seanshannon.org

Growing

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 03:45:00 +0000

It would figure that after getting back to a regular blogging schedule last month, I'd go nearly the entire month this month without posting anything. Given that I need to change to a new content system for the .org now that Blogger is ending FTP support (I'm assuming I'll have to install WordPress, or rather bribe someone into installing it for me), this is doubly disturbing. My Spring Break started today, though -- as usual in Toledo, with several inches of snow on the ground and even more falling as I type this now -- and I'm hoping to use my time off here to catch up on things I've been neglecting, like cleaning my room, reading, and blogging.

I can't say too much about the events of this past month, but earlier I went to Columbus for a weekend and finally had a weekend where nearly everything went right. I'd needed a weekend like that in the worst way since Mom's medical troubles started last September, and I'd been repeatedly denied that chance. Not only did I wind up having one of the longest periods of happiness I can remember having in several years, but I grew tremendously as a person in that one weekend. I can't say that I sit here now with everything in my life hunky-dory, because it isn't. In fact, I've had a fair bit of upsetting news this month as well, but because I had that one weekend turn out so well for me, I feel much more capable of handling things than I did a month ago.

I also wrote my first screenplay earlier this month. I completed a number of short stories last month, and one of them was one I had the proverbial "good feeling" about. I bought a couple of books on screenwriting to help refresh my memory on formatting and similar issues -- I took a screenwriting class in 2003, but I hadn't attempted the format since then -- and wound up churning out a 15,000 word screenplay in eight days. All the screenplay's events fell pretty much where they're supposed to in a Hollywood screenplay, and I was surprised at how easily it came to me given that I'm not a film person by any stretch of the imagination. (I haven't been to the cinema to see a film in eight and a half years.) I hold no illusions about this screenplay becoming a smash hit, or even picking up an agent, but writing it was a tremendous experience for me, and once I've let it rest a while, I'm going to go back and edit it and see what I can do about getting an agent to see if it will sell. I'm also going to turn the screenplay into a novel, since I have a good feeling about that as well. This will mean putting off the novel I'd planned to start writing shortly, but I want to strike on this one story while I still feel on a roll with it.

It's odd for me to come here and say that I'm not depressed about things. I guess that when I feel good for a prolonged period of time, it's only natural for me to want to enjoy the good time and not spend so much time writing about it. That being said, I should work more on blogging on a more regular basis. I can't afford to let this place fall into disrepair.

I'm With Johnny

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:29:00 +0000

There have certainly been more pressing things to be concerned with than the late-night situation that's been unfolding at NBC, but I can't deny having my own thoughts and feelings about it. All things being equal, perhaps a bit of this silliness is needed after all the other heavy stuff going on, and as great as some of the humour that has come from this situation has been, at its core there's still some stuff going on that is far from funny and which, as insignificant as it may be compared to things like the crisis in Haiti, deserves a bit of attention.

For those of us who are old enough to have watched Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show on a regular basis, I don't think it controversial to say that most of us likely consider everyone who has come after him a pale imitation. If I were to pick a favourite of the people who have followed in the Carson mold, it would be David Letterman, but I thought Letterman was a lot funnier when he was at NBC. Somewhere in his transition to CBS, I think Letterman lost a fair bit of what made his run at Late Night so entertaining, the feeling that instead of his show being a "Big Show," it was just a bunch of dumb guys getting together and letting you in on all their dumb jokes. There was a subtlety to Letterman's NBC work that mirrored Carson's, and as the years have gone by on his CBS show, Letterman seems to be straying further and further from that.

That being said, I've hardly been a fan of Jay Leno's, at least apart from his stint as substitute host for Carson back in the day. When Leno took over The Tonight Show, it went from being The Tonight Show -- as brilliant as Carson was, he downplayed himself perfectly and let his guests shine -- into The Jay Leno Show. In addition to relying to heavily on overly staged gags and heavy production, Leno's interviews were often marked by Leno using the guest to get his own jokes over. This is not a criticism of Jay Leno the person, but Jay Leno the talk show host, but for someone who grew up watching Carson as often as possible, the change was dramatic and altogether uneasy. Leno might be a possible choice for my least favourite post-Carson late night host, had CBS not inexplicably given one of the least funny people on the face of the planet, Craig Kilborn, his own show for five years.

I watched Conan O'Brien's first couple of weeks in Letterman's old time slot, and I wasn't impressed, although I think even Conan himself will admit he was finding his legs then. I didn't catch his show much after that, and from what I watched it did look like he grew into the role. However, I never cared much for Conan because, honestly, it felt like his comedy was almost entirely shtick and gimmick, flaccid characters and stale bits that, once stripped away, didn't reveal much of an actual person, let alone comedian, underneath. Even with Leno, as much as his show bothered me, I still got the sense of Jay Leno the person underneath it all, and even though I may not have cared for his show, Leno as a person still seemed likable enough. I watched Conan's first shows as Tonight host, and it felt like he'd improved a bit, but nearly every show's first few episodes have a surplus of A-level material.

To be honest, I've always identified NBC as my favourite of the big networks; apart from my childhood love of The Cosby Show, I guess NBC has a way of marketing its shows that make them more appealing to me than other networks. That being said, I thought NBC made an unforgivable error by not consulting Carson when it came time to replace him, and giving his show to Leno instead of Carson's own choice, Letterman. It's hard not to have sympathy for NBC for trying to avoid that situation by negotiating a smooth hand-off between Leno and Conan several years ago, but at the same time, after the dust has cleared, it's obvious that Conan got supremely shafted by NBC in this whole deal, and my criticisms of his work aside, I feel incredibly sorry for him. I'm trying to be understanding of Leno's role in this whole situation as well, but at the same time, there's a very large part of me that wishes he'd just go away and leave late night to others.

If I were a regular late-night television watcher, I don't know what I'd do now. Letterman's okay, but that's about it for me. Jimmy Kimmel has his moments, but a lot of his material offends me. I've tried watching Jimmy Fallon a few times, but his show is literally too painful for me to watch; I worry that my television might short-circuit from all of his flop-sweat. Craig Ferguson and Carson Daly just don't do anything for me, and I associate Daly too much with the late-90's crapification of MTV when they went from Daria and Lilith Fair to TRL and Britney Spears.

Honestly, I think the only way I could watch a late night talk show again is if someone resurrected Johnny Carson, and I mean resurrected in the literal sense of the word. Carson had a unique gift that I'm not sure anyone else will ever have, becoming a legend of American comedy and television so sublimely. I'm not even sure his show would work today, though. There's clearly no big market for the alternative kinds of shows Tom Snyder and Whoopi Goldberg and Bob Costas have tried out, and these days when Jon Stewart so perfectly imitates Carson's phrases and mannerisms whenever a joke fails, all I hear young people say is, "What is he doing, that's so stupid and unfunny." I wasn't even eighteen when Carson ended his run on The Tonight Show; this whole sordid affair is making me feel way too old.

Can It, Keith

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:53:00 +0000

Longtime readers know that I have almost always been a fan on Keith Olbermann, dating far back to the pre-.org days when Olbermann was on ESPN, when he and Dan Patrick truly revolutionized the art of the sports recap. The two of them could make watching highlights of any sport, no matter what sport or who was playing, an enjoyable experience, and their reunification on Football Night in America made the show must-see viewing for me. I must admit, though, that I have to ask of them the same question I ask of the Beastie Boys: Does the high quality of their original, pioneering work make up for the wave of poor imitators that followed in their stead? I have been a fan of Olbermann's work on MSNBC as well, even though my politics are firmly to the left of his, and I think Countdown does a good job of balancing serious journalism with opinion and comedy. Even when I get tired of Olbermann shilling for Democrats instead of standing up for the liberal positions he espouses, I still feel compelled to watch his show, for both its informative and entertainment values.

His Special Comment last night on the Supreme Court decision allowing corporations to spend freely on elections, however, went far beyond the pale. I certainly agree with him that Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was not only poor jurisprudence, but sets a dangerous standard for the future of this country. The notion of equating the spending of money with free speech is inherently ludicrous, particularly given our country's notion of corporate personhood. Money, like speech, is a tool that can be used for great good or great evil, but find me one person in this economic downturn who lost his or her house not due to lack of money, but due to lack of words. The only people who could look at our current political system and think that the cure for ails it is more corporate money are people who stand to benefit from the infusion of nearly unlimited amounts of corporate cash into our elections. Unfortunately for we Americans, five of those people are on the Supreme Court right now.

That the court decision paves the way for corporations to tighten their strangleholds on American politics and American people should go without saying. However, for Olbermann to claim on his show last night that the decision was worse than Dred Scott v. Sandford was so hyperbolic as to be just as ludicrous as the decision he was deriding. That Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission has the potential to do great, irreparable harm to this country cannot be denied, but to compare it to the most discriminatory decision in the court's history, one that led to this country's bloodiest war and the deaths of over 600,000 Americans, is at best highly paranoid, and at worst an insult to all those in this country whose ancestors toiled in the most inhumane institution this country even enacted, slavery. Olbermann was on the money when he said that American news outlets needed to spend much more time covering this decision and its ramifications, but his rhetoric in his Special Comment last night actually did our common cause a disservice.

It has been painful this past year to see Olbermann descend to a form of self-parody. His repeated setting aside of his principles to defend Democrats started in the aftermath of the 2006 elections, but became legion following Obama's inauguration. Even on those occasions when he does go after Democrats for abandoning progressive beliefs, he does so in a withering tone, giving the camera puppy-dog eyes as if to say, "Please don't stop your party officials from appearing on my show." Perhaps the most galling example of this was the unabashed name-calling he engaged in leading up to Scott Brown's election this past Tuesday, which Jon Stewart pointed out on last night's Daily Show. Again, Olbermann was correct in principle to address many of the concerns he brought up about Brown, but he did so in a manner which was, in a word, juvenile. The worst part is that Olbermann should know better; he has pointed out in the past that Bill O'Reilly is wise to ignore Olbermann's barbs because you never want to be seen as "punching down," trying to hit those underneath you, as Olbermann so clearly is in television ratings and national stature. Olbermann has been punching down at Republicans for some time now, and while this can be effective for right-wing pundits and talking heads -- we all need to laugh at their pompousness, and Olbermann can still be very funny -- when he does it to Republicans, he only reinforces the ludicrous Republican notion that they are the dominant political party in America right now.

I will admit to being very distressed by Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and the potential it has, but for Olbermann to act like Chicken Little because of it was unintentionally hilarious, and requires me to do something I never thought I would do: Go to Olbermann's right and defend capitalism. As much as the spectre of complete corporate domination was made substantive by the decision, the idea that it will lead to a One World Nation is remote at best. Despite its many disadvantages and how they've been repeatedly demonstrated in my adult lifetime, American capitalism has shown that it does have a capacity, perhaps even a natural instinct, to make sure that people of different tastes are catered to. If that were not the case, then right now there would be either Coke or Pepsi on my local grocer's shelves, but not both. There would be no Big Three automakers because one of them would have bought out the other two ages ago. Even if liberals are, sadly, a minority in this country, the idea that corporations would homogenize everything and squelch liberalism, or even criminalize it, is unlikely. That this country's laws will become more favourable to big business as a result of this court decision is inevitable, but to declare it the death of the country is absurd.

That it is a possibility is without question, and if there is a company that could rise to become this nation's Shinra, it is certainly Walmart. They already have a record of using their money to curry lawmakers into helping them become more dominant in America, and that is likely to get even worse in the months and years ahead. However, even Walmart's resources are not always enough to counteract the ability of the American people to realize a bad deal when they see one. I teach in a county where, despite Walmart's best efforts, the people there resoundingly voted against the ability for Walmart to build one of its big box stores there, right next to the very building in which I teach. As much as I worry about how ill-informed Americans are about the forces at work to manipulate them into doing things against their own interest, they have shown that sometimes they can still recognize when to take a stand against corporations and the blight they would inflict upon the land.

That Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission could, potentially, turn America into a country uninhabitable by free-thinking liberals and progressives is, sad to say, real, and it is something that I will be guarding against, and I hope that others will join me in seeking whatever legal means are possible to overturn this unfortunate, uninformed, and undemocratic decision. To declare it worse than a decision sanctifying and legalizing the enslavement of a race of people, however, is not only incorrect, but it is insulting, and Keith Olbermann should know better.

Turn Left Now

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:40:00 +0000

I wish I could say that the special election of Scott Brown to the Senate last night came as any kind of surprise to me. I watched the news last night, dumbly hopeful that somehow the people of Massachusetts would go with the lesser of three evils (counting the Libertarian candidate), but hearing the tales of his closing the gap with Martha Coakely so quickly in the past couple of weeks, and the repeated missteps of the Coakely campaign, this result was pretty much a given three or four days before the election. The fact that the teabaggers could get a candidate into the Senate in less than a year, while the Green Party has still yet to get anyone to Congress, is the kind of thing that makes me wish I didn't hate the cold so much, because Canada and Western Europe are looking more and more like a better fit for me and my politics.

I spent the night listening to the usual Democratic talking heads making excuses about how elections always trend against the party in the executive office, and how voters see the ruling party as the status quo, and all of that other gobbledybook. They tried to downplay the numerical significance of losing just one Senate seat when the Democrats still command such a huge lead, totally overlooking the symbolic value of losing the Kennedy seat less than a year after his death, as if their caving in on health care wasn't making Teddy spin in his grave enough. Now he's spinning so much he could probably power all the streetlights in Hyannis Port if you hooked them up to his corpse. As usual, the Republicans are reacting even more stupidly, claiming a statewide vote somehow counts as a national referendum and trying to get Obama to surrender the presidency to Rush Limbaugh because "obviously" he is now a total and complete failure.

If Obama and the Democrats continue on their present course, though, a winning Limbaugh-Coulter ticket (or Palin-Beck or O'Reilly-Hannity or what have you) is becoming more and more of a probability. The Coakley campaign encapsulated perfectly what the Green Party has been saying about Democrats for years now: that they think if they're one step to the left of the most moderate Republican, that they're automatically entitled to the votes of everyone to the left of them. I don't know if what Coakley and her staff did should even be called a campaign, given how they took so much time off, seemingly thinking that the seat was theirs, that there was no way the voters of Massachusetts would vote for anyone other than a Democrat. From health care to gays in the military to a host of other issues, Obama and the Democratic Congress have been either putting off meaningful change or cutting it short entirely, under the same assumption that anyone to their left is somehow obligated to vote for them. It has now cost them one Senate seat, and it's likely not going to be the last.

The irony in all of this is that this past month I've been reading The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience, in which author Kirstin Downey shows that, although fraught with poor compromises of its own, FDR and Perkins managed to push through grand, wide-ranging social reforms, reforms that, try as they may, Republicans have still yet to take off the books. If Republicans truly believed that a national health care program would be bad for the nation, they wouldn't be so eager to can it. As with New Deal social reforms, and as with the civil rights advances of the last fifty years, once these programmes are in place, Republicans know that there is no way to kill them because the American people will realize how beneficial they are, and that despite their costs, they will want to keep them in place because they appeal to our better nature, a nature Republicans and the Religious Right spend the majority of their time trying to crush so their donors and benefactors can make more money. Even with majorities in both houses of Congress that rubber-stamped almost everything he did, Dubya couldn't spend his so-called "political capital" from his 2004 election to privatize Social Security. Why Democrats cannot take a lesson from this example both eludes and frustrates me.

If yesterday's election shows anything, it is that fractured as they may be with the whole Tea Party thing, the right-wing in this country is energized, and the left-wing is hopelessly though justly apathetic. If the Democrats want to minimize the chances of another 1994 Republican landslide, this is the time they need to get tough and start behaving like liberals. Don't Ask Don't Tell should have been stopped by executive order as soon as Obama took office, and not only does he need to end the discriminatory policy now, but he needs to rehire all the servicepeople thrown out of the military due to this policy in his presidency, if not all of them altogether. Our operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen would immediately benefit from aignificant influx of Arabic translators. Given that Brown's election puts a likely end to the health care bill in its present state, congressional Democrats need to use every tool at their disposal -- including budget reconciliation -- to push through as much reform as they can get with 218 votes in the House and fifty-one in the Senate, hopefully including a public plan. They need to raise taxes on upper-class individuals and corporations, and they need to do so without apology.

There may be too many historical forces at work to prevent Democrats from losses in the midterms, but if they want to at least stem those losses, they need to give their base more reason to vote Democratic. I wish I could say they'll vote Green instead, but if history has shown anything, it's that they'll stay at home. If that happens this year, then next year we may have a Tea Party Congress on our hands, and Goddess help us all if that should happen.

Invisible

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:15:00 +0000

I know not many of you follow one of my favourite authors, Poppy Z. Brite, but I subscribe to both her LiveJournal and Twitter feeds. Brite has lived in New Orleans for most of her adult life, and was among those who lost their homes when the gulf coast levees failed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She's quick to point out that the levee failures, not the storm itself, was what caused most of the destruction, and it's hard not to agree with that assessment. She also points out, quite frequently, that that part of the country has yet to really recover from the destruction of four and a half years ago. If you remember back to last August, when President Obama visited the stricken areas, the news networks covered him as he visited areas and gave speeches and pledged support.

Therein lies the problem. When the cameras shut off and the news went back to tea party protests and the like, nearly everyone, once again, forgot how the people of Louisiana still need help. I will shamefully admit to being one of those people; reading Brite's posts and tweets about the damage and need for help does remind me, but within minutes I forget about it and go on with the rest of my life. I have my own needs to meet, and it isn't always easy to balance that with being aware of those who are less fortunate than I am. It's a problem that many of you deal with as well, I'm sure; we can't all be Mother Teresa, but at the same time we wish we could do a better job of taking care of others.

However, I think our culture deserves a lot of the blame for this. It should go without saying that most American news outlets spend too much time talking about the latest celebrity gossip, particularly from reality television shows, and too little time talking about the rest of the world and what's going on outside of our borders. If it's out of sight, then it's out of mind, and certainly there are those out there who like it that way, because it enables them to put so much more focus on "real problems" like stopping same-sex marriages and reducing taxes on millionaires. Most people in this country probably hadn't given more than a passing thought about Haiti since the United States' military presence in the 1990s departed, and it's only now, in the wake of the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, that we're drawn to Haiti again.

As the news reports coming out of Haiti this past week have made clear, the economic and infrastructure problems in Haiti were legion well before the earthquake hit, and Haiti's impoverishment in comparison to other Western countries was so enormous that it demanded much more attention than it got. Given how little attention was paid to how disaster-stricken Haiti was even before this earthquake, it's no wonder that this news comes as such a shock to so many people; quite honestly, I should have known better. As with Hurricane Katrina, there was no way to prevent every death, but if money had been spent on making the region as disaster-proof as reasonably possible, maybe we wouldn't have so many piles of corpses on our screens and in our heads.

The question now is whether we'll remember the problems in Haiti after the news cameras leave and the nightly news goes back to covering the latest celebrity sex scandal, or we'll just go back to not thinking about those less fortunate than us because we're not confronted with the images of them like we are right now. I'm going to try to remember the people of Haiti long after the wall-to-wall news coverage ends, but I know that I'll probably get caught up in the vagaries of my own life at some point and won't keep them, or the people of Louisiana, in mind as much I should. I just wish the American news media would do the role they're supposed to do and spend more time covering the injustice in this world, and less time on the trivia of celebrity drama. It shouldn't have taken this earthquake to get them, or us, to pay close attention to the problems in Haiti. Those problems don't go away when the news cameras shut off.

Far From Nirvana

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:04:00 +0000

I had thought that nothing could happen that would make me blog about, or even give much conscious thought to, the whole Tiger Woods brouhaha. Once again, I underestimated the ability of Fox News to take any situation and turn it into an opportunity to force their beliefs and morals down our throats. If I were to post a picture of the fingernail I broke earlier today and how I clipped it off, someone at Fox News could find some way to turn it into an example of how Obama's socialist policies are destroying America, or write some paean about how the religious right's version of Christianity means I'd never have to deal with another broken nail for the rest of my life.

I've come to expect Fox News personalities to say things so out of place with both reality and rational thought that more civilized countries would institutionalize them. I'm still a staunch believer in the First Amendment, and I still believe that the best defence against lunatic ideas is to allow the lunatics who espouse them to state them loudly, and at every possible opportunity, so people can judge for themselves how crazy they are. Granted, I think this would work a lot better if we could take a pair of scissors to this country and cut off the Deep South (they sound like they'd like that right now, anyway), but all Americans, now matter how misguided or misinformed, deserve a right to have their voices heard and votes counted.

That being said, the presence of Fox News in our culture, particularly when it is so dominant in some areas, complicates this matter a great deal. Fox News has always been a partisan tool for the right-wingers of this country to use to influence public discourse, obfuscating opinion and cherry-picked facts with actual journalism, and anyone in denial of this fact is in need of an intensive course of deprogramming. In the past, though, Fox News would at least put on a thicker veneer of objectivity with its Alan Colmeses and oh-so-rare shows that were actually "fair and balanced," although those shows usually came on weeknights at three in the morning. They still pull good ratings, though, because Fox News' demographic skews so old that at any time in this country, there are probably hundreds of thousands of televisions tuned into Fox News because their owners just died of old age.

That veneer has been steadily thinning since the election of Obama, though. Openly promoting Tea Party protests this past year was a textbook crossing of the line between journalism and advocacy, and although some on the left called Fox News out on this, such protests were nowhere near as vociferous as they should have been. Brit Hume's comments about Buddhism and Christianity were equally outrageous, and in the past even Fox News knew when to apologize when its personalities said something so out of line to defy description. Instead, Fox News has stood behind Hume's comments, even going so far as to have him basically reiterate them word-for-word on Bill O'Reilly's show.

Now, I will admit to not being as well-informed about the intricacies of Christianity as I'd like, but I think it reasonably safe to say that I know more about Buddhism than Brit Hume does. Setting aside the sheer offenciveness of Hume's comments for the moment, the notion that Christianity is somehow "better" at dealing with forgiveness than Buddhism is just patently and demonstrably false. Hume was speaking of what Tiger Woods would have to do to be forgived not by any actual higher power, but by the "higher power" of the religious right. Nothing short of beocming a card-carrying dittohead would redeem Tiger in their eyes, and for many of us, that would be a far greater sin than his affairs.

Worse yet, right-wingers continue to use the co-opt the language of victimization -- something which, in all seriousness, makes me physically ill -- and claim that criticism of Hume's comments are what are intolerant and misinformed, not Hume's comments themselves. Pretending for a moment that I held any actual cultural or political sway (a huge stretch, I know), imagine what would have happened if I'd written about any of the Republican politicians who got caught in affairs and sex scandals these past two years (I've lost count too), and said that what that politician needed to do was embrace Wicca, because Christianity was inadequate when it came to polyamory. My piece would probably be the lead story on The O'Reilly Factor, Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck's radio shows for at least five days. Ann Coulter and Michele Malkin would be writing columns calling for my assassination. Brent Bozell would be shouting that my claim showed exactly how Christians are discriminated against in America. This controversy isn't about Tiger Woods or Buddhism or anything like that; it's about the religious right and their continuing efforts to make their warped religion the norm against which everything else should be compared.

I've come to accept Fox News and the Bill O'Reillys and Sean Hannitys and Brit Humes of this world the same way I've come to accept the scar I have on my right calf from when I sliced it open trying to climb a chain-link fence when I was younger: A reminder that stupidity exists in this world, and that it usually leads to painful, lifelong consequences. Even in the context of Fox News' laughable definition of "fair and balanced," though, Brit Hume's comments went way over the line, and not just liberals, but moderates and journalists as well should be screaming bloody murder until Hume apologizes and retracts his ill-informed statements about Buddhism and Christianity. If we don't, then we can expect similar comments from other right-wingers every time anyone not of their ilk gets in the news for anything.

My City for a Decent Cable Company

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:36:00 +0000

I've written before about how I went to private school with children of the family that runs Toledo's local cable company, Buckeye Cablesystem. (The same family also owns our local paper, the Toledo Blade.) I've made no secret of the fact that I'm hardly a fan of Buckeye, particularly when they were slow to add new channels I really wanted in the 1990s (Food Network, ZDTV, MuchMusic, Bravo), which was why I had DirecTV for a few years there. After the fire I didn't bother renewing DirecTV, though, mostly because I didn't have much interest in television once I went back to college, and by that point I was tired of trying to catch every single televised performance of every musician I liked. (Now that other people have put those performances up on YouTube, I feel fairly vindicated in my decision.) Buckeye does have the best local cable and high-speed Internet access in town, yes, but given how Toledo is, that's kind of like being valedictorian at summer school. There wasn't even any serious competition in town until recently, when AT&T started making offerings, and so far their introduction into Toledo has been a huge disappointment. (I don't even think they've gotten their service out here to my suburb yet.)

That being said, Buckeye still puts up a lot of its own commercials during various broadcasts advertising their various services, and apart from the gratingly smug tone many of these commercials take, some of them are just so bad I can't stand to watch them. One of their recent commercial lines has been to show "humourous" things you can do with your old satellite dish after getting Buckeye Cable, like use it as a frisbee or an outdoor grill. Now, they're not that funny to me, but I'm willing to accept that my sense of humour is significantly different from most people's, so maybe that's just me. However, in each of these commercials, when they're advertising their special offers at the end, those offers include cash and/or credit for selling them your old satellite equipment. In other worse, they're showing you what you can do with your old satellite dish, and then basically saying you won't have the dish after you use this special deal. This is the kind of elementary logic failure that makes me want to go down to Buckeye Cable's offices and start yelling at no one in particular about how ridiculous they make themselves out to be.

In another of these "alternate use for your old satellite dish" ads, they show a guy turning his old dish into a replica of a Star Trek starship that he then hangs from the ceiling of his bedroom. They even have a crappy synthesizer playing a rip-off of the first four notes of the old Star Trek theme, and they only refer to it in the commercial as a "starship model." However, the man's bedroom is full of licensed Star Trek merchandise, including bedsheets with the Next Generation logo on them and a life-size cardboard cutout of Data. It's like they're trying to have it both ways, referring obliquely to Star Trek like they're trying to avoid a lawsuit, but then having all this official merchandise in the background. There's no disclaimer about Paramount licensing the use of Star Trek stuff for the commercial, either, so I have to assume that Paramount could shoot a cease-and-desist order to Buckeye Cable here to get that commercial taken off the air, which would do wonders for my nerves.

The other big line of commercials Buckeye has introduced lately has been for their home phone service, trying to show why it's a good idea to have a landline even in this age of cheap cellular service. I have to admit that the first of these commercials, about a grown-up daughter bonding with her mother over the phone, was actually quite touching and well done; it's probably the best commercial I've ever seen Buckeye put out. However, after that they started trying to be funny, and as before, the commercials became ludicrous. One commercial shows a guy having to lean out of a window of his house, with an active beehive right above him, trying to get good reception on his cell phone. (They couldn't even afford to get fake bees for him to swat at, so he just looks like he's having an episode.) After the Buckeye guy comes in and does his thing and hands the guy a wireless landline phone, though, the guy goes back into his house, but only closes his window part of the way. If the bees there were as bad as he made them out to be, his home would be uninhabitable within about five minutes. It's like that commercial the soda industry put out trying to get Congress not to put a national tax on sodas where the woman takes groceries out of her car's trunk and then leaves the trunk wide open as she goes into her house and closes the door behind her. I'd meant to blog about that commercial a while ago, but then Jon Stewart beat me to it.

The worst of these Buckeye phone commercials, though, makes me want to pull my hair out, so of course it's in heavy rotation. It's about this guy who tries to order a pizza at 2101 (9:01 PM, if you insist) since he doesn't want to use up any of his weekday minutes, only to be told that the pizza place he called stopped delivering a minute ago. First of all, nearly every cell phone company I know starts offering reduced/free minutes at 1900, not 2100. Secondly, no pizza place I know of stops delivering that early. Pizza places, like fast food (especially Taco Bell), make a killing on the late night just-got-stoned-and-need-munchies crowd, so it's in their best interest to stay open as late as possible. Those logical flaws alone would be bad enough, but then the Buckeye guy comes in and gives the caller a landline phone, the caller smiles, and then places a call on the landline phone. Uh, excuse me, but why the Toot is he calling again! The pizza place will still be closed! He's still going to spend the night hungry and miserable! Couldn't you have gotten the phone to him fifteen minutes earlier?

I know that looking for logic in television commercials is kind of foolish to start with, and I admit I probably view Buckeye more harshly than I do other companies, so I'm probably looking for this stuff to point out. Still, though, stuff like this makes me batty. If your commercials are going to be smug and self-righteous, at least have them make some sense.

Lack of Enthusiasm

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 02:21:00 +0000

Looking back at the past year, which was easily the most anemic ever in terms of how much I worked on the .org, it's clear that I've lost enthusiasm for a lot of the political stuff I've been so interested in for so long. I entered the year eager to see how Obama would handle himself at the start of his presidency, and I have to admit that I let my hopes get up after his inauguration speech, when he delivered a pretty stinging rebuke to the eight years of Dubya with the man himself sitting not twenty feet away. (I still wonder if Obama would have delivered that speech had Dick Cheney not been wheelchair-bound at the time.) From there, though, things quickly went downhill, either actively (allowing health care reform to become anything but reform), or passively (not repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" even as many of our country's best Arabic translators sit at home unable to serve their country because of entrenched homophobia). Obama was never "my guy," but I still let myself believe that he, like nearly anyone else, would lead the country in a significantly better direction. Things are better now, yes, but not significantly so by any stretch of the imagination.

As a teacher of rhetoric, keeping abreast of current news is kind of part of my job; doing so provides me with a wealth of information from which to draw potential discussion topics, and it also helps me guide my students towards paper topics that might actually interest them. All things being equal, it's one of the easier parts of my job, since I also need to stay clued in to things like college football, Taylor Swift, and (gag) the Twilight movies and books. This means catching a fair amount of television news, and also checking news Websites throughout the day, and back when I had more motivation to deal with politics, this wasn't such a problem. Recently, though, I stopped checking for Toledo news stories via Yahoo! News' Toledo portal, because it just felt like a real chore to me that didn't yield much, even with the city changing mayors recently. One of the things I've liked most about this vacation is simply that so much television news is just year-end recycled stuff instead of new stories, and I haven't had to catch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert for a while. That last bit says something because I really like their shows, but recently I've just wished I could have that time to do something else with my life.

In the past, it's taken things that hit really close to home for me to get back into politics, like when I was at Antioch when the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, and several of my friends were arrested protesting outside of John Kasich's office. You'd think that with all the medical stuff my family has been through these past couple of years that the health care debate would do more to energize me, to get me on my soapbox, but after suffering defeat after defeat this past year, and not knowing if anything will actually ultimately get passed into law, it just seems like there's no use in it. Obama and the Democrats constantly moved themselves away from progressive principles this past year, and yet Republicans are likely to make significant gains in the upcoming November elections. Sometimes I feel like there really isn't a place for me here in America.

A Simple Solution

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:51:00 +0000

AT&T is latest to end Tiger Woods sponsorship (AP via Yahoo! News)

As hard as I've tried to avoid the whole Tiger Woods thing these past few weeks, it's kind of hard to do that, especially when seemingly everyone, everywhere, is talking about it. After all, it's a perfect distraction from all that health care stuff, and who really cares if people go bankrupt or die because of our health care system if we can spend all our time talking about the umpteenth alleged Tiger Woods mistress and what job she has and whether or not she's prettier than Tiger's wife? Keep in mind, this is the same country that, when faced with the reality that Saddam Hussein did not have a viable WMD progamme in Iraq when we threw him out of power, decided that instead of calling congressional hearings about that, called them instead over Janet Jackson showing her nipple at the Super Bowl.

Speaking of this country's puritanical views on sexuality, while I don't mean to diminish the pain that people across this country feel when a spouse or partner reneges on a promise to remain faithful, our continuing obsession over celebrity love lives is simply absurd. You would think that by now this country would realize that a good handful of celebrity marriages are nothing but shams from the start, designed to boost publicity for the two parties instead of being, you know, for love. For all the rhetoric about same-sex marriage destroying the institution of marriage, or America, or the space-time continuum, or whatever the excuse is this week, I think a convincing argument could be made that far more damage is being done to marriage by these sham pairings. It's like some agent somewhere is shuffling around celebrity names trying to find the next roll-off-the-tongue pairing name like "Brangelina," and once that name is found phone calls are made, dresses are picked out, and writers are called in to concoct a story about how X and Y really met months ago and instantly knew they were soulmates. At least the stories manage to be marginally more believable and entertaining than the garbage Hollywood is putting on film screens these days; perhaps that's the awful truth of it, that people follow these celebrity entanglements because they're more entertaining than any films or CDs out there.

Getting back to Tiger Woods, though, him losing so many endorsements over these alleged infidelities -- I think more women will come out once the holidays are over and the morning shows are no longer being anchored by the third-stringers -- is just completely out of proportion to what Tiger did. After all, this past weekend I saw several commercials for Hanes t-shirts featuring Charlie Sheen, even after he allegedly held a knife to his wife's throat and threatened to kill her. One has to wonder what the public and/or the marketing people who control them see Tiger as having done that's so much worse than what Charlie Sheen did. Anyone who tries to tell me that race and gender aren't playing factors in here clearly hasn't been living in America for very long. Let's face it; if Tiger Woods had skin as white as Charlie Sheen's, would there be anywhere near as much attention paid to him, and would he have ringed up so many endorsements? This is to take nothing away from Tiger's athletic skills, but let's face it, watching someone play golf is only about a step up from watching paint dry. (Keep in mind, this is coming from a self-admitted fan of curling. At least the physics and geometry in curling is interesting.)

This gets me to my solution, simple as it may be, to this whole Tiger Woods thing. Much has been made of the fact that, through his golf winnings and endorsements, Tiger has become the first professional athlete to earn a billion dollars. Going back to that health care thing, nuisance as it is, instead of continuing to obsess over this Tiger Woods things so ridiculously, how about we simply make him pay $900 million to go to health care for uninsured Americans? Uninsured Americans will get health care at his expense, so they'll be happy, and as a country we'll be happier because not so many people will be going bankrupt and dying. Republicans will be happy, because Tiger's contribution will probably mean that they can get rid of the upper-class tax hike in the health care bill. Democrats will be happy, because their health care bill will likely be enacted into law and they can claim a major legislative triumph. Tiger Woods will still have $100 million left over, which is hardly a small sum, and after this act of generosity, I think it would only be fair for him to get his endorsements back and for us to all forget about this whole silly mess, and let him get back to winning hundreds of millions more dollars for whacking a tiny white ball into a hole in the ground.

We would save lives, save families, stop a lot of political squabbling, and get this whole Tiger Woods media mess off of our screens once and for all. I really don't see a downside to this. Better yet, if Tiger gets caught sticking his nine iron in someone else's bag again, we can simply make him pay for universal health care for all Americans, and then this country will really, truly, be a better place. You're welcome.

(Oh, and Happy New Year and all of that.)

Enough.

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:04:00 +0000

In retrospect, we should have expected that Democrats would wait until this time of year to buckle and cave in on public health care. They were probably figuring that once the Massachusetts ground had frozen up, no one could hear Ted Kennedy turning in his grave as the party that purported to lionize him and his family, once again, turned their backs on the social reforms that defined the Democratic party in the middle of the 20th century.

Were I in a more humourous mood, this would be the part of this entry where I would start a sentence with the phrase, "Now, I'm not the kind of person to say 'I told you so,' but ..." I'm not in the mood to lay on the yuks right now, though, and one of the primary rules of comedy is never to beat a joke into the ground. Democrats retracting from their election promises of progressive reform and instead caving in to big business and big money has become as predictable as the sun rising in the east every day. As inelegantly as Ralph Nader phrased it after the 2008 election -- and I still think he owes Obama, and the nation, an apology for the words he used -- the spirit of his observation has proven true. Obama has become yet another proxy for corporations, and allowed his party to once again kowtow to the power of the almighty dollar, sacrificing the needs of the people in the hope of getting enough money and corporate support to maintaing Democratic power in Washington.

The Democratic party has lost all claims it might have had to calling itself the party of FDR and Kennedy and LBJ. If Democrats had been as obsessed with maintaining power sixty years ago as they are now, you would still see the word "colored" above half the drinking fountains in the South today. I can understand the marriage of the Republican party with big business, and as despicable as Karl Rove's Machiavellian politics were, at least when he got his vaunted "fifty percent plus one," his Republican president and congress passed law after law after law, squashing civil liberties, helping the rich get richer, and screwing the poor and working classes into the ground. The Democrats have larger majorities in both houses of Congress than Dubya ever had, and a president who campaigned saying that he believed in single-payer health care. When it came time to actually reform health care, though, single-payer was not only taken off of the table, but Democrats wouldn't even allow single-payer advocates in on any discussions and debates. The public health care option, and everything spawned from it like the "Medicare buy-in," have slowly withered away, and what we are left with is a huge giveaway to the insurance industry that Republicans are still fighting tooth and nail because of their obsession with destroying Obama by any means necessary.

I have said this before, but as the health care debacle draws to its sordid conclusion, I don't think I can point to a more demonstrative example of my point: It is time for all true progressives and liberals to tell the Democratic party to go compromise itself, and join the Green Party. If people like Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, and Joe Lieberman are the true power brokers in the Democratic party, no well-intending progressive, from the everyday voter all the way up to the Dennis Kuciniches of the country, should continue to lend their name, power, and most importantly, vote, to a party that has repeatedly demonstrated that it will not take progressive concerns seriously. Just as the Tea Party lunacy has shown the divides in this country's right wing, the health care debate has shown that the liberals in the Democratic party are not in the right party. The days of Republicans and Democrats taking everyone's votes for granted because of where they stand on abortion or global warming or X issue have to stop, and they have to stop now. Both parties are sending this country into the bottom of a fetid cesspool, and the only difference is how quickly each party wants to take us there.

.journal update

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 03:18:00 +0000

New in the .journal: .org.9: Seeking stability. As promised, a brief update about the past year, although given the chaos of the past two months, most of the focus is on that.

As I say in the entry, the .org is probably going to continue to be neglected for the next month or so while I tend to other, more pressing issues. I promise that I will return to more regular updates here when my schedule allows, but given all that's on my plate right now, I just can't promise that I'll have the time to post stuff on here like I'd like to.

Another Family Update

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Yes, there will be a .journal update sometime this weekend to commemorate the .org turning nine years old earlier this month. My life has become painfully hectic since Mom went to the hospital a couple of months ago, and those of you who have been following my Twitter feed know about all of the other stuff that has popped up. I'm keeping the personal stuff close to my chest right now because I really can't talk too much about that, particularly when so much of it is ongoing. In the meantime, I kind of need to post an update here about what's gone on this past month with three members of the family.

First of all, Mom has finally been to see my sister and brother-in-law's doctor, who is a lot better than the one she'd been seeing. Unfortunately, the infection in her belly isn't going away through antibiotics alone, and she's going to need surgery so they can cut all the infected parts out of her. On Wednesday she got an appointment at a surgery clinic for the middle of next month, and while I haven't asked too many questions, I'm assuming that it's then that we'll finally find out when she'll go under the knife. As desperate as I am for Mom to get better -- she's had nearly no energy since her hospitalization -- the thought of her going under and getting sliced up is still something that really scares me. It's going to mean more time by myself in this house, and even though I can prepare for it this time, it's still not that easy to think about.

On my front, I had a bit of a relapse with my eye at the start of the month, probably induced by stress from what may have been the worst Halloween of my life. (Sorry, but I can't really go into details about that.) Since then, though, it's been getting better, even though I haven't had antibiotics to put in it for over three weeks because Giant Eagle hasn't gotten my eye gunk in. I don't know if there's a shortage of the gunk, or if Giant Eagle is just being really bad about filling the order, but whatever the case, I'd feel a lot better if I could start using it again, even if it is really gross. I'm on a steroid now to try to heal the scarring on my cornea (no small irony there), and while my vision is a bit better in that eye, it's still kind of blurry. I'm guessing that I'll wind up needing glasses at the end of this all; I'll need to ask my ophthalmologist if I qualify for Lasik or not.

Finally, there's my Aunt Jo, my mother's younger sister and only sibling. On the 15th of this month, my sister got a call saying Aunt Jo had died. More specifically, Aunt Jo had died on the 16th of last month, and this was the first that any of us had heard about it. Mom and Jo were far from close; shortly after learning about her death, Mom referred to Jo as an "enemy," and that was a term I never thought I'd hear Mom say about anyone. Emotionally this wasn't like losing Dad or my grandparents, but it was still a bit of a hit. More importantly, though, when their mother died in 2003, Jo was supposed to sell the family home in Michigan Center, Michigan (near Jackson) so she and Mom could split the money, and Jo still hadn't gotten around to doing that. Now we're having to hire a lawyer so we can try to get that situation handled, and having to come in more than a month after Jo died is, needless to say, likely to cause some serious problems. I just hope we can get those resolved soon, because having the money in hand for Mom's surgery, when the time comes, would be nice.

Bad Timing

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 01:31:00 +0000

The medical issues this family has had over the past two years have been troublesome. I was hoping that at some point I would be able to write in detail here about Dad's death last year, but there are some outside considerations that are preventing me from saying much about what happened to him. For now, I drive past the hospital where he died (and where I was born so long ago) every time I go to and from work, and every time I see where the ambulances pull up, I can't help but remember what it was like that February day as I tailed behind the ambulance in Dad's GMC Safari, waited in the lobby and then in a waiting room for the family to arrive, and then getting the news. Those first few times I drove past the hospital it was almost unbearable, and while I've gotten better at handling my emotions as I drive by there, it's still a painful reminder of what happened to Dad.

You can imagine my terror, then, when last month Mom asked me to call an ambulance for her, and like Dad, she had to be taken out of here on a stretcher. Thankfully Mom just had a bad attack of diverticulitis, and after a week in the hospital she was able to come home. However, most of that week she was doped up on morphine to help her handle the pain in her abdomen, and she didn't even want me to come see her because she was so embarrassed about her condition. For my part, I spent a week in the house alone here, and even though I knew Mom's diverticulitis, I couldn't help but remember that a few years ago her mother recovered from a stroke at a hospital, but then at the hospital she contracted pneumonia and soon died from that. I guess that week was kind of a little test for me to see how I would handle living on my own if I were thrust into that situation, and while I took care of the things that needed taking care of around the house, emotionally I was kind of a wreck.

Things would be bad enough if we stopped there, but shortly after my trip to the emergency room with Mom, my left eye started turning red and painful. My original thought was that I'd gotten pinkeye by touching something germ-ridden in the hospital and then touching my eye, but when I went to the doctor I was told that I had a scratched cornea. The doctor said he'd call an ophthalmologist who would call me to set up an appointment, but I never got that call, so I had to search out an eye doctor on my own. This past week I had two appointments, during which I found out that I actually have an ulcer on my left cornea. Apparently my rosacea leads to my eyelids getting infected, which in turn led to the ulcer, although I'm guessing that the stress of Mom's hospitalization probably had a big hand to do with it as well. If I'd known that rosacea could lead to problems like these, I would have gotten mine treated a long time ago; on all those commercials for anti-rosacea drugs they make it sound like it's just a cosmetic problem, and to be blunt, I couldn't care less about red patches on my face. I am not a physically attractive person, I have never been one, I never will be one, and that's just fine by me. For now I've got to put very expensive eye drops and ointment into my eye several times a day, and I have a follow-up appointment next week to see how this course of treatment is working. I can only hope that I don't need to take more drastic action to get my eye fixed, because for all of my physical problems, the one thing I always had was sharp 20/20 vision, and it's kind of scary not to have that any longer.

The punch line to all of this is that Mom's 64 years old, and of course I don't have health insurance because I'm still only working part-time (although I just picked up another online teaching gig), so we're having to pay for all of this ourselves. If we'd just waited a year for all of this to happen, Mom would have had Medicare, and maybe I could have gotten affordable health insurance. We're working out how to pay for this, and we probably won't need outside help to do so, but did we have to become poster children for the problems with the health care system in this country at a time like this?

Good Thoughts/Energy Needed

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:39:00 +0000

Mom is in the hospital right now after coming down with diverticulitis. It appears that things are under control right now, but given Mom's advanced age, and what happened with Dad last year, I'm not taking anything for granted. Your good thoughts/energy/prayers/etc. would be most appreciated.

A moment in time

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 01:35:00 +0000

Working with people around the age of eighteen years old as much as I do reminds me a lot of what I was like when I was that age. I'd say "that age" lasted a lot longer than just a year or two for me, because it feels like a lot of my personal development got put on hold after I left Antioch and didn't resume until I started going back to college six years later. For that matter, I've always said that I never really did much personal development for the nine years I spent in private school because of the way I was treated there. In a lot of ways, my undergraduate years in college felt like what I thought high school would be like for me, and graduate school felt like undergrad. I don't act my age in a lot of ways, and while in many respects I wear that as a badge of honour -- I think it gives me an edge when I'm teaching because I approach school with a mindset close to my students' -- I also can't say that I would particularly know how to act like a thirty-three year old if I had to. I can do a good caricature of the stodgy thirtysomethings I've had to deal with in my past, but acting like the real thing doesn't come easily to me.

What's bringing this to mind right now is the fact that I'm recognizing that I'm still going through a lot of the same existential crises that I see so many of my students go through. Certainly the early years of the .org were filled with a lot of that young angst and hellraising, and those of you who remember my pre-.org writing know that I actually used to be much, much worse in that regard. After I got my MA, though, and I had to concern myself with finding employment, I really tightened things up around here. I made the overall site look more elegant, I stopped swearing and giving in to hyperbole as much as I used to, and I just generally became a lot more cautious about the things I said online. Under the surface, though, I think I'm still going through a lot of the same turmoils that I went through before I graduated, and especially with all the big upheavals in my life these past two years, there's a part of me that wants to write about these upheavals in ways that, while they'd provide a moment of temporary relief, would do me much more harm in the long run because they aren't that healthy.

As I think about the .org turning nine in a few weeks here, I wonder at how much progress I've really made. I have always been incredibly lucky to be in a position where I haven't had to deal with a lot of the concerns that most people my age have to deal with, and I'm still in that position. I could still take a number of very sharp turns with my life here, and have the safety and security to know that even if I completely screw things up, I'll still have a safety net to catch me and help me get back on my feet. If Dad's death last year taught me anything, though, it is never to take anything for granted, and in spite of all the heavy stuff I've had to deal with lately, I can't help but feel that I need to take advantage of these opportunities I have before they slip away. I may be unsteady on my feet right now, but there comes a point where I have to stop focusing on regaining perfect balance, and get back to moving forward. It's scary, though, and at times like these I wish I didn't have to be so cautious about what I say here. Maybe I am "growing up" here after all.

I Haven't Stopped Believing

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 02:52:00 +0000

Journey is one of my more shameful guilty pleasures. The video for "Separate Ways" caused too many bad influences in my childhood to count. This past NHL playoff season, of course, Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" became an unofficial anthem of the Detroit Red Wings, both for the reference in the song to "a city boy/born and raised in South Detroit," and for its general message of not giving up, no matter how tough times have been in Michigan these past few years. I don't know how many Red Wings fans stopped believing after that heartbreaker of a Game Seven, but I wasn't one of them. However, I think it's safe to say that I've pretty much stopped caring about the Red Wings. It was hard enough to get behind the team when it seemed to distance itself so far from its gritty roots -- and I realize that this is just Mike Babcock and management adjusting to Gary Bettman's vision of a new NHL -- but with Chris Chelios getting dumped this offseason and the team bringing back Todd Bertuzzi, who I still say has no business in any hockey sweater right now, let alone one with the Wing Wheel on it, I just can't see myself following the Red Wings that closely. I have too much on my plate as it is, and rooting for a team that no longer plays my kind of hockey just doesn't make much sense any longer.

As it is, the NHL has just gotten too sanitized for my liking, and as much lip service as Bettman pays to how fighting has always been a part of the game, he seems to be doing his New York best to cause fighting to slowly disappear from the game, and I'm sorry, but hockey needs fighting like Paris Hilton needs a brain transplant. This business with the Phoenix Coyotes has been painful to watch as well, as seemingly every other NHL team and every other major North American sports league seems to be behind Bettman's insistence that the team not be moved to a place where people might actually watch the games, namely Hamilton, Ontario. I have the feeling that Gary Bettman would move the Maple Leafs to Topeka and the Canadiens to Biloxi if he thought he could get away with it.

Speaking of sports, this past weekend I was in Columbus for reasons that don't concern you. Friday night, when I was in my hotel room chilling out, I turned on the television and sure enough saw a University of Toledo football game. This is never a pleasant thing for me, because a lot of the tuition increases I had to put up with as a student there were thanks to the college paying ESPN huge sums of money to televise so many Rockets games, only to have ESPN stop doing so once the Rockets began stinking again. It also doesn't help that last month I got a Rockets schedule in the mail, and even after adding gender identity to their non-discrimination clause, the college is still addressing mail to "Mr. Sean Shannon," whoever that is. (Then again, it also listed the 22nd of October as being on a Saturday. Remember, folks, this is where I got two degrees from.)

Anyway, this takes me to today, which was probably the most advertised Rockets football game in history, the start of a home-and-home series against Ohio State. (Speaking of Ohio State football, remind me never to travel to Columbus on the weekend of a big game ever again.) UT didn't really advertise it much when they went up to play Michigan last year, but of course after they won -- probably the second biggest victory in UT football history -- they've been sending me e-mails every month trying to get me to buy a "Big Win in the Big House" t-shirt. Now, I can understand why this would be such a big thing for UT, but in one of the most senseless decisions I can remember the school making -- which is saying a lot -- they decided to play the "home" game of the series at Cleveland Browns Stadium. Isn't the point of doing a series like this the revenue that can be gotten from having the Buckeyes here in Toledo? How much money did Toledo's local economy lose from such an asinine decision? The worst part is that the only major highway from Toledo to Cleveland is a toll road, so everyone from town who wanted to go to the game had to pay even more just to get to Cleveland. Anyway, Ohio State -- excuse me, THE Ohio State University (Goddess I can't stand that) -- shut out the Rockets, and will probably do so again down the road in Columbus next year. I'll try not to be in Columbus that day, no matter what other fun stuff might be going on in the city.

Different Playbooks

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:55:00 +0000

I suppose I should count my blessings that my long vacation from teaching coincides with the congressional recesses, as it means that I can give myself a bit of a break from politics at the same time as I take a break from my primary employment. However, as has been made clear from today's developments at town hall meetings across the nation, politics isn't exactly taking a total holiday this month. (After all, August is the month without any holidays, at least by most Americans' standards.) The disruptions at town halls, particularly those related to health care, provided what would have been a wonderful teaching moment if I had a class to teach. As it is, I have to file today's events in my brain, and hope that at least some of my students for fall term were paying attention to the coverage of town halls as well.

In all the coverage of the disruptions at these town halls, only a few have bothered to mention that this is another Republican "astroturf" phony-grassroots movement, being bankrolled and coordinated by big business interests that also ran the teabagging movement earlier this year. None have pointed out, as I do in all of my classes, how American political discourse continues to degenerate to a point where most participants and observers believe that the winner of an argument isn't the person who makes the most logical points, or engenders the most sympathy from the crowd, but who can shout the loudest. (I guess you could call it the Jerry Springer-ization of our culture.) Neither have any broadcasts I've seen compared this to the days of the Bush 43 presidency, when Bush's "town halls" featured nothing but carefully-screened, pro-Bush audience members, and protestors at Bush events were forced into distant, screened-off "free speech zones," out of sight and out of mind of the news media and the general public.

This just underscores to me the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans; they're playing with two entirely different playbooks when it comes to influencing public debate. Republicans have been able to use these guerilla-style tactics to take advantage of the comparative openness of Democratic-hosted town halls and similar events, while they close off their own similar events to opposition voices, to hardly a whisper of protest from Democrats. Being a fierce First Amendment advocate, of course I want to keep the public debate open to as many viewpoints as possible and to let those viewpoints have an equal chance of being heard, but at the same time I think there's something to be said for engaging in civil behaviour whenever possible, and the obstructionists who have been disrupting these recent town hall meetings have hardly been civil. Worse yet, their agenda seems to be to prevent intelligent discourse, not add to it, and I find that kind of galling. At the very least, I think there should be a single playbook for all participants to follow, and Democrats' reluctance or inability to engage these obstructionists at their own level once again speaks to the inherent spinelessness of the Democratic party. The health care debate is too important to be lost because Democrats don't want to dirty the cuffs of their trousers by getting down in the mud with these obstructionists.

I hate having to openly advocate for left-leaning peoples to break codes of civility to deal with this astroturf movement that seeks to derail health care reform. Given what is at stake, though, and given the effectiveness of this movement so far, I don't know that there is any other conscionable choice.

What Was That Decade?

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 23:03:00 +0000

One of my new favourite places to shop online is torrid.com. Torrid is basically Hot Topic for larger women like myself, and I don't know how I didn't find out about them sooner. Granted, they make the kind of clothes I wear when I'm having a social life versus when I'm in my professional life, and I've only recently begun having a social life again, but you'd think I would have heard something about them. My one visit to their store in Toledo, about a month ago, was a real eye-opener for me; I'd like to keep going there, but unfortunately the store is in the super-mall east of here that started picking up all the youth-related violence after Southwyck Mall closed down, and I try to avoid going there. That leaves me to shop Torrid's selection online, which isn't quite the same thing (especially when it comes to clothes), but it's been fun to buy new clothes and see how they help open up parts of my personality that have been dormant for a few years.

Of course I get e-mails from Torrid, and in their most recent e-mail they proclaim that "The Grunge Look is Back." Having lived through the original grunge craze back when I was in high school, I can't call what Torrid is selling grunge -- they're basically using plaid in more modern applications -- but nonetheless it does get me thinking back to my high school days, when the popular music scene finally started producing artists whose material I liked (although I moved towards Björk and folk-rock, I did like grunge a lot). I can still remember turning on MTV during spring break of my senior year and John Norris saying that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide; I don't know if it was quite a Jimi Hendrix or Janis Joplin moment for my generation, but it was at least close to it.

What really bothers me, though, is that we're in the last year of the '00s here, and I really don't know how to characterize the decade. The '80s had the invasion of the synthesizers in pop music, Michael Jackson and Madonna, big hair, yuppies, and all the stuff inspired by Miami Vice. (Most of those were the reasons why I got into rap back then.) The '90s had the grunge look and the Seattle sound, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and the relativistic morality embedded in the television and films of the decade. Coming up on the dawn of 2010 here, though, I don't really know how to characterize the music of the decade, who the two or three most important artists are, and what the fashion of the decade was. The politics and morality were certainly easy enough to catalogue, but given that I was in college for pretty much the entire decade, you'd think I'd be more capable of knowing what popular trends in music and fashion were. Given that I try to use popular culture as a way to make my teaching more accessible to students, it's even more troubling that I keep drawing blanks. Maybe I need to wait a few years to see if the culture itself helps define these things, but in the meantime I don't feel good about my inability to grasp these fundamental elements of the culture most of my students grew up in.

What They're Trying to Sell Me Now

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:34:00 +0000

Coming from the early days of the Internet Age, I'm used to basing my e-mail addresses and other contact information off of my real name (sean@..., sshannon@..., seanshannon@... and so on). Back when I first went to Antioch, my e-mail address, as was all students' there, was based off of my real name, and I couldn't request it be changed to firedancingspirit@... or something like that. When Dad was first able to access the Internet through his old CompuServe account, his address was based off of his CompuServe ID number, which was about as easy to remember as a phone number, without the convenience of area codes. Although the age of vanity e-mails soon came, I guess I'm kind of old-fashioned, and I kept picking e-mail names -- and the domain name for the .org -- based off of my name. More than once I've had people tell me that they'd think someone as imaginative as I am would come up with something more creative. I guess maybe now that I'm in the work world (or at least as close to "the work world" as academia ever gets), though, maybe it's a good thing I stuck with identifications that don't carry any potentially risky baggage.

As I've written before, though, this comes with its fair share of risks. My Yahoo! Mail account is based off of my real name, and it's the one I tend to use whenever I don't want to give my .org e-mail address out for fear of getting a lot of spam. This was before the spam filters on my server and my computer became better than those on Yahoo! Mail, though, so I'm having to rethink this strategy. Unfortunately, I've found that having such a "simple," easy-to-remember e-mail address on Yahoo! Mail means that many other people will also give it out as their e-mail, either accidentally or on purpose. Honestly, I'm beginning to expect it's more of the latter, as my Yahoo! Mail account is quickly becoming unmanageable from all of the spam I'm getting. Even with as much of it as the servers filter out, maintaining that e-mail is becoming more of a hassle than it feels it's worth to me.

Perhaps the worst spam of all I get on there is the political spam. At least one of the organizations I get spam from is because of my own actions -- a particularly beligerent Democratic recruiter coaxed that e-mail out of me in 2004 trying to get me to support John Kerry's presidential bid -- but I also get a lot of junk mail from Republican and conservative and Christian groups that I know I never signed up for. (I'm also on the mailing list of this one Democratic politican in Virginia for some reason.) Ironically enough, that e-mail address is also the same address I use for the political e-mails I want to get, so I have to sort through the e-mails I get from Ralph Nader and the Green Party as well, and Yahoo! Mail sometimes flags those as false positives for spam. (For those of you who were on Obama or McCain's e-mail lists during the campaign, I don't know if you're still getting e-mail from them or not, but Nader's been sending regular e-mails continuing the push for a single-payer health care system.)

The biggest punch line in here, though, is the content of the e-mails I get from all the various political organizations. Setting aside solicitations for donations -- a necessity of our political system in its current incarnation -- my Green and Democratic e-mails are pretty much all about substance, trying to inform me on various issues and get me involved in them. On the other hand, many of the Republican and Christian organizations that send me e-mail also try to sell me stuff, ranging from life insurance to miracle cures. Some organizations send me more sales stuff than political stuff. Ultimately, all politicans are salespeople, trying to sell me on their vision of how the city or country or world should be, but when you use an ostensibly politically-minded organization to try to get me to buy these material items, it just strikes me as absurd. Unfortunately, given the current state of American politics, it probably doesn't seem so absurd to most of you.

Losing Interest

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 00:46:00 +0000

When I said that I wanted the Red Wings to exit the playoffs early, I should have known that the universe would take that as a sign to get the Wings all the way to game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals, and then to have them lose in a real heartbreaker. Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, the universe threw a whole bunch of bad stuff at me right before then, so the Wings' loss really didn't affect me that much. That being said, between the way the NHL is going as a whole, and the Red Wings are going in particular, my enthusiasm for the Red Wings is just diminishing more and more. There was a time when I could craft my schedule around Red Wings games (and Hockey Night in Canada), but it feels like that time has passed now. My interest in sports has been diminshing a lot these past few years, but now I can barely be bothered to glance at the previous night's Tigers score.

This isn't true with just sports, either. Over the past couple of weeks I downloaded a lot of games to my Wii using the Wii Points I got for my birthday earlier this year, and I just can't seem to be bothered to play them much at all. Even the sequel to Final Fantasy IV -- which remained my favourite game ever even after I played Final Fantasy VII for a while, and the first video game to ever make me cry -- has gone mostly unplayed for several days, even though I've had next to no responsibilities over this holiday weekend, and plenty of time to play video games. The number of video games I've bought but never even put in my systems to test out is growing to truly appalling levels, and I've even gone so far as to buy games for systems I don't own yet. It feels like my buying habits have yet to catch up with the changes in my life that have seen things like sports and video games -- and yes, as much as I hate to say it, this blog -- to the wayside.

Unfortunately I can't talk too much about the changes in my life recently, but suffice it to say that for the first time since I was in school, I actually have a social life. I feel like I'm making stronger bonds with people than I have in a long time, too, and I'm getting the opportunity to figure out some things about myself that I never knew before. Given how I am about self-knowledge, you can imagine what a cool thing this is for me. I can't deny being kind of fearful, though, given how I've messed up situations like this in the past. I finally get a nice, long break from teaching after this month is over, and I'm hoping to use the next couple of months here to try to reintegrate things into my life that I've let slip for a while now. That should mean more blog entries, but it won't, for example, mean paying more attention to sports. This blog still serves as an important outlet for me and a way of connecting with people; I just don't feel that paying close attention to sports is doing me much good any longer.

Inhuman

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:52:00 +0000

Although I don't live in Monroe County, I make an effort to stay up-to-date on news from the area since I work there, and I try to integrate my students' immediate environment and news into my classroom teachings as best I can. Most of them hate writing -- and after hearing about their high school experiences, I can hardly blame them -- so if they have to write, I try to at least steer them towards topics that they care about, to help them with the difficult task of writing.

This past month, the biggest news story to come from Monroe County was the disappearance of a five-year-old girl by the name of Nevaeh Buchanan. Within the past week the body of a little girl matching Nevaeh's description was found in a shallow grave near the River Raisin. Although autopsy results are still pending to determine whether or not it is Nevaeh's body, the press and others are talking about the matter as if it's already been determined that it is Nevaeh's body. Monroe County is already a tight-knit community as it is, and the recent economic downturn has hit the region very hard. Under ordinary circumstances, Nevaeh's murder would be a county-wide tragedy. With the region devastated in so many other ways already, her death has been nothing short of crippling.

All of this would have been bad enough in and of itself. I can't even begin to imagine how Nevaeh's parents have felt these past few weeks, questioning every little thing they said and did before Nevaeh's disappearance, and trying to come to terms with the possibility that their daughter was dead, a possibility that grew as each horrible day passed and they heard no word on their daughter's whereabouts. The loss of any family member is devastating, but when the family member is so young, it is all the more painful. It is hard to believe that anyone would ever want to compound a grieving family's death by heaping abuse and scorn on them, especially when the loss is still so fresh, the wounds still open.

Unfortunately, it appears that no one told the Buchanans about Nancy Grace, because they went on her show last night, and Nancy Grace ripped them a new one for what she perceived as their "mistakes" that led to Nevaeh's disappearance and presumptive death. That Grace has done this before is not news; in fact, in 2006, shortly after Grace pilloried her on national television for supposedly not being open enough about the recent disappearance of her two-year-old son, Melinda Duckett committed suicide. I don't watch Grace's show, but I heard of the Duckett incident on other news broadcasts, and I can remember thinking back then that Grace's conduct was, to say the least, reprehensible. Now it's hitting home in a way that it didn't back then, and I can't recall being this angry at a public figure in years.

That the parents were already second-guessing their actions goes without saying; in the face of any great tragedy, nearly all of us can't help but question if the tragedy could have been avoided if we'd done even the smallest thing just a little bit differently. It should also go without saying whenever a little boy or girl disappears, the police have to treat the parents as suspects and interrogate them, as best as the circumstances allow, to rule them out as potentially being involved in the disappearance; we have seen it happen enough in the media in the past two decades, and while we recognize that it is a necessary part of police work, that doesn't mean that we have to be comfortable about it happening. That the Nevaeh Buchanan tragedy serves as a lesson to parents of young children to be more careful about monitoring their children and teaching them to be vigilant about strangers also, quite literally, goes without saying; in all the news stories about Nevaeh's disappearance, parents and children have been quick to say that they would be a lot more careful about these things from now on.

I do not know what possesses Nancy Grace to think that she should use these tragedies to shout out the lessons to be learned from them that are so obvious, let alone to do so in a way that abuses and humiliates parents who are just coming off of the worst possible tragedy one can imagine young parents could go through. As much as I desire to understand the human mind and all of its facets, there are simply some aspects of it that are too dark, too sadistic for me to want to understand. What Nancy Grace's motivations for her actions are, I won't dare to guess and won't comment on. What I can say beyond any doubt, however, is that her actions themselves are, to put it mildly, monstrous and inhuman. That Nancy Grace was allowed to continue hosting her television show after Melinda Duckett's suicide is incomprehensible. Now that she has repeated the same actions that led to Duckett's suicide on another grieving family, I think it is the obligation of every American who has even half a heart to demand that CNN pull Nancy Grace off of its airwaves immediately and permanently. Nancy Grace has the right to say whatever she wants to say about the Buchanan tragedy, but that doesn't mean CNN, or any other television network, has an obligation to televise such abusive, disgusting behaviour towards grieving parents.

Gaming Vicariously

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:32:00 +0000

After getting my Wii last autumn, I played it a fair bit, especially after I got Wii Fit for it. (Like with my dance games, though, I really don't think of Wii Fit as "playing a video game" because for me it's exercise.) As much as I don't like using my Gamecube controller to play Virtual Console games, there's no denying that the downloadable games were one of the main selling points of the system to me. I've bought more than a handful of Virtual Console and WiiWare games, whereas apart from Wii Fit, the only packaged game I've bought for my Wii so far is Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Not only are the downloadable games a lot less expensive, but they've been a lot more fun for me as well.

Unfortunately, video gaming just isn't as enjoyable for me as it once was. I hardly played any video games at all from February through April -- this included breaking my use of Wii Fit, much to my chagrin -- and my systems are, quite literally, collecting dust in a corner of my room right now. After ending this past semester, though, I fired my Wii back up and downloaded a few new games, most notable Dr. Mario Online Rx. Dr. Mario wasn't exactly my favourite puzzle game when I was younger, but it was definitely up there. I've really gotten back into it -- I've had some games go close to two hours long -- but at the same time I've tried playing online, and I keep getting slaughtered. (Worse yet, when I am about to win games, quite often my opponents disconnect, rendering the game a draw.) I know that I should expect that my video game performance should degrade as I play games less and less -- I've blogged about this before -- but for some reason there's still a part of me that feels sad, and sometimes gets irritated, over this fact. Even if video games don't matter that much to me any longer, it still bothers me that I'm not that good at them. (Not that I was ever in any contention to be a video game champion in my prime, but at least I was a lot better then.)

What I've found myself doing lately is gravitating towards videos of people playing video games on YouTube. In addition to just watching people play through the games, I've become fascinated by tool-assisted speedruns, or TASes, where players literally slow the game down frame-by-frame and exploit every bug in the game to run through a game at superhuman speed; they're quite astonishing when replayed back at "normal" speed. I've also enjoyed videos where the players add their own commentary, although, like so many other things, Canada seems to have cornered the market on quality in this regard, with Proton Jon and Azura being the two who entertain me the most.

At the same time, though, the fact that I've been watching people play video games more than play them myself makes me wonder about how I've changed these past few years. Although I still play video games, it seems that by focusing more on watching these videos, in a way I'm kind of saying to myself that my video game-playing days are over, and video gaming is something more for "other people" to do now. Granted, I have much more serious things to worry about than video games now, but it wouldn't be that hard for me to make more time for video games if I wanted to. I don't want to, though. I've found many other things I'd rather do than play video games, and while some of them are quite enjoyable (stop snickering), most of them aren't as meaningful to me and my past as video games are. It seems like everywhere I look, I find more evidence of how I'm changing as a person, and although I know that change is a huge part of life, I still want to fight it, especially as I'm watching the trees I played on in my childhood be cut down day by day right now. I guess it's only natural that under these circumstances, I'm pining for other things from my childhood right now.

Satan Enters Through Your Loins

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:36:00 +0000

Ohio Christian school tells student to skip prom (AP via Yahoo! News)

Just when I thought this part of the country couldn't get more bad press after dealing with "Joe the Plumber" for the past six months, something like this has to pop up. In all seriousness, this is a news story I would expect to see in a newspaper from forty or fifty years ago, not in 2009. I'm not trying to be disrespectful of religious beliefs here, but at the same time, there is no doubt in my mind that, in this instance, Heritage Christian School is severely overstepping its bounds here by threatening to suspend Tyler Frost for engaging in legal activities on his own time. If the school wants to ban dancing or rock music on its own property, as much as I may disagree with their reasons for doing so, I can respect that as their right. When they threaten to punish a student for things he does off of campus grounds on his own time -- again, this is rock music and dancing we're talking about, not illegal drug use or drunk driving -- and even withhold him from his class' graduation procession, then I get angry and nauseated.

This was kind of a big issue for me growing up. I began having political leanings around the time I was in my junior high years, and some of my classmates from those years stopped going to the private school I went to after junior high, transfering to the various religious high schools around here. In almost every instance, when I saw the students later, they had become severely withdrawn, and their willpower and self-identity had nearly vanished. (One of the schools some students transfered to, Notre Dame Academy, was the same school Katie Holmes went to, to give you a reference point.) Children's rights became a big issue for me then, as these episodes cemented in my mind that children should have the right to practice their own religions, irrespective of their parents' beliefs. I was lucky enough to live in a household where my parents never pushed religion on me, except to learn about what was out there and make my own determination about what would work best for me. I think that's a right every young person should have, and this news story just reinforces, to me, the reasons for that.

Although I haven't thought too much recently about the episodes from my own youth, this is a topic I definitely deal with as a teacher. I try not to talk about my own beliefs -- religious, political, or otehrwise -- when I teach, and I always make a point to say on the first day of class that I grade based on the strength of an argument, irrespective of its position. I've assigned countless As to papers whose positions I wholeheartedly disagree with, because even though I disagree with the positions, the papers were written very persuasively, and deserved As. I often argue against my own beliefs in class when the need arises, because I want to encourage my students to think through opposing viewpoints, the whole Socratic Method thing. What I've noticed, though, is that for many students who come from these religious schools, who have had religion pounded into their heads from such an early age, when confronted with beliefs that are contrary to their own, not only do they show the same refusal to accept that people can hold different views that so nauseates me about modern conservative discourse, but some of them are even blown away by that fact, and get a glazed-over look in their eyes as I or other students explain the rationales behind the opposing viewpoints.

This just makes me worry all the more about our future as a country, because right now our education system is failing on all levels. No Child Left Behind and the rash of state proficiency exams that started twenty years ago have taken education out of the hands of the teachers, with education's goals and the methods taken to get there being put in the hands of people who have no training in education at all, no concept of how young people learn and what they need to know to function in our society. The financial "race to the bottom" has not only destroyed the arts programmes of countless schools to give students no creative outlets (because, after all, creativity encourages free thinking), but to cut costs students are often evaluated only by Scantron tests; you don't want to know how many students I've had who literally were never expected to write anything in high school. Corporate America has already trampled public schools with its sponsorships, further taking control away from teachers and further indoctrinating young people into consumer culture, and the charter schools that some (including President Obama) promote are about a thousand times worse in that regard.

One of my missions as a teacher is to open my students' minds to the realities and possibilities that are out there in this world. On the secular level, that's already being made painfully difficult by how high schools are turning into places where students are expected to do nothing but rote memorization of rules and nuggets of information deemed important by people who have no connection with the reality of today's youth, and hardly any connection at all with greater reality. Religious schools are even worse, as many students from those schools actively resist being exposed to beliefs and views that are in opposition to those they've been indoctrinated in for all of their lives. If we don't allow young people to vote until they turn eighteen because we don't think they have the capacity to make sound decisions until then, how can we say that they have the ability to choose their own religion? We need to take a serious look at the role religious schools play in this country, because it seems like a strong case could be made to banish those schools. How am I to be expected to open the mind of a young person whose parents, church, and teachers have been welding that mind shut for eighteen years?

More than a toy?

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Thu, 07 May 2009 22:30:00 +0000

Back when I first got a cell phone in September of 2001, I got it mainly for emergency purposes. To that end, my cell phone service has more than paid for itself, based solely on an incident in October of the following year when Dad called to tell me that my car was leaking transmission fluid, and that if I'd tried to drive it I probably would have wrecked the whole transmission. There have been other times over the years when I've had to use it for emergency purposes, although I did use it for social purposes a few times back when I was at UT. More recently I've been using it for work purposes -- although I still prefer to communicate by e-mail whenever possible -- and now I'd like to start using my phone to keep in touch with someone I've been spending a fair amount of time with lately. (Tease me about it and I'll delete your comments.)

Unfortunately, I'm once again at the point where I need to buy a new phone. I first bought a real brick of a phone from Verizon, but a couple of years later the battery contacts on the phone went out, and it kept powering down out of nowhere. I switched to Virgin Mobile after that -- they cost less to keep active -- and my first phone from them served me well, until I broke the pin in the phone where the AC adaptor hooked up, and Virgin Mobile told me that it would cost less to buy a new phone than to repair the old one. My current phone is one of their flip camera phones -- I figure having the camera feature qualifies as an "emergency" application since, for example, I could use it to snap photos if I get in a driving accident -- but now the battery just won't hold a charge, and it doesn't always detect when I plug in the AC adaptor. I've had the phone go out on me suddenly during non-emergency use, and the last thing I need is for it to die when I really need to use it.

I'm probably going to stick with Virgin Mobile for now, if for no other reason than because I have a huge bank of rollover minutes built up, and it still only costs me eighty dollars a year to maintain. However, I can't deny feeling a bit of tech envy when it comes to the phones that other carriers provide. All throughout the year I've been hearing that phones that don't have full keyboards are "so three years ago" or what have you, and I still text more than I place calls on the phone, so a full keyboard would be nice. However, Virgin Mobile only offers two phones with keyboards, and both of them only hold fifty text messages. If I'm going to get more active with texting here, then I probably need something with more storage. At the very least, though, I'd want to use up my accumulated minutes on that phone before switching to a new carrier, which makes me wonder if I shouldn't just get one of the ten-dollar phones Virgin offers to use before switching providers.

Realistically speaking, I shouldn't get one of the new super-phones, as they cost so much more to maintain, and I'd have limited use of the extended features. Still, I've been looking at T-Mobile's Android phones and experiencing a good bit of tech envy. I've seen them in use more lately, and as much as I don't necessarily all the cool features they have, I've seen them in use enough to know that they wouldn't just be toys for me; some of the applications have very useful purposes that mesh in well with my needs. Still, I would be looking at $75 a month at least for my service, when I'm not even spending a tenth of that right now on my current plan. My brain tells me that I should just stick with Virgin Mobile for now, put up with the relatively small inconveniences of having a phone that doesn't bake bread and trim my fingernails, and wait until the prices and plans for the super-phones go down. Paying my student loans off and finding a full-time teaching position in the meantime would be nice as well. Still, I can't deny there's a part of my heart that's eager to get something new and shiny and all whiz-bangy. I thought I'd moved past this phase of my life. I guess I'm feeling like a kid again in more ways than one right now.

Let the Colourful Metaphors Fly

noreply@blogger.com (Sean) — Tue, 05 May 2009 18:57:00 +0000

When the first trailers of the new Star Trek movie came out, I noted to myself that I wanted to say something about them. I guess that I was kind of nonplussed by the trailers themselves, except for at the end when it began to play the four-note sequence that started the classic Trek theme songs, played over a modern reenvisioning of the logo of the original television series. For a long time, that part of the trailer sent a chill down my spine. Watching episodes of the oriignal television series with Mom is something I recall quite vividly from childhood, and my parents took me to the openings of the second, third, and fourth movies. I suppose I identify more with Next Generation since it was one of the few good series I could get back before I had cable in my bedroom, but I guess I was a bit of a "trekkie" back in the day. (I use trekkie as opposed to the more "serious" term "trekker" because I wasn't that into Star Trek.) I remember the audio/visual lounge at Antioch being filled for the premiere of Voyager, which was around when my love for all things Trek began to decline. I was in college, I had cable in my bedroom at home, and there was this new thing called the Internet that was giving me access to all sorts of new worlds that I could explore on my own.

Anyway, I did my best to remain cautiously optimistic that the new movie was going to be something that I could be happy about, and perhaps something that Mom and I could bond over. As we've drawn closer to the release date, though, and as I've seen more of the movie and its promotion, I've already reached a deep level of disappointment. I've read all the news stories about how trekkies and trekkers feel about how closely the movie will follow Trek canon, but to me, looking at what I've seen so far, there really isn't anything Star Trek about Star Trek. It feels to me like you could take out the names of Kirk and Spock, and the names of the various races and planets and organizations, and no one would be the wiser for it. It feels like the generic, prototypical 21st-century science fiction blockbuster movie, just with a few names added to give it a false sense of historicity.

I realize that new generations reinvent series like Star Trek, and that Star Trek itself has gone through a good deal of this; no one can deny the gulf of difference between the original television series and the films, let alone the later television series. At least with those early films and Next Generation, though, Gene Roddenberry was at the helm, and you had the feeling that Roddenberry still conveyed that Trek essence in the newer material. (Roddenberry came from a time when an artist's vision still meant something in big commercial productions.) It seemed like the later series, like Voyager and Enterprise, not to mention the later films featuring the Next Generation cast, seemed to stray away from that vision, and now it feels like the only vision J.J. Abrams had in this new movie is the vision of his bank account increasing by tens of millions of dollars.

What gets me is that I'm beginning to have more and more of an emotional response to this, when I haven't really cared that much for anything Trek for over a decade or so. (I'd like to get some of the Next Generation DVD sets eventually, but I've been horrible lately when it comes to buying DVDs and then never watching them.) I suppose that because this touches on what to me was a touchstone of family bonding, and it's coming not that long after Dad's death, that it's provoking a very emotional and irrational response from me. I mean, yes, wincing at a car chase in a Star Trek movie makes sense, but I shouldn't be jumping to the conclusions I am based solely on the trailers I've watched and stories I've read about the movie. I really should watch the movie all the way through before I have this kind of visceral hatred of it. The thing is, I've never been one to watch films in the theatre (the last time I did that was eight years ago when the Final Fantasy movie came out), and, well, it doesn't feel like there's much of a point in getting the DVD when it comes out, given how many other DVDs I need to watch here.