Right now, however, let's focus on actual anniversaries and such here, and it was on this day in 1972 that the Supreme Court first ruled that the death penalty in the United States could constitute cruel and unusual punishment. This decision would be reversed a few years later, of course, but at least for a short while there the United States had no death penalty. These days the only two major industrialized countries that still have the death penalty on the books are the United States and Japan, and if you think the death penalty in the United States is cruel and unusual, go read up on how it's meted out in Japan. I recommend starting with the reports on Amnesty International's Website, which will also educate you on the absolutely horrid conditions in Japanese prisons, which basically haven't been reformed to any great extent for nearly a century now. The next time anyone tries telling you that this nation needs to punish its criminals harder and toughen up the prisons, print him or her out a copy of Amnesty International's reports on Japanese prisons, and then tell him or her that the rate of recidivism in Japan is nearly the same as it is here. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What’s something you wear only on special occasions, and when was the last time?
I have a Tori Amos t-shirt that I got from a company that used to advertise in the back pages of Rolling Stone back in the mid-1990s that was sold during her tour in support of Boys for Pele. The t-shirt is black with the words "RECOVERING CHRISTIAN" printed on the front in huge white letters, the reference being from her song "In the Springtime of His Voodoo." I used to have the t-shirt in my regular rotation, but then whenever I wore it into the Student Union at UT, I would invariably get a few Christians who would come up to me and ask me what my problem with Christianity is. I took the shirt out of my rotation after that, but I'd still wear it to campus Halloween parties as a cheap "costume."
2. What’s something you consume only on special occasions, and when was the last time?
For some strange reason that dates back to before my birth, we Shannons always have a dinner of Swedish meatballs and mashed potatoes (along with the Shannon family staple of Wheat Thins and Bar-Scheeze, a cheese spread made by a restaurant near my folks' childhood homes) every Christmas Eve. When I went vegetarian I kind of abstained from this dinner for a while, but once we got vegetarian meat substitutes in our local supermarkets, my Mom's been kind enough to make me vegetarian meatballs every Christmas Eve since.
3. Who’s someone you see only on special occasions, and when was the last time?
Given how estranged I am from my non-immediate family, I'll have to say Lara whenever there's a dance game tournament that I feel up to going to. I really wish I saw her more often that that, though.
4. From now on, you will commemorate every year on this date something that happened to you in the past twenty-four hours! What will it be?
I am really blanking here, because today's been kind of blah so far, except that I played dance games for the first time in nearly two months earlier this afternoon. Let me push the time frame back a little more than twenty-four hours, then, because yesterday afternoon I got word that I'm going to be interviewed for a job I'd really like to get here soon.
5. What’s a unique special occasion you share with just a few people you know?
I'm blanking again. There aren't even any special occasions within the family I can think of now. Well, since it was just this past week, I'll say the anniversary of Rowan's death, since that was an occasion, albeit a somber one, for the whole family.
I can't quite determine when, exactly, the German word schadenfreude -- the guilty pleasure and joy one sometimes feels at seeing another's misfortune -- became such an integral part of our modern-day lexicon. My first exposure to the word came when my sister bought a cassette tape of Dennis Miller reading one of his collections of rants he first presented on his HBO show and then later made into books. (We didn't get HBO until the mid-late 90s when we got DirecTV, so we didn't actually see his show until then.) For some reason my sister kept that cassette out in the kitchen, so whenever I was out there putting together a meal of some sort, I'd pop the tape in the kitchen stereo and listen to bits of it. I'm pretty sure I must have listened to the tape at least ten times all the way through, and Miller's rant on schadenfreude stuck with me simply because the concept of schadenfreude was so intriguing to me. At the very least it tickled me, back in my pre-English student days, that a foreign language would have a word to describe a concept that is nearly impossible to describe in one or two words in English.
In the years that have followed, though, my relationship with schadenfreude has become more and more uneasy. On one level, schadenfreude is, by its very nature, something that makes you feel a little bit guilty when you experience it, because you know that you're not supposed to take joy in the misfortune of others. It seems, on the surface, something that you should be making a conscious effort to avoid. However, I don't think it is actually possible for most people, let alone myself, to totally eliminate schadenfreude from their lives. As bad as it may be, at the very least schadenfreude is something which is usually internal, and as long as that joy is not externalized in a crass comment or a Nelson-esque "HA HA," it is something which ultimately is not damaging to the people around us, and the fact that we experience a bit of guilt through schadenfreude allows us to acknowledge that it is wrong, even if there is that small part of ourself that kind of gets off on it. Schadenfreude may not be the best thing in the world, but there are certainly much, much worse feelings to internalize and externalize, and all things being equal I'm guessing that allowing yourself to experience schadenfreude every once in a while may actually be kind of healthy, as a way to allow some negative feelings to manifest themselves in a relatively harmless way.
This all having been said, I'm kind of surprised that I didn't experience some small bit of schadenfreude at the recent incarceration of Paris Hilton. As I've said before, I cannot find any rational explanation as to why Paris receives any real kind of publicity, let alone serious news coverage, and I think that she is as good of an example as I could possibly hope to produce as to how our culture leads us to care more about the minutia of some random person's life than about more pressing local, national, and international concerns. The fact that one survey I heard about on the news said that 95% of the respondents believed that Paris should be jailed for her probation violation just reinforces, to me, the notion that Paris' celebrity status and newsworthiness is largely a concoction of the American news-entertainment media to either distract us from the real issues facing our lives, or to create something for itself to cover and follow, thus creating a self-perpetuating industry. It's not that I feel any hatred towards Paris herself, but at the same time I wish I didn't have to hear about the relatively insignificant details of her life when I think there are far more important things that our news and our culture as a whole needs to discuss.
When Paris first reported to jail I didn't particularly care about it in any way, except that I was annoyed at all the news coverage about it. After she was released early by the sheriff and then the judge turned around and ordered her back to jail, though, I found myself feeling a fair deal of sympathy towards her. Pretty much everything I heard about it on the news suggested that the judge in question was treating Paris in an entirely unreasonable way given the nature of the case, and was acting either out of hatred towards Paris and/or celebrity culture, or else using Paris' case as a way to leverage the small bit of celebrity he gained from it. In the weeks that followed, pretty much every news report I saw on the story kept showing the same grainy photo of Paris' tear-streaked face in the police car as she was being whisked back to jail, and I heard far more details about how she was nearly dragged out of the courtroom beforehand than anyone really needed to know. Given my feelings towards celebrity culture, I would have thought that I might have cracked even the slightest smile inwardly towards Paris' misfortune, but instead all I could do was shake my head and somehow actually feel kind of bad for her and the way everyone else seemed to be taking such delight from her imprisonment.
It could perhaps just be that I was feeling more upset that the twists involved in her imprisonment were putting her in the news so much. The coverage of her release particularly bothered me, as I, along with most of my long-time readers I suspect, was absolutely devastated at the time by the news of the Benoit tragedy in Atlanta, and wished the news networks would have devoted more time to that. (I haven't followed professional wrestling to any appreciable extent in ages now, and hadn't even watched any wrestling television this year until this past Monday, but Jeff still passes along news of the deaths of the wrestlers I used to watch, and each death still saddens me. Would that I could write about the tragedy without likely attracting the maelstroms of criticism that drove me from writing about wrestling nearly seven years ago now.) Still, now that Paris is out of jail and back to doing whatever it is she does that allegedly makes her life so newsworthy, can we all please just move on and leave her alone, both for her sake and ours as well?
There's something about me -- I think it's more of a mental thing than a physical thing -- but for some reason I always seem to be awake way late at night during each solstice. Although I'm just about the furthest thing from a morning person you'll ever meet, for some reason I need to be up at around 0500 on the day of the summer solstice to see just how light the sky is then. (Actual sunrise here doesn't come for another hour, but you can definitely see a difference in colour between the western and eastern skies at around 0500.) Even right now, even though we just had a fairly massive line of thunderstorms come in and really darken things, there's still enough light out that kids could be out playing at around this time. In fact, a couple of weeks ago as I was writing an entry here at about this time of night, I was a bit taken aback by the sounds of kids playing that late at night, and needed to remind myself that schools had just broken for the summer.
The Fourth of July is coming up, of course, and my sister and brother-in-law are trying to determine which of the local fireworks festivities they want to hit up. I can remember back when my parents took me to those as a kid, but after a while we just stopped going to them for some reason. These days Mom likes to watch the programmes put on PBS and A&E, whereas I just really don't care about anything like that anymore. I really don't know why, and I feel like I'm missing out by either not going to a show or even watching one on television. (We can usually see a few fireworks our neighbours put off from inside the house, but they're never all that spectacular.) I don't know, maybe I'll try to tag along with the kids when they go out, although I'm guessing that I'll probably run into some problems with the food being offered, unless by some miracle someone's cooking up some tofu dogs.
I guess one of the things that's always kind of rubbed me the wrong way about fireworks is how all the kids I knew growing up loved firecrackers and bottle rockets. I mean, I see the attraction of the stuff that shoots up and, for lack of a better phrase, make pretty colours, but all firecrackers and bottle rockets do is make the same loud noise, over and over again, and I can make a noise nearly as loud just by clapping my hands together really hard. The only thing I can think of that could possibly explain this is just how kids -- particularly young boys -- think it's cool to play with fire, and perhaps get a bit of a visceral thrill from the danger of possibly blowing their own hands off. Not that I was ever that much of a thrill-seeker growing up, but I never really saw the attraction in that.
For some reason, these past few weeks I've found myself inexplicably bothered whenever I go to a Website and I see stock photography of people being used to advertise something, whether on the Website itself or in an ad appearing on the Website. I'm not sure that it necessarily takes a special skill to be able to identify these kinds of photos -- the too-perfect lighting, the way the models conform way too close to our cultural concepts of beauty -- but recently either there have been a lot more stock photos being used at the Websites I visit, or I've gotten a lot better at picking them out than I used to be. I can't really explain why this would bother me, except that I think I watched a little too much Mystery Science Theatre 3000 when I was younger, and of course whenever one of the old bad films resorted to stock film footage for some scene Joel/Mike and the bots would point it out derisively. (As much as I loved, and continue to love, MST3k, I think that it perhaps made me a little too cynical for my own good.)
It's hardly like I don't understand the rationale for using stock photography, given all of the headaches and fees involved in getting permission from people to use their likenesses in advertising. This is something I had personal involvement with back in my Website design days, and it's something that my father's been dealing with ever since he moved to photorealistic computer-based illustration tools. This isn't even a matter of me being the good liberal here and rallying against Western notions of beauty as inherently patriarchal and encouraging destructive thoughts and behaviours and all of that. What bothers me, I think, is just the fact that the company, through using these stock photos, sends a message out to me that they don't think it's worth the effort to produce their own advertising photos, and instead they're just going to draw from this pool of photos than anyone can use for any purpose. If a company produces its own advertising photos, then honestly I think I'm more likely to buy from them because they're taking the time to produce something for their product, and not just a general audience.
Another problem is that, my memory being what it is, it's hard not to notice when a company starts using the same stock photo that another company's been using for a while. I can remember a few years ago, back in my undergraduate career, when I'd flip through magazines at the campus library I'd keep running into this ad for some dental product that had this woman with blonde, curly hair, blue eyes, perfect smile, large breasts, you know the type. I must have seen that advertisement in at least half a dozen magazines. Then a few months later I was looking at magazines up in the Spectrum office, and I see the same woman, same photo, and at first glance I assume it's an ad for the dental product. However, instead of that, there was this big text box next to her with this woman saying how she wasn't letting her genital herpes get in the way of her daily activities, and I'm sorry, but it's hard not to see something like that and not laugh your fool head off. I think cases like this prove one of the dangers of using stock photography for advertising purposes, and should dissuade other companies from continuing the practice.
Even if commercials for it didn't seem to pop up everywhere in what little television I watch these days, all of the news stories and such make it nearly impossible for me not to be aware of the iPhone's upcoming launch this week. Even in the context of today's gadget-driven, early-adopter, multi-tasking culture where every new product with even the smallest feature its creators believe to be revolutionary is given a product launch with more fanfare than the Beatles' first United States appearances, this is one of the most colossal launches I think it would be possible to conceive. Only if Congress passed an act to make Friday a national "iPhone Launch Day" holiday could the release of the iPhone possibly be a bigger event than Apple, news outlets, and the mass media are making it out to be.
Now, I've mentioned repeatedly that I've never been that big a fan of Apple's products over the years. I went to primarily Apple-dominated schools over the years (both my private school and Antioch were, at the time I went to those places, Apple-exclusive), but we always had PCs at home. I've used Macs when I've needed to and even messed around with them when I didn't particularly need to -- Bowling Green State University's public-use computers are all iMacs -- and although I can certainly see how Macs are better at certain tasks, PCs have always been far more intuitive for me to use. It's not that I have a problem with Apple's products, but to date they've just not produced anything that I felt I needed to have. (When I decided to finally get an MP3 player last year, for example, I wanted one that used regular store-bought batteries so I'd never have to worry about the hassle of getting an internal battery replaced, and I couldn't find an iPod that fitted my needs in that regard.)
That being said, I've seen the videos of Steve Jobs demonstrating all the iPhone's features, and as I've said it's hard to avoid all the iPhone commercials that have been on television, and yes, this thing certainly looks like the most revolutionary thing since sliced bread. That being said, even if I had the money to purchase an iPhone right now, or the patience to wait for through the inevitable market shortages that are going to pop up, I just can't see why I would actually need an iPhone. Yes, I have a cell phone, but I only really carry it around for emergency purchases, so my dinky little Virgin phone more than suits that need, and likely for a lot less money per month than an iPhone would cost out to. (I'm very weary of the fact that with less than a week to go Apple and AT&T haven't released pricing information beyond the unit's cost.) My little Sansa MP3 player gives me all I need from an MP3 player -- a nice randomized stream of music from my new age collection -- and if I really needed to use the Internet away from my computer, I'd just buy a laptop since most of the places I go to have free wireless Internet service through our home provider. At least with a laptop I'd have Word with me, which would be the main thing I'd need in any kind of huge device like that.
There are other things that are concerning me about the iPhone here. For one thing, that on-screen keyboard looks like the actual keys themselves are about the size of a small mosquito apiece, and I can't imagine that entering anything on them without lots of errors would be that easy. I can't possibly see the actual production displays being as vibrant as they appear on television, or at least for longer than about three months of life. I also imagine that it won't be long before people discover critical flaws in the product that inevitably force people to keep buying new iPhones or paying for costly repairs, although Apple loyalists will, I'm sure, try to deflect blame by pointing to all the flaws in PCs as if PC's flaws somehow, by some weird and warped act of making the comparison in the first place, somehow make Apple products flawless by comparison. (That is one thing about the Apple crowd that has always cheesed me, the fact that so many of them equate having fewer flaws with having no flaws at all.)
This may sound odd, but this whole iPhone hubbub is actually taking me back to all the hype last summer (and in the preceding months) leading up to the release of Snakes on a Plane. Even though Snakes on a Plane might have been an incredible film for what it was supposed to be, there was just so much hype and so many expectations placed on the film before its release that there was really no way for it to live up to what people expected of it. In a similar way, I just have the feeling that this so-called "God Machine" Apple is coming out with here is going to, in some way or another, wind up being a huge disappointment, and I wish people -- the news media, Apple loyalists, gadget enthusiasts, pretty much everyone -- would tone down the hype just a little. All that this hype is serving to do is make me even more weary of going to any electronics retailer over the next two to three months.
I could go with a number of possible lead-ins to the Friday Five here. For international football fans, today marks twenty-one years to the day that Diego Maradona made history twice, first with the "Hand of God" goal and then the goal that would later be named as the Goal of the Century, although ironically enough the former goal is inarguably more famous. This is also the birthday of Cyndi Lauper, my childhood love of whom I can directly trace into my getting into professional wrestling for the first time. I might also note the interesting juxtaposition of this being the birthday of both the recently-deceased 60 Minutes reporter Ed Bradley and Fox News' Brit Hume.
However, I can't help but lead in here by noting that on 1969.06.22 the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire, and the subsequent reporting on this event by Time magazine was, as much as anything, one of the primary catalysts of the modern-era environmental movement. What's important to note here, though, was that this was far from the first time that the Cuyahoga caught fire; in fact, the first recorded instance of the river catching fire dates all the way back to 1936. It took some 33 years for people to realize that if a river catches fire, there might be stuff in the water that probably shouldn't be in there that should be cleaned out. Even today the river is still polluted enough that the EPA identifies part of it as a "Great Lakes Area of Concern." So the next time one of Cleveland's sports teams chokes in the playoffs, just remind yourself, it may be something in the water over there. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. If you get the first choice of Monopoly tokens, which do you choose? If someone else chooses it first, which is your second choice?
It's been so long since I've played Monopoly that I can only remember that I usually pick either the wheelbarrow or the boot. I know I preferred one as a kid, but I can't remember which one. I have a Monopoly set out in the garage somewhere, boxed in with all my other board games and pen-and-paper RPG stuff that I've never bothered to search out since it got boxed up after the house fire. At this point it'd probably just be easier for me to bust out my copy of Monopoly for the NES.
2. What’s a board game you are especially bad at?
I barely ever play board games any more, except on the rare instance when Jeff comes over and brings one, and I have free time to play. Instead of responding with a particular game here, I'll have to say that I'm just generally bad at games that involve ruses or deceptions, because even though my expression in naturally emotionless and I have a great poker face, I put so much energy into keeping it up that I tire myself out quickly and can't keep it up for any serious period of time.
3. What board game are you particularly good at?
Again, I'll just have to go with a general category here and say trivia games, particularly games where the trivia isn't so, well, trivial. I have a "velcro brain" that tends to pick up all kinds of interesting details and keep hold of them forever, but the less useful the knowledge is, the less likely I am to retain it for a significant period of time.
4. How competitive do you get while playing board games or party games?
Too competitive. I tend to be a very anti-competitive person in most of my life, so when a situation comes up for my competitiveness to come to the forefront, like when I'm playing a board game, it tends to get kicked into overdrive. Heck, I'm still castigating myself for a simple mental error I made when playing one of Jeff's trivia games close to a month ago.
5. What’s your favorite board game? What’s a board game you can’t stand?
If I ever had a favourite board game as a child, it was either Monopoly or Life, depending on which one we actually had the pieces to play with. (Yeah, I was terrible about losing game pieces when I was young.) I kind of got out of board games when the dare-based games first started coming out, but had I been around for those, I probably would have hated them because I got picked on enough for all the dumb stuff I did by accident without being prompted to do more dumb stuff on purpose by a game.
Earlier this year I bought Norton Internet Security 2007 after my Norton Utilities subscription expired on me. I wasn't too thrilled with Norton after Utilities failed to really do anything for me either before or after the hard drive crash I had last spring, but I'd had a lot of experience with Norton in the past and just generally considered thought them to have the best computer security software out there. Of course, as soon as I installed the software I found that it really slowed my system down and it put up all these annoying things on my system and in my Web browser to let me know that Norton was protecting my system (yeah, thanks, I already bought your product so you can turn down the advertising). Then, when I blogged about this and went to get an Amazon.com link to Internet Security 2007 to insert in here, I found out that most other people were having the same experience I had with the software, and that I really should have bought something from McAfee instead. Still, I'd paid for a year of Norton coverage, and I was determined to at least get my money out of that.
Fast forward to around the start of the month. I'm here on my computer minding my own business when Norton suddenly pops up and says I need to register Internet Security 2007 to keep using it. Strange, I think, because I'm pretty sure that I registered it when I first installed it, but I click on the "Register Now" button and trust that this will solve the problem. Instead, however, it then proceeds to say that the one-year subscription I bought back when I got the software this winter had expired, and that now the software wasn't going to do much of anything to protect my system until I buy a new subscription. I know that this isn't right, so I stay on my now-unprotected computer and get on the Web, specifically Norton's Website, to try to figure out what's going on. After going through Norton's Knowledge Base (or whatever they call it), I find out that apparently a lot of people are having this same problem and that the way to fix it is to completely uninstall and then reinstall Norton.
It sounds so simple, but of course between uninstalling it and reinstalling it and then downloading all of the patches to the various components of the software via LiveUpdate, not to mention all of the times I'm forced to restart my computer, I wound up spending an incredibly long time to get my computer back up and operating like it should. Given how critical the software's firewall and anti-virus functions are, this wasn't exactly something I could put off for any period of time. It was bad enough when I had to do this once, but I lost the better portion of the early part of my day here having to go through this whole procedure for the third time this month. I really don't want to think about how much productivity this has cost me here.
Suffice it to say that I consider this current state of affairs completely unacceptable, and I will never buy Norton products again if I can possibly help it. More to the point, though, if this is happening to enough people that Norton has a page on the problem up on their Website, and that they actually think that forcing customers to go through this rigamarole is acceptable (instead of, you know, patching their damn product), then I seriously have to wonder about pursuing some sort of class action lawsuit. I know that there's probably some legal jargon buried deep in the user agreement that Norton can use to avoid getting sued, but for the love of Belldandy, for any piece of software to be this unreliable, particularly something as important as Internet security software, is beyond the realm of reasonable business practices.
Yesterday as I was downstairs fixing my lunch an SUV pulled up just a tiny bit into the driveway and two women around my mother's age came out. One of them had a weathered black book tucked in her hand, and it didn't take me any time all to recognize what this meant. I was all prepared to go duck into my parents' bedroom to wait the ladies out (and hope that my spaghetti didn't turn to mush in the meantime), but Mom called my sister down from the office to deal with the ladies instead. Apparently this is about the fifth or sixth time these particular ladies have come to our home, and every time my sister has dealt went out and had some kind of conversation with them. I kind of avoided the conversation -- I had lunch to cook, after all -- but one of those ladies said "God help ..." at the start of nearly every sentence she made, often quite loudly. When my spaghetti was ready, I got it around and hightailed it back up here to my bedroom as quickly as I could.
I don't like it when people try to get me to convert to their religion, and even if there weren't a general consensus in Wicca not to actively recruit other members, I wouldn't try to do it just because I don't like doing things to other people that I don't like being done to myself. Not only does it annoy me when people go door-to-door -- especially to my door -- trying to get people to change their religion, but in my experience talking to others who've been on the receiving end of this kind of stuff, it's also a nearly-entirely fruitless process. If you want to convince other people that your religion is the best religion, it seems to me like the best way to do that is to live as healthy and as happy a life as you possibly can and lead by example, not go door-to-door and tell people that their souls are condemned to eternal damnation and that you'll still "pray for them" anyway. Well, that's the best legal way to convince people, anyway.
Even though I freely admit that these people annoy me, though, I'm not that happy with my sister going out there and, as she described it, "having fun" with them. I don't think that trying to out-annoy anyone is ever a wise course of action in the first place, and given that these ladies keep showing up for more, I don't think that it's proven to be particularly effective for my sister. If we want these ladies to stop coming on our property -- and that seems to be what the rest of us in the family want -- we should just say as much and threaten to call the cops on them for trespassing if they ever come back. I certainly understand how my sister could find her discussions with them entertaining, and there certainly was a time in my life when I would have joined her in that, but even if these ladies are annoying the heck out of us, I still think it's disrespectful for my sister to "have fun" with them.
I also want to note here that while these ladies were talking with my sister, I saw what had to be a male child of no more than twelve years shifting around in the back seat of the SUV. In addition, I want to note that it was over 90 degrees out with sunny skies when these ladies were visiting us, and my sister said that the ladies did not leave the motor (and thus the air conditioning) of their SUV running for the fifteen to twenty minutes that they were on our front porch. If I see that kid in the back of that SUV the next time those ladies visit us, I will be calling the cops on them for a hell of a lot more than just trespassing.
Today marks a year since Rowan passed away. Needless to say, this has me in a very somber and very reflective mood today.
I was very lucky to get through my childhood and early adult years without having that much experience with death. The only family member I can remember dying in all that time, or at least the only I can remember who I ever had contact with, was a great-grandmother who I never remember really talking to. I remember playing euchre with her and other members of Mom's side of the family, but then again everyone on Mom's side of the family plays euchre and I was far too young then to really join in on their conversations. Over the past decade, though, I've had to deal with the deaths of two cats and three grandparents, and perhaps it wasn't so lucky for me to get through childhood without that much experience with death because I never really developed coping skills for dealing with loss until I was an adult.
Rowan's death also marked the first time that I ever personally witnessed death. When Alexander died nearly a decade earlier, he was put to sleep at an animal hospital and I wasn't there. I can still remember the plaintive cries Rowan made all through the day, wandering from room to room (she had lost her sight about two or three years prior to this), throwing up clear liquid. She protected us for over twenty years -- I still believe that if it weren't for us finding her with her hacked-up tail, we wouldn't have realized that my sister's psycho ex-husband was stalking around on our property -- and even though she had basically brought us Skooter over a year earlier as her "replacement," she didn't want to leave us, and as much as we wanted her pain to end, we didn't want her to go either. Even hours after her death, we couldn't get her eyes to close. It was as if she wanted to keep watch over us even in death.
In the year that has passed, of course we have all resumed our normal activities, and we have laughed and we have loved, and we all still miss Rowan dearly and hope that she and Alexander will be there to greet us when we pass on. On a day like today, though, it's hard not to wonder just when it became okay to move on from that grief. Even though in my mind I know that we had to move on, even though in my heart I know that Rowan would have wanted us to move on, when the anniversary comes around like this, it's almost as if the grief never lifted from the air, because it is certainly heavy in the air right now. I know that there are no hard and fast rules for when and how to grieve, but looking back now that a year has passed, there's a part of me that can't help but second-guess my own actions and wonder if I really grieved for Rowan as much as I should have. Today, certainly, I feel like I haven't grieved enough over this past year.
Although I still don't have much interest in the current generation of video games (and hardly any time at all to play them these days), I still hold a lot of interest in classic video games. I still have all of my old video game systems, and as much as I appreciate the classic game compilations that have been coming out lately, I still don't think that anything really compares to playing the original game on the original system. As much of a pain in the ass it is to go through all the old tricks to getting an old NES cartridge to play (blowing thoroughly on the connectors, inserting the cartridge so it just barely connects and the end of the cartridge opposite the connector rests against the inside wall of the system), I still think there's something, for lack of a better word, romantic about it. More than just a nostalgic trip back to my own childhood, I think these games manage to triumph over today's crop of video games in a lot of ways because the limited graphical abilities of the old systems forced developers to focus much more on gameplay than just wooing potential players with graphical geegaws.
One thing that's bothered me a lot, though, is that GameStop keeps pulling back on its used offerings. It wasn't all that long ago that I could still buy old NES games there, but these days they only stock games from the Playstation/Nintendo 64 era and beyond, and of course nothing for the Saturn or Dreamcast since the whole video game industry seems to be adamant on erasing Sega's consoles from our collective memory for some unknown reason. It's not that I don't understand that retailers have a limited amount of space to stock merchandise and that these older games just don't make as much money for these retailers as the newer crop of games does, but at the same time there is a definite market here, and it's just not being met by any major national retailer right now.
My options for buying older games keep getting diminished. There was a locally-owned video game store in Bowling Green called 2Play that used to stock all kinds of old games and systems (even for the Sega Master System), but they went out of business last year. Toledo's never been much of a garage sale market, and I don't know of any classic video game groups in the area that I might get a hold of. It's getting to the point where, once I have the money to do so, I may start hitting up eBay in a huge way here just to try to get some of those ultra-rare titles that I've been itching to own (and which I know won't be coming out on any of the retro services on the current generation of console systems).
... that the first federal party in Canada devoted to the separation of Quebec from the rest of the country, the Bloc Québécois, was formed. Whatever your opinion of the notion of Quebec sovereignty or French-speakers, I'm sure that we can all give the Bloc a hearty "thank you" for making Royal Canadian Air Farce and This Hour Has 22 Minutes that much funnier over the years. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. What’s something you were into before it became popular?
I'll go with computers for one hundred, Alex. My first gaming and programming experiences came on my father's old ZX-80, before I even went to nursery school. Of course, by the time knowing a lot about computers and being a good computer gamer was considered really cool, I was so into my music and other stuff that I missed any opportunity I might have had to be considered cool.
2. What’s something you were reluctant to jump on the bandwagon with, but now are totally into?
Dance Dance Revolution. I probably would have tried it out a year or two earlier than I did, but the people I knew who played the game at the time were, while friends, some of the most exceedingly annoying people I've met in recent memory.
3. What’s a current trend or fad you just don’t get?
All of them? American Idol for starters ...
4. If you could turn any current fondness of yours into a popular trend, what would it be?
This is a trick question to get me to admit that if something is considered cool, then I'm probably a whole lot less likely to do it. Well, I admit it. That being said, if I could get more people to stop and think about how their actions affect others before doing anything, well, maybe that wouldn't seem so cool to me anymore, but it would make the world a heck of a better place, so let's go with that.
5. What’s something that’s totally uncool that you love anyway?
I don't think new age music has ever been considered "cool," although I would point out that most peoples' impressions of new age music are likely tainted by the formulatic stuff that gets put out there into the mainstream by artists like Yanni and John Tesh. Seriously, go buy some of David Lanz's or Michael Jones' earlier work, or some of the more recent work of Catherine Marie Charlton or Matsui Keiko (who can actually make "smooth jazz" work), it's good stuff and you'll thank me later.
TV's 'Mr. Wizard' Don Herbert dies at 89 (AP via Yahoo! News)
When we first got cable when I was young, I was a real die-hard Nickelodeon watcher for the longest time. Just as I think watching Sesame Street every day when I was younger prepared me for a lifetime of learning, Mr. Wizard's World helped continue to make learning fun for me, and opened up new possibilities for me that I wouldn't have been exposed to if I'd watched MTV all the time like the other kids in the neighbourhood did. For that matter, I think watching You Can't Do That on Television prepared me to become the huge Monty Python fan I later became. (When they trot out the green slime on Nickelodeon specials these days, do kids even know where it originated from?) Funnily enough science was always my worst subject when I got older -- I had incredibly poor teachers in high school -- but when I was younger, Mr. Wizard's World was a real joy for me, especially since it enabled Mom and I to bond from her memories of the shows Mr. Wizard did when she was young.
If there's one thing that strikes me most about Mr. Wizard's approach as I look back on it, it's that he was able to make science seem cool without really trying to spin things that way. I admit that I was far out of his target demographic when Bill Nye's show first started airing, but from what little I can remember of his show, he came off to me as kind of obnoxious, coming right out and saying, "Isn't this cool, kids?" (I think I remember part of that annoying "BILL! BILL! BILL!" theme song was some woman saying, "Science rules.") As a general rule, if you feel like you have to tell kids that something is cool to get them to believe that it is, in fact, cool, then it isn't really cool. If Mr. Wizard ever said anything like "isn't that neat" to the kids he was with, he always did it after showing off something that got some kind of reaction from the kids, and him saying that was more a reaffirmation of what the kids just saw than him trying to sell science as cool.
In the mid-1990s back before we got DirecTV at the house and there were few stations on our basic cable that were actually worth watching, I can remember watching Mr. Wizard's World again, as Nickelodeon aired the shows late at night for Cable in the Classroom. While the early-1980s computer graphics they used to introduce the show's segments made me cringe, and I still shudder at the kind of clothing we all wore back then, the show itself was still entertaining to me, even though I was far past the target age of the show. I can't really watch the children's shows being produced these days -- I don't get the appeal adults see in Lazy Town although that may just be because I don't do drugs -- but if by some chance I were to come across a repeat of Mr. Wizard's World when I was flipping around the television looking for something to watch, I'd definitely stay on the show for a while, both because of the fond memories and because it's just a good show.
It's bad enough that a show like Mr. Wizard's World could never get made these days because television executives and marketers would claim that it doesn't have enough "flash" or whatever. What's really bothering me right now is that in the culture we're in right now, most people my age and younger would look at the show and go, "A man in his sixties performing "experiments" with ten-year-olds? Ha ha, he must be a pedophile!" I'm guessing there's probably going to be a whole wave of those kinds of comments about Herbert in the coming days here, and each one is probably going to make me feel sick to my stomach.
Antioch College Suspends Operations to Design 21st Century Campus (Antioch College)
Even though I was only in Yellow Springs itself for less than six months, I can't begin to put into words how profound my experiences at Antioch were. I had just come off of nine soul-crushing years at a private school here in Toledo where I had everyone from students to teachers to administrators tell me that everything I thought was wrong and that I'd never amount to anything my whole life, and I don't think I ever made one real friend among my peers at that school. (I was friendly with a few teachers, but more than a few teachers there actively campaigned to have me thrown out of the school for every reason they could think up.) My time at Antioch was really the first time in my life where I felt like I fit in and belonged, and if nothing else I went from being a big rebel figure in the eyes of that private school, to being a fairly mundane figure by the Antioch student body's standards.
Although I think I've always had strong political leanings, and although my time at Antioch was punctuated by the Republican congressional landslide of 1994 and a resulting clash between Antioch students and Columbus police at a protest over proposed Republican education cuts that would have likely killed Antioch then and there, I wasn't that involved politically while I was there. I think I was too concerned with other areas at that time; for one thing, I threw myself into my music studies, and this was around the time that two of my all-time favourite artists released what I still consider to be their best albums: Tori Amos' Under the Pink and Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. I also fell in love with one of my fellow first-year students there, who gave me my first kiss. Although the Columbus clash definitely got me involved with political stuff, it really made me more angry than anything, and because I never returned to Antioch after that first year, I didn't really learn how to harness that anger usefully. I think that's the main reason why my writing in those years while I wasn't in school was punctuated by all those strong emotional outbursts that I never really learned how to control until I went back to UT and immersed myself in English and rhetoric studies (and GLBT politics).
It's hard not to be selfish here, but I think that after I started my graduate studies in English, and after I realized just how much I loved teaching, I think that the job I daydreamed about the most was teaching at Antioch. When I started getting turned down from some of the teaching jobs I applied to after graduation, I started applying for other, non-teaching jobs at Antioch, simply because if I couldn't get a teaching job at Antioch (they haven't advertised an English position since I graduated), and if I couldn't teach elsewhere, then I wanted to have at least some job at Antioch. Not only do I continue to be grateful to Antioch for all that my time there taught me, but I remain as committed as ever to the social justice issues that have been at Antioch's core for so long (let us not forget how important and vital Antioch was in the Vietnam era), and being a representative of Antioch, even if I wasn't able to help its students learn how to use their own writing to change the world around them, would have been nice. I guess that now that dream of mine will have to be on hold as Antioch restructures itself and, hopefully, rises from the ashes to reclaim some sliver of its old glory.
It's been hard not to think about all my memories of Antioch here. I can remember endless nights in the Student Union playing Mortal Kombat II and the just-released Twilight Zone pinball game (Rod Serling was an Antioch graduate), the best pinball game ever as far as I'm concerned. I can remember drinking copious quantities of Barq's Red Creme Soda and Fruitopia, and how one angry student smashed the Fruitopia machine and scrawled on it in black marker, "ORANGES DO NOT A REVOLUTION MAKE." I can remember getting my first contact buzz when some students lit up during a showing of Dazed and Confused in the auditorium, and then waking up in the middle of the night puking with a rash all over my face and arms. (Marijuana allergies run in my Mom's side of the family.) I can still remember all the things Dr. John Rinehart taught me about composing music, and all the wonderful recitals we had while I was there. More than anything, though, I remember what a salvation Antioch was for me, and I fear now that for other people like me, there won't be an Antioch for them to find refuge at, at least for the next few years.
Given how vital and important Antioch was during the last great war that tore this nation apart -- Antioch at one point had a dozen campuses -- it boggles the mind that now they're being forced to suspend operations like this. I know all too well how much higher education costs have risen in recent years, but for Antioch to close down now, when this country needs places like Antioch to help prepare future agents of social justice, makes me at once incredibly sad and incredibly angry. Even though I know it's not likely to happen, I can't help but hope that someone will throw enough money at Antioch here to allow them to avoid this long suspension and restructuring.
Writing about video games last night made me think about my feelings about Microsoft a bit more than I'd been doing lately. On the one hand, I'm kind of hesitant to say anything bad about Microsoft right now because they're currently hiring Ariel as a consultant, and I do use an awful lot of their products from Windows to Word to an original generation Xbox. On the other hand, Microsoft engages in a lot of business practices I strongly disagree with, and I know a lot of my readers feel the same way. Before I went back to school I'd set up my computer at the time to dual-boot Windows and Linux, and had I not gotten caught up with the demands of school and kind of been forced into using Windows for a lot of things (UT had few Macs and no Linux systems in their computer labs), I think I probably would have made the switch over to Linux. As it was, I really haven't followed Linux there for quite a long time, and I think I just have too many other things in my life to keep track of right now to bother with relearning Linux and porting all of my files and stuff over. I do use Microsoft products for both work and play, but I'd hardly consider myself a fan of the company.
Anyway, it's been hard not to notice the way Microsoft has inundated the Internet advertising market lately with ads for their new Live Search service/portal/soon-to-be-millionth failed attempt at trying to conquer the portal market. Now, normally these kinds of things don't attract my attention, but recently I keep seeing ads for the games Microsoft has put on Live Search, and what's troubling me about these ads is that the games that they're advertising are games that I can remember playing on Yahoo! Games five or six years ago, but with different graphics, e.g. a Text Twist rip-off using some weird chicken-and-egg graphical scheme but the exact same game mechanics. It's one thing when a company does a poor imitation of another company's offering and tries to sell it as new and innovative (such as Microsoft's aerial photography being second-rate compared to Google's similar offering), but when a company as large as Microsoft tries to repackage a game that old, then puts in a huge ad buy to advertise the game to the mass market, it just makes you wonder what exactly they're trying to accomplish.
I know that there are people out there who might not have heard of Text Twist before and may first hear of the game through Microsoft's version, and that Microsoft already has enough influence on the portal market through their MSN service that they'll get a large number of people to play the game simply because it's available through them now. Still, though, there's a part of me that feels strangely insulted by Microsoft thinking that putting new graphics on an incredibly old (albeit still entertaining) Internet game is something that merits as much advertising as I've seen for it over the past week or so. Granted, it doesn't make much sense for Microsoft to use their advertising money to advertise products and services where they're already dominant (operating systems and office software to name just two), but at the same time you'd think that perhaps they might lower their advertising budget just a bit in order to spend more money doing things like, say, fixing all of the problems I've heard about in Vista. (That being said, if cutting the advertising budget means cutting Ariel, then I'd rather continue to see those ads.)
About a couple of months ago GameStop started e-mailing their weekly flyers to me at my Yahoo! e-mail address, even though I'm positive I've never given GameStop my e-mail address. (I seem to have a lot of people who mistakenly give my Yahoo! e-mail account out as theirs.) Although I own none of the current-generation video game systems and have neither the money for, nor the interest in, any of those systems, I still look at the flyers just to see what's out there. I guess this is another one of those things that's making me feel old, because this is the first time since the 8-bit era where I can remember not buying at least one of the current-generation systems in its first few weeks of release. (In the previous two generations I bought the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation 2 on their first day.) Then again, I haven't even had the time to go out to the garage to play my dance video games for several weeks now.
I guess I still have lots of questions about this current generation of systems that would probably be easily answered if I actually bothered to play any of them. For instance, I can remember that in the months leading up the Wii's release, people suddenly went from decrying the strange shape and setup of the Wii controller to suddenly falling in love with it, and I still can't figure out exactly when or why this change took place. Likewise, I've heard all the bad stories about the PlayStation 3 and its current status, but I don't understand why people are now thinking that Sony's lost their "aura of inevitability" when it comes to landing those two or three exclusive titles that most video gamers will, however begrudgingly, buy a PlayStation 3 just to be able to play. For that matter, some of the most anti-Microsoft people I've known have completely changed their opinion of the company based solely on the Xbox 360, which really boggles my mind.
I think that I'm just now getting to the point where any loyalties I ever had to video game companies has just about dried up. My Nintendo loyalty ended back when Square jumped ship to Sony for Final Fantasy VII (hard to believe that was over a decade ago now), and as much as I love Square, I'm just not into them anymore. I can remember back in their early days publishing titles for the PlayStation I bought up pretty much everything they released, but after a while I just got burnt out. I bought both Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII on their first days of release and enjoyed each immensely, but I skipped Final Fantasy XI because I don't play MMORPGs, and I bought very few of the scores of other titles they released for the PS2. I'm sure Final Fantasy XIII will be a great game (although I have some reservations about the way they're pursuing it), but I just can't see myself laying down however many hundreds of dollars I'd need to lay down in order to play it.
Apart from a fairly large number of repeats per day of some songs, I continue to find more and more to like about Urge Radio. The past couple of days I've been listening to the "I Love the 90s" station a lot, which I assume is named after some show on VH-1 that I probably wouldn't watch even if I watched VH-1 because it would be full of D-list celebrities and "critics" cracking painfully bad jokes and trying to sum up ten years in a few overwrought clichés. That being said, all in all I'm finding the 90s station surprisingly tolerable, even in spite of the large number of pop songs it plays that I'd rather never be reminded again. ("Mmmbop" and "Macarena," anyone?)
I'm finding it curious exactly how Viacom chooses to define a decade musically, though. I mean, yes, choosing music released in the years between 1990 and 1999 is certainly a quite reasonable way to do things, but I think this also presents some problems. As an example, two of the songs I frequently hear on this station are Wilson Phillips' "Hold On" and Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle." While both songs were technically released during the decade, I consider the former to be much more representative of 80s pop and the latter of this decade's sound. Similarly, I think cases could be made for including some stuff that wasn't released during the 1990s in this station because it would thematically fit well. (The Sugarcubes' first two albums and the Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique both come to mind here.) I'm not saying that dividing decades by dates as opposed to themes is a bad way of doing things, but I don't think it's the way I would do things if I were programming these kinds of things.
The main thing that listening to this station has done, however, has been to make me feel incredibly old. This has been the first time I've really been forced to sit down and come face-to-face with the fact that the music of my young adult life is now considered classic rock. I mean, most of the stuff I listened to then was stuff I considered to be "instant classics," but there's a difference between that and classic rock. My folks always loved classic rock when I was growing up (and back then pretty much every radio station in Toledo was either classic rock or country), and it was one thing to listen to something that came out before I was born on a station like this, but now the "classics" bar has been pushed up to stuff that came out when I was fully grown.
What I'm really wondering now is what things will be like thirty or so years from now. Although I don't actually watch them, I can't help but notice in the television listings that PBS has been doing a lot of "sounds of the 50s/60s" stuff lately, bringing back together some of the artists of the day to perform their hits. This will certainly be the case with 1990s artists in just a couple of decades here, and it's making me think about what artists could be chosen for such specials, and what those choices would say about the decade as a whole. I mean, given that this is PBS we're talking about here, I'd like to think that some of my favourite artists like Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan would have a better shot of appearing, but at the same time there's a part of me that can't help but worry that in twenty or thirty years a new generation of people not yet born are going to think that the most emblematic artist of the 1990s was Green Day or Ace of Base.
Also, even though this is entirely my fault for being wrapped up in so many other things for the past six years or so, I can't help but be bothered by the fact that I have next to no idea who might be included in a similar special about this decade. Then again, given what little I've heard of pop music released in this decade, I think that this perhaps is actually a good thing.
... George Orwell's classic tome 1984 was first published. I mention this because I think it may be too heavy-handed for Keith Olbermann to use to lead into his "Oddball" segment tonight, even though we all know he'd really like to, so I might as well get some mileage out of it. On that note, let's play the friday5.org meme!
1. What’s a favorite shortcut of yours?
I can't think of any physical shortcuts right now, so instead I'll just mention what first came to mind when I read this question. When cutting and pasting on my computer, instead of using Ctrl-X and Ctrl-CV, I use Ctrl-Insert to copy something and Shift-Insert to paste it somewhere else. I can never remember the more traditional way of doing it (I had to look at the pull-down menus in Word just now to refresh my memory), and I find that using the Insert key is much faster for me. (If I actually need to cut something instead of copying it, I go Ctrl-Insert, Delete, then Shift-Insert.)
2. What’s something you insist on doing the long way?
Make bread. The family has a bread machine that is capable of some moderately tasty stuff, but when I make bread it's always by hand, with several rong rises. It takes forever, and all the bread I make has a tendency of coming out way too dense, but there's something therapeutic I find in making bread by scratch. Now if only I could find a way to work that bread into my diet so I'd have more excuses to make it.
3. What does your favorite pair of shorts look like?
Every pair of shorts I own are black, most of which are just old pairs of yoga pants or sweatpants with the legs cut off around mid-thigh. I have a nicer pair of shorts I bought at Meijer several years ago, but I don't wear them too often these days because I've lost so much weight that the waistband has become too loose.
4. Excluding classical music, what’s the longest song in your iTunes?
I don't use iTunes, but the longest piece of music I have on MP3 right now is the title track from Michael Jones' Seascapes, which clocks in at a hefty 20 minutes and 53 seconds, and also happens to be very good although not my favourite of Michael's pieces.
5. What’s the title of a short story you really like?
I could pick any number of Poppy Z. Brite's shorter works here, but for now let's go with "Monday's Special" from her short story collection Are You Loathsome Tonight? It's always been a favourite of mine for showing how Brite's mastery of language lets her tell a story with such rich detail in so short of a space.
More than the actual amount of television the average American watches over a given period of time, I think it's important for us to look at the various ways in which television infiltrates other aspects of our lives, in particular mainstream news reportage. There are certainly times when a television show merits such coverage; I can still remember, even though I wasn't older than seven years old at the time, the importance of M*A*S*H coming to an end. Something that transcends the bounds of normal television, such as John Ritter's sudden death a few years ago, certainly merits mainstream coverage. The Super Bowl, even though over the years it's become much more about marketing than actual football, is still one of those cultural phenomena that merits serious press. Even as much as I loathe American Idol and everything it stands for, I will begrudgingly admit that it has become important enough to a large segment of the American populace that I can accept some headlines in mainstream news. That being said, while I can understand covering the finals of American Idol, I don't get why coverage of each night's show is worthy of separate news articles.
This brings me to a few days ago, when I clicked on a mainstream news article that was basically just an episode summary of the recently-aired penultimate episode of The Sopranos. Now, I have never watched The Sopranos, but I've talked to enough people who are fans of the show and heard enough details about it to believe that it is, at the very least, a quality show. However, I can hardly believe that the show has reached that M*A*S*H level where the show's ending is a huge cultural event. Unless a show is at that level -- since M*A*S*H I think the only two shows that have come close to that are The Cosby Show and Seinfeld -- I do not see how an episode summary of any show, let alone an episode that isn't even the final episode of the show, merits a separate news story. Perhaps if the article in question also talked about the history of the show, some of the behind-the-scenes machinations or even tied the episode's themes into current events, I could understand, but this was just an episode summary that you'd expect to see on a Sopranos fan-run Website (albeit a very well-written episode summary).
The entertainment news industry is bizarre enough to start with, and I've witnessed it becoming more and more strange over the years. I can still remember tuning in to Entertainment Tonight during the John Tesh-Mary Hart years, and what passes as entertainment news today is miles away from what the show was then, although in retrospect Entertainment Tonight was quite weird for its time. I don't want to say that entertainment news doesn't have its place within the larger news community, but I think there's a difference between the traditional entertainment news reportage -- the behind-the-scenes stuff like shows getting canceled or renewed, actor/actress contracts, ratings -- and the kind of wall-to-wall coverage shows like American Idol get today. Perhaps today is as good a day as any to ask the question, why has there ever been even a single news story about Paris Hilton? Stuff like this makes me wonder just how much the explosion of the entertainment news industry (and the piffle it covers) has been due to actual market demand or cultural interest, and how much it's thanks to the false packaging of such things (by its very producers) as actually being important and relevant to the average consumer.
Bush's Surgeon General nom: gay sex is hazardous to your health (pamshouseblend.com)
One of the things that bothers me about the way many people on the left argue against the Bush administration is that they perhaps focus too much on how the administration became more autocratic and imperial after the 09.11 attacks. Certainly that happened, but I think focusing on what happened after 09.11 makes people forget about those first eight months of the administration. Let's not forget that Bush came into office having clearly lost the popular vote in the 2000 election, with large questions still (even to this day) surrounding whether or not he actually won the electoral vote, a 50-50 Senate tie that eventually flipped Democratic when Jim Jeffords went independent and started caucusing with the Democrats, and a fairly small majority in the House. Even if you believe that Bush won Florida (and thus the election) fair and square, you can't deny that it was like his administration won some kind of huge and sweeping mandate.
In spite of this, look at the people Bush put into his cabinet. Yes, the aftermath of 09.11 and the invasion of Iraq made much clearer how much people like John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld were on the fringes of the right-wing, but let's not forget things like Ashcroft demanding that a drape be put over the statue of Lady Liberty because he wasn't comfortable being in the same photo with a stone boob. Yes, Democrats and people on the left did exaggerate the right-wing credentials of Bush's appointees, as is always the case in politics, but long before 09.11 happened Bush appointed a large number of people with very far right-wing beliefs into his cabinet, in spite of the fact that he barely got into office campaigning on governing much closer to the centre than he ever actually did.
After 09.11, of course, the actions of Bush's cabinet and his appointees both became far more extreme, and were portrayed as more extreme by opponents of his administration. It seemed like for all that opponents of the administration brought up some of the clearly far-right positions held by some of these people, they all either continued to serve in office or won confirmation to their positions. Although it took several years, I think the accumulation of these incidents played a big part in the Democrats' success in the 2006 elections, as there was a clear, tangible, and easily understood body of evidence to support Democrats' claim that Republicans in the House and Senate had essentially formed a "rubber-stamp Congress" that allowed Bush and his administration to do whatever they pleased, without providing the checks and balances that are one of the main reasons why this country has been able to survive and thrive for as long as it has.
Had Bush nominated Holsigner to be Surgeon General in 2003 or 2005, I'm sure that his claims about homosexuals and homosexuality would have generated a large amount of anger among left-wingers, and perhaps a bit of mainstream press coverage, but the nomination would have gone right straight through without most people really noticing this. For Holsinger to be nominated now, with the Democrats in firm control of Congress, boggles the mind. I'm certainly not going to claim here that last November's elections somehow made the American populace fully tolerant and welcoming of non-heterosexuals, but at the same time the notion that homosexuality is some sort of mental illness has clearly been outside of the mainstream of American thought for quite some time. This nomination is more than likely doomed to failure from the outset, and this isn't like the Harriet Myers Supreme Court nomination where Bush might possibly be putting up one candidate for the mere purpose of making a second candidate look better by comparison.
This whole thing is making me recall comments made by Karl Rove in the leadup to the 2006 elections, back when the outcome was still kind of in question. Rove asserted to the interviewer that the Bush administration was "a centre-right government" for "a centre-right nation." With all due respect, I would very much appreciate it if Rove could point to twenty, ten, or even five politicians he would define as being to the right of this current administration. (I believe the only reason why people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter spout such extreme right-wing rhetoric is to make people like Bush and Cheney look reasonable by comparison.) It's bad enough that this administration seems to believe that they have the right to act however they want and legislate however they please, but for them to try to push through Holsinger's nomination after the 2006 elections suggests that not only do they not care about the current political climate and what American voters have so clearly requested their elected representatives to do, but that they aren't making even the slightest effort to be aware of that climate.
I'm not sure whether this should come as a surprise given the style of my writings here, or as no surprise at all given what I've said about my personality, but contrary to the long and flowing sentences I tend to write here, in person I tend to be a woman of very few words. Although I add all kinds of embellishments and details when I'm writing -- both here on the .org and in all the other kinds of writing I do -- when I'm speaking, I tend to be very direct and to the point. I think this is one of the main reasons why I have a bit of a reputation for being standoffish, even though I try my hardest not to be.
However, there's an aspect of the way I talk that has become more of an obvious problem for me over the years. When I do speak, I have a tendency to cut my sentences short if I think that what follows doesn't really need to be said. As an example, if we're running low on orange juice in the fridge in the kitchen and Mom asks me if we need to make a grocery run, but I know there's more orange juice in the fridge in the garage, I might say something like, "Well, there's another carton of OJ in the garage so ..." I don't finish the sentence because the final part of the sentence -- that a trip to a grocery store isn't necessary for that purpose -- really doesn't need to be said. This tends to be something I do more with people I know closely, but it's still something that makes my speaking style distinctive.
This has posed a couple of problems for me. First of all, obviously it takes people a while to get used to this. All too often when I'm talking with someone for the first time, I'll drop a sentence off and just get an expectant look back from that person, forcing me to finish the sentence. (Sometimes, I hate to admit it, I'll forget the concluding part of the sentence in the brief awkward pause that follows.) More recently, though, what I've noticed happening is that members of my family will start jumping in on the middle of my sentences, perhaps expecting that I'm going to trail the sentence off at that point when I'm not. I may have more points to make, or I might be coming to a conclusion to the sentence that I think needs to be said, but I'll just get completely talked over there and won't get a chance to finish the sentence. At first this was kind of a shock to me, but now it's becoming more and more of an annoyance.
Given the shyness and social anxiety I suffer from, it's hard enough for me to speak a lot of the time, unless it's with close family or it's in a situation where I have a real feel for the role that's expected of me. (I never had any shyness problems when I was teaching, for example.) With as much as I'm being cut off in mid-sentence by my close family recently, though, I'm thinking that it's just going to become harder and harder for me to say anything at all.
Over the years I've mentioned several times how many of Yahoo!'s services I use and how happy I've been with them. Over the past few days, though, I've noticed a considerable downturn in the quality of the Yahoo! services I use, and it's making me wonder if it isn't time for me to go all-Google here.
Let's start with Yahoo! Mail, since I've had an account there since its earliest days, and even though I still use .org-based e-mail for my most important transactions, not a day goes by when I don't use my Yahoo! Mail account for one purpose or another. A couple of days ago Yahoo! rolled out the integration of their messenger client into their mail service, which you'd think would be a good thing. The problem is, for one thing, I haven't used Yahoo! Messenger in forever -- I used to use it quite often, but these days I use AIM more simply because that's what most of my friends have -- and as a result, I have a lot of "stored messages" that positively inundate the Yahoo! Mail screen with extra tabs that break the design. That alone would be bad enough, but now the mail software doesn't load right half the time, and it usually takes me two or three reloads to even be able to click on my messages from the inbox. Given that checking my Yahoo! Mail is usually my second task of the day on my computer (the first being to check my .org mail), this is not making me happy.
I still check My Yahoo! every day during lunch as a way to check up on news and other daily tidbits very quickly, and I still think that Yahoo!'s interface for doing this is a lot better than the one Google recently rolled out. However, over the past few days I've noticed that whenever I load up a My Yahoo! page, it takes about ten seconds between the time I click on a link and when IE makes the "you clicked on a link" sound. Normally this would make me worry about something being on my computer, but the My Yahoo! pages are the only pages this is happening on, and I did an extra virus scan on my computer overnight just to make sure I didn't have anything nasty loaded onto it. I appreciate how much work went into the recent overhaul of My Yahoo!, but I should not be experiencing these kinds of delays. Particularly given how much of a rush I tend to be in the early part of the day so I can get to other things, having this kind of slowdown on My Yahoo! is a huge pain.
I've got a résumé on HotJobs, of course, but it hasn't exactly yielded me much in the way of leads, except for a few cut-rate insurance companies asking me to sell for them. I haven't used Messenger in so long that I don't even have it installed on my computer now, following the hard drive crash I had over a year ago. I tried Yahoo's music software, but I couldn't get it to stop changing the tags on some of my MP3s and messing up the sorting order I'd made for them. As big a fan of Launchcast as I am, I haven't been using that much recently either, and shortly after I made that post about Urge Radio a few days ago I found out that they have a station called Blue Room that sounds like I programmed it, so I've had that on in the background for most of the past few days' work.
I'm not sure if I'm read to start transfering all of my services over to Google's equivalents (at least the Google services that match up with Yahoo! equivalents), but it's certainly been on my mind a bit these past few days. Perhaps these problems I'm having with Yahoo!'s services are only temporary, but my patience with them is starting to run a little bit thin now.
... that Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released, and if you don't own a copy, what's wrong with you? Anyway, Friday memeage from friday5.org again for the heck of it.
1. What’s your favorite goody at your favorite bakery?
Actually my favourite bakery closed several years ago, but back when I went there they made this wonderful garlic bread loaf that was just the way I love my garlic bread: Slightly crunchy on the outside, but moist and chewy on the inside.
2. Someone’s visiting from out of town and craves something sweet: Where do you take him or her for an experience he or she can’t get at home?
Hmmm. Normally I get my ice cream fix at Dairy Queen, and all the "local" ice creameries I've been to all use Toft's ice cream. Even though I've never had it myself, I'd have them try the gelato at The Original Gino's Pizza, a local pizza chain that has a well-earned reputation as the best local pizzeria.
3. What’s your favorite order at your favorite ice creamery?
Large cherry malt, heavy on the malt powder, from Dairy Queen. I always used to get it at the truck stop we'd pass when my father took me to and from Antioch back in the day.
4. Oh no! You forgot to save room for dessert! What dessert item on the menu will you order anyway, because you can’t resist?
"On the menu" suggests a sit-down restaurant to me, and the only restaurant I regularly order dessert at is TGI Friday's, so let's say Oreo Madness.
5. You’ve got a craving for sweets, but it’s so late at night that only the corner convenience store is open. What do you get?
Given that I have a 24-hour grocery and a 24-hour Meijer I can drive to in less than five minutes, I don't think I'd ever be forced to go to a convenience store, but for the sake of argument, either a chocolate chip ice cream cookie sandwich if they had them, or a 3 Musketeers bar if they didn't.