Warning: defiitely NSFW!

“This animal is bullshit!” Excellent.

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Topics we discuss this week: Christina’s emotional speech on Grey’s Anatomy, Olivia and Peter’s “date” on Fringe, Michael’s reaction to the changes on The Office, Lisbon’s compromising situation(s) on The Mentalist, and why we like The Good Wife.

Plus, this new Funny or Die parody video starring Nicol Paone:

We’ll be taking a month or so off, partly due to the Olympics, so look for a new episode on March 12.

“Some people are getting kittens.” Love it.

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Veronica and Linda team up to fight the power on Better Off Ted, Bones calls Booth out on his relationship with his brother on Bones, and the American Idol auditions include an awkward scene in which Ryan Seacrest gets pissed off at a guy hitting on him.

Lori and I discuss all this and more — including our thoughts on the iPad — in this week’s episode of Small Screen Stakeout.

We also review The Dirty Bomb Diaries, a low-key but effective 16-episode series chronicling the experiences of a young woman (played by Misty Van Cleve) in the aftermath of disaster: If you were trapped in a city after a radioactive Dirty Bomb detonated, what would you be willing to do? Who would you become? Witness the conflict through the eyes of a single woman struggling at Ground Zero with no supplies, sporadic phone service, a lack of police support and a city ready to tear itself apart. We discuss the making of the series and tell the story of how we survived the great Seattle earthquake of 2001.

You can watch the first two episodes below, and the rest on Clicker.com.



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This week on Small Screen Stakeout, Lori and I cover the JFK conspiracy on Bones, Better Off Ted’s bagel-throwing contest, the latest American Idol auditions, Sarah Paulson’s terrific performance on last week’s Law and Order: SVU, the Samantha Bee/sexual harassment episode of the last Law and Order, Callie and Arizona’s “hot” makeout session on Grey’s Anatomy, the flashbacks on The Office, and the premiere of the new ABC legal drama The Deep End — which needs a lot more depth. Plus, Defying Gravity, Caprica, and Sofia Vergara on Ellen.

The web series we’re discussing this week is last summer’s high-profile web series Foreign Body, a 50-episode prequel leading up to the release of Robin Cook’s new medical thriller of the same name.

Here’s a compilation of the first four episodes (they’re only two minutes long each). If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can watch the rest of the episodes on the series’ official site.

To say Foreign Body is a parade of sexist and cultural stereotypes is an understatement — not to mention the plot is confusing and the acting sub-par. It’s all especially appalling when you consider that it was backed by Michael Eisner, sponsored by Honda, and cost $10,000 an episode to make. But more about that in the podcast!

Add your thoughts on this and the rest of this week’s topics in the comments.

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Lori and I spend so much time discussing the TV shows we watch, we decided to launch a weekly podcast so you all can share in the fun/arguments. This week we cover Bones, Better Off Ted, American Idol, Fringe, Law and Order: SVU, Grey’s Anatomy, Modern Family, and my personal favorite, The Good Wife, as well as two two new web series/videos which I’ve embedded below so you can watch them before listening, if you want to.

This being our first audio podcast, it’s a little on the long side, and includes a lot of rambling asides — from six degrees of Sanaa Lathan, to the benefits of marathoning TV shows, to why we hated the latest Twilight movie New Moon. It clocks in at around an hour and half, so you may want to multi-task while you listen.

Hope you enjoy it, and let me know in the comments if you agree/disagree with our take on a show or episode.

A blog about women, crime, and the media whose contributors range from policewomen to sex-crimes prosecutors to forensics experts to mystery novelists, the content on Women in Crime Ink is an interesting mix of information about the law, forensics, and criminology; the psychology of criminals and victims; critiques of how the media covers a particular crime (or type of crime); advice for mystery writers; and true crime stories.

Here are some of their recent blog posts:

• Cutting-edge FBI Data Technology - an overview of how the FBI uses computers and technology to track criminals
• What Makes a True Crime Book Bad?
• Christmas Tidings of Mayhem - a look back at the 1885 Austin, TX serial killer dubbed the “Servant Girl Annihilator”, who was never apprehended
• 2009: Sex, Sex, and More Sex - a review of the year’s high-profile cases of infidelity and sexual assault
• Lessons From the Dead - why adolescents are especially vulnerable to predators and how they can protect themselves

I’m not a huge fan of true crime stories, but I’m interested in the statistics and psychology of criminal behavior.  It may seem like a morbid topic, but we live in a culture rife with crime, and reading the perspectives of women who are experts in this field gives me important information, and food for thought.

If you’re interested in criminology, writing a mystery or true crime novel, or just learning more about the world we live in, check it out at womenincrimink.com.

There are lots of tips available for freelancers trying to break into writing for online publications, but one topic I don’t see mentioned very often is the value of the well-crafted comment.

Editors get solicited all the time by potential writers via email pitches, and sometimes this works (I’ll write more on that in a future blog post), but commenting is another and sometimes better way to land a writing gig.

The right comment can:

• illustrate your writing ability
• show you can take initiative
• communicate you understand the tone and style of the writing on the site
• demonstrate your passion for and knowledge of the subject matter

Consistently posting high-quality comments on a site you want to write for may not lead to freelance work right away, but it’s likely to put you on their radar  — or someone else’s — and land you writing assignments in the future.

Case in point: I discovered one of my best AfterEllen.com writers because of a single comment she left on the site.

Her comment stood out among the hundreds of others because it was well-written, intelligent, funny, and deflected criticism through sarcasm without being mean-spirited or resorting to personal attacks. Not only did the comment amuse me (never underestimate the power of provoking an emotional response in an editor), it demonstrated that the author had a good understanding of the zeitgeist of the site (which is often the most difficult thing to communicate to potential writers).

I was impressed enough by her comment that I contacted her via private message and invited her to write a sample blog post for us. A year later, she’s become one of the site’s most popular writers, and other sites have subsequently hired her for freelance writing work. She’s well on her way to being able to make a living writing full-time.

Don’t get me wrong: Her success is due to her talent and hard work. But she got her first break because she took the time to leave a thoughtful, well-written, and entertaining comment.

This story isn’t uncommon: I know of several other writers who have been hired by blogs or editorial sites by making a good impression in the comments or in forum threads. From an editor’s perspective, it’s always good to receive a killer sample piece from a writer trying to impress you, but it’s even better when someone impresses you without trying.

What qualifies as a “well-crafted” comment?

It varies slightly based on the tone and focus of the site and article/post/video you’re commenting on, but some themes are universal: clarity, wit, creativity, and most importantly, grammatically correct sentences with proper capitalization and spelling. This last point should go without saying, but unfortunately, an increasing number of comments look something  like this:

i love this movie its so cool if u dont like it ur just a hater

At least this makes it easier for professional writers to stand out, simply by crossing their t’s and capitalizing their I’s — which is the only good thing about the rapid decline of proper punctuation and capitalization on the internet. But that’s a rant for another day.

The bottom line: if you want to write for a living, or even as a hobby, take care with what you write even in informal settings. You never know who’s paying attention.

One of the things that pushed me into leaving was the realization that not only was I burned out, but this was actually hindering the site from being as good as it could be. As most writers will tell you, it takes a certain amount of emotional energy to write analytically, regardless of whether you’re writing a short blog post or a 3-page article (especially if you’re trying to make it entertaining at the same time). Trying to navigate the phalanx of Hollywood publicists, managers, and network executives to get information or an interview takes a toll, too.

Really, the excitement starts to wane after doing almost anything for over 7 years, especially 14 hours a day.

But being burned out meant I was doing less writing and chasing down interviews, which translated to less interesting content on the site — and that wasn’t OK with me.  I wanted the site to succeed, even if that meant I had to leave. (Also, I wanted some sleep, to read books again, and to experience this thing called a weekend that I’ve heard everyone rave about.)

The last month has only affirmed my decision. It’s been great to see all the good things happening on AfterEllen.com since I left — from the interviews Karman and the writers have lined up (many of which haven’t been published yet), to Trish’s Morning Brew column (which I love and wish I’d thought of myself), to the interesting entertainment coverage they have in the works that won’t be published for awhile.

I talk to Karman and Trish a few times a week, but mostly just to answer random technical questions, catch up on the latest lesbian entertainment gossip, or just to say hi.

Turns out, they don’t need me all that much — and I couldn’t be happier (or more well-rested). Now that I get to be a guest at the party, instead of hosting it, it’s fun again! I still tend to automatically scour for typos (a habit that will probably take me years to undue), but now when I read AfterEllen.com’s blog posts and articles, I just get to enjoy them with everyone else.

Not that I have a ton of time to do that, unfortunately — I’m hard at work again, on an entertainment-related site still in development that Lori and I were recruited to run.

Yes, it was a short break. But my new job doesn’t require writing or interviewing anyone.

And for the first time in years, watching bad lesbian movies is entirely optional.

Started by “a passionate team of TV-loving freaks with search engine, media, data and content management backgrounds,” Clicker.com is “one part directory, one part search engine, one part wiki, one part entertainment guide, and one part DVR [and] contains more than 450,000 episodes, from over 6,000 shows, from over 1,200 networks, tens of thousands of movies, and 50,000 music videos from 20,000 artists.”

You can easily browse videos by type of content (TV, movies, web originals and music) as well as genre (drama, comedy, action, etc.). Some of the videos are embedded, but many listings link off to other sites (e.g. the Buffy the Vampire Slayer listing sends you to TheWB.com).

There are internet video sites like NewTeeVee.com and TubeFilter.com that review and/or feature original web series; sites like Hulu that only feature online video related to network TV content; and sites like YouTube that include all of the above as well as soft porn, fan videos, and video blogs.

But this is the first I’ve come across that focuses on aggregating all “television or television-quality” web video, regardless of who produced it, and it most likely won’t be the last.

A site like Clicker.com would seem to be at a significant competitive disadvantage to popular and well-funded sites like Hulu and YouTube. But the diversity and huge volume of videos on YouTube is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness (it’s easy to get overwhelmed when searching for something, and the increasing number of spam videos are annoying), and as popular as Hulu is, they’re held hostage by Hollywood’s profitable but confusing to consumers windowing strategy which makes content available on Hulu only at certain times (Hulu includes some independent web series, but buries them beneath the studio content).

Hulu expects these windows to “converge over time,” but until then, there’s a gap to be filled by sites like Clicker.com.

And I’m on board with any site that helps me find ways to watch the web series Anyone But Me, a Feist music video, episodes of Lincoln Heights, and The Secret of NIMH.

Only a handful of the 80 individuals nominated are people of color, and about half of them are nominated are in the R&B category. Maybe the People’s Choice folks are hoping hiring Queen Latifah as the host will distract us from noticing?

To celebrate America’s time-honored tradition of overlooking talented people of color in entertainment, I’ve created this 2009 White People’s Choice Awards game from the nominations on the PCA website. (Duplicates are the result of Taylor Swift some people being nominated in more than one category).

Play the game and see how well you score!

This handy guide can also double as a bingo card when the awards air on Jan. 6 on CBS!

Who said ethnocentrity can’t be fun?

The Real Andrea (Andrea Wachner)

Real Andrea rigged up a video camera at the event ahead of time, fed Fake Andrea info about each classmate through an ear piece, and then sat back and watched the resulting fun from a nearby hotel room, via a live feed on her laptop.

Fake Andrea

The resulting funny/awkward scenes include Fake Andrea asking one classmate “Am I only the only stripper in the class?” and asking a male (Republican) classmate,  “are you straight or gay?” Sadly, Fake Andrea did not claim to have invented the Post It or quick-burning cigarettes, which would have made it even funnier, but I suppose that would have been tipping her hand too much.

“Andrea” chats up a former classmate

Naturally, Fake Andrea ends up stripping at the end of the evening, which finally tips off some of her classmates to the fact that everything might not be quite as it seems.

Watch it here:

The video kind of meanders at the end, but I love the effort and creativity that went into this. As one commenter said about it on YouTube said “you might have won the internet.”

“I Remember Andrea” is currently making the film festival rounds — you can read more about it on IRememberAndrea.com and its Facebook fan page.

Fast-forward 20 years, and my teenage niece spends all her free time playing video games on her Xbox with her four best friends, who are all boys (she likes having guy friends better because “they’re less judgmental”).

She and her guy friends even ditched their high school’s homecoming dance a few weeks ago in favor of a Halo marathon at her house. And when Halo OTSD was released last month, her aunts bought her a copy after a week of her dropping not-so-subtle hints about how all her friends had the game and she didn’t. (We hate to see her suffer.)

But in other ways, she’s a typical young teenage girl: a straight-A student, a fashion maven who gives me make-up tips, and a huge Twilight fan who has the New Moon countdown app on her iTouch and who thinks Robert Pattinson is the ultimate chocolatey goodness.

All of this has me wondering: how will playing video games shape who she becomes as she grows up?

Will the assertiveness she’s learned and rewarded for in the games carry over into her real life, in any kind of permanent way? Will gaming help her relate better to male classmates and coworkers as an adult? Will she turn out any differently than if she’d spent her free time reading, or playing sports?

Games like Halo are still ridiculously male-oriented. There’s only one female character in Halo OTSD, for example, and a study in December of the top 10 best-selling games for each of the major consoles found that only 54% of the games contained female lead characters, while 92% had male lead characters; 38% of the female characters displayed significant body exposure, including cleavage, thighs and midriffs; and female characters were much more likely to giggle (yes, giggle) than male characters.

But none of this seems to bother my niece, at least not enough to prevent her from playing games, even the ones that are clearly designed for a male audience. I’ve only seen positive improvements in her self-confidence since she started gaming, and contrary to the stereotype, it seems to have improved rather than hindered her social life.

Not a lot of studies have been done yet on the long-term effects of gaming on girls, since girls haven’t been playing video games in large numbers for very long, but a study in September of younger teenage girls found that playing games like Tetris actually improved brain function. I’m not surprised: When my niece and I play Oblivion together, she spends more time strategizing than fighting, and she can run circles around me on anything that requires hand-eye coordination. The complexity of most video games today can’t help but expand the way you think.

To be fair, my niece is drawn to the games in part because of the social aspect — the ability to play Halo with her friends, either in-person or online using headsets to communicate. But almost all video games are incorporating this kind of social aspect now, which means more and more girls are likely to start playing, and at an earlier age (my other nieces, ages 9 and 12, also play a lot of video games).

Despite this and the fact that women and girls already reportedly comprise 40% of gamers, girls who game are still considered a “freakish anomaly”. According to the results of this university study released in the summer, however, men and women who game more in their teens continue to do so later in life.

If that’s true, an entire generation of girls may grow up spending more time fighting aliens than reading Pride and Prejudice.

Or even more likely, they’ll be fighting aliens, reading Pride and Prejudice on a Kindle, and text messaging — all at the same time.

Just as long as they’re not driving while they’re doing it.

The heroine is played by Christine Chatelain (Sanctuary), sporting a Natty Gan-meets-Lena Headey as Sarah Connor look.

Here’s the first episode:

The pacing is a little slow — six minutes of running through the woods might work on a bigger screen, but gets boring quickly on a computer monitor (especially if you have buffering issues) — and not much happens in the first episode, but it’s nice to see a female-powered web series (and one with fairly high production values) getting so much promotion.

This sort of advertising from for-profit companies is de rigeur, as Huffington Post blogger Alex Leo outlines in “Five Sexist Trends the Advertising World Just Can’t Shake. Sites like Jezebel regularly track sexist ads, like this recent Reebok commercial:

And print ads for cars:

Video games:

Even lesbian TV shows.

But except for Peta, non-profits have traditionally avoided, you know, exploiting people. 350.org is now apparently hopping on the selling-out-women band-wagon.

I’m a big proponent of educating people about global warming, but I doubt most people watching “Supermodels Take it off for Climate Change” are paying attention to the spoken message. If the models weren’t all white women, you might think you were watching a risque Benetton or Calvin Klein ad. Or an episode of Big Brother or Tila Tequila.

And if you are halfway paying attention to the message of 350’s ad, you’re just as likely to come away thinking global warming is a good thing because it means women will wear less clothing. Mixed-messages much?

Putting out an ad that distracts viewers from your message while exploiting and alienating a large number of them doesn’t seem like such a great way to encourage unification. Or solutions.

Lori and I are the heads of a vampire family — with our three nieces as our children — and it’s our job to scare kids as they walk by. (So basically, what lesbian moms and their kids do to the Religious Right the rest of the year.)

Spending quality time with the nieces

I offered to frighten the guests by reciting the plots of bad lesbian movies at them as they passed, but was told that would “bore” them, not “scare” them. Clearly my sister’s never seen Bar Girls.

Happy Halloween everyone!

I don’t know if I’d actually buy an Apple Tablet — it depends on what it does, the price, how heavy it is — but I like the idea. And I know by 12 and 14-year-old nieces would love one — they’re addicted to games like Sally’s Spa and Enigmo on their iTouch. (Full disclosure: they learned to play those games on Aunt Sarah’s iPhone).

To pass the time, Wired magazine is doing an Apple Tablet mock-up contest, inviting readers to submit entries in two categories: Most Realistic Mock-Up and Most Creative Mock-Up, for “anyone who can dream up the Apple tablet that we all really want.”

Here are two of the entries so far:

I’m tempted to fire up the Photoshop and see what I can come up with myself, but not being a graphic designer, the results would probably be embarrassing for everyone. But it’s fun to think about.

Check out the rest of the entries or submit your own here.

“Swedish Fish Stories.”

I love that guy.

I’ll check out the album on iTunes, because I like his voice, but I’m not sure what I think about the cover except he’s clearly not trying to downplay his sexuality, and that he looks like the love child of Pink and Elvis, with a little Cyndi Lauper thrown in for good measure.

And I hope he’s not trying to bring back the Michael Jackson one-glove look. That would be bad for everyone.

Speaking of fashion advice, check out Movieline’s new post, “How to Turn the New Adam Lambert Album Cover into a Last-Minute Halloween Costume”.

This wouldn’t be unusual if the “crew” the men were trying to leave was a street gang or the Mafia, but it was a magazine-selling crew. Even stranger? There have been 86 (!) deaths connected to magazine crews over the last several years.

Apparently, the magazine-selling industry, which includes about 200 of these crews, is “unregulated and thrives on violence and coercion.”

There’s even a watchdog website called Parent Watch that tracks the violence associated with these crews, and tries to educate parents and the media about how they lure young people by promising a life of travel and good times, and then trap them in 14-hour workdays, low pay, and apparently, beatings if they try to leave.

Um, what?!

Forget Global Warming, this is the real proof that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

Stay tuned for an expose on the dangers of selling Amway products.

Before you start worrying that anonymity will go away on the web (not that this is even possible), the basis of the suit by these women was that the reportedly unsubstantiated and highly inflammatory personal attacks (including sexually explicit ones) were:

1. made on a website frequented by potential employers (law firms)
2. tied to the women’s real names (so anyone doing a Google search on their names could easily find these comments).

I’m all for free speech, and I believe the anonymity provided by the internet is really good in a lot of ways (allowing closeted or questioning gay or bisexual people to be out online, for example). But as someone who has run a very large community, I’ve seen how detrimental anonymous commenting can be, both to the community and to the individuals being attacked. Although most commenters are fairly respectful (or at least not outright malicious), I’ve been appalled over the years to see what some people will say when they can hide behind anonymity — things I doubt they would ever say if they had to attach their real names to it — if they had to be personally accountable for their own speech.

I also believe community owners or moderators have a responsibility to prevent abuse of anonymity. Unfortunately, a law called “Section 230″ currently immunizes internet publishers from legal harm, so the women could not sue AutoAdmit for refusing to remove the comments, they could only go after the anonymous commenters themselves. Perez points out the problems with this law:

At the time of its establishment in the 90’s, however, those “publishers” were the ISPs themselves - the AOLs and CompuServes that delivered Internet access to consumers. The idea of bloggers, social media publishers, and anonymous blog and forum commenters didn’t really exist yet and therefore wasn’t taken into consideration.

It’s the policy of AfterEllen.com’s community to remove personal attacks, or racist, sexist or homophobic comments, and while I’m the first to admit the line can be fuzzy sometimes, I believe I should absolutely be held responsible if I allow comments that clearly cross the line to stand (as long as I’ve first been made aware of them).

I’m not suggesting people shouldn’t be able to have freedom of speech on the internet, or that there shouldn’t be anonymity, but I do believe there should be legal recourse available for those who are subject to personal attacks online made by people hiding behind anonymity, just as there is in the offline world. As more and more employers and schools use the internet to research potential employees or students, malicious and unsubstantiated attacks have real-world effects beyond just hurting someone’s feelings.

Jessica Valenti of Feministing.com makes a similar point in a great piece she wrote in 2007 for The Guardian entitled “How the web became a sexists’ paradise” about the particularly detrimental effect anonymity is having on women online:

While online harassment doesn’t necessarily create the same immediate safety concerns as street harassment, the consequences are arguably more severe. If someone calls you a “slut” on the street, it stings - but you can move on. If someone calls you a “slut” online, there’s a public record as long as the site exists … And for young women applying for jobs, the reality is terrifying. Imagine a potential employer searching for information and coming across a thread about what a “whore” you are.

Sometimes the attacks are even more personal, as Valenti recounts the story of a woman who received harassing comments on her site that escalated to death threats and the publication of her social security number and home address — all from anonymous commenters, of course.

If the threat of being sued for libel makes someone think twice before posting those kinds of comments, then I say bring it on.

I love satire. And leotards.

What you’ll find here: posts about a variety of things I’m interested in, like new media, politics, racism, feminism, business, general entertainment, the genius of random things on the internet, and what I’m currently up to.

What you won’t find here: posts about lesbian entertainment. At least, not very often. If I’m going to write about that topic, I’ll save it for AfterEllen.com. After writing over 1,000 articles and blog posts on that topic over the last 7 and a half years, I need to take a bit of a break from that for a little while, anyway.

Please feel free to comment on the posts, but no personal attacks, trolling, flame-throwing, or other circus acts. Thanks!

Nathan Havey makes several good points about it in a well-reasoned piece on The Huffington Post.

At one extreme, one in six women in the United States will be the victim of sexual violence in her lifetime (RAINN). At the other, controlling for differing industries and employment levels, women earn $0.77 to the dollar that men earn. And this is the best it has ever been … it is critically important, particularly for the men reading this, that you take a moment and really consider the idea that we are living in a system that started with women as property and is still a long way from ‘equal.’

Do these Senators consciously support rape? Of course not. But their actions absolutely support a status quo in which rape and sexual violence flourish.

An anonymous blogger started the satirical website RepublicansForRape.org as their form of protest, and Jon Stuart took the Republicans to task about this in his usual pointed but humorous style:

It’s fairly obvious why so many Republicans are against this amendment, given how much money military contractors have donated to the Republican party, and of course it’s reprehensible. (Disclaimer: I vehemently disagree with most of the Republican Party’s positions, but I don’t think most Republicans are evil. Although I’ll admit I wonder about Dick Cheney.)

But it turns out the amendment’s biggest obstacle may be a Democrat: Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, the third longest-serving senator in history, who heads up the Senate Appropriations Committee, is reportedly considering removing the provision after pressure by the military subcontractors.

The Department of Defense, with the support of the Obama Administration, is also apparently against the amendment.

Health care reform, meanwhile, is being held up by Democrats, not Republicans — a point on which Inside Washington host Ana Marie Cox and her guests (one Democrat and one Republican) all agreed this week.

“Never let it be said that the Democratic Party is monolithic, or unified for that matter,” blogger Tracie Powell summed up on CQ Politics in her analysis of the military contracts amendment. But The Onion made a similar point in the fake headline they tweeted out last month: “BREAKING: Democrats Hoping To Take Control Of Congress From Republican Minority In 2010.”

With friends like these, who needs Republicans?

Read my first Smart Lemming blog post to find out.

It’s an interesting slideshow, but it seems to me that it illustrates more about the power of photographs than newspapers. And the shift from print to online doesn’t spell the demise of photos — in fact, I would guess most of us see more photos today than we did a decade ago because of the web.

Although, to be fair, most of us probably encounter more entertainingly photoshopped images, than photos about significant moments in history.

Not that those aren’t fun, too…

Posters by Whitney Slone and Maureen O’Connell

Through an in-depth examination of five major North American disasters — the San Francisco earthquake of 1906; the 1917 explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the 1985 Mexico City earthquake; the 9/11 attack in 2001; and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 — Solnit reveals how people really behave when normal rules of society are suspended in the wake of tragedy — with spontaneous altruism, self-organization and mutual aid — vs. the how people are widely (and falsely) believed to behave in these circumstances (with violence, sexual assault and the hoarding of resources).

She also demonstrates why promoting the idea that people will behave badly in the aftermath of a disaster actually creates that behavior; and why government intervention (or lack thereof) has historically made the situation worse, not better.

I originally picked up this book because I’ve long had an interest in how people behave in unusual or life-or-death situations, and because I’ve had a few brushes with disasters myself (although none as devastating as the ones described in the book), including the Mt. St. Helens eruption in 1980 (fortunately, I lived far enough away that we just had to deal with the ash); the 1994 Northridge earthquake (I was staying in a hotel in L.A. and had to run down 22 flights of stairs in pajamas without my contacts in); a tornado in Fargo, ND in 1996 (I was just driving through); and the 2001 Nisqually earthquake — one of the worst quakes we’ve had in the Seattle area in a long time (I was at the top of a tall building in downtown Seattle when it happened).

I also live in the shadow of North America’s largest dormant volcano, Mt. Rainier. There are Volcano Evacuation Route signs posted throughout my neighborhood, with warnings from local newscasters at least once a year that we are overdue for a catastrophic eruption. (I don’t spend much time worrying about this, but I also won’t be surprised to wake up one morning and find a fast-moving lahar with my name on it, since I seem to be a magnet for disasters.)

But you don’t have to live in a disaster-prone area to find this book inspiring, and useful.

In fact, given the ongoing threats posed by global warming, terrorist attacks, and the Swine flu, this should be required reading for all Americans, if for no other reason than to dispel the myths that lead people to behave in terrible ways after a disaster, like the handful of white New Orleans residents who shot any black man who moved during the Katrina aftermath because of false reports about rape and looting.

I love the internet.