"I'm delighted to announce the launch of HuffPost Good News..."

"... a new section that will shine a much-needed spotlight on what's inspiring, what's positive, what's working -- and what's missing from what most of the media chooses to cover."

How perfectly insipid. It's like Martha Stewart, but for news. Is it bad of me to feel like this is meant to work as news for women? Relatedly, my father used to insist that the news should be entirely about people who died. Dying being such a profoundly important matter. As long as anyone has died — and there's never a day when no one dies (if there was, would we notice?) — that's what the news should focus on. I tried to say, but wouldn't that be monotonous? It's banal, isn't it? Why not report that people are breathing? The real question is: What are people doing that's different and important now, not who did something in the past that makes it seem significant that he has now died? It's that thing, that for the newly dead makes us care that he has now died, that we should be learning about now. No, whatever that thing was, death is bigger. Death is the news. The news for men.

AND: Here's HuffPo's news for men: Weird News.

"I love the excitement of coming out here and seeing all these beautiful people I know."

"Even my dates are a comfort. This place has made me strong. It keeps you young.”

Says a 52-year-old prostitute, who's been walking the streets for 30+ years and now has the NYT writing a flattering story about her. Why would the NYT publish this? Because the NYT is all about helping its aging female readers feel good about themselves.

Time Warner's cable guys "assigned to the highest-end 'Signature Home' jobs will be getting a more 'fashion-forward look' soon."

And Verizon's recent ads "highlighted its technicians’ dress shirts"  and "characterize the install as a white glove experience."

That's from a NYT article — promoted top and center on its front webpage — called "Today’s Cable Guy, Upgraded and Better-Dressed." The photo at the link shows a clean-shaven, crewcut cable guy — with white paper booties over his shoes to protect the gleaming hardwood floor — demonstrating how to use the TV to a woman standing by her side. There's a second photo of another cable guy — also in booties. He's the bearded type. This better class of men will come to your house and help you set up the company's elaborate "suite of products."

"My genius husband had the router in the basement," joked the homeowner, Kathleen Hassinger, a 39-year-old mother of three daughters...

Now — it's been obvious to me for quite a while — the New York Times is written for women. But at what point does it actually become... ridiculous...

[Selene Tovar, 35, a stay-at-home mother of three] needed the Internet service at her three-story home in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood to be fast enough to power the family’s six televisions, five Xboxes, several PlayStations and multiple iPads and laptops. Even a new scale — a Hanukkah present from her husband — required a fast connection so it could send daily weigh-ins to an iPhone app.

Note the clueless husband: thinks a scale is a nice gift. Coming to Ms. Tovar's aid was Quirino Madia who "wore a white button-down shirt and gray slacks."

But watch out, affluent ladies of New York, "many cable technicians still wear the standard work clothes and tool belts."

***

And I'm sure it's got nothing to do with anything the New York Times would ever have intended to allude to, but reading that article made me want to Google "cable guy pornography," just to see how prevalent that genre was. I don't know. That's just the direction my mind went. Not that I clicked on any of the links. I didn't. And my Google search only retrieved about 4 million hits, so maybe it's not such a big porn sub-genre. I don't know if the new "fashion-forward look" will heat up the sub-genre or not. Actually, I think not. But I'm no porn connoisseur. I'm more of a Google-search connoisseur. For example, I moved on to the search: "fashion-forward cable guy porn" — 192,000 results — and found "James Franco Porn Documentary: Disappointing Sex Tape Inspires Film," an article in HuffPo (the San Francisco edition). Speaking of disappointing! James Franco does not appear as a fashion-forward cable guy in any porn film. Apparently, one time Franco made a home video with his girlfriend a realized: "Those people in pornos, they are great performers. They're not just doing it, they're selling it to an audience." The guy's a genius!

***

Rereading this post, I suddenly see what the real porn is for the ladies who read the New York Times: "three-story home in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood."

Can the police break down your door and burst in on you if they smell marijuana burning?

They don't have a warrant, but no warrant is needed under "exigent circumstances," such as when there is evidence of destruction of evidence. In the case argued in the Supreme Court today, after the police knocked and announced themselves, they heard a toilet flushing. Is that enough?

Kennedy uses this opportunity to ask why the smoking of marijuana itself doesn't constitute the destruction of evidence.

"She was wrapped in her fuzzy blanket, ready to listen to Taylor Swift or play Fruit Ninja on her iPod."

From an op-ed the NYT chose to publish in the wake of the Gabriel Giffords shooting. Please add this to the pile of evidence that the NYT aspires to be the newspaper for soft-hearted, soft-headed women.

IN THE COMMENTS: Mary Beth wins the thread:

I had a discussion with my daughter Amy the other day before I came here to ask her what the most important issue was....

(Link added.)