Reality Television...oxymoron

This is why I hate 'reality' television.

It's clearly not 'reality' in the least. It's a manufactured, manicured, groomed simulacrum of reality.

It seems painfully obvious to me that the judges (including a thoroughly creepy Randy-Jackson-alike on the left) have been told to open the scene looking angry and dismissive of the schlub in front of them. Handlers have already screened this schmuck and seen that he looks like crap but has a great voice.

A story...a storyline...ratings GOLD!

Everything about this entire scene - the pauses, the edited crowd reactions, the dramatically lit mixing board, the distantly-shot but immaculately mic'ed reaction shots that make us think we're somehow seeing intimate moments between mother and son -  just smacks of so much fakery and image management that it makes me want to throw crap at my computer monitor.

This is why the NBA owners deserve no sympathy

The NBA is headed toward a lockout, the kind of lockout that the NFL is already deep into.

According to some folks who all know more about the NBA than I do, this could be a protracted lockout.

At the heart of the matter is, of course, money. They players want more of it, and the owners do, too.

But all I can see is exceedingly stupid stories like this one: The Trail Blazers have offered former No. 1 draft pick Greg Oden an $8.8 million qualifying offer to stay in Portland.

If you don't know who Greg Oden is, go ahead and click through that link to see his stats. He's played one season worth of games - 82 games exactly - in his four professional seasons. He has earned nearly $22 million dollars in those four years.

I get that injuries are a part of the game and the risks that you take when you sign a player to a long-term contract, but stop throwing good money after bad and offering Oden a raise at this point. He is injured. He is going to be injured or injury-prone his whole career.

Don't give him a raise.

I have no sympathy for anybody in professional sports.

Or for any sports fan who bitches about professional sports and the money involved. If you we want the madness to end, you we have to stop paying attention, have to stop giving any money to these already far too wealthy people (owners AND players).

Update: Pardon our ranting: Fashions I hate

Two more...

scarves when it's over 50 degrees...

Burberry plaid...

Pardon our ranting: Yappi

Yappi is both everything that is right and everything that is wrong about the internet.

Today's rant is brought to you by the Yappi discussion about Josh Andrews's new job as the head boys basketball coach at Middletown High School.

I have to admit that I've used Yappi in the past. I've checked out how Princeton's girls basketball team was respected in the state, basketball scores around the state, who was going to be the next Princeton football coach, and info about some other GMC schools.

(Oh, by the way, for those of you who aren't from around here,Yappi is a discussion site about Ohio high school sports.)

It's a great site to get quick information from around the state. If I need to know what the best girls basketball teams are in Northern Ohio, I'm going to Yappi.

If I need to know who won the regional final in Columbus, I'm going to Yappi.

Because it's populated by people who are obsessively interested in their little sport niche (softball, Dayton boys basketball, seventh-grade girls Middletown volleyball), the smallest bit of minutia is typically on the site within minutes. The OHSAA won't have the results up that quickly because those people are putting it up as a job. The Yappi boarders are putting things up as obsessions.

And this is all for good and for ill.

These are people who aren't ever going to be able to provide the distance needed for unbiased reporting, for rational thought in most cases, for reasoned consideration of both sides of the issues.

They're going to scream for their coaching candidates, defend their favorite baseball player to the absolute death, and they're going to take anything said against their opinion as a personal attack, a slight, a reason to start a flame war and dig up their old feelings about the hatred for that stupid rival school that cheated their ninth-grade volleyball team in the county championships in 1982 because, by god, those feelings have just never died.

And it's all done anonymously.

No reason to actual cite a source, VikesRulz!!, because nobody's going to know who you really are or call you on anything in the real world. No reason to prove your 'inside information' about the new jv softball coach at your favorite school, Middies4Life87, because if you really do have that inside information, you're not supposed to be sharing it - either because you're probably an employee yourself or because some employee leaked it to you.

But of course you wouldn't be on these discussion boards if you weren't desperate to tell the whole world just how knowledgeable you are, how inside you really are, how much you love your school. So you brag about knowing inside info, you incessantly bring up the '92 football championship game whether it's relevant or not, and you flame everybody who's a little less pure of a RealMasonComet95, don't you.

Yeah, I check Yappi from time to time, but I certainly don't want to ever become a regular there.

A reminder...

I hate April Fools Day.

I hate practical jokes.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is stupid

I'll get it right out of the way off the bat.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is stupid in every possible way.

It's a museum created by Jann Wenner and others of his era to celebrate the music of their childhoods - not the music of today but rather the music that they remembered from when they were younger.  The Rock Hall says things a little differently, but...

In 1983, A small group of music industry professionals led by Atlantic Records Founder and Chairman Ahmet Ertegun and including Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner, attorney Allen Grubman, manager Jon Landau and record executives Seymour Stein, Bob Krasnow along with attorney Suzan Evans set out to establish an organization to “recognize the people who have created this music which has become the most popular music of our time.”

They had no problems picking the first few inductees - James Brown, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Robert Johnson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Elvis, Sam Phillips, and a few more.  Even years two - Roy Orbison, Hank Williams, Muddy Waters, Smokey Robinson, Lieber & Stoler, Marvin Gaye, Ahmet Ertegun (on the Hall's Board interestingly) - and three - Beatles, Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, Les Paul, The Supremes - couldn't have been tough.

But eventually the font of easy inductees dries up.  There isn't a new Bob Dylan to get the crowd excited and united every year.  You end up with Tom Donahue (a SF DJ from the 1960's - hmm...wonder where Rolling Stone  was headquartered around then), The Bee Gees (no rock in their career), Buffalo Springfield (three albums recorded - total), The Young Rascals (seven recording years, only three years as actual commercial forces), Paul McCartney (whose solo output doesn't remotely qualify as good enough - neither does John Lennon's, by the way), Richie Valens (who recorded for less than one year and died at the age of 17), Miles Davis (jazz, yes, rock, not even), the Dave Clark 5 (whose Rock bio says "their records were, quite simply, fun to listen and dance to" - such a ringing endorsement).

And eventually you get around to ABBA and Blondie and Run-DMC and Madonna and Grandmaster Flash.  Great artists?  Probably.  Rock artists?  Not remotely.

I've been to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I've been to the Baseball Hall of Fame, too.  Didn't enjoy either one, but really didn't enjoy the Rock one.  They're both museums trying to freeze moments in time and capture glories that were fleeting enough as they happened, but at least the Baseball Hall of Fame had some sort of continuing thread that could tie all of the players together.  They all did basically the same things.  They threw the ball; they caught the ball.  Sometimes they won; sometimes they lost; sometimes it rained.

The Rock HoF, on the other hand, seems to be trying to bring together genres and musicians that are just too disparate.  How can you put the Velvet Underground in the same hall of fame with Elvis Presley and the Tom Waits and the Sex Pistols and Madonna?  The artists are so different, so separated in time, so radically unlike each other that trying to judge them against each other on some sort of quantifiable but qualitative scale just seems ridiculous.

And where do you draw the line at what is and what isn't Rock enough to be included?  Madonna?  ABBA?  Grandmaster Flash?  These aren't Rock artists, but then again, the music of Elvis is probably as far from that of Black Sabbath (2006) as is Madonna (2008) from the Eagles (1998).  There is, at this point anyway, no underlying rockness to most of the inductees that are left because rock isn't the dominant popular force that it once was.  In twenty years, we're going to need to somehow judge whether Daft Punk and the Avett Brothers are both rock enough to make their ways into the Hall's hallowed halls, and by then rock will mean even less as music will have morphed even further.

So, check out this year's inductees...as well as any of these articles complaining about or reporting on the choices...

• Rock Hall announces new inductees
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Neil Diamond's in, Bon Jovi's out
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: Bon Jovi's in good company not getting inducted
• 2011 Rock Hall Nominees: Let the head scratching begin
• Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees: Who's Who!
• LL Cool J, The Beastie Boys Do Not Make Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductees
• More Like 'Hall of Lame', Am I Right?
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Who Should Be in for 2011 and the Future?
• Rock And Roll Hall of Fame's Most Egregious Snubs
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame: the Outcasts
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Nominees: Who Should Get In, Who Got Overlooked?
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Could Change Induction Criteria to Suit Bigger Acts
• Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Candidates: a critic's elite eight
• Future Rock Legends (an entire website devoted to looking at who does and doesn't deserve to be inducted...see also, navel gazing)

All I can promise you is these two things:

• I will never discuss the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame again other than perhaps to shake my head and move on.  The choices that they make are irrelevant to my musical listening pleasure.
• I will not be going to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame under my own free choice again.  It's boring.

Oh, and I promise that none of this has to do with the fact that they passed over the greatest Jewish rappers in history.  Another genre ignored...

PS - The Baseball Hall of Fame, on the other hand, is fascinating and may soon have a major backlog.

Misusing a word...badly...

Three-time finalist Andy Roddick has been knocked out of Wimbledon after an epic five-setter against unseeded Yen-Hsun Lu of Taiwan on Monday.
~ CNN article's lead sentence, emphasis added

Today's match was impressive - three tie-breakers and a fifth set that ended at 9-7, but I'm not entirely sure that the adjective epic can be rightfully applied to a match in light of Roddick's performance in last year's final (16-14 in the final set) or the Isner-Mahut match last week (70-68 in the final set - in case you just rolled out from under a rock). 

Morons

Take your spaghetti tree and shove it

I hate April Fools Day.

Hate it.

I don't like practical jokes, and I especially don't like practical jokes played on me - thankfully there weren't any of those this year.

Every frickin' day, I wake up and head to the intertubes to check out what's up in the world.  And on this day, this frickin' day, I get tired of every website posting something that's a stupid joke.

A twenty-cd collection of NPR fundraising announcements?  Dumb

Google renaming themselves to Topeka?  Dumb

Rob Neyer's Thursday links being all hoaxes?  Dumb

When there were fewer media outlets, the occasional practical joke was funny.  Now, however, that there are countless media outlets - that every company and person has its own blog - and they all feel the need to write or post or read or tell something that they think is funny, it's simply April Fools overload.

Cut it out, folks.

There has been one funny April Fools gag.  One.

Pardon our ramblings: Sped

Special education is a tough topic to tackle.

It's tough for me, in particular, because special education is something that I largely see from the outside.  My classes - honors and advanced placement chemistry - tend not to be heavily populated with special needs students.  Add that to the fact that I'm a school success story - National Merit, good tester, smart kinda guy - who never had an inkling of needing special services.  All in all, every single thing that I'm about to say could be dismissed with a hearty "well, yeah, but you wouldn't understand."

And that would entirely correct.

Yet, I head once more into the breech, dear friends, once more.

---

I've been saying for years that special education will be the death of public education in this country.

I work in - and we (American students, at least) were each educated in - a system of mass production.  Raw materials enter my classroom twenty or thirty at a time.  I apply a fairly standard curiculuum to each blob of developing brain matter, hoping to impart the same knowledge to all twenty or so of them at the the same time and in the same way.  At the end of the year, my classroom pops out twenty quasi-identical widgets ready for the next step in the processing line (their junior year, senior year, freshman year in college).

It's a method designed for maximum efficiency - one person making twenty widgets in a single go.  No need or time to really differentiate anything, no real incentive to adjust anything other than what I'm doing from time to time as the line boss directs.  Sure, there will be a certain amount of raw material waste as not every widget comes off the line stamped and educated to perfection, but even the most off-blueprint widgets have a home somewhere out in the world.

Then, along comes the special education movement, the idea that some of the brain blobs need to be treated differently, that they can achieve the same level of widget perfection, but that they are just a further into the raw state of things when they come to me.  This means I have to invest a little more time, have to adjust my teaching a little more, have to monitor these certain brain blobs a little more closely. 

And this doesn't fit well in the mass production model of education.  No longer am I able to successfully widgetify twenty or so brain blobs as once because this one takes a little more time than the others.  No longer am I able to be as efficient - producing the maximum number of working widgets with the minimum time and money invested - because some of the brain blobs take more of my time.

A factory education model runs entirely antithetical to a special education society.  If our educational system had been a little more woodwright's shop and a little less Henry Ford, then things might be a little different.

---

Why do we have special education?

My general understanding - and I'll admit that I've never seen this written anywhere, it's entirely my conjecture - is that somehow we're saying that certain people come to school behind and need a little help in catching up.  Some of the reasons for that catching up need seem entirely reasonable to me - blindness, head trauma, radioactive spider bite - but some of the reasons for special education just seem like poor home training.

The boy who won't do his homework...the girl who doesn't seem able to control her mouth...the boy who throws tantrums at the age of fifteen...the student who was never trained to appreciate education so won't do the work needed to see the rewards.  How are those justifications for employing a new person to do nothing more than do the home training that never got done at home?

---

I will admit that I struggle sometimes seeing the necessity for special education services when the disability is not readily visible.  The blind student, the epileptic student, these are disabilities that I can see, that I simply cannot doubt.

The student with anxiety, depression, ADHD, disorganization are students that I often find myself wondering why they need services.  I don't mean to doubt the veracity of these conditions - at least not the veracity of the existance of these conditions within the population - merely to state that I often find myself wondering whether these conditions really exist within the students that I see.

I know that there are people with far more expertise than I - psychologists, counselors, special education specialists, medical doctors - who are able to diagnose these conditions, but I wonder how many of the conditions are excuses for a lack of training that these young people received in their very young, most early formative stages.

ADHD?  Maybe you just weren't given tasks that occupied you.  Maybe you spent too much time in front of hyperactive, jump-cut-filled television programs as a wee bairn.

Disorganization?  Don't ask me the proper, clinical term - I just know that I have had students whose primary symtoms came out to me simply as disorganization.  He would do assignments - according to parents and counselors, anyway - only to never turn the assignments in, having simply lost or forgotten them.  Are we really saying that this student is somehow crippled?  Disabled?  Because he was messy?  Because he was forgetful?

I admit freely that I find myself wondering whether many of these conditions couldn't have been more effectively dealt with by the parents at a younger age.  Wondering whether these diagnoses aren't simply admissions of poor parenting.

---

I had a student once whose condition was "weak wrists."

The student was allowed to see another student's notes from class.  He wasn't to be penalized for his poor penmanship.  He was allowed to have his parents scribe his assignments from home.

I'll admit that I haven't a clue as to how you measure the strength of wrists, but I always did wonder how this "weak wristed" student could manage to be a starting pitcher on our school baseball team in spite of his 'disability'.

---

I know I'm probably of a very old school mindset here, but I so often wish that I could simply stand up at some of these meetings and say "Your kid isn't good at science."  or "Your kid isn't very smart."  or even just "Your kid isn't honors smart."

"Lots of people aren't, and they're doing just fine.  They end up as store managers, solid workers, hell, teachers in this building."

"Just because your kid isn't going to get a National Merit Scholarship or isn't going to be the valedictorian doesn't frickin' matter."

"Let him find his way in the world and offer him help where he needs it, but get him the heck out of the honors science class because he's drowning.  There's no shame in being really good at some things and not so good at others.  This is the way of the world."

"Few of us can be outstanding at everything.  Maybe your kid's skills are in playing soccer, singing, making music, throwing a baseball.  It doesn't mean he's disabled just because his science skills don't his skills in other areas."

---

I had a girl in class whose disability was that she was really smart in all areas but one.

Her tested ability levels in math and science were outstanding, 99th percentile kind of stuff.

Her tested ability levels in English - particularly in the writing part of the game - was in the 70th percentile, above average but not phenomenally so.

She was on an IEP (individualized education plan) because he writing skills weren't the equal of her math and science skills.

So what?

So she didn't write so well.  Why does that mean she should get twice the time on tests as the kid who is just average - hell, slightly above average - across the board?

I remember her counselor telling me - us, probably, there were seven teachers at the meeting - saying that the qualification for special services came about because one of her ability levels was drastically below her other ones, that no matter that he one was still in the 'above average' category, that skill being below her other skills made her a special education student.

To me, a spike in one ability doesn't mean special education, it means gifted...just in one area.

Why does talent in one area have to mean disability in the other areas?

---

I could never do the job of the special education professionals in our building.

I especially could never do the job of the special education folks working with the severely handicapped, the mentally retarded (I apologize for not knowing the correct current term), the non-verbal, the wheelchair bound students.

I love my job, love working almost exclusively with the smart kids, the good kids, the ones with whom I have to worry about cheating and SATs and APs and calling home because they aren't doing their homework.

I never have to worry about taking one of them into the shower to clean them up after they've soiled themselves.  I never have to worry about guiding them by hand through the hallway during the bells because otherwise they will grab onto any person who passes by.  I never have to wait patiently for them to construct a sentence using a word board, one picture at a time before the computer will enunciate their words for them.

I also never have to worry about the murderous, the violent, the unstable, the abusive and the abused.  These are all taken care of far from my door.  For good or for ill, I simply never see those folks except as they pass by my door on the way to lunch or to Mr O's room,

---

I know that special education is too expensive for us.

In the past decade, the special education population at Princeton High School has sky rocketed from 4% to nearly 20% this year.  That mean one in five of our students are somehow deemed as unable to perform without assistance.

That means in my typical class of 20 or 25, there should be 4 or 5 students who are legally entitled to more of my time, more of our school's money than are the other fifteen or twenty.

It's a problem financially, a big problem financially, because it means that 20% of our population is taking up a far bigger proportion of our resources than 20%.  There are separate federal funds to support this extra outlay, but it's not like that money comes out of thin air.  Somewhere along the line, it's coming from the same pie.

And when people look at schools and say that we're paid too much, the we spend too much, that our building are too opulent, we need to point out that we are doing exactly what we're told to do from above, from the government, from the people who vote for the government.

And that government says that the moment a student is labeled as needing an IEP or a 504 plan, they are entitled to more services which are more expensive, and we don't have a lick of choice in the matter.

Not that I'm sure we should.

---

With all that being said, with my very solid dose of skepticism, I can't imagine how it must feel as a parent to realize that your child is not - and maybe cannot - be ready to be independent in the world, to think that the only way my child could ever succeed is with drastic help beyond that which most people get.

Especially, if that knowledge made me confront the fact that perhaps I made a poor choice of mates (nature) or that I had done a poor job of raising my child (nurture).

Continuing to nail his legacy

I can't bring myself to say that this is any sort of beginning of the end for the current administration. It's pretty typical that a second-term president will spend his lame-duck term enacting legislation and policies that he might not be able to move forward if he had to worry about another election, so I really shouldn't be surprised.

But...

President Bush's neutering of the Endangered Species Act is phenomenal.

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said late Monday the changes were needed to ensure that the Endangered Species Act would not be used as a "back door" to regulate the gases blamed for global warming. In May, the polar bear became the first species declared as threatened because of climate change. Warming temperatures are expected to melt the sea ice the bear depends on for survival.

Well, no, we wouldn't want greenhouse gases regulated, would we?

The Interior Department said such consultations are no longer necessary because federal agencies have developed expertise to review their own construction and development projects, according to the 30-page draft obtained by the AP.

Sure, wouldn't want to actually consult those stupid science guys to find out if we're gonna kill or harm or poison the animals.

The reviews have helped safeguard protected species such as bald eagles, Florida panthers and whooping cranes. A federal government handbook from 1998 described the consultations as "some of the most valuable and powerful tools to conserve listed species."


In recent years, however, some federal agencies and private developers have complained that the process results in delays and increased construction costs.

Oooooh...delays...and even costs involved in protecting the environment. I hear those are going to be featured in a new horror movie next year. A half dozen attractive twenty-somethings will be trapped in a rural area, and their lives will be threatened by delays and increased construction costs.

Remember to get out and vote in November, folks.

Pants

There comes a time in the school year - and the specific time depends on the weather - when I have one simple thought when I leave the building each day:

I'm in pants, and I'm not happy.

I'm in no way suggesting that I wanna walk around pantless, but from about early May until sometime around September, I'm kinda grouchy every time I have to wear anything longer than shorts.

That time has been here for about two weeks now.

Just so you know.

Smile, you're on Candid Camera

I hate hidden camera shows.

I hate them from Candid Camera all the way down through every one of its stupid frickin' descendants like Punk'd and Howie Do It.

Hate them.

Bill Simmons is dead to me

I have come to absolutely hate Bill Simmons.

His latest column - if you can call it that - is another installment of his mailbag in which he and his readers try to come up with the most ridiculous sports/entertainment analogies possible...

Q: Too bad you decided not to have break-up sex with the Boston Bruins this year, isn't it? It's like an ex-girlfriend who switched to contacts from glasses, let her hair grow out and discovered aerobics. Now she's the hot girl at the bar.
-- Alex, D.C.

...obsess over stupid reality television...

Do you think if someone told Bruce Jenner in 1976 that he'd spend his golden years trying to steer the misguided children of a lawyer who successfully defended O.J. Simpson from charges of killing his own wife, or that his son would introduce the world to the concept of a "bromance," he would have thrown his discus or javelin off to the side and taken the silver medal in the decathlon?
-- Ben S., Lexington, Mass.

...run the whole concept of metrosexual but still kinda manly thoroughly into the ground...

Do you think the relationship between Rocky and Apollo could be considered the original bromance?
-- Kevin McB, Oakland, N.J.

...tell us about living in Los Angeles...

Let's say you are at LAX and you are about to board your flight, but then you notice one of the cast members from "Lost" on the same plane. Do you still get on that flight?
-- Brian, Richmond, Va.

...rank the stupidest hypothetical pieces of minutia crap ever...

Wouldn't you say the Red Sox not getting A-Rod in 2003 was BY FAR the best non-trade of all time?
-- Adam, Toronto

I find myself skipping more of his mailbag answers than I do reading them, so Bill Simmons is now officially dead to me.

His crappy columns will not be darkening my computer screen again.

Another possibility, perhaps

From the AP article...

Travis the chimpanzee, a veteran of TV commercials, was the constant companion of a lonely Connecticut widow who fed him steak, lobster and ice cream. He could eat at the table, drink wine from a stemmed glass, use the toilet, and dress and bathe himself.

He brushed his teeth with a Water Pik, logged on to a computer to look at photos and channel-surfed television with the remote control.

But on Monday, the wild animal in him came out with a vengeance.

The 200-pound animal viciously mauled a friend of his owner before being shot to death by police.

Investigators are trying to figure out why -- whether it was a bout of Lyme disease, a reaction to drugs, or a case of instinct taking over.

...

Police said that Travis was agitated earlier Monday and that Herold had given him the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in some tea. Police said the drug had not been prescribed for the 14-year-old chimp

...

"I don't know the effects of Lyme disease on chimpanzees, but I will say that it's deceiving to think that if any animal is, quote-unquote, well-behaved around humans that means there is no risk involved to humans for potential outbursts of behavior," she said. "They are unpredictable, and in instances like this you cannot control that behavior or prevent it from happening if it is in a private home."

Connecticut law requires anyone who owns a primate heavier than 50 pounds to obtain a state permit. But Herold was exempted from the law.

"Given that the family in Stamford owned Travis before this law was put on the books, and the fact that over the years the animal did not appear to present a public safety risk, their possession of the chimpanzee was allowed to continue," said Dennis Schain, spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Or, there is another possibility...and I'm just spitballing here...

Maybe he was a frickin' wild animal.

Monkeys aren't pets, folks.

They don't belong with the humans.

That's just a theory, though.

I hate the Girl Scouts

I can come up with a hundred reasons to hate the Girl Scouts, but today I offer just two.

Number one, they've moved their cookie campaign up by almost three weeks, almost exactly swamping PHS's opportunities to collect donations at any Kroger store in the area.

And, exhibit b, they are - for the umpteenth time - decreasing they already pathetic value of their cookies.

Nobody cares

Here's the deal, ok: nobody cares about anybody else but themselves.

Or at least, nobody cares nearly as much about anybody else as they do about themselves.

Take, for example, my self-entertaining dressing habits. Earlier this school year, I decided to go a week wearing a combination of black jeans and a Princeton shirt. With four pairs of black jeans in my closet and a half dozen collared Princeton shirts, it was an easy enough challenge. Plus it made the mornings a little more mindless, and it entertained me. Along the way, I was curious as to when during that week one of my students would comment on my repetitive sartorial choices.

Here's the big surprise: nobody ever did.

Its not that my students are any less observant or caring than any other group of people, I'm pretty sure it's just that every one of them was too busy thinking about what everyone else was going to say about themselves to give my dressing habits more than a cursory thought.

Another quick story...a couple of months ago, in discussions about possible Thanksgiving meals, my mom explained something with the reasoning "because you know I don't eat lamb." I replied to her that I didn't know any such thing. Admittedly, I didn't remember her ever eating lamb, but there's a big difference between not eating something because it's an uncommon food and not eating something because you have some sort of stomach-churning revulsion.

I'd lived with this woman for the better part of eighteen years, and I had to admit that I really didn't have any clue as to her eating preferences or habits. Yeah, I remember which meal I always helped Dad make on weekday nights when I was growing up, the first meal that was ever deeded entirely over to me as a teenager - spaghetti with meat sauce. But her preferences? No clue.

So, I have begun to shift a single phrase out of my vocabulary because I think it reflects a sense of narcissism in each of us: you know that I....

I'm trying not to say that because I have come to realize that nobody knows anything about us - or not nearly as much as we would think they do. Nobody is staring at us - noticing that pimple, that your socks don't match today, that you're cutting back on sweets - because they're all too busy thinking that you're staring at them.

Every man is an island.

Free donuts...of choice

Anytime tomorrow, stop by your local Krispy Kreme establishment and get yourself a free doughnut - of your choice.

Personally, I'd go for the jelly-filled, but that has nothing to do with the rest of the story.

Apparently the original announcement from Krispy Kreme read like this (according to a Miami New Times article):

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American's sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies -- just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet 'free' can be.

Seems innocuous enough, but some groups will take any opportunity for free publicity, so the American Life League, an avowed anti-abortion group, responded with the following press release:

The following is a statement from American Life League president, Judie Brown.

"The next time you stare down a conveyor belt of slow-moving, hot, sugary glazed donuts at your local Krispy Kreme you just might be supporting President-elect Barack Obama's radical support for abortion on demand – including his sweeping promise to sign the Freedom of Choice Act as soon as he steps in the Oval Office, Jan. 20.

The doughnut giant released the following statement yesterday:

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc. (NYSE: KKD) is honoring American's sense of pride and freedom of choice on Inauguration Day, by offering a free doughnut of choice to every customer on this historic day, Jan. 20. By doing so, participating Krispy Kreme stores nationwide are making an oath to tasty goodies -- just another reminder of how oh-so-sweet "free" can be.

Just an unfortunate choice of words? For the sake of our Wednesday morning doughnut runs, we hope so. The unfortunate reality of a post Roe v. Wade America is that "choice" is synonymous with abortion access and celebration of 'freedom of choice' is a tacit endorsement of abortion rights on demand.

President-elect Barack Obama promises to be the most virulently pro-abortion president in history. Millions more children will be endangered by his radical abortion agenda.

Celebrating his inauguration with "Freedom of Choice" doughnuts – only two days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision to decriminalize abortion – is not only extremely tacky, it's disrespectful and insensitive and makes a mockery of a national tragedy.

A misconstrued concept of "choice" has killed over 50 million preborn children since Jan. 22, 1973. Does Krispy Kreme really want their free doughnuts to celebrate this "freedom.""

As of Thursday morning, Communications Director Brian Little could not be reached for comment. We challenge Krispy Kreme doughnuts to reaffirm their commitment to true freedom – to the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – and to separate themselves and their doughnuts from our great American shame.

And now the Krispy Kreme's announcement reads thusly on this website:

Krispy Kreme Doughnuts’ Inauguration Day promotion on Tuesday, January 20, 2009, is offering one, free doughnut of a customer’s choice at participating Krispy Kreme locations nationwide. No purchase is necessary. The promotion allows customers to commemorate Inauguration Day by selecting one free doughnut of any variety at local participating stores. On Election Day, November 4, 2008, Krispy Kreme ran a promotion that provided customers with one free star-shaped doughnut at stores nationwide. The Inauguration Day promotion is not about any social or political issue.

It does still have the word choice in the announcement, but it does have that final disclaimer in there.

My issue here isn't for or against the right of a woman to have an abortion - that's your business to decide how you feel there - my issue is that I want the debate over this issue (as well as over every other issue) to stick to the actual issue at hand. Don't go looking for conspiracy theories and hidden meanings in every statement that anyone or any corporation makes.

If you see that Consumer Reports says (and I'm making this up here) that the want every consumer armed with the information to make the right choice, don't freak out about them being pro-gun.

If Wired magazine has a note saying that (again, made up by me) they want people to be able to vouch for and trust their information, don't start screaming about their secret agenda to promote school choice.

If someone says "I'm pro choice", scream. It's your business - though I'd rather you engage in a reasoned debate with them instead of calling them a baby killer. But don't go looking for stupid fights where they don't exist.

By the by, my favorite comment on the New Miami Times website:

if they were abortion donuts, i don't think i'd want one. i assume they'd be taking them out of the oven way too early.

Uggly boots

I'll admit that I have absolutely no fashion sense. If I'm lucky, my shoes match my belt when I'm dressed for school.

So I obviously have no business ranting and slagging someone else's fashion choices.

No business at all.

So here goes...


I hate Ugg boots.

Pick a metaphor

Any metaphor...but stick to just one or two...c'mon, man...

Don't leave a comment

The Cincinnati Enquirer's website has undergone some radical changes over the past year or two, something that was covered in Wired magazine a little while ago.

They've combined all their local newspapers (formerly the various community papers including the Princeton-area Tri-County Press) into the one website, no longer offering up individual homepages for each. And they've - more noteworthy - also encouraging a lot of what they call citizen journalism which seems to end up being a whole lot of people doing stupid and mostly non-newsworthy self promotion and a lot of very poorly-written local interest articles.

Seriously, look at this piece of crap. There are nothing but short sentences, not a single combination into an actual paragraph. It's like something written by a middle schooler.

The lack of actual reportage - and any sort of consideration for what is worth reporting and what isn't - isn't, however, my beef for tonight. That'll be for another time as we consider the dichotomy between what people want to see/read/hear and what they need to be told. Instead, my complaints for today lie entirely with their increased offerings of comments on every news story.

Take, for example, the comments recently left on a story about the Lakota contract talks:

When are teachers going to realize the make good money? Hey, I haven't had even a cost of living increase in over FIVE years! Do you hear my complaining? No, I understand it's tough out there right now. These teachers who are already making a LOT more than I ever will are never happy. Look, if you don't like being a teacher find another career! But you will quickly find that there isn't much out there which you will make more money. Yes, times are tough....grow up and deal with it like the rest of us. Or does it just kill you to drive home in your big SUV, pull into your huge garage, and then take the family out to eat? Yea, I bet. Spoiled teachers.....sheesh!

...

Be sure to have a full knowledge base of any situation before you rattle off a half-brained response. Don't assume the media has all of the information you need to be fully aware.

...

This sounds like sour grapes to me! I was curious do you have your masters degree? If not... Why don't you go back to school and get your master's degree so you can have a big SUV, huge garage, and go out to eat every night. Please do some more research before you make comments like the one you spewed out above.

We have a craptacular initial comment, one designed to set a tone of only the lowest level of discourse. It's an ignorant rant, practically designed to pick a fight. And it's dumb.

The Enquirer has added the opportunity for people to have intelligent discourse replying to any of the topics that the site covers, but they haven't set anything in place to prevent this kind of asinine, lowest-common-denominator commentary - which is what I find most common to the comment section. And then we get two people saying "oh, you should be more open-minded" when they should really be ignoring the moron and just letting him scream into the ether without response.

See, it's way easier to smack on people if you don't have to see them face to face.

Newspapers - and by extension news websites - should not be for the reporting of every mundane detail of the world nor as forums for every opinion to be bandied about without concern for the factual basis of that opinion.

As much as I want everyone to be free to report and to inform each other - it's important for our freedoms that we have some outlets - I also want there to be some sort of established news entity that can provide a researched, resourced, filtering of what is happening in my world, and a bulletin board service with commentary is not that entity.

Randall had it right.