posted 2007/07/30 at 21:00
Broadcaster Tom Snyder dies at 71 (AP via Yahoo! News)
Although I was alive when Tomorrow was still on the air, and I have vague memories of sometimes watching Johnny Carson back then, I never got a chance to see Snyder's show there. In fact, I think my first exposure to Snyder may have been through Dan Aykroyd's impersonation of him on reruns of Saturday Night Live. I was a big fan of Later when Bob Costas was hosting it (I've always been a fan of Costas), and I can remember Snyder occasionally substitute hosting for him. I think I even caught the original airing of Snyder's interview on that show with Howard Stern that ended with Snyder storming off the set, although this was long before Toledo radio got Stern so I only had the vaguest notion of who he was. In fact, before Snyder moved to CBS, I had at best the faintest awareness of who he was.
Once Snyder started hosting The Late Late Show, however, I became a huge fan. At a time when Jay Leno turned The Tonight Show from Carson's offbeat irreverence to a huge self-important production, David Letterman was still struggling to find a new identity for himself in the earlier timeslot he got at CBS, and Arsenio Hall was ... well, Arsenio Hall, there were a lot of other late night shows that got started and stopped here. My favourite out of all of them was Whoopi Goldberg's show, which just featured her and a single guest for a half-hour, with no monologue, no studio audience, and no band. (Robbie Robertson recorded some absolutely gorgeous music for the show, though, and ever since then I've nearly killed myself trying to find recordings of that music. If you can help me track it down, please let me know.) Whoopi's show lasted only a season, but Snyder's Late Late Show kind of carried on in that same tradition, albeit with Snyder injecting more of himself into the show. Then again, Snyder earned the right to do that through all his years of broadcast excellence, and at least he was entertaining when he did so.
Back when I took all those years off of college and I kept the oddest hours, there were times when I would literally work overnight at my parents' office just because that was most conducive to both my sleeping schedule and the way I work. We had a spare TV there that didn't even have rabbit ears, so catching any channel on it was a hit-or-miss affair, but if I was there then I made sure to catch Snyder's show. Even when he had a guest on I knew nothing of, I could still enjoy the interview because Snyder did more than just tell a few jokes and let a guest plug his or her latest project; he made sure that the interview was actually informative, and did so in a way that was entertaining and hardly ever risked being stodgy. (That last bit is the reason why I've never gotten into Charlie Rose that much.)
It was bad enough to me that Snyder got sacked from CBS, but it really hurt that he had to be replaced by Craig Kilborn, the second most loathable figure in Hollywood as far as I'm concerned (next to David Spade). Sure enough, Kilborn turned the show into a huge misogynistic ego-stroke, and I only ever watched the show when I wanted to be mad at something. These days I think late night television is basically unwatchable; Leno's too lost in his own aura, Letterman seems to be retreading the same material over and over again, Kimmel just plain isn't funny, and O'Brien and Ferguson just do nothing for me. Tom Snyder's Late Late Show may very well end up being the last of the truly great late night talk shows, and television is truly a bleaker place now that he is gone.
posted 2007/07/28 at 23:37
Earlier this week, after no small amount of pushing on my part, I was finally able to get paid for all of the stuff that I lost in the house fire over six years ago. Why it took so long to get a cheque cut for the stuff I don't know, but this did put a good chunk of change into my bank account. Most of the money came from the comics I lost in the fire, and unfortunately the ones I want to replace (the Popples series Marvel put out during the initial craze) are all but impossible to replace, and the ones that would be easy to replace (old X-Men from the late 80s) just don't hold that much interest for me anymore. Thus, the cash is pretty much mine to do with as I please.
I'm about 90 percent sure at this point that I want to use this money to build a new computer. Whether I build the computer for myself or for my father is still very much in the air, and unfortunately this is kind of an important distinction because whereas I prefer Intel-based systems since the one AMD system I've ever owned crapped out on me in a hurry, my father prefers AMD systems because they're better for the 3-D stuff he does. Unfortunately, it's been four years now since I built Yggdrasil Mark I, and only now am I learning about stuff like PCI Express. I'm kind of ashamed at just how out-of-the-loop I've gotten when it comes to computers, and if I'm going to build something here soon, I'll need to catch up in a hurry. (Or, of course, I could always just go the notebook route, but the only notebooks I could afford right now would be even less powerful than Yggdrasil Mark I.)
I'm going to put out a general call for advice here, although my suspicion here is that Don B. will be the only one to answer. I don't need the latest and greatest in terms of processors and mobos, but I don't want to buy crap either. An Asus motherboard is pretty much a given with me, and I prefer to shop at NewEgg and Tiger Direct for big-ticket items. (Stuff like cases, mice, and keyboards I'll buy locally since those will be cheaper to buy that way and I'm not so worried about name brands.) I want something that will at least run current-generation stuff (though I will most certainly buy XP Pro and not Vista), but I don't need quad-core or a $600 graphics card or anything like that. Any suggestions on Intel and AMD processor/mobo combinations -- particularly from NewEgg and/or Tiger Direct -- would be appreciated.
posted 2007/07/27 at 13:54
A lot of things have happened on this day, from the debut of Bugs Bunny (1940) to the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics (1996). Lots of people were born on this day, from Norman Lear to Gary Gygax (hi I'm a geek thanks for asking) to Yahoo Serious. Gertrude Stein and Bob Hope, among others, died on this day. However, I think I can sum up the importance of this day to me personally in just three little words:
Happy birthday, Mom.
On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. What are your nicest and ugliest articles of clothing?
Well, my nicest shirts are probably the Oh My Goddess! t-shirts I bought several years ago, which are still in pristine condition not only because I take extra-special care of them, but because I haven't been able to fit into them for a long time. (I think I've finally lost enough weight to start wearing them comfortably again, though.) I'd say my shorts are the ugliest articles of clothing I have because they're all sweatpants that were starting to fall apart anyway that I cut the legs off of and didn't hem back up neatly, but since I never wear them out of the house that's not such a big issue.
2. What are your favorite and least-favorite things about the city/town you live in?
My favourite thing about Toledo would probably be that we have some nice metroparks, particularly the one less than a mile from my house. It's hard to narrow down just one thing I don't like about Toledo, but if I had to pick one thing at this exact moment it would be that there's still a stubborn strain of conservatism that pervades our local politics even though we're historically a very strong union town.
3. What were the longest and shortest durations of your romantic relationships?
Zero and zero. I don't do romance.
4. Who are the oldest and youngest people in your family?
Just counting the immediate family, Mom turns 62 today, and I'm 31.
5. Who are your neatest and messiest friends?
This is going to be difficult to answer just because I have such a small circle of local friends these days, and I generally meet said friends at neutral locations instead of us going to each other's houses. The Internet is a wonderful thing, though, so based on photos of their houses I've seen, I'd say Ariel is the neatest and Don B. is the messiest.
posted 2007/07/25 at 20:46
These past couple of weeks it's been kind of hard to avoid all the reminders in the media that school is going to start soon. The Best Buy commercials and special site on Yahoo! are just the tip of the iceberg; our local Meijer has now set aside the area usually reserved for Christmas trees and decorations (or at least that's what the area was used for before their recent redesign) and started stocking it full of notebooks, folders, locker supplies and the like. One wonders if they'll just convert the area over to Christmas in September once school has started. Perhaps my own bad memories of back-to-school shopping are affecting me here (particularly those early years of going to a super-rich private school yet having to do all of my school clothes shopping at K-Mart), but there's a large part of me that wants to tell Yahoo! and all the retailers to just shut up and wait until the start of August to start their campaigning, if not after the start of the NFL preseason. Kids don't need reminders that their summer vacations are rapidly coming to a close.
I will say that this is actually a bit of an improvement. There used to be another department store on the corner opposite from our local K-Mart that would actually start their back-to-school television campaigns in June. I never liked that place to start with -- the store was always very poorly kept, their prices were never that great, and the workers were unbelievably apathetic -- but the fact that they would start advertising back-to-school stuff in June, at a time when I didn't have cable in my bedroom so I was limited in there to local over-the-air channels, drove me up the wall. Worse yet, these commercials weren't put together that well, since the chain in question never had that much money and were always using technology that was five to ten years behind everyone else. Sadly, given that Wal*Mart is now occupying the real estate their store once stood on, in a sick sort of way I actually wish that this particular store was still there.
This is also the first end-of-summer since 2000 where I'm not preparing to go back to school as a student. I am, however, going to be teaching again this coming semester (details are still being finalized, and I'll post them once they are), and I think that I'm now gaining a new appreciation for the range of feelings that students have for returning to school. As much as I wish companies wouldn't start advertising back-to-school stuff until the start of August, as a teacher it's never too early for me to be thinking about how to greet a class that will probably have both students who like going back to school and students who loathe it. I'll need to start working on syllabi here in short order, but I also have to worry about the image I portray on that first day, and how to best serve all of my students. It does feel good to finally be getting back in the saddle, though.
posted 2007/07/23 at 15:32
For a long time I avoided the temptation to make an Amazon.com wishlist for myself. I always felt easier giving my family a hard-copy list of stuff that I knew they could buy locally, and I never felt like I had much of a chance of having any of my readers buy me stuff off of my wishlist. Indeed, so far my family members and I are the only people who have bought stuff off of the wishlist, although if you'd like to be nice and get me something, well, here's my Wishlist. (Have I mentioned that I haven't had that much money coming in lately?) Still, for the most part I've been using my wishlist just as a list for myself, to tag items that I'd like to buy once I have the money for them. (Given how I stopped collecting every single Björk and Tori Amos put out once I went back to college, and that I'd like to rectify that situation some day, there's always going to be a lot of stuff on that list.)
Anyway, a few months ago I had this very strong hankering for gummy bears. I loved gummy bears as a kid, but I haven't been able to eat them since I went vegetarian since nearly all gummy bears (and other gummy candies, for that matter) are made with gelatin, and gelatin is a big no-no for me. I tried looking around town for possible vegetarian substitutes, but I couldn't find anything that even came close. (The closest Whole Foods Market to me is in Ann Arbor, and there isn't a Trader Joe's that's even within day-trip distance.) I knew that Amazon sold groceries, though, so I took a chance with them, and sure enough they do sell vegetarian gummi bears, albeit only in bulk packs. Still, I figured this would be a nice treat to have at some point (by the time I found them my hankering for them had somewhat abated), so I put them on my Amazon wishlist for future consideration.
Now, in recent weeks I've been looking at my wishlist a little more than usual, mostly because Urge Radio's been introducing me to a lot of musicians whose work I really like and whose CDs I'd like to buy at some point. Normally when I add something to my wish list, I go through and review all the items that were already on the list just to remind myself of the stuff I'd like to have. This normally isn't too big a deal, except for when an item I had on the list goes out of stock on me unexpectedly. However, recently I was somewhat mortified when I went to check out my wishlist, and saw that in addition to buying those vegetarian gummi bears from Amazon, I could now buy one "used and new" box of them, much like you can buy "used and new" CDs and DVDs and such from Amazon's partners and affiliates. I don't need to click on that link to be told that this "used and new" offering is a new offering, but still, ever since then I've kind of been walking around thinking about how Amazon might try to sell me used gummi bears, and what form they might possible come in. (Sorry, but I didn't want to be alone in thinking of those images.)
My point in mentioning all of this is that although I admire Amazon for a lot of things, they still seem to have some lapses in thought. You would think that they would have the sense to realize that no one's really in the market for used groceries, and that they're putting uncomfortable images in people's minds by even suggesting that used groceries might be available for sale up there, and so they should put up a little flag in their page-rendering software that changes the "used and new" link for grocery items to just read "new." I suppose I should just be glad that I came to this discovery over vegetarian gummy bears and not, say, all-bran cereal. (Okay, that was gratuitious on my part, I admit.)
posted 2007/07/21 at 23:18
First of all, happy birthday Chantelle, wherever you are.
I've got a bit of a dilemma here. Jeff may be facing a situation soon where he doesn't have a car of his own, and obviously he really needs one for driving to and from work. About a couple of weeks ago I found out that my parents were thinking of selling our old 1988 Chevrolet Astro minivan to him, which kind of didn't sit well with me because of my memories of the Astro. When I mentioned this to the folks, they raised the possibility that we could sell my Camry to him instead, and then I could take the Astro for myself. (Although I paid half on the Camry when we got it, the titles and such are all in my father's name.) Basically I'm being forced to decide which car we part with, and I don't think there is a good answer to that question.
The Astro was my family's primary vehicle from the time I was twelve up until shortly after the fire, when we began to worry about its ability to handle long-distance trips (at that point my mother was driving up to Michigan every other weekend to be with her mother, and did so up until her death in 2003), at which point we bought a used 1994 GMC Safari. Obviously the car holds a lot of good memories for me, the first of which being the fact that on the very day that we bought it, my father took me on a five-day vacation up to his parents' vacation home way up off the northern coast of the lower peninsula. I considered this very strange at the time, but I can remember that as night fell as we crossed the 45th parallel, I snuck back to the far back seat of the van, laid on it with my head looking out the side window, and watched the stars and listened to Peter Buffett's "The Waiting." There have been very few moments in my life more inspirational than that.
The Camry, of course, holds the honour of being "my" first car. It's nicknamed "Sean's First Movement" for three reasons: it's the first car that I've been the primary driver of, it's a nice reference to classical music and my own musical roots, and the "movement" part is particularly apropos because the thing is coloured fecal brown. I can't say that I had that good a start with it, particularly as the day we bought it I wound up getting a ticket late at night because I got confused about the lighting controls and wound up driving with my parking lights on when it was pitch black out, but that car took me to and from school more times than I could count. I haven't been driving it so much lately because of the problems I've mentioned on here in recent days, but that car will always hold a special place in my heart.
I don't want us to lose either car, but at the same time Jeff has to have a car here. The Camry gets better gas mileage, yes, but if I do get a full-time job that requires me to move here, it would sure be nice to have the Astro to haul stuff from here to wherever my new residence winds up being. More to the point, I'm very concerned because if we sell Jeff a car and then I wind up moving, the folks will only have the Safari left, and if it goes down then the folks will be without transportation themselves. (Granted, they don't go out that much now that they're working for home, but they still have to go out for grocery runs and the like.) Perhaps I'd feel better about this if I weren't the one having to make the decision. I've never been that much of an automobile enthusiast -- especially in comparison to my father -- but both cars hold fond memories for me, and I don't like being forced to make the choice as to which car we keep and which car goes to Jeff.
posted 2007/07/20 at 14:35
Instead, let's go back to this day in 1948 for a couple of events. First of all, twelve leaders of the Communist Party USA were indicted under the Alien Registration Act, better known as the Smith Act. The Smith Act is the closest thing to a sedition clause on the federal books today, and although there haven't been any prosecutions under this Act in my lifetime, surely there are those on the right who would love to see it start to be used again to silence, or at the least intimidate, the anti-war movement here. Taken by itself this event might not hold so much historical significance, were it not for the fact that on the exact same day as these indictments, President Truman reinstated the military draft even though the United States was not in any officially declared war, citing the ever-increasing "menace" from the Soviet Union in doing so. You know what they say about those who learn nothing from history. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What’s overdue for a good cleaning?
Pretty much everything in my room is in need of a good dusting at this point. I've never been that good about dusting to start with, and with how busy I've been these past couple of months I have really, really let things go too far here.
2. What’s overdue for some kind of professional examination, service, maintenance, or upkeep?
My Camry. In addition to the fact that the driver's side window won't roll down, and hasn't for over a year now, and I don't have air conditioning which makes summer drives a real pain, there's a weird squeaking and rattling sound coming from the rear window on the driver's side. The car also needs some brake work done, I think.
3. Who’s overdue for a phone call or letter to you?
To me? I've never been one to expect friends to contact me out of the blue, but given that I've hardly been on any instant messaging software at all lately, I've kind of fallen out of touch with Jessi and that makes me sad in the heart.
4. What’s overdue for an appearance in your neighborhood?
I'd say a good, loud thunderstorm at a time of the evening when I can enjoy it without worrying about all I'm not getting done by unplugging my computer equipment just to be on the safe side, but not so late that I just want to sleep instead of enjoy the storm.
5. Who’s overdue for a good comeuppance?
He knows who he is.
posted 2007/07/19 at 14:52
Back when I got my first e-mail account at Antioch in the fall of 1994, I didn't have a choice in what address I got; I got the first initial of my first name, followed by my last name, at the university's e-mail server (which wasn't antioch-college.edu at the time). I gather that this is still how most colleges still dole out e-mail addresses to their students, albeit sometimes with a number appended at the end of the address so that John Doe and Jane Doe don't get the same address. Back in 1994 this wasn't such a big deal to me, and to this day I still generally try to pick something simple having to do with my name for an e-mail account or an account name for a Website if I can. I generally prefer to use "sean," "sshannon," or "seanshannon" for a username if I can, although these days that can be quite difficult. (For example, none of those options were available to me when I finally signed up for a Gmail account.) I realize that as more and more younger people began to use the Internet, it became trendy to create an account name based on your favourite singer or sports team or something like that appended with your year of birth or some other number of significance to yourself, but I still prefer the elegance and simplicity of a username based on my real name.
Back when Yahoo! started offering services that required logging in, I was lucky enough to secure "sshannon" as an account name there, which is pretty remarkable considering the sheer amount of traffic Yahoo! was getting even back then. However, in the years that have followed, I've gotten more and more e-mail at my Yahoo! Mail account that's addressed to people like "Sarah Shannon" and even "Shantasia Shannon." Whether by accident or on purpose, there seem to be a lot of people who are either giving my Yahoo! Mail account out as their own, or people are misreading the account (perhaps someone with an e-mail account of "sshannon@someotherdomain.com" are writing down their e-mail account to someone and that other person is just assuming it's a Yahoo! account), or maybe people are just entering that e-mail address into online forms as a way of avoiding spam. Some of the wrong-address e-mails I've gotten have been amusing, but sometimes they can get to be a nuisance. (For example, someone recently created a match.com profile using that e-mail address, and that was a huge pain to straighten out.) I've changed the password on that account to know that there's no chance that someone else is accessing it, either.
Anyway, I mention this because I recently started getting e-mails from the Bavarian Inn Lodge up in Frankenmuth, Michigan, even though I've never been up there in my life and never visited their Website. The e-mails clearly state that I've stayed there previously, which isn't even possible. Normally this would just be another inconvenience for me, but in this case it's actually proving to be kind of beneficial. See, the Bavarian Inn is quite possibly the best location for playing dance video games within day-trip distance for me. They've got pretty much all of the latest games, and they're kept working well because one of the employees there just happens to be one of the best dance game players in the world. I haven't taken a trip up there because of time and money considerations, but I've kind of been meaning to, and now all of a sudden I'm getting e-mails about all these great deals there without even signing up for them. It's still kind of amazing to me that, among the family photos and news of politicians running for office in New Jersey that I mistakenly get, I would just happen to start getting these e-mails because someone, accidentally or purposefully, gave my Yahoo! Mail address out as their own.
posted 2007/07/18 at 16:29
As I wrote yesterday, following my excursion to UT to apply for a job, I headed over to our local Old Navy to pick up some nice shirts to wear for job interviews. I shopped mostly from the clearance section, but I picked up a total of three nice shirts and paid barely more than fifteen bucks. I don't think I could have gotten that good of a deal even shopping Meijer's generic clothing. Perhaps I could have gotten a better deal at Wal*Mart, but, well, I don't shop at Wal*Mart.
This kind of takes me back, because it's actually been over six years since I last bought anything at Old Navy. (This is more due to the fact that Old Navy's kind of a ways away from me than me avoiding a popular brand just for the sake of avoiding a popular brand.) I can remember this clearly because I had just recently dropped below 200 pounds and I was able to fit into non-plus size women's clothing for the first time. One of my friends at the time swore by Old Navy jeans, so I picked a pair up even though I've never particularly cared for jeans. (Particularly now that I'm so into dance games I just can't see myself wearing jeans again, given how much they limit my mobility.) I liked the jeans an awful lot, but then somehow they got lost after the house fire. (I think they were in the wash at the time, and that they somehow just didn't get returned. Either that, or like so many other things of ours, they turned up missing from the boxes of stuff the disaster recovery people took out of the house.)
I also remember that my first shopping trip to Old Navy was close enough to the fire that I still had the shopping bag the jeans came in, which was quite sturdy. In fact, I actually used it to carry my books to and from UT for that first summer class I took. I didn't need anything bigger, and the bag did a nice job for me in that regard. Once I was going to school full-time, though, I needed a bigger bag, and so I bought a proper bookbag. I don't recall exactly what happened to that bag, but I remember it serving me in good stead for quite some time. I have the Old Navy bag from yesterday sitting next to me, but it's of a much flimsier construction than that first bag I got, and I'll probably end up just throwing it out here.
Although this was only the second time I ever bought anything at Old Navy, I actually went there a number of times after that first trip I made. The reason for that is that this particular store actually bordered the property of the hotel our family stayed at after the fire, to the point that if you went to one of our windows and looked down, the Old Navy logo was pretty much the first thing you saw. You couldn't just walk straight over because of the fences around both the hotel property and the Old Navy store, plus the fact that it was the back of the Old Navy that faced the hotel, but I walked over there with my sister quite a few times as she started to rebuild her wardrobe after losing it all in the fire. For that matter, since there were so many other stores within walking distance of the hotel (most notably the city's only Bed Bath and Beyond at the time), she and I did quite a lot of walk-around shopping then. As much of a pain it was to live in that hotel for nearly eleven months for a number of reasons, it was kind of nice that I could actually walk to some good stores while I was there.
posted 2007/07/17 at 17:28
I'm writing this entry from the computer lab in UT's Student Union. Once again I found a great job that required me to submit an application through Taleo.net, and all the computers at home still refuse to submit any forms through the Website. (I believe that this is a problem with our cable company/ISP.) Since I really didn't want to pass up on applying for this job (localizing game text for Nintendo), I hightailed it out here for the second time this month, and I can only hope that either I get a full-time job here soon so I don't have to keep going out here, or at the very least that our cable company figures out what the Toot is causing us to not be able to fully use certain Websites at home and fix the problem. (Apologies to the peanut gallery, but this is one problem that switching to Macs wouldn't fix.)
I can't say that I feel too strongly either way about returning to campus like this. I did have both good and bad experiences at UT, and in all honesty near the end there I was kind of glad to get out of here, although that was more due to fatigue than anything else. Still, this wasn't a situation like I had at the private school I went to where there were just so many bad experiences there that returning to campus was painful. I'm just feeling rather business-like here; I came, I finished the application, and now I'm taking the opportunity to write a blog entry while I'm here so I can avoid rush hour traffic before I head to Old Navy to pick up a nice shirt to wear for a job interview later this week.
I haven't exactly gone to visit any of my old professors here, in part because my time here is so limited, and in part because I don't know whether or not they're even coming to campus on a regular basis for the summer sessions. Pretty much everyone I knew here as a student graduated by now (save my composition students), so I guess I don't have to worry about that so much either. One of these days I would like to come say hi to a few of my old professors here and see what they're up to, but that will probably have to wait a little while here.
The physical changes to the campus are what I'm noticing the most right now. Following UT's merger with the Medical University of Ohio a year ago, the university debuted a new logo, and of course now they're plastering it wherever they can. They've also erected new, more informative signs on the parking lots, and there are more maps around campus to help visitors find their way around. What's funny to me, though, is that the tagline for the football team's upcoming seasonn is "Building Champions." I suppose that's the nicest way they can think of to say, "Yeah, a few years ago we won a bunch of conference titles and sent Chester Taylor and Bruce Gradkowski to the NFL, but now we're going to be lucky to break .500 on the year."
posted 2007/07/16 at 21:18
One of the things I've been looking forward to this summer is replaying Final Fantasy VII to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of the game's US release. I plan to start playing on 09.07, the exact date I picked up my copy at my closest Toys'R'Us (the release date), and with any luck I'll actually get all the way through it, and not wind up playing it partway and then getting distracted by other things and not finishing it. (That has unfortunately been the case for nearly all the RPGs I've tried to play in what fleeting spare time I have these days.) It's been a couple of years since I last played through Final Fantasy VII, but somehow I have the feeling that everything will just come clicking back to me simply because of how many times I've played through it in the past.
I guess that this kind of brings me to the subject of Final Fantasy XIII. It was nice of Sony to lower the price of the Playstation 3 to $499, and I've certainly seen enough of them available for sale, but ignoring the fact that I just don't have the money to pick one up right now, I still don't see the value in the system, particularly when the next-generation DVD war still seems to be very much in progress. (Not that I follow said war that closely, but I assume that Blockbuster going with Blu-Ray kind of brought that platform back to life when it looked like HD-DVD was going to win easily.)
There's something else that's been bothering me about Final Fantasy XIII, though, which is this notion that the game is going to have this huge overarching mythology that carries through to all of the titles that are produced using the Final Fantasy XIII title to tie them together. Now, I've always been a huge RPG fan, and you'd think that I would like the fact that Square Enix sounds like they're going to be putting in a huge amount of effort in creating a backstory to the games by referring to it as a "mythology." What I think is bothering me is that I think there's really only a certain point to which a backstory for a video game should be developed, at least at the start. Just to use Final Fantasy VII as an example, the game certainly has a mythology now, and its story was quite intricate and detailed for its time, but most of the Final Fantasy VII mythology came after the game was a huge success and its fans pretty much demanded that the universe stay alive. (Now if only Square Enix would create Final Fantasy VII sub-titles that could possibly live up to the standard of the original.)
I don't want to say that Square Enix is wrong to create a whole mythology for Final Fantasy XIII before the game is released, and if history has taught us anything it is that the first Final Fantasy title for a new generation of systems is always the best one, so there's always hope there. Perhaps this is just a manifestation of my inner Final Fantasy VII fan still desperate for a graphical remake of the game on a current-generation system. Still, even though I've been good about getting all the Final Fantasy (main) titles on or near their release dates (except Final Fantasy XI because I don't play MMORPGs), I just don't see myself picking up Final Fantasy XIII any time soon. Playing through Final Fantasy VII again just seems like it'd be far more fun for me.
posted 2007/07/14 at 22:43
Clinton, Edwards overheard planning to eliminate other Democratic candidates (kucinich.us)
I wish I could say that this came as any small shock to me. Perhaps there was a bit of shock involved here as I can remember Kucinich and Edwards swapping delegates at the 2004 Iowa Caucus to better both their showings (the first time I realized that even though Kucinich is one of the most principled politicians in Washington, he's not above using political machina to his advantage when he can), but that was just small. I don't think there's any irony in the fact that Fox News were the ones to leave their microphones on to catch this conversation, but if this was a deliberate attempt on their part to do damage to the leading Democratic candidates (which, as much as I dislike Fox News, I doubt), you have to wonder at the wisdom of helping the most conservative- and corporate-unfriendly major party candidate in the race right now.
Taken by itself, the simple exchange between Clinton and Edwards, as much as I dislike it, wouldn't have been that big a deal to me; in fact, I don't particularly see how an exchange like this is newsworthy in the first place. It's not like we don't assume that candidates in any political election may sometimes conspire to narrow the race down to just themselves. The non-denials that the Clinton and Edwards camps have issued since then, though, that they weren't talking about excluding the Kuciniches and Gravels of the campaign from debates but rather were talking about an alternate format where only a few candidates selected at random would debate to allow for longer answers, is ludicrous. Not only does it boggle the mind how either camp could expect anyone with more than a rudimentary knowledge of major party politics to believe this explanation, it also insults the intelligence of those of us who know better. My opinions of Clinton centrism are fairly well-known to anyone who has followed this blog for any period of time, and I never particularly cared for Edwards at all, but this episode has managed to lower my opinions of both of them quite a bit.
The notion that having so many candidates in a debate reduces each of them to "soundbite responses" is at once both true and untrue. While the format does only give each candidate a short amount of time to respond, the problem here is not the number of candidates but the lack of time for the debates. It's bad enough that we live in a soundbite culture, where the power and media elite overwork and overstimulate everyone to the point where they don't have anywhere near enough time to make rational decisions about the food they eat, let alone the politicians they vote for, so that people expect from their elected officials, if not demand, tidy, catchy little one-sentence solutions to problems that require answers ten to a hundred times longer than a simple blurt. Even if all the candidates got together and pushed for longer debates, though, the news media wouldn't allow it because it would prevent them from doing what they believe is their true function: not reporting the news, but pushing the commodities that are their anchors. There is simply no way a news network would agree to carry a long debate because they want things over with as quickly as possible, so that instead of hearing what the candidates have to say, they can give us the interpretations of the Wolf Blitzers and Chris Matthewses of the cable news world. After all, the business of the news industry these days isn't to inform the public as to what's going on in the world around them, it's to push their own talking heads as somehow being more relevant to people than their elected officials.
I wish I could say that I hold some hope that real political change will come from this gaffe, but experience has taught me better. After all, no one blinked when, following Kucinich's verbal smackdown of an ABC News moderator in a debate, ABC pulled its reporters from the campaigns of Kucinich and two other Democratic candidates, not coincidentally the other two candidates who had more than a laughable claim of possibly being called "liberal" (Carol Moseley-Braun and the Rev. Al Sharpton). At the least I can be glad that this episode did give Kucinich a bit more visibility in a media that is loathe to cover him because they know that he won't fall into their pockets like the other candidates would. Perhaps this may lead to some serious consideration by the American public of how the media and the major political parties manipulate the political process so that only a certain group of people get fair coverage and access to the public as a whole, but I doubt that will happen. Certainly it won't happen if the major news outlets have any say about it (which they most certainly do).
posted 2007/07/13 at 15:53
Gerald Levert was born. Perhaps the best known of Eddie Levert's sons, he passed away this past November from a heart attack, and his loss was untimely to say the least. His body of work simply needs to be heard to be believed, but I must admit that my favourite performance of his will likely remain his guest vocals on Chris Rock's astoundingly funny parody of the "Wear Sunscreen" phenomenon, "No Sex (in the Champagne Room)." On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. What’s a gross food you like anyway?
These days I don't think anything I eat could qualify as being gross, although there will always be those omnivores who think that the vegetarian meat substitutes I eat are disgusting. However, several years ago I seemed to be one of only four or five people on the face of the planet who loved Pepsi Blue, and I still wish Pepsi would re-release it (or that I could get one of the generic knock-offs still being produced around here).
2. Who’s an unlikeable person you like anyway?
As strange as thie sounds, I still have a soft spot in my heart for Mike Tyson. There's just something in me that believes that Tyson was a good man who was essentially ruined first by the death of Cus D'Amato and then getting himself mixed up with Don King. I don't say this to try to lessen the horrible things he's done since then, but even though my mind tells me that I should abhor Tyson, in my heart I just can't. (I don't even like boxing, although I think the sport does produce interesting characters like Tyson, Muhammad Ali, and George Foreman.)
3. What’s an unpleasant task you enjoy performing anyway?
I really enjoy getting the opportunity to move big stuff around the house or my room. I think I get more into the organizational side of it than the physical labour side, though. For that matter, I kind of need to switch a couple of bookcases' positions in my bedroom here soon to help me maximize my space. (I also need to buy and put together a new tower-style bookcase to help me with my overflow of books here.)
4. What’s a dumb song you enjoy anyway?
There are a good number of songs in the dance video games I play that I have the feeling I shouldn't enjoy because of inane lyrics or simplistic style or things like that, but that somehow manage to get a hook in me in some strange way. Since I've been playing In the Groove at home recently, I'll go with Missing Heart's "Charlene" for an answer; the lyrics are weak and the instrumentation isn't all that good, but I still kind of like the song as a whole for some strange reason. (For that matter, I feel that way about nearly all the Missing Heart songs I've heard.)
5. What’s a lousy restaurant you frequent anyway?
These days I don't frequent restaurants much at all, and when I do go out I tend to go to pretty good places. For lack of a better answer, I'll say Arby's here because I really like some of their stuff for reasons I don't really understand. (I haven't even been to Arby's once this calendar year, though.)
posted 2007/07/11 at 15:52
I'm sure that for most of the rest of you this is the day where you all go out to your nearest 7-Eleven for the free 7.11 ounce Slurpee you can get all day. Around this house, however, this day is most important for being my sister's birthday, so allow me to say happy birthday, Heather.
I'm actually not on my diet today due to a combination of it being my sister's birthday and me wanting a slice of her birthday cheesecake, and the fact that we had a half-off coupon to use at our local Papa John's. (Not that I care for their pizza all that much -- I find it strangely soup-like in some ways -- but I like it every once in a while, and that coupon was going to expire today.) Under normal circumstances I might think about heading to our nearby 7-Eleven to pick up a free Slurpee, but unfortunately that 7-Eleven closed down a few months ago. Granted, it wasn't in a particularly good part of town (at least by the standards of the surrounding area), but I always passed it on the way driving to and from UT, so I figured that it must have gotten a lot of traffic due to its sheer convenience. Ironically enough, now the closest 7-Eleven to me is right next to UT, so if I want to go there then I'd have to drive past the old store anyway. All things being equal, though, even though it's been a while since I had a Slurpee, I'm not sure I want one bad enough to drive all that way for one.
I suppose there's no use in mentioning Slurpees and 7-Eleven without mentioning the whole thing with 7-Eleven turning a few select stores into Kwik-E-Marts for the month as a promotional tie-in for The Simpsons Movie. I seem to be one of those rare people who doesn't particularly care one way or the other for The Simpsons; everyone else I know either really likes or really dislikes the show, but I've never cared too strongly one way or the other for it. I may watch a few minutes of it if I flip by it on the television (and the only times I've had my television on recently have been to watch specific shows), but it's not a show that has ever struck me as being particularly noteworthy in any aspect. I suppose its longevity kind of makes it impossible to ignore now, though, and I do think the 7-Eleven tie-in is a nice marketing touch. My question is, given that only a handful of stores have been converted to Kwik-E-Marts and that the promotion only lasts through the end of the month, are fans of the show who aren't close to any of the promotion locations making huge trips just to go to the Kwik-E-Marts before the promotion ends?
posted 2007/07/09 at 17:12
When my father made new house plans for this house after the fire, he took the area that had previously been my bedroom and turned it into an addition to the master bedroom. What had been the only bedroom I'd known for nearly all of my life (save for the odd trip and the time I spent living in the dorms at Antioch was now a walk-in closet and a bathroom. The actual toilet itself got placed where my television had been in my old bedroom before the fire, a fact that I still, to this day, do not believe to be the coincidence that my father claims it to be. This is now the only bathroom on the first floor (the old bathroom is now our laundry room), and although I usually use the bathroom up here on the second floor out of mere convenience, sometimes, like when I'm in the middle of cooking or baking something in the kitchen, I may duck into the master bathroom to use the facilities quickly.
For some reason, even though she hardly ever buys anything out of them, my Mom still receives a lot of print catalogues from those places that cater to ... well, I don't think there's a kind way of putting it. Basically the catalogs are filled with all manner of quaint stuff, ranging from machines or doodads that claim to heal all of your ailments, to those wooden lawn decorations of people's butts bending over to tend to some imaginary garden. These are the same places that sell all of those "World's Greatest Grandpa" t-shirts and the like, although for some inexplicable reason I saw a lot of young adults wearing those shirts around campus at UT in 2001, then all of a sudden the fad stopped and I never saw them again. I never quite figured out what was going on there, as even by the usual laws governing young adult fashion this was kind of weird. Anyway, back when we only had the one bathroom in the house I would become intimately familiar with the contents of said catalogues because Mom would always leave them in the bathroom, but now I hardly ever get to see them because, well, I don't use her bathroom very often.
The other day as I was baking, though, I stopped into that bathroom again, and quickly flipped through the catalogue offerings right below the toilet paper roll. Imagine my surprise, then, when there was actually a ThinkGeek catalogue tucked away in there. Now, first of all, my brother-in-law and I are the only two people in this house who might possibly have an interest in ThinkGeek's stuff, but the mailing address on the catalogue showed that it was quite clearly intended for Mom. More than that, though, ThinkGeek doesn't exactly strike me as the kind of company that would benefit from that kind of advertising. Particularly in this modern age, it seems like the only companies that still need to send print catalogues out are the companies that cater to people who think that pink flamingos in their front yards actually increase their property values. I might understand some other companies still doing print catalogues, but ThinkGeek is just about the last company I'd think would benefit from sending print catalogues out. The people who buy from those kind of catalogues don't exactly strike me as big consumers of Bawls, or people who would understand t-shirts with decryption codes printed on them.
posted 2007/07/08 at 14:40
Not that I have anything against that big hot dog eating contest in New York every fourth of July, but I had a hard enough time last week fathoming why ESPN, of all networks, would be carrying this event live at lunch-time this past Wednesday. I really couldn't figure out why nearly all the family was gathered around the living room television watching the event life. It just so happened that things timed themselves so that I had to stick down there for a couple of minutes waiting for my lunch to finish cooking, so I did watch the end of this competition. As it drew to a close and it looked like the American was going to beat the reigning Japanese champion, one of the ESPN announcers actually had the chutzpah to claim that the American's victory, if it happened, would be "the greatest moment in the history of American sports," or words to that effect. Now, I understand that sports announcers are, by nature, given to the odd bout of hyperbole, but given that I still don't understand how people can consider driving in a circle for hours on end a "sport" (I'm not saying it doesn't take skill, I'm just questioning the athletic value of motor racing), for someone to claim that an American eating more hot dogs in a given span of time than a Japanese person is somehow one of this country's greatest athletic achievements ever just completely boggles my mind.
Although I question competitive eating's worth as a "sport," I might as well turn this into a sports-related entry since I haven't done one in a while. I didn't wind up watching much of the Pistons' playoff run because I just got so busy with other things, but I think that the resurgent popularity of the Pistons in Detroit is about to take a huge hit, first with all the big names being traded away and now the spectre that the Age of Lebron has already arrived. I don't think Detroiters ever stopped loving basketball, but once Michael Jordan and the Bulls started winning championships left and right, the spirit of basketball in Detroit kind of died out there. Although the Detroit-Chicago rivalry is a bit more tangible in basketball still, the close proximity of Detroit and Cleveland means that there will always be a rivalry in all sports between the two cities; no one thought to pay it much mind in basketball until recently, though, since the Cavaliers were never that good. Now it looks like Lebron and the Cavs will take the place of Jordan and the Bulls in terms of squashing Detroiters' hopes of championships.
On the hockey front, I might have been wrong about who they'd get, but sure enough the team that knocked the Red Wings out of the playoffs yet again went on a raid of the Wings' players after the season ended. I can't say that I was ever all that attached to Schneider, and of course I never thought Bertuzzi had any business putting on the Wing Wheel, but these post-playoff talent raids that every team that knocks the Wings out of the playoffs seems to go on after the playoffs are over are the proverbial insult added on top of injury. I can only hope that with Bertuzzi gone the Red Wings will have enough sense to go out and get an enforcer-type who isn't the worst cheap-shot artist in the history of the league in order to both toughen the Wings up and to hopefully spark interest in the team again after the debacle of last year's attendance at the Joe.
posted 2007/07/06 at 14:19
... that today is the birthday of both Nancy Reagan and George W. Bush. There's a joke to be made in here about astrologers and finding weapons of mass destruction, but I'll leave it for you to write. Right now, let's just play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. Given as a percentage, approximately what are the chances that there is a french fry somewhere in your car? If you do not own a car, what are the chances that there is a french fry somewhere in the car you most frequently ride in?
0%. Even on the rare occasions I eat fast food these days, I always dine in. I can't even recall the last time I used any kind of drive-thru service, fast food or otherwise, because the driver's side window of my car has been stuck in the up position for longer than I can remember. I might hasten to add here that my car has no air conditioning, which makes driving during the day real fun on days like today.
2. Given as a percentage, approximately what are the chances that you will eat ice cream sometime in the next four days?
There's a 100% chance I'll have it later tonight after dinner. If someone else in the house eats the last of the ice cream before I get to it, I'll go out to get a new carton. I love my ice cream.
3. Given as a percentage, approximately what are the chances that you’ll get a personal, handwritten greeting in the mail sometime in the next week?
0%. The only people who I can ever recall writing greetings by hand to me are family members who either don't want to have anything to do with me now or are long since departed.
4. Given as a percentage, approximately what are the chances that there will be rain in your neighborhood within the next forty-eight hours?
According to the Weather Channel forecast I just looked at, apparently 0%. We're only supposed to get rain in here on Monday, after a couple of real scorching days temperature-wise.
5. Given as a percentage, approximately what are the chances that in the next twenty-four hours, you will be in the same room as a naked person other than yourself?
0%, and I'd like to keep it that way, thank you very much.
posted 2007/07/04 at 14:39
As I've mentioned here in recent months, I've had a recurring problem accessing some Websites from this computer. The problem seems to be tied to submitting forms on certain Websites; for some reason, when I try to submit them on some Websites, the connection invariably times out and nothing goes through. Although I have no way of verifying this for sure, I think the problem is related to Websites that use an interstitial page between when you click on the submit button and when the data is actually sent, so that another page pops up that usually says "Your data is being submitted, please hold." (This is a pretty good way to get around the problem of people accidentally pressing Submit buttons multiple times.) The interstitial never pops up for me, and the page just hangs there until I get a message saying that the connection has timed out. In the past I'd just wait until I got onto one of UT's computers to use Websites like this, but that's now not really an option for me. (Just for reference, the problem occurs in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.)
In the past I had thought that perhaps this was being caused by some weird function of my Norton Internet Security software, and given the recent problems I've had with being forced to reinstall it every couple of weeks, I was all too ready to assume Norton was the culprit when I ran into the same problem earlier today. The thing is, I was now having this problem when I was trying to apply for a job I was interested in, so in this case the problem was much more serious, and even if I could still get on the lab computers at UT, the whole campus is closed because of the holiday today so I couldn't even get into the Student Union, let alone the computer lab there. Given that my brother-in-law was out with my sister and Jeff catching Sicko just now, though, I figured I might as well fire up his computer and see what happened with it.
Well, my brother-in-law doesn't use Norton, and instead seems to use the same hodgepodge of various freeware security programmes that I heard of most students using when I was going to school. He also has an earlier version of Internet Explorer. In spite of all of this, however, I ran into the exact same problems at the exact same Websites. Ignoring the fact that this has gotten me quite irritated at the present moment, I can't believe that there's any software problem at work here now. I'm beginning to wonder if maybe there's something that our cable company is doing to block us from being able to access these Websites properly, although I can't think of why, or even how, they would do anything like this. Still, like Sherlock Holmes said, once you've eliminated the impossible, then what's left, however unlikely, must be true. Unfortunately, given our past record with said cable company, I'm actually going to go to UT tomorrow to see if I can use a computer there simply because it'll be easier for me than having to deal with the cable company.
This was actually my first time using my brother-in-law's computer, and even though I know he brought the computer over from England, I kind of assumed that he'd be using an American-style keyboard by now, if only because I know he uses computers a lot at his job here. However, he still has his old keyboard, which was a huge pain for me to get used to because the quote and @ symbols were reversed from the keyboard layout I'm used to. Perhaps it's because I've been using computers from such a young age, but having a new layout thrust on me there, even if it was only a few special characters that got moved around, required a huge adjustment for me. Unless he's somehow convinced his employers to let him use that different layout at work, I really don't see how he could switch back and forth between the different layouts at work and at home. Granted, I'm already annoyed at this whole problem I'm having using certain Websites, but I was nearly going bonkers there every time I went to type in my e-mail address and had a " pop up in place of an @.
posted 2007/07/03 at 14:23
I can't say that I've particularly cared for most of the Internet phenomena that have cropped up since the introduction of YouTube. I suppose that this is because I got more than my fill of "wacky" videos of people and animals when I was younger and ABC's America's Funniest Home Videos was the top-rated show in all of television. I never saw the particular attraction of this show and was honestly nauseated by how much it became a part of American culture at the time, to the point than even now, long after shedding his good-guy image from back then and resurrecting his career through his appearance in The Aristocrats, I still don't particularly care that much for Bob Saget. Although there are those people and organizations out there that make good use of YouTube, for the most part the service seems to be America's Funniest Home Videos on a global scale without the benefit of having the clips passed through editors first to make sure that they might possibly have at least the slighest bit of comedic value. I get quite my fill of these kinds of clips when Keith Olbermann shows them on the Oddball segment of Countdown, and for the most part I don't go looking for the "hot videos" on YouTube or any similar services.
There has been one recent exception to this, though: I have made a point of watching the videos of Carolyn, aka kerokerorin86. Carolyn vlogs in Japanese (except for the odd English vlog here and there), and while I really can't judge how well her Japanese is, I can easily say it's several degrees better than mine. (Sadly, I haven't really studied or even practiced my Japanese after I passed the translation exam for my MA degree last autumn.) What makes Carolyn's vlogs so compelling to me is that even though she isn't Japanese and claims never to have been to Japan in her life, she sounds, almost stereotypically, like a young Japanese girl. What makes this all the stranger is that when she does speak in English, she sounds, well, American. It's almost impossible to believe that she's able to change her accent so well for each language.
I think what fascinates me so much about Carolyn's videos is that I've been fascinated with how people in different countries and cultures develop their unique ways of speaking, particularly Japanese women. One of the reasons why I think the anime productions of Oh My Goddess! have been so wonderful is that Inoue Kikuko so perfectly captured Belldandy's voice; there's a gentleness to her Belldandy voice that is necessary to help convey the essence of Belldandy's character. I think Juliet Cesario did about the best job she could when she did the first AnimEigo dubs of the original OVA, although I think she put too much emphasis on Belldandy's sweetness as opposed to her gentleness. The American voices of Belldandy that followed Cesario have, to be honest, disappointed me wholly.
Back then I wondered if it would actually be possible for someone who was born and raised in America to capture the qualities of Belldandy's voice that Inoue-san brought. Based on little more than my own admittedly ignorant perceptions of Japanese and American cultures, I suspected that there were underlying cultural reasons why Japanese women spoke so differently from American women. In my mind I reasoned that things like American children being allowed to be much louder than Japanese children, and the much lower rates of smoking of Japanese women compared to American women, played a huge part in why Japanese women sounded so different from American women to my ear. Just to clarify things, I'm not saying that Carolyn sounds like Inoue-san's Belldandy; by her own admission, Carolyn's "accent" when she speaks Japanese is probably attributable to her being such a fan of the girl group Morning Musume. Still, the sharp difference between how Carolyn sounds when she's speaking Japanese versus when she's speaking English makes me wonder about where that distinctive (again, perhaps stereotypical) young Japanese women's way of speaking comes from.
At the very least, watching Carolyn's videos has me wanting to crack open my Japanese textbooks again, so some good may come out of me watching her videos.
posted 2007/07/01 at 15:10
Today marks six months of continuous dieting for me, or at least continuous in the plan I started at the beginning of the year where I allow myself Saturdays and other special occasions off of my diet, as long as I don't overeat or eat too much really bad stuff. (To date the only "special occasion" I've had was my birthday.) Given that I was out of the house taking care of other business in the early afternoon yesterday, when I got hungry I decided to head to Gino's Pizza -- one of Toledo's oldest and most-loved pizza places -- and have some cheese pizza and cheesy breadsticks. I used to have to cross the county line to get to a good Gino's location, but recently a new location closer to me opened, and I went there to dine in for only the second time ever.
This being a fairly new location, a few of the booths had flat-panel televisions built into the adjacent walls, and since there was only one other diner in the pizzeria at the time, I decided I might as well grab a booth with a television. I'd wanted the booth that had some kind of football game on its television, but that booth was taken, so I picked another booth at random, not knowing what channel that television was tuned to at the time because it was running commercials when I sat down. Imagine my horror when I found that not only was that particular television tuned to MTV, and that I couldn't change the channel, but that I just happened to sit down there while MTV was in the middle of a marathon of My Super Sweet 16. I only knew of this particular show because I happened to catch an episode of South Park that lampooned it, but even though the in-wall televisions didn't have any sound coming out of them, it wasn't too hard to tell what all was being said just by watching the pictures and stuff.
Now, I spent a large portion of my academic career learning how to decode the hidden messages that are out there in our media- and corporate-driven culture, and even though I don't identify myself economically as a Marxist, I believe that Marxist readings of modern culture can provide a tremendous insight as to the deepest problems underlying our society today. Both in my academic writings and my other writings, including on this Website, I put a lot of effort into trying to explain these readings in the simplest, clearest words possible, so that other people can hopefully understand just how poisonous our hyper-capitalistic culture can be, and learn how to spot these problems in their own lives. That all being said, I don't think it is actually possible or necessary for me to provide any critique of My Super Sweet 16. Watching birthday parties with banners noting the forty-plus corporate sponsors of the party, ranging from Christian Dior to Sony, there are just no words to describe how unbelievably messed up this whole spectacle is.
Perhaps this is just me romanticizing my youth, but I do like to think that, at least for a few years there in the mid-1990s, MTV managed to somehow turn itself into a halfway-watchable network. Listening to the 90's station on Urge Radio reminds me that yes, we had our share of insipid "boy bands" and one-hit wonders (I almost inserted an extra "s" into that phrase), but on the whole, between the influence of Lilith Fair on the dwindling music video content, a news division that amazingly walked the line between being entertaining and being informative (oh how I pine for the days of Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren), and the greatest American-produced cartoon of the decade (Daria, which might have saved my teenage years had it come out a few years sooner), I actually watched quite a bit of MTV there and was happy with it. This being the 1990s and the youth culture generally being more angsty and all, I'd like to think that if MTV had produced something along the lines of My Super Sweet 16 back then, it would have been a deliberate act of criticism, rightfully showing, if not mocking, the follies of material and wealth obsession. In today's culture, though, particularly given the popularity of other shows such as Cribs and Pimp My Ride, I honestly get the impression that shows such as those and My Super Sweet 16 are intended to celebrate and glorify the wrongheaded quest for material wealth.
I will never raise children because, to paraphrase Richard Belzer's character from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, more than not wanting the responsibility of a kid, I wouldn't want to give a kid the responsibility of me. There was a time when I thought about having children, though, and I was bound and determined back then that I would never censor anything my child/ren wanted to see, whether for reasons of morality or sex or even violence. I would provide some real strong counterpoints to material that I personally found objectionable (namely senseless violence), but I thought it would be best for my children to be exposed to as many differing viewpoints as possible. I don't want to say that I would prevent my hypothetical children from watching My Super Sweet 16 if they wanted to, but at the same time this incident yesterday is making me think about just how feasible it is to introduce a pre-teen to the works of Henry Giroux.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon