BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: November 2007
Friday, November 30, 2007
Manscaping
I've been enjoying Christopher Hitchens speeches online for months, but hadn't gotten that much fun out of his columns... until this one. It's all about self improvement; he gets his British teeth buffed to a pearly white, and then caps it off with... a full Brazilian wax. His description of the process is about the funniest thing I've read this month, although that's not necessarily saying too much, given the academic works I've been plowing through. (About 50 psych journal articles on hypersexuality on Wednesday night alone. Trust me, when the main focus of all of them is pharmacology and side effects, it's not nearly as interesting as you'd think.)
Here's what happens. You have to spread your knees as far apart as they will go, while keeping your feet together. In this "wide stance" position, which is disconcertingly like waiting to have your Pampers changed, you are painted with hot wax, to which strips are successively attached and then torn away. Not once, but many, many times. I had no idea it would be so excruciating. The combined effect was like being tortured for information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly) sandpaper handjob.
...
You ladies will know what I mean by the stirrup position, which I was now unceremoniously instructed to assume. That's to say, I braced one leg up while Ms. Padilha braced the other. And she does this for a living. To be Dr. Lituchy and to spend every day up to your elbows in other people's oral cavities would be tough enough. But this -- And wait: surely you can't be serious about putting -- Oh Jesus. I was overwhelmed by a sudden access of lava-like agony, accompanied by the vertiginous sensation that there was no there there. Stunned into silence, I listened slack-jawed as she told of her plans to expand into the London market, and to fly to Dubai to demonstrate her technique.
there are 33 courses at Colorado with 400 students or more. Three have more than 1,200. Most are broken into sections, but even those may have hundreds of students. One chemistry course is so big that the only place on campus where everyone can take the final exam at once is the Coors Event Center, Colorado's basketball arena.
Such arrangements are here to stay on U.S. campuses.
There already are 18 million American college students, and that number is expected to increase by 2 million over the next eight years, as the value of a college degree continues to climb.
To get everyone through their coursework, monstrous class sizes are unavoidable. That does not have to be a bad thing. At their best, giant classes can be effective and inspiring -- a way to get the best teachers in front of the most students. But according to Carl Wieman, who won the 2001 Nobel Prize as a physicist at Colorado, such successes are rare.
Students often tune out and are turned off. Charismatic lecturers get good reviews but, the data show, are no more effective than others at making the most important concepts stick.
Most remarkably, when it comes to teaching not just "facts" but conveying to students the scientific approach to problem-solving, research shows that students end up thinking less like professionals after completing these classes than when they started.
The article is surprisingly comprehensive, and talks about new teaching techniques and programs that do more to involve students, etc. One thing it doesn't do is mention the responsibility of the students to their own education. I wouldn't quibble about that in an article on high school; 15 and 16 y/os are stupid and bored and clueless about school (I certainly was) and want nothing but to get out of that high school hellhole. High school can serve an educational process, but the traditional 10th, 11th, and 12th grades are basically a place to warehouse kids during their most destructive teenage years, while imparting some civilizing socialization and beating a few basic skills into their maturing brains. Anything that gets some learning into the little animal's heads is a bonus, hence the media attention to any teacher with an approach novel enough to get the kids to stop text messaging and daydreaming about sex for 45 minutes.
College though, should be different. It's optional, for one thing. Students don't have to attend college, and it's quite expensive, in the US at least. (This is not a legislative accident. Thanks to a steady dwindling of government aid over the past few decades, students without rich parents are forced to take on huge loans and/or work part time while attending college, which keeps them from having free time to foment revolution and protest, and twines them inextricably into the American economic system.) If you want to spend $32k a year to not pay attention and screw around like it's the 13th grade, you're free to do so. In my view, colleges need merely provide the material and competent instructors who aren't afraid to give students the grads they deserve -- if the kids want to not pay attention and drink a lot of beer and flunk out, that's their prerogative.
Unfortunately, it doesn't often happen like that. Coddling parents support kids who flunk out rather than forcing them to support themselves, lazy kids who make no effort slide through with Bs and Cs, and a lot of colleges are just glorified degree mills, happy to pass anyone who pays the tuition for four, or five, or six years. These factors result in a steady flow of "adults" into the US work force who are unprepared for real life responsibilities and who remember little from their college years other than how best to tap a keg.
So yeah, I guess the current state of affairs isn't that great, but I'm still a bit annoyed that this whole article never puts the blame for not learning where it belongs; on the students who don't try to learn.
As I've mentioned a few times on this blog, I am just finishing up my degree. I'm in my third and final semester at an unspecified Bay Area university, and I've basically done 2.5 years worth of classes in that time, and while none of my courses have been held in amphitheaters (my transferred units covered all the basic courses, so I had just upper division classes and a bunch of major requirements to satisfy), I've had plenty of opportunities to pay much less attention and to slide by. I've chosen not to do so since I'm paying a lot for this educational opportunity and I want to get something out of it. Which is, of course, the difference between attending college in your thirties (late 29s?) and paying your own way, vs. attending in your early 20s with your parents paying your bills, when you're still bored from four wasted years in high school.
I expect the new year will see me filling countless blog posts with complaints about my fellow students and college life in general. I'm not going to get into that yet, especially not with more papers to write this weekend and a couple of weeks of classes remaining, but I will say that underlying this blog entry is a year and a half of watching the vast majority of the 19-23 y/o underclassmen make virtually no effort to learn anything, or involve themselves in any way, in every single class I've taken. I've not had many tests these past three semesters, since most of the grading comes from research papers and other class projects, but when there have been tests, they've been very easy. Almost ridiculously easy, since they are mostly fact based, and the only things on the tests are the things the teachers have discussed at great length in class. I've hardly studied for any of my exams, since I haven't needed to. I've known all the material on the study guide since I did the readings in advance, attended every class, took notes, and paid attention. (I was 0/4 on that checklist in high school.)
My bipedal colleagues though, have tended to react to the tests like Gremlins to a bath. I understand their hysterics, but I don't really sympathize. If I didn't do the readings, cut most of the classes, and didn't pay attention or take notes, I'm sure I'd be spending the night before trying to do a semester's worth of reading in 3 hours, and then praying the prof gradeed leniently enough to let me scratch through with a C-. And that's in small classes where you have to try to not be engaged. I can easily imagine how lost in the masses most students are in huge lecture halls. It's their choice, though. Taking responsibility for your own actions; it's part of growing up, and if that's the only lesson you learn in college, then at least mommy and daddy's $32k wasn't completely wasted.
Okay, now that I've ranted and angrily shaken my cane at those damn kids, what's a more reasoned, mature response? Wanting to wave a magic wand and instantly transform every 20 y/o in the US into a mature, sensible adult is not a policy position. And as much as it's fun (and largely accurate) to blame the kids for not paying attention, it doesn't change the fact that in our society, this is how the majority of young adults are. So we need to find ways to change college to work better for them, find ways to change them before college, or both. Or most likely, do nothing and continue our inexorable slide into bankruptcy and non-superpower status, as the USSR did before us.
The ways to change college are covered in the article I quoted from, and some of them sound promising. How would one change the kids, though? Most obviously, it would be up to parents. Some kids are prepared for college, primarily ones from "traditional," education-valuing families (primarily Asians and children of recent immigrants), since they've been conditioned since birth to buckle down and work and not dare think about blowing the opportunity. That approach works very well on the educational level, but some of the kids naturally rebel and blow up in spectacular fashion, and the ones who don't often fly through college, but enter their adult lives with semi-crippling shame-based psychological afflictions largely manifesting themselves in guilt-wracked demonstrations of excessive filial duty. That may be a fair trade off for a good education and a work ethic that will lead to a comfortable life, but it's open to debate, and it's not a policy solution anyway.
What do we do with the white kids, though? Or the non-white kids from minority families who have been in the US long enough that the "must get a good education and job" drive hasn't been flogged into their brains since birth? These types of kids make up the majority of college students in the US, and they've grown up in a permissive, celebrity-obsessed, frivolous, non-reading, ignorance-embracing, reality-TV culture. How do you make them learn? It's a tough question.
One pretty much universal truism is that education is wasted on the young. The 20 y/os have no idea what an incredible opportunity they're squandering while they 13th-grade their way through a university, and they don't know that because they have no idea what real life is like.
A digression: I hated high school and had no desire to attend college since I could imagine learning anything of value, and I desperately wanted to not be around the frivolous idiots who made up 98% of my peer group. So I didn't, and my parents let that be my decision, but they worked wisely to lead this horse to water. I was allowed to live at home, but I had to start paying fair market rent as though I were a roommate in my mom's house. I also had to pay a share of the utilities and phone, I bought almost all of my own food, and other expenses, like car insurance and clothing, were mine as well. After a year of that I found myself several thousand dollars in debt and quite unhappy working at shitty part time jobs, and at that point my dad's standing offer to pay my room and board if I were a full time college student looked pretty damn inviting. I didn't finish my degree (hence my recent return) and I didn't get a real job or become a real person after college, but that was my own stupidity choice. I did pay far more attention to, and get much more out of, my college experience than most of my peer group at that time, though. (Just not a degree, since I wanted to be a writer and took classes for my own edification, rather than as part of a degree path.)
As is the case with most people, I look back on my own experience, see what worked for me, and want to apply it universally. I had a year of reality and that slapped most some of the smirking adolescent immaturity off of my face. Ergo, all teens should have that. Ergo... national service! They have those programs in a lot of European countries, but they're generally tied to the military. As far as I know, just about every 18 y/o in Spain, Israel, Norway, Sweden, and others has to join the army for two years. After high school, and before college. I'm sure there are deferments and all sorts of exceptions for people who have rich/powerful parents, but those aren't the people we're trying to reach with this plan anyway. Since those countries are not prone to invading third world nations with lots of oil, the goal isn't so much to boost their fighting forces as it is to get the kids out of their homes and put them out in the real world. Being in the army isn't quite reality, since it's such a regimented, ordered, and structured existence, but it's a good transition from childhood to adult life. And perhaps more importantly for our purposes, it's a fairly miserable existence composed primarily of physically demanding, unpleasant, unpaid menial labor, after which anything, even college, must seem like heaven. (Careers in the military aren't that bad, of course, but for raw recruits in their first year or two, it's pretty much hell. Intentionally.)
I don't suggest we duplicate that system in the US, if only because I fear to imagine what globally destabilizing mischief our government would get into with a few million extra soldiers at their disposal. The whole point in this national service concept is to get the kids doing something useful for a couple of years, so they can return to college slightly older and much wiser and ready to get educated. And given the way the poor soldiers and national guardsmen have been stuck in Iraq for 4 and 5 years now, their initial limited tours mandatorily extended several times, our future hypothetical national service kids would be stuck in Iraq, or Iran, or Afghanistan, or Venezuela, or Cuba, until they were 27.
So, maybe have "armed forces" as one of the choices for the national service, but there would need to be other options too. Working on our sadly underfunded and neglected National Parks, joining the Peace Corps to help out in famine-wracked foreign countries, working for charities and school mentoring programs for younger kids, interning in manual labor jobs that don't require an advanced degree, etc. I'm sure policy wonk types could think of countless useful tasks to keep the kids busy for a couple of years. And while this would be compulsory, it wouldn't be mandatory, Kids who really were ready for college could start at 18, or earlier if they zoomed through high school. They'd have no margin for error, though. They'd be forfeiting the scholarships and other financial aid they would have earned during their two years of service, and they'd know they were on a very short leash, and that if their grades dipped, or they got into trouble, they'd be shipped off to shovel snow in Alaska faster than they could say, "But mommy never made me..."
Furthermore, quite a few kids don't want or need a four-year, liberal arts education. Plenty of people would be better served by two years of vocational training, which would teach them the skills they needed to change oil, or stock shelves, or run a cash register, or sell carpet, or install stereos in cars, etc. If that sort of practical training could be partially incorporated into the national service, then all the better. If not, the tuition and scholarships young adults would earn for their service would completely pay for that sort of training upon their return.
Now, all of you readers from foreign countries can use the comments to tell me how this sort of thing has been going on in your homeland forever and how you can't believe we don't already do something so obvious and common sense in the US.
On this national day of gluttony and televised, uniformed violence, I am thankful that I only have 3 research papers and a senior project to finish by Monday, rather than the 6 that I might have had, had I not finished 3 of them last week. The only turkey consumed here today came from a package of cuts 'n gravy and went into the Jinxer's tummy, but am looking forward to half a BBQ chicken sandwich leftover from last night, when I ate at Claim Jumper with Malaya and a friend of ours. I considered ordering some sort of turkey-based meal at the time, but figured I'd be more thankful today for half a sandwich than for the memory of eating turkey last night. And I was right.
My first meal of the day, eaten while editing my nearly-finished paper on the weapons and armor in use during the Italian Renaissance? Granola cereal with soy milk.
John Scalzi has posted the winners of his LOLCreashun Museum photo contest. A winner was not me! His pics go to show that humor is very relative even amongst people with similar tastes. Only one of his favorite 10 pics appears in the six favorites I excerpted last week, but since that's the one that won the whole contest, I guess there's some level of agreement.
I talked to my dad while driving home from class Monday evening, and when the conversation got around to what I've been up to besides my scholastically-induced nervous breakdown, Dad said, "I keep looking and watching the news and the paper and TV for any word about that game you're doing the website on, and I never see a thing. Hellgate, right? I haven't heard about it anywhere. They review games in the paper every week, and it's never been mentioned, and I see ads on TV all the time for other gmaes, but I've never heard a word about it. Didn't you say it was coming out on Halloween?"
As a friend said a week ago when he sent me a link to the joking-but-not-really Something Awful review of HGL... Well, I can't quote him. It's too depressing. I'll encapsulate: "It sucks. I paid to be a founder, but it's hilariously unstable, TINY, woefully too small to compete in today's MMORPG market, the tilesets are boring and repetitious, the Halloween special items were crap and poorly implemented, it's unbalanced, quests like "The Wall" are undoable in Elite, Elite Nightmare is entirely unplayable, etc... But let's cross our fingers for Patch 1!"
I replied that the complaints and the SA review are funny, to everyone who hasn't spent a couple of years of their lives working on some aspect of the game, in hopes that it would be popular enough to earn them some money long term. Ha ha! Glad that's not me!
Turns out there are some drawbacks to covering the entire front page of your blog with LOLcat photos and YouTube links to Beavis and Butthead videos.
In my college-educated defense, the algorithm making this calculation runs for about two seconds, so it's clearly just counting multisyllabic words, and perhaps cross-referencing them for frequency of use. In fact, I'm sure that's what it's doing, and here's the proof.
I posted about John Scalzi's Creation Museum visit a couple of days ago, and added an update to the post for the LOLilarous contest he's running in conjunction with his visit and photo journal. Just take any of the shots, LOLcat them, and post them in a thread in his forum thread. I got quite a few laughs reading the current entries, and was eventually motivated to do my own. The following will only be funny if you read the Scalzi post, viewed his photo series, and are a fan of LOL cats and thus know the conventions of the genre.
I think it's funny, but then again, I would, since I made it. I don't think it's the funniest in the contest, but it made me laugh. Looking again, I see that someone else has put a ceiling cat into this same shot, but they did really crappy photoshoppery, and used a different, and I think less satisfactory caption.
Thursday night has become, largely be default, my mindless surfing time, thanks to my last class of the week falling on... Thursday evening. So I drink too much caffeine and catch up on all the bullshit I've not been reading for the past six days (as opposed to all the bullshit I find time to read every day) in preparation for another weekend full of homework and long mountain bike rides. This evening I've been surfing all over, but since I just went through the past month's News of the Weird updates and found several worth quoting... here they are.
This one is just baffling. I read it three times and I still couldn't quite tell you what happened there.
Junior New York City hedge fund trader Andrew Tong charged in October that his boss forced him to take female hormones to dampen his aggressiveness, which the supervisor said was leading him to make bad trades, according to a CNBC report. In his lawsuit against Mr. Ping Jiang (a big-time trader who reportedly earns $100 million a year) and employer SAC Capital (one of the biggest hedge fund names on Wall Street), Tong claimed further that he was harassed and even sexually attacked, and had started wearing dresses. [CNBC, 10-17-07; New York Post, 10-11-07]
Mandy Bailey, who lives in a suburb of Phoenix, is the mother of conjoined 1-year-old girls and wanted to take them to a family reunion in Maryland. She called Delta Air Lines to make sure the girls could ride for free on her ticket. No, said Delta, because even though a child under 2 can ride for free, each infant would need an oxygen mask in case of emergency, and thus, a separate ticket was needed. Bailey kept complaining (giving the story international reach) until a Delta higher-up compromised for the flight: Bailey's sister-in-law, who had been assigned to another row on the flight, was put next to Bailey so she could share her oxygen with the second twin. [Arizona Republic, 10-3-07; WSMB-TV (Tucson)-AP, 10-4-07]
The phenomena of rich old white guys who grow more belligerent and lacking in common sense with every dollar they accumulate never fails to bemuse and confuse me. Quite a few humans (mostly do-it-yourself type men) are utterly unable to place any reasonable value on their own time, or absorb the concept of "sunk costs." This guy might be their king.
"Over my dead body was I going to give the state another dollar for the tolls," said Thomas Jensen, 68, to the judge in Rochester, N.H., in September as he accepted the three-day jail sentence instead of a $150 fine. He had been convicted of cheating the state for insisting on using two discontinued 25-cent tokens to pay a 50-cent toll after he had failed to use the tokens up before their expiration. The toll road is a connector between the 50-cent-saving Jensen's main residence in Braintree, Mass., and his summer home in New Hampshire. [TheBostonChannel.com-AP, 9-15-07]
I saw this on CalPundit and liked it enough to repeat it. Billionaire Google co-founder Larry Page is getting married in early December, and his wedding invite list looks like yours would, if you were worth $20 billion dollars. One big name can't make it, though.
The invitation list to Page's wedding is expected to include many of Google's current and former employees, as well San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and billionaire Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group.
Former Vice President Al Gore, a senior adviser at Google, told the Chronicle he has been invited to the wedding but will not be able to make it because he will be picking up the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway.
I'm sure Gore is a far better man than me, but you know he's got to be enjoying this. You reckon the build up is better than the event? Once you've won your Noble Peace Prize you're just another prize winner. But now, you can drop it into the conversation every minute. "Dinner? Next month? Sure, let me check my schedule. I'm cool the 3rd or 4th, but I'm busy the next week. Yeah, I've got to jet off to Norway for this awards dinner thing. Sorry. How about the 12th?"
Much like the temporal conundrum created by those old, "I haven't got time for the pain" headache pill commercials, I don't know if there is a best time to wrench your back so you can not comfortably sit or stand upright for more than 10 minutes at a time. However, I can say that one of the worst times is when the past few weeks of inconsistent work have created a situation when you need to sit upright at your desk, working on research papers, for at least 8 hours a day.
SciFi Author and blogger John Scalzi finally completed a write up of his long-threatened visit to Kentucky's new Creation Museum, and the resulting captioned photo gallery and fertilizer-glorifying article is both entertaining and elucidating. No quote can really do it justice, but here's a sample:
The interplay of this Holy Trinity of explanations comes to its full realization when the Creation Museum considers what really are its main draw: Dinosaurs. Are dinosaurs 65 million years old? As if -- the Earth is just six thousand years old, pal! Dinosaurs were in the garden of Eden -- and vegetarians, at least until the fall, so thanks there, Adam. They were still around as late as the mid-third millenium BC; they were hanging with the Sumerians and the Egyptians (or, well, could have). All those fossils? Laid down by Noah's Flood, my friends. Which is not to say there weren't dinosaurs on the Ark. No, the Bible says all kinds of land animals were on the boat, and dinosaurs are a subset of "all kinds." They were there, scaring the crap out of the mammals, probably. Why did they die off after the flood? Well, who can say. Once the flood's done, the Creation Museum doesn't seem to care too much about what comes next; we're in historical times then, you see, and that's all Exodus through Deuteronomy, ie., someone else’s problem.
But seriously, the ability to just come out and put on a placard that the Jurassic era is temporally contiguous with the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom of Egypt -- well, there's a word for that, and that word is chutzpah. Because, look, that's something you really have to sell if you want anyone to buy it. It's one thing to say to people that God directly created the dinosaurs and that they lived in the Garden of Eden. It's another thing to suggest they lived long enough to harass the Minoans, and do it with a straight face. It's horseshit, pure and simple, but that's not to suggest I can't admire the hucksterism.
Scalzi's site is popular and this article is being massively linked; the comments went from 258 to 283 in the time it took me to read it. I recommend the comments, there's plenty of amusement to be found there too, most of it courtesy of the snarky counterattacks being launched towards various flat earthers and their hapless attempts to defend the indefensible. I didn't read them all and never will, but I would like to draw your attention to comment #222, which pretty well sums things up.
foreigner Says: November 13th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
your country is doomed. have fun on the ride down.
Ironically, the people who funded this $27m Dino-Ride would agree with the sentiment -- except for the "fun" part -- while arriving at that position from a diametrically-opposed POV.
Update: Scalzi has launched a LOLCreation photo contest using the pictures from his trip, and the entries thus far are quite good. I got numerous LOLs, at least. It would obviously help if you like LOLcats, and read the creation museum post, and viewed the images, all actions I heartily recommend. What else do you have to do, spend time with your loved ones? Pffft.
I have no real commentary to add to this. I just saw it on LOLpix and enjoyed it enough to repost it. It's not perfect, but it does perfectly sum up quite a few internet themes/memes in one handy jpg.
And this, just because I saw it in the same folder when I was uploading the internet danger image. It's not my favorite image in the history of computers, but it's definitely in the top 10.
I'm not sure from whence came the burst of blog posts last weekend, but I hope it didn't lead you guys to expect that sort of thing to continue. Not for a while yet, anyway. It usually feels, in my mind, like I last blogged two of three days ago, so when it's the 10th and I check my blog and notice the last post was made the 1st, it's kind of a shock. Lately I've been so busy with college and other things that the weeks are a blur. My routine is to water my indoor jungle on weekends, and every time I find myself with the watering can in my hands I think, "Has it really been a week? Did I forget and water them on Wednesday? Since it can't have been six days since last time..."
Anyway, to post something while I'm thinking about it, I saw this link on a few blogs recently, and was amused by it. It's apparently a TV commercial by the Australian Secular Party, though I do not know if it's actually appeared on TV in Oz, or if it's just something they put together for online/viral promotion. Needless to say (to anyone who lives in the US), there is no amount of money that would get this commercial on any major US network, and I doubt you'd have much luck on cable either. For all the sex and violence their enemies allege they show, the US broadcast media is profoundly conservative in their social leanings. Things that insult any particular religion (other than cheesy terrorist shows like 24 with evil Islamic bad guys) or especially all religions, are not kosher. So to speak. Thankfully, we've got the internet to amuse us with "What if..." videos.
I'm not even taking an opinion on whether this is a good video, or truthful, or well-produced. I just think how interesting it would be if this kind of discourse were permitted in the major media in the US, aside from very occasional Christopher Hitchens' interviews. All of the major networks in the US shows religious programming every Sunday morning, there are constant late night infomercials from various fringe churches, and public access channels are infested with wacky spokesmen from cults of every flavor. Yet I don't believe I've ever seen any atheist, or anti-theist, programming. Someday, perhaps.
While I'm on the subject of YouTube, did you know they have a listing of their most viewed videos ever? Last week I found myself wondering if there was such a thing, and a few clicks took me there. It's not a real proud list. It's rather infested with tween/teen skewing music videos, for bands like Avril Lavigne and My Chemical Romance, and even one by Linkin Park. Who knew they were still around?
The number one video of all time on You Tube, with over 64m views, is not a teenie-bopper music video, though. At least not explicitly. It's got a bunch of hit pop songs, and it's got dancing, but it's also quite clever and funny.
I have no idea how this one got 64m views. It's a good movie, and I enjoyed watching it, but there's obviously some pretty intensive viral promotion required to get even 1m views, much less 64x that many. Perhaps it was heavily-plugged in the mainstream?
It's odd, since I'm "plugged into" various demographics and fringe interests popular on the internet; politics, gaming, sports, atheism, technology, and a few others, but I tend to be largely oblivious to mainstream fads and cults. So I never get jokes or references to new TV shows, or anything to do with Mtv or pop music, and something like this video, which might have been a huge hit on "mainstream" websites, is entirely off my radar.
Lastly, here's a pic I shot of my desk a couple of days ago. Work is going on with all of those books, and there are six or eight more stacked up in the bedroom, where I often retreat to sit propped up on pillows and read/take notes. And I've got 3 other research projects I'm not going to start until I finish my ongoing papers on Rousseau's educational theories, French Revolution politics, Italian Renaissance armor/weapons, Burma's culture, my gigantic senior project on storytelling in computer games, and studying for the College Math CLEP exam. Better yet, I had far higher stacks of books the last two semesters; just not all at once.
I've not felt challenged by any individual class during this return to college, but 20 units this term, and 8 research papers due in a 2 week period, is becoming a challenge just by sheer weight. And with that, I must get dressed and run some errands in the rainy Saturday afternoon, before returning to try and finish up a couple of these projects, so I can start others not yet begun. Whee!
I once referenced the female "wiggle the pinkie" gesture as about the most cutting insult a young male could endure. Apparently that expression isn't as ubiquitous as I thought, since I heard from some readers who didn't know what it meant. They must not have been Australians, since there's an ongoing public safety campaign in New South Wales utilizing just that gesture in an effort to shame young men into not driving like... young men. Recklessly, in other words.
The commercial is on their website, and as you can see, I found it amusing enough to warrant snapping a shot from a pivotal moment.
...when a woman wiggled her finger at Simon Jardak as he drove along a road in Sydney three months ago, he saw red.
Instead of shame-facedly taking his foot off the pedal and slowing to a sedate pace, he hurled a bottle at the woman through the window of his car.
"She started doing that hand gesture, you know, the RTA one," Mr Jardak told a Sydney court.
"And it offended me... because of, you know, she implied I had a small penis."
I don't quite know what to say about the guy's explanation/defense, but there's something captivating about getting idiots of the white trash Jerry Springer Show type in courtrooms, where they've got to stand up straight, speak like adults, justify their actions, and face someone brighter than them who will take great delight in calling them on their half-assed lies. The stupid but cunning ones try to lie and dig the hole deeper. The less bright ones are somewhat more interesting, since they're not smart enough to lie, so they just deer-in-the-headlights and blurt out words you absolutely can not predict in advance. They might blame aliens, or say that they're not responsible for the most outlandish reasons, or sometimes, mostly surprisingly of all, they're startled into honesty. When they are it's kind of "wisdom from the mouths of babes," since they can deliver insights far beyond what you'd think them capable of. Not that these insights are necessarily enhancing, so to speak, of their character.
You see it in action on most of the spoiled teenagers on Judge Judy, where the honest ones speak for 30 seconds and get cut off, while she gives the cunning liars plenty of slack to hang themselves with. It's remarkable how much insight you can get into a person's character just observing them speak for a few minutes, while they're under questioning and can't retreat to whatever their comfort zone of conversation or attitude is.
I suppose Mr. Shrimpy in this case thought he was offering a defense for his actions. It probably worked on his friends, who were like, "That bitch deserved it for dis'ing you like that!" but in the real world, with a judge, it's a confession. "She made a mocking gesture so I assaulted her." isn't exactly what a lawyer would advise saying under those circumstances.
The funny part is that he leaves the impression he's still legitimately upset by the pinkie wiggling. He could care less about being fined and getting a criminal record; how dare she insinuate that his adolescent, tire-screeching, compensating behavior might stem from manhood issues?! I'm almost surprised they guy didn't try to call his urologist as a witness, to testify that his penis does not, in fact, fall substantially below the standard dimensions.
This case aside, I highly recommend this gesture to my female readers, though like any good weapon, it must be used selectively. You can't just walk up to a guy and throw it in; you've got to let him do something stupid first, ideally in an attempt to impress. I hardly need to remind any females of the fragility of the male ego. This gesture, when deployed effectively, will cut most any guy to the quick, especially if he's young and/or less than Ron Jeremy-esque. Just be sure you don't overdo it, lest the pinkie becomes just another version of "fuck you," or a middle finger that no longer serves to insult anymore thanks to its ubiquity.
I hadn't seen this in at least five years, but I laughed almost as hard this time as I did back then. The 2 "class is over for the week" glasses of viognier with toasted bread and cheese probably helped on that score, though.
I had a very rare encounter with a smoker this morning. Mercifully, hardly anyone still seems to smoke, in Northern California at least, and it's banned in virtually all businesses and public buildings, so aside from occasionally having to hold your breath as you walk past some idiots puffing away outside a building, one can live here in a blissful state of ignorance. I did see a smoker this morning though, a guy I slightly know from a class we share, and while talking to him for a moment before class, being sure to stand upwind, he dropped his cigarette, but immediately picked it up and continued smoking it.
For an instant I was kind of grossed out, though it was just a concrete sidewalk below him; not a manure pit or something. Then I thought about the five second rule, but soon realized how silly that was. He's sucking on a cancer delivery system; what on earth could he drop the cig into that would be worse for him to ingest than what the cigarette provides as its basic, essential function?
Logically, isn't worrying about a smoker's cigarette being dirty like feeding your kids shit cookies and telling them to wash their hands before they eat them?
