Some Words

This is why we can’t have nice things. Note the people in the comments claiming they will never respect Conan after he wasted money with the sketches in the last three nights of his show, instead of sending that money to Hati. This is in the comment thread discussing his final episode, in which he notes that they did not actually spend that money. Hell, do people really think that someone would sell him an original Picaso on that short notice? This is why we can’t have nice things in our society. People are always there waiting to get indignant and angry, even when there is nothing to yell about. In three years, America’s number one export will be manufactured rage. But hey, at least the manufacturing jobs will be back… right? Right? I’m sorry CoCo, that might have been a little cynical.

From time to time, I lament that Boing Boing no longer seems to be bringing me the amazing and absurd at quite the clip that it used to. They even seem to have dropped the “A Directory of Wonderful Things” slogan I recall them having. There is a stead stream of guest bloggers and the “wow, I never would have imagined that” moment seem farther and farther between. Meanwhile the political stuff I agree with but am annoyed by how they present continues to increase. Also, the steampunk stuff that isn’t steampunk has been on the rise. It is at this point that I remind myself that I am friends with a man I can only call the one man Boing Boing. Sadly for the world, he does not have blog, but I’m friends with him on Facebook, and that means my feed brings me weird and wonderful things.

For example, because of this man, I saw this particular video long before Boing Boing found it, and without all the weak sex jokes in the comment thread.

Anyone who doesn’t know Wizard/Casaubon is missing out. I leave him in his semi anonymous state because he always worried about getting a teaching position if his name got out. If I was on a hiring committee, I’d want to know that my life would be 100% more interesting with him around. Of course I didn’t say better… We can’t have him getting an ego.

P.S. Wizard, if you sent me an animal carcass in preservative fluid like you suggest you might send people in your January Christmas gifts note… lets just consider this whole note as a case of it being opposite day.

After having viewed the second half of the end of Russel T. Davies and David Tennant’s finale I’ve been feeling a little better about it. I still wouldn’t downgrade it to merely “farty” as Colin suggested, but it is less crap when viewed as a whole. My primary complaints remain however.

There was no real payoff for the Master making everyone on earth the Master, unless you count the “Master Race” pun, which still makes me want to punch RTD in the face. So I guess I’m not counting it.

The whole thing could have been edited drastically. I know they’re saying goodbye to someone a lot of people really loved, but the end sequence where he sees

everyone

again was a bit much, especially when it happened at the end of the last series already. And did they need the lighting bolts/junkyard confrontation in the first episode? Not in the end as it turns out. What is the point of being able to shoot lighting bolts that cause explosions when it just gives the guy you shoot at indigestion anyhow?

At any rate, it was not as bad as all that, almost pleasant in the end, and I did think that the acting was well done, when decent lines were there to make it possible. On to Smith/Moffat, which I have high hopes for, though it’s hilarious to see people complaining that Smith is not attractive. Because everyone wanted a piece of Pertwee and McCoy back in the day…

The NYTimes today has an article about an aspiring lawyer who amassed over four hundred thousand dollars of debt. The New York state bar denied him admission based, essentially, on the size of his debt. The story is itself sad, as reading it entails playing witness to a man who did what might not have been sensible, but was definitely determined and inspiring, in pursuit of his dream.

But it is my continuing obsession with comment threads that causes me to write. This article already has over three hundred comments on it. Now many of them are about the absurdity of his being denied, in light of the other transgressions that practicing members of the New York bar have gotten away with. Well, that seems like a pretty good point. But there are two other dominant types, the first being of the “this proves lawyers and judges are evil” variety, all too common I’m afraid. Lawyers and cops always get judged by their worst members, and both professions have a spotty record for policing their own.

The other group attack the student loan program and the cost of education. Now, I’ll be the first to say that the cost of education has gotten too high. We’re in a situation where other countries have arguably better secondary education, and the one real advantage the American educational system had was its colleges. Now we’re putting those out of reach, and the ones that remain in reach are often places where you have to get a good education in spite of those around you. I’m not saying a good education is impossible at a lower tier state school, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to get it.

So people take out loans to afford it, and then many have trouble paying it back, because you have to take out the same damn loans whether you major in accounting or social work. We do want social workers, right? We don’t all want to live in some warped Ayn Rand nuthouse, do we? So we need the loans, and we should really consider how much we charge the people who will be working lower paying jobs that we really need done. (Also, anyone reading this who’s going to be doing social work or other public interest work, there is a public service loan repayment program. Check it out.) But who in the hell are these posters talking about when they refer to lawyers getting quarter million dollar loans and then expecting to pay them back? Are these K-J.D. people? Because I have no idea how it would get up that high. If this is a mix of Stafford and Plus loans, you’re looking at around 7.5% interest averaged out over all of them. That’s going to be just under $20,000 a year to hold even. Sure, you can pay it pre-tax, but it’s still a big pill to swallow.

I’m going to save some more rant for later though. First off, I want to talk a bit about undergrad. Second, for some reason every time I’ve tried to save this draft the past three times I’ve written it, I got cut off at 440 words.

Edit: And it turns out to be the connection on campus.

I don’t watch a ton of sports, nor do I tend to read much about it, the exception being hockey. I’ll read some NBA stuff from time to time, and I’ll check to make sure the Lions still suck, but hockey is what I follow. Last night was a very relaxing game for me, and while I was watching it, I found myself thinking about how people talk about stars in sports. In this aspect, hockey is one of the worst. The slow degeneration of the language caused by hockey announcers on national television is amazingly depressing.

First off, I am sorry Chicago, it’s great that you’re a reemerging marking in hockey. I’m glad the Blackhawks are good again, but you do not have two super stars right now, you don’t even have one. You have a very good team, and one that I look forward to watching many times in the future, but the announcers were wrong when they said that you had two super stars. Kane and Toews might get there one day, but they aren’t there yet. This over glorification of the athletes who are merely, and I don’t want that word to be too prejudicial, are stars, is ridiculous. This happens in other sports, but perhaps because hockey is trying to mount a comeback on the U.S. sporting scene, it is much worse with the hockey announcers.

Not every team can have two superstars. The very nature of a super star is that they stand out from the other stars. They aren’t just stars, they stand out from the rest of the stars. It’s ridiculous that I have to say this. I’m not sure I’d say Detroit has a single superstar, and they are likely to win back to back cups.

This shouldn’t surprise me though. Every time you draw a linguistic Maginot Line, the sports announcers are just going to run through the Ardennes of human speech in their quest to render the English language comical through superlatives. Do you really need to say that an athlete “owns” a hard shot? Basketball was bad on that one for a while too. I understand that the job of sports reporting is a constant struggle against repeating your cliches too quickly, but it has to be better than that. Also, ESPN should hire some more editorial assistants to check the writing. It’s amazing how many mistakes get through. You know there are plenty of people available with the way that the publishing industry is these days.

This has been another “Get Off My Lawn Moment” with Ian Macleod.

Since last paying significant attention to this blog, I had forgotten how much blog spam accumulates in the filters. I just scan them to see if there is anything that looks like it isn’t a blog of crap. However, even shorter comments get tossed if the email address looks odd. On the off chance that I’ve actually thrown out a good comment: “I’m sorry whoever you were.”

Since moving to Portland, I have been amazed by the reviews on Citysearch. So, really, this is not Portland’s professional reviews, or really any of the other sources of reviews. And this is not to say that the Citysearch in Minneapolis was full of well thought out and eloquent reviews. But maybe a fifth of the reviews here focus on perceived slights on the part of wait or service staff. This is more amazing to me because the general quality of the wait and service staff here seem to be almost eerily happy to be doing what they are doing. I do not pretend to understand why. However, this is not enough for the hypersensitive reviewers of Citysearch Portland. I have yet to understand why seemingly one in five reviewers seems to lack some basic level of empathy, and says that the food was good, but gives one star because the wait staff was not suitably obsequious.

With the departure of several cover letters, I think that it is time to acknowledge that some of you might be finding my page. Hello. I’ve not bothered to use any real effort to hide myself. Of course, the flip side is that I don’t know that you’ll find anything very interesting. I think I swear a few times on here, and you might not like my taste in music. Other than that it’s mostly me talking about other people’s bad driving and a few little rants. Oh! I almost forgot, there’s a bad short story on the other page. I’m not taking it down, because it could probably be dug up in some archive somewhere or another on the internet. If, for some reason, you want to read any of my short fiction, just ask. I have a few stories that I have been sending out recently, and which I would be much happier to show you.

Politico reports on Obama getting irked by the ridiculous media exposure that presidents are exposed to, and the consequent loss of the next four years of his daughter’s childhoods that might come with it, and manages to have exactly the sort of over intrusive overly detailed reporting that they are writing about. In what world do I need to know that the future president ordered a tuna sandwich on twelve grain bread? Other, lesser, men might have settled on a mere eight grains. I know that’s what I just bought at the market today. Obama is bringing the kind of change that means and extra four grains? I honestly don’t even need to hear what he ordered, or that he ordered. He’s at a restaurant, I can infer that he ordered food. Hell, I can infer that he eats, he’s human after all. I don’t really need any information at all about him taking his kids anywhere. But I appear to be in the minority in thinking that his ability to deal with a bunch of guys who long ago gave up on real investigative journalism has nothing do do with future duties as chief administrator and commander in chief.

Unless someone wants to write an article claiming that it was irresponsible of him to get tuna, because the increased popularity of the fish after he eats it will put further strain on already depleted stocks of tuna, teetering on the brink of extinction. If we’re going to invade the poor man’s privacy to this degree, let’s at least pointlessly saddle him with the blame for the extinction of the blue fin. I prefer my political reporting with a side of impotent rage.

Generally I have been avoiding saying much about current events, because this is a small private blog that about six friends read. It just doesn’t seem like there is much point to giving my opinion about this or that national issue here, and people could just be reading Ezra Klein in that time anyway. But this was too much.

When the history of the past eight years is written, it will not make the official records that a Walmart temp was trampled to death in a rush of customers yesterday but it serves as a tragic little coda to my impressions of the Bush years. When the President told people that it was patriotic to shop in the face of a recession, he did not cause this. Yet the elevation of blind spending as a pass time has gotten so bad that yesterday people crushed a man to death so they could save eighty dollars on an LCD TV. To my mind that deserves at least as much soul searching as the current financial crisis.

Shown to me by a friend of mine, I could not help smiling when I saw this. Kudos McSweeny’s, kudos.

Belief that I would be able to concentrate on my studies without distraction today was shattered when I found myself reading a few NY Times stories.

As Shea said in the comments, sports metaphors are often obnoxious, and yet I cannot help that when I was reading the paper today, I found myself thinking of one. The article mentioned the possibility of terror attacks during the transition, because God knows we can’t go a day in the media without raising that specter. And I started thinking that with our forced so over committed, how could a president express that we needed to pay less and not more attention to the perpetrators of a terror attack, so that we could get to the business of governing that they had hoped to interrupt. The first thing that came to mind? Shaking the tackle. It’s inescapable. I don’t even really watch football.