assumption that any particular man that goes for a young, but legal, woman is probably guilty of child molestation."

That's fair. I think what is dicey and haunting though is that he didn't just meet Soon Yi when she was 18, 19 or 20, but knew her some years before as the partner of her mother. Certainly he must have played parental figure to her in some ways. That still does not make him a child molester, but it's extra creepy and would give any mother pause to have her boyfriend take up with one of her brood. You know, how long has this been going on? It's certain to have been a developing attraction at least.

There were a couple of smart letters to the editor today, including one that said, hey, if you guys care about Dylan's festering wound, tell her the truth. On the other hand, one of those scenarios could result in hard time.

I honestly don't know how to lean either way. I want to believe that it's not true, and none of this has anything to do with a desire to watch movies or whatever. I am sure I will still view his films. It does seem more horrible from my point of view to disbelieve a person who endured something like that though. But that's just my choice, others who have read and know more - I'm not going to - are probably going to have a better handle on it. And what I think in the end doesn't amount to anything for the people involved anyway.

[Monte Smith]

A friend and I got into the Allen/Soon Yi discussion a little while ago. I said I thought that it was sick, and she said that it wasn't necessarily sick for Allen to have a relationship with his partner's adopted daughter, but I meant that it was sick to have a relationship with Woody Allen.

[LennyH]

[tippy]

LOL, Monte. Lenny, I guess since this subject has become a board killer - not maybe that that's hard to do or anything - I am going to change the subject. I was looking up some Buddhisty quote I heard on NPR - something about the key to life or happiness or something being that there is nothing to attain, never found the quote, but instead I ran into this guy Mr. Money Mustache. Anyone find him annoying? (Or not. I certainly like the anti-consumerist philosophy.)

[walto]

[tippy]

Well, that's annoying. He's not perfect, Walto. He shops at Costco, has a smart phone and his wife has all of the clothes she'll ever need through her old age.

[walto]

[tippy]

Can admit that I'm off the grid. I get no tv stations whatsoever. No lympics, no news. No nothing. That is not really my choice though. In that HBO show Newsroom they said something about how we (the citizens) owned the airwaves and that I was supposed to get broadcasted programming, but I don't. Cable has it all scrambled and taken up, right?

Interested in the cheapo phone service plans though. Anyone have one to recommend?

My latest Apple itunes password which I have to jump through hoops (reset) every single time is "Fuckyouapple[number]". God, they drive me nuts. But they did accept it. Hoping to listen to Beck.

[tippy]

So far, no luck. Shoulda created that password in all caps. Trivial annoyance: Apple makes me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon.

[tippy]

It's iTunes that drives me batty. On top of it being very difficult to access my purchases there, or record them or import them to my music library - which I've never figured out - they don't let me reuse passwords so I have to get a new one every time. At least, thank God, they don't ask me 20 questions anymore and will send me a reset password link to my email. I won an iPod shuffle at one point, which I thought was cool, but it's full now and I don't know how to trade tunes out either.

On the other hand, amazon cloud went into my computer and imported my entire music library without my permission. Whatever. I guess that's just the way it is now.

I use to get a smattering of tv stations, mostly fox and pbs, with a digital antenna until last spring when I got new windows and I haven't had any stations since then. I am going to try a stronger antenna.