Family

Sic Transit Gloria: Lindsay Lohan’s Record For “Worst Excuse Ever” Drops to Third Place

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Back in 2007, when Lindsay was young, hot and seemingly had a long career of Hollywood stardom stretching out before her, I awarded the actress the championship for most brazen and manifestly ridiculous excuse ever. She had just been arrested for driving intoxicated and possession of cocaine, which had been found in the pocket of her jeans. Lindsay’s professions of innocence were that 1) she wasn’t driving her own car and 2) “These aren’t my pants!”

But like so many records, this one was short-lived. In 2012, The Smoking Gun reported that in Wisconsin police responded to a domestic abuse call to find Mrs. Michael West [Note: NOT the spouse of the Ethics Alarms commenter] bleeding from her face and saying that her husband Michael beat and tried to strangle her. Confronted by the officers, Mr. West (above, next to Lindsay) explained that he was innocent. A ghost did it.

That pushed Lindsay to second place, and those standings held for another 13 years…until this month. Brian and Sara Wilks [above] of Houston, Texas were at Miramar Beach with their four children on October 11when they left their baby alone under a tent for about an hour as they walked up the beach with their more mobile offspring. Officers responded to reports of an unattended infant on the beach, and witnesses told police that the baby had been left alone while the family wandered off. When Brian, 40, and Sara, 37, returned to the scene they found police waiting as some charitable bystanders took care of the infant. Mom and Dad admitted to placing the child under the tent for a nap before leaving with their other children.

Their explanation of how an infant ended up alone on a public beach for more than an hour?

They “lost track of time.”

You know: it can happen to anyone! And up go the Wilkses to the top of the “Worst Excuse Ever” rankings. Sorry Lindsay.

The Villain In The Phillies-Marlins Ball Heist Was NOT the Obnoxious Phillies Fan…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

No, indeed.

The incident that has “gone viral” from the stands at a Phillies-Marlins game in Miami is covered in the videos above. Phillies outfielder Harrison Bader hit a home run into the left field seats. The ball hit the bleachers and rolled around as four fans tried to nab the souvenir. A man appeared to win the battle, returned to his seat and gave the ball to his young his son, who rewarded him with a hug.

Enter Cruella DeVille. A woman who had been scrambling for the ball, wearing Phillies gear, confronted the man and demanded the ball, claiming she had a hold of it before he got it. The father complied, taking the ball out of his son’s glove and handing it to the woman. Of course the incident was filmed and posted on social media, with the unidentified woman being quickly dubbed “Phillies Karen.”

Sensing a public relations opportunity, the staff at the Marlins’ LoanDepot Park (another horribly named baseball park: money isn’t everything, guys!) wanted to make things right, so they sent a stadium employee to give the son and his sister a goody bag full of baseball stuff.

Awwwww…

The villain in this incident was not the horrible woman. (She doesn’t know her baseball ball-chasing rules, incidentally. In those scrambles for bouncing balls, whoever gets a firm grip on the ball first wins fair and square. I have been in many of these tussles, one of which featured a little old lady snatching the ball from me —a Mickey Mantle foul!—just as I thought I had it in my grasp….) No, the villain was the weenie father.

What a disgrace. This guy gave up in the face of an unjust and unreasonable confrontation because he didn’t have the guts to tell the woman to buzz off, de-gifting his son of a prize—it was his birthday!—in the process. In that moment, he taught to boy many things, none of them good. Don’t fight for what’s yours. Let bullies win. Avoid unpleasant confrontations at all costs, even when it means letting unethical tactics prevail.

He also taught his son that his father is a weenie. Good to know, I guess.

The Organization That Will Help You Kill Yourself for $20,000…What a Deal! [Corrected]

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

“People” magazine is carrying the depressing story of Maureen Slough, (above), an Irish woman, 58, who told her family she was going on vacation to Lithuania with a friend. However, she confided to two friends that she would really be traveling alone to Switzerland, where a non-profit there would help her to kill herself.

And that’s what she did, after paying the organization, Pegasos, in Liestal, Switzerland, £15,000 (a bit more than 20,000 U.S. dollars) for the assistance.

A brief digression: Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland and had been since 1942. It isn’t euthanasia which is illegal but often isn’t punished here in the U.S. and elsewhere: the patients kill themselves with prescribed drugs, and doctors aren’t involved beyond writing a legal prescription. (Writing a prescription for a drug that the doctor knows the patient will use to commit suicide is, in my view, a violation of medical ethics.)

Maureen’s adult daughter received a text message on WhatsApp from Pegasos informing her that her mother had died. That was nice of them. “What was worse was not only did I get the text on WhatsApp, they had advised me that her ashes would be posted to me in 6-8 weeks,” she said. “In that very moment, because I was alone, I just sat there with the baby and cried… I just felt like my world ended.”

Later, Slough’s ashes arrived.

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The Ethicist Rejects Unconditional Love

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

I don’t.

“My Brother’s an Unpleasant Drunk. Can I Cut Him Off?” the headline to The New York Time’s weekly ethics advice column reads. Well, obviously you can cit him off, but this is ethics: should you cut him off? I must confess, I developed a healthy dislike of the inquirer, who may not be a drunk but is also unpleasant. He writes in part…

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Melania and Vanity Fair

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

One of the nauseating Axis catch-phrases is that Trump’s is not a “normal” Presidency. That is true, but it is the people saying that who have made it so. A particularly petty example, which I rank near the organized effort to stop Trump in his first term from participating in the Kennedy Center Honors program (that worked out well!) is the catty, mean girls decision to keep Melania Trump, obviously one of the most attractive and glamorous of all First Ladies (she makes Jackie Kennedy look like a Muppet) of all the women’s magazines, when covers featuring the First Lady had previously been routine. Puppet President enabler Jill Biden was judges worthy of several covers, but not Melania Trump. Nah, there’s no ladies magazine media bias!

The snotty boycott reached its apotheosis earlier this month, when sources reported that staffers at Conde Nast’s “Vanity Fair” threatened a walk-out over the possibility of a Melania Trump cover. A “mid-level editor” supposedly said that she’d “walk out the motherfucking door, and half my staff will follow me” if the magazine tried to “normalize this despot and his wife.” “Normalize.” “Despot.”

Nice. How fair and rational. Also reportedly, Melania told the magazine to get lost when it proposed a cover after snubbing her (because her husband is eeeevil) all this time. Good.

Just because the Trump-Haters have been trying to tear the nation apart doesn’t obligate the victims of their vendetta to prostate themselves to make peace.

Another Bonkers Question To “Social Q’s”

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Who are these people?

A mere summary won’t do the full craziness of this question to the NYT’s manners advice column full justice, so here’s the whole, ugly thing:

My husband’s brother, mid-60s, has always been single. Before his parents died, he lived with them. While attending a violent political rally that my husband and I opposed early in the pandemic, he contracted Covid, then infected his mother and behaved irresponsibly in managing her care. She died soon after. We have had no real relationship with him in years. Still, he emails suggestions of gifts he would like for birthdays and Christmas. We send them, and he responds with thank-you notes. When he asks what we would like, we respond that we don’t want any gifts. He sends them anyway, and we donate them to charity. We do not acknowledge them, which we normally would do. Recently, he expressed a desire for acknowledgment of his gifts. How should we handle this?

I’m not going to read columnist Phillip Galanes’s answer to this one because I declared him an irredeemable woke bigot quite a while ago. I’m insulted that he thinks any reader worthy of human association would be interested in such a family’s pathology. Shunning a family member is an extreme move that had better be justifiable; shunning him without letting him know he’s being shunned is not just cruel, it’s weird.

Considerations:

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Smug, Self-Satisfied Progressive Asshole of the Year: David Litt

/ Jack Marshall / 22 Comments

The obnoxious screed “Is It Time to Stop Snubbing Your Right-Wing Family?,” authored by an obscure writer I never heard of (three of his better-known mentors are above) and hope I never hear of again, was deemed appropriate content for New York Times readers, and not as satire either.

Litt epitomizes the type of insufferable elitist jerks that have made the modern Left the pit of despond that it has become over the last decade or so. Yuck. Was this guy ever a tolerable human being? The Times should be required to publish a full analysis of how Litt got this way as a public service, kind of like that episode of “I Love Lucy” where her book draft was sought by a publisher to use in a how-to tome to illustrate what writers shouldn’t ever do.

The column is about how Litt “felt a civic duty to be rude” to his wife’s younger brother because he hadn’t seen the light and surrendered his mind to the Woke and Wonderful. A few excerpts will tell you all you need to know about Litt, but I may add a little commentary here and there:

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“The Ethicist” Answers the Dumbest Question Yet…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Sure, Prof. Appiah answers the question from “Name Withheld” correctly, because if he didn’t, the New York Times would have to send its long-time author of its weekly ethics advice column to Madam Louisa’s Home for the Addled and Bewildered. But why did he feel he had to answer such an easy question at all? Slow week for the ol’ mailbag, Kwame?

A wife worried about the fact that her husband is sedentary, fat, and getting fatter asked if it was wrong to try to get him to take affirmative steps to lose some weight. “As we both approach 50,” she writes, “I worry that his B.M.I., which is 30, and his B.R.I. (body roundness index, a measure of abdominal fat) are high (he can’t even button some of his shirts around the middle), which could lead to other health issues. I’ve already tried encouraging him to move more and eat better, but I can’t schedule every one of my workouts for us to exercise together, and he dislikes some of the routines I do, anyway. He’s also very sensitive about his weight.”

“Is it wrong for me to try to get him to take Ozempic?,” she finally asks. “I’m hoping that losing weight will help boost his energy levels, which might lead to more self-care. I know it’s not my body, and I’m not his doctor, but as his wife I also know it will fall to me to care for him if health issues arise.”

Ignore her concentration on Ozempic; she’s not asking about the risks involved with that medication or about the perils of quick fixes. She’s asking if it is wrong (this is The Ethicist she’s writing to) for a spouse to try to get the man she has vowed to love and to cherish to be responsible and take care of himself before it’s too late. Ozempic, Weight Watchers, jogging, whatever: how can a wife’s diligent efforts to somehow convince her husband to get healthier be wrong, as in “unethical”?

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Naming Ethics: Your Children Can Suffer For Your Ignorance

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This one will be short, if not sweet.

A Reddit user shared this baby shower announcement on the sub-reddit devoted to terrible baby names, mostly absurd spellings….but this isn’t a spelling problem:

Yes, the parents are morons.

It seems that they didn’t know about the worst nuclear facility disaster in history, which rendered the Ukrainian city of Chernobyl a veritable ghost town in 1986, In some movies, it’s a zombie town. But the parents just thought it was a pretty name. You know, like “Treblinka.” Or “Malmedy.”

It is unknown at this point whether someone will back Mom and Dad into a corner, slap them silly, and tell them that they cannot stick an innocent child with that name, although naming a child “Chernobyl” is perfectly legal. It did prompt some inspired mockery on Reddit, though.

My favorite: “I guess it’s a nuclear family.”

Yes, My Conservative Facebook Friends Can Be Just As Irrational As the Progressives…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

A usually wise and measured conservative Facebook friend posted with approval a tweet by conservative pundit Matt Walsh, complaining about the father of a 15-year-old school shooter who killed two people and injured six others being charged after the tragedy. The killings (the girl shot herself as well, and died) occurred at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, in December.

“Let’s just be honest about the pattern here,” Walsh wrote. “This is the third time that a parent has been charged for violence committed by their child. In every case, the parent has been white. There is violence committed in the streets of every major city every single day. You could blame the crappy, neglectful parents in literally all of those cases. And yet none of them have ever been charged.”

Wow, talk about the wrong hill to die on! Both of those other cases involved criminally negligent parents, and the father of the late shooter in Wisconsin may have been the worst of the three.

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