a selection of goodies

[jlh]

• Well, the Olympics are over, which is probably good for me because I was watching too much TV anyway. Now I'm back to listening to music instead of Chad Salmela shouting about cross-country skiing. That said, the cross-country events, including biathlon and Nordic combined, were by far my favorites of the entire Games, and I'm not alone in that. Also I'm glad that Canada won hockey and got the most golds, even though medal counts are so Cold War.
  
• Though that closing ceremony was some crazy town. Are closing ceremonies ever particularly good?
  
• Timothy Olyphant's new show Justified premieres on FX on March 16th, conveniently after White Collar's finale. You can see the trailer here on ew.com. I hope it does well so he doesn't have to keep being awesome in mediocre horror movies in order to pay his mortgage.
  
• You know that study that found a correlation between liberal political beliefs, atheism, and male monogamy on the one hand and higher IQ on the other? First, the thing is full of holes—how long have we been talking about IQ being culturally based? Second, it's evolutionary psychology, which this outstanding Newsweek article takes apart and doesn't bother to put back together again. I could say more, but it's really all in the Newsweek article. Ev psych, kinda shitty.
  
• Which reminds me, does anyone else feel like the whole gay animals thing is proving the wrong point? Will finding gay animals make gay people more "natural" for anyone? And will homosexuality being "natural" or "biological" really mean anything for equality or changes in attitudes? Because many other groups are "natural" but that hasn't done much for their status.
  
• And then there was that huge article in the NYT Magazine this Sunday that once again tried to say that depression is "creative." For those of you that don't know, I've been struggling with clinical depression since I got out of college, though probably before then as well, and when I'm in a really severe depressive episode I don't create fuckall. I barely get out of bed. I mean, didn't Elizabeth Wurtzel already say this twenty years ago? Anyway, here's Foster Kamer on the subject:
  

  There's nothing good about depression. It sucks. Here's what to tell people who're depressed: get some fucking help. See a shrink. A good one. If you need them, get some fucking drugs. And that you love them, and that it's gonna get better, and it's gonna get better just by trying. And that you love them. And then love them.