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Anybody else think this is fairly shoddy journalism? It’s a classic reporter error to mistake a small movement in a counterintuitive niche into a full-blown trend.
The link to the story reads: HIV cases increasingly older and straighter. But the story doesn’t include anything at all about HIV becoming more of a heterosexual problem. (Michael Fumento, despite occasionally being something of a nutcase and having an alarming love for animated GIFs, has written often and persuasively about the media’s attempts to make AIDS seem more heterosexual than it is. On one hand, it’s a laudable attempt to bring attention to a serious problem; on the other, though, it’s something of an insult to the gays whose deaths are apparently not enough of a tragedy to get people interested.)
The thrust of the story is about an alleged boom in AIDS infections among the elderly. There’s only one fact in the story to back this up: “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the proportion of Americans over 50 with AIDS has risen steadily from 10 percent in the early 1990s to 13.4 percent in 1999, the most recent figures available.”
First off, the phrasing’s wrong: it should be the proportion of Americans with AIDS who are over 50, not the other way around. (It’s not as if 13.4 percent of old people have AIDS; it’s that 13.4 percent of people with AIDS are old.)
Second, the story omits an extraordinarily obvious point. Think about it: there are two ways to be an old person with AIDS. First, you could contract HIV at an old age. Or second, you could be contract HIV at a younger age and just live longer.
In the 1980s, before AZT, before protease inhibitors, AIDS wasn’t something you lived with for decades. Once symptoms developed, you generally died in short order. Now, of course, people can live a decade or more with proper medication. So let’s say you were a 42-year-old gay man in 1990, and you contracted HIV. Thanks to protease cocktails, you’re now a thriving 54-year-old man with HIV. Sure, you’d be part of that 3.4 percent increase in older AIDS patients, but it’s got nothing to do with older people getting infected more often, the thesis of the story.
The only anecdote given in the story is of Jane Fowler, a 67-year-old with HIV. But the story points out she contracted HIV from a man she was dating 17 years ago! How can an infection in 1985 be part of a rising infection trend today? The fact she’s lived longer is, however, sign that it’s people living longer that’s behind any numerical rise.
Even the big official quote in the story — “It is an area we want to be concerned about,” said Robert Janssen, director of the CDC’s Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. “Potentially there is a risk of there being increases in new infections in older people” — is not convincing. (Any reporter will tell you that’s exactly the kind of fuzzy quote you get if you call someone up and say: “Hi, I’m doing a story about this growing problem. Isn’t it a growing problem?”)
Maybe the basis of the story is accurate, and more old people are being infected. But the reporter hasn’t done anything to prove it here.

For the three of you interested, the Josh Update since Thursday: Spent Thursday night with Laura out at the DMA, getting a sneak peak at the new Thomas Struth retrospective and listening to those wacky boys in the Observer-approved Chomsky. (That would be the Dallas Observer, not the New York Observer.)
Then Friday morning, it was off to Cecil, Wisconsin, for the mumble-mumble birthday of Kelly. (On the legendary Cheese Factory Road no less!) It was good to see some of the old Toledo crew and to revel in the smell of cow manure on Kelly’s family’s dairy farm. Plus, beer’s cheaper there than in Dallas. The only real drawback was the thick blanket of cigarette smoke in every Wisconsin home and bar, which left me unable to breathe for big chunks of the weekend. But hey, breathing’s optional, right?
Larry King-style dot-dot-dots: Oliver North was in line behind me at DFW, followed by a crowd of middle-aged Rush-listening middle managers who apparently believe selling arms to Iranian militants to fund the overthrow of a legitimate government is downright patriotic!… I was accused of being an industrial spy in a cheese-novelty shop… Kelly’s family owns a cow named Satan…

My college officemate Gabriel Snyder is moving, from the New York Observer to Us Weekly. So I guess I’ve read the last of his writing for a while. It’s disappointing, since he interviewed me for an Observer media column a couple weeks ago, and I suppose it’ll never see print now.

Kevyn Aucoin, the world’s most famous makeup artist and a Cajun to boot, died last week. I don’t pretend to follow the makeup world, but I do follow my fellow Cajuns, and everything I’d read about him in the last few years indicated he was an honestly great guy, generous, talented, and kind.

Guerrilla freeway signage. Great story from the LAT. (Check out the video, too.)

I must admit I was pleased to see Larry King lose his USA Today column last year. It was, after all, consistently the worst piece of high-profile “journalism” in America, a nonsensical string of celebrity suckups, meaningless observations, and unsupportable claims, all assembled with the coherence of an ADD eight-year-old playing with Legos. (It was even made subject of a half-ass crabwalk.com parody back in October.)
But it’s somehow strangely satisfying to see his column reappear at CNN’s site as “King’s Things.” It gives hope to those of us who struggle with our inner mediocrity. To save you 10 clicks, here is King’s column this week, in its entirety:
Do you see any hotels use keys anymore? I hate the cards and the flashing green or red lights… Whatever happened to Newt Gingrich? I never see him anymore… Art Howe is baseball’s most underrated manager. He consistently gets the most out of the Oakland A’s… You look up “funny” in the dictionary, you get a picture of Lewis Black. The man is flat-out hilarious… My friend Rich Cohen has written a mini-masterpiece. “Lake Effect,” a memoir of growing up in suburban Chicago, will hold you every page… I’m so old I can remember when they actually called “walks” in the NBA. Every game I see at least 10 traveling violations without any whistle… Have you seen anyone smoking a pipe lately? Whatever happened to those little wooden things?… To me the jockey is the best athlete, all things considered. Therefore, Laffit Pincay should have a statue erected of him… New York-New York in Las Vegas is a fun hotel. However, the roller coaster is not my cup of tea … Has Robert B. Parker ever written a bad book? The man is one terrific writer.

I spent last night at Bent Tree Country Club for the annual dinner of Yale Club of Dallas. This is the third time I’ve gone to a club event since I’ve been in Dallas, and each time I arrive with the faint hope that there’ll be someone close to my age there. And each time, I’m disappointed — it’s gray hair as far as the eye can see.
After I showed up, a guy walked up to me and started chatting. “Doesn’t look like there are too many of us younger people here,” he said. His name tag said: Class of ’73. 1973! He’s probably 50! He graduated before I was born! But at that moment, he and I truly made up the young crowd. (Thankfully, my friend Natacha showed up a bit later, which was welcome, both because I hadn’t seen her in a couple of months and because she can breathe without the aid of an oxygen tank and has no liver spots.)
On the way in, a youngish guy wearing a golf shirt in an SUV asked me what was going on at the club tonight that brought all these cars into the parking lot. I told him. “Ah, rich people,” he said dismissively. He said dismissively, while driving his Lexus LX 470 away from his tee time at his country club. It’s always interesting seeing Old Money and New Money collide, each thinking the other unworthy of their riches. (I, of course, represent that all-important third category, No Money.)
Anyway, dinner was nice, if only because of the dessert: a noble cannoli, prompting fond memories of Libby’s Italian, the true highlight of four years in New Haven.

Stupid dad, freaky looking kid.

Back before I became a history major and a writer, I was mostly known academically as a math geek. In seventh and eighth grade, I was good enough to be in Mathcounts, a national math competition. (Actually, I was never good enough to make it to nationals; this kid from Paul Breaux Middle always beat me in the finals.)
Anyway, despite the fact I last competed in 1988, I somehow have remained on the Mathcounts mailing list for the last 14 years. In the latest edition of “Mathcounts News,” there are five sample questions from recent competitions. Since you folks seemed to like it the last time we played Math Quiz here on crabwalk.com, here are a few more. (I can only post the first three here now because the other two include graphs or charts. Leave your answers in the comments. And don’t look there before you do the problems yourself!)
1. What is the sum of the reciprocals of the natural-number factors of 6?
2. A middle school has 12 doors to enter or leave the building. In how many ways is it possible to enter the building by one door and leave by a different door?
3. At the Word Store, each vowel sells for a different price, but all consonants are free. The word “triangle” sells for $6, “square” sells for $9, “pentagon” sells for $7, “cube” sells for $7, and “tetrahedron” sells for $8. What is dollar cost of the word “octahedron”?

There is a mariachi band in the newsroom. They’re playing La Bamba. Loudly. With a Casio keyboard accompaniment. Gotta love journalism.