A Gross Thing My Cat Does

Yeah, that's right. It's gross, my cat does it, and I'm telling THE WHOLE DAMN WORLD about it.

She eats her own earwax. She loves it. When her hind nails are long, she likes to dig around in her ears and then lick them. She's not licking them clean, she's actively enjoying the flavor of earwax.

Pete says, "Hey, you don't know. Maybe it tastes like strawberries and champagne." I say, "It's SO gross!"

Sydney Makes Things Up About Rebecca Haarlow (10)

Rebecca Haarlow once endorsed an edible lipstick made of ham, flavored with rose water.

In which I, surprisingly, didn't freak the hell out

I haven't posted in a long time because I started a brand new job on January 4th and it is awesome. So awesome that I've been happily working longer hours and have generally completely forgotten about everything else that I used to do before January 4th. But I have things to say, to send out into the ether! Things that are not important or necessarily even interesting but that I will nonetheless spew into an ambivalent void like a blind man's primal scream in a deserted parking lot.

So in week two of my new job, on a Monday I believe, I had an experience so terrifying while getting ready to leave in the morning that I had trouble getting dressed or sleeping for the rest of the week. First, it is important to understand that I am a huge arachnophobe. I don't like things that buzz and dive bomb my head either, stinging or otherwise, but I have full on anxiety dreams about having to walk past spiders in their webs when I'm stressed. In fact, this whole post is making me kind of twitchy and itchy as I type it, so I will try to keep it brief.

Like any normal person, when I get dressed, I put my sweater on last (pro tip: it goes on over your other clothes). I was planning to wear a cardigan. As I swung it around behind me to pull it on, out of the corner of my eye I saw a large, black thing fly towards the wall, and at the same time heard a "thunk", like a wad of duct tape hitting the wall. I knew what it was. It was too large to be a shield beetle (one of two insects that don't nauseate me on sight), too heavy to be... never mind. I knew it was a spider, a really big (for Portland) spider. I immediately dropped the sweater and looked to see where it had landed. Any arachnophobe will tell you that as horrified as you might be, you have to know where it went. It's a million times worse to have it just out there, somewhere.

It had fallen straight down and seemed to be disinclined to move too much. I grabbed a plastic pint glass from the bathroom counter and went to trap it. (Since almost our first date lo these many years ago, Pete's policy has always been to kill spiders for me, usually without telling me what he's doing. And since that time, my policy has been to leave anything that might make a noise when squished under a glass or bowl for him if he's not home. I know, it's terrible and I should be a stronger and more empowered woman, but I am a coward and squishing bugs is super gross. I own it and I've made peace with it.) The thing is, the damned spider was keeping to the moulding, so when I tapped the wall above it to get it to flee so I could trap it, it just kept to the wall. What I needed was a partner. Someone who would make the spider run away from the wall so that I could imprison it. I would also accept someone who would just kill the damn thing, but I knew that was unlikely, as my only option was The Cat.

Domino is good for several things. Sitting on your lap, accepting head scratches and belly rubs, eating cat food, making cat poops, batting cat toys into the nests of cables found at the back of electronic equipment, and whining. Domino is not a hunter. Oh, she thinks she is, but she would be wrong. But this one time, the stars were aligned for her, and what I needed was someone to gently bat at the spider without trying to carry it off somewhere and pretend to eat it: Domino's forte. I spotted her in her little cat bed by the window, picked her up and set her next to the bureau (which is where the spider was then taking cover). I tried to indicate the spider, but she thought I just wanted her to follow my finger because she is a cat and her brain is the size of the interior of a cat skull. But tapping on the bureau made the spider move, and that got her attention. Like she actually understood what I wanted from her, she tapped her little paw behind that spider, driving it out into the open. Where I accidentally killed it, crushing it under the edge of the glass while trapping it.

I left it under the cup because I wasn't sure if it was dead. And then I had to build a fort around it out of books because the drawback to my brilliant "involve the cat" plan was that the cat did not want to become uninvolved. And you know what they say: curiosity freed the maybe not totally dead spider.

It took me a full five minutes to verify that a different sweater was indeed Stuff of Nightmares free and then another five to check every nook and cranny of my winter coat. I called Pete immediately to tell him we had to move and I couldn't sleep another night in this House of Horrors. He was very sympathetic and didn't point out the inherent flaws in that plan, which is part of why he is a great husband. (Spouses, take note: "Well, that's not going to happen" is never the right answer in these situations. Neither is, "I don't understand why you're so upset.")

I couldn't help wondering where it had come from - was it in the closet the whole time? Did it recently invade the house? Did it crawl up and across other clothes? The sweater was new, so the I had to wonder, Has it been living on the sweater since the warehouse? Was it there when I tried it on? Did I bring it home? Is it an invasive species? Right about the time the tiny, detached, wannabe biological scientist part of brain started pondering what kind of spider it was, if it was poisonous, if so, just how poisonous, I physically stopped in my tracks and said, "Oh my God stop it!" I had to will myself not to think about it or my skin would have never stopped crawling. Pete disposed of it when he got home and I think he looked up what it might have been. I don't know if he fond the answer because I asked him not to tell me. It never even touched me, so it doesn't matter. If I asked him to tell me only if it was non-poisonous (which, frankly, in Oregon, is quite likely), and he never said anything, I'd know the thing I didn't want to know, the thing that could only make me dwell on the terrible "what if I'd put my sweater on more slowly, what if I hadn't noticed" questions, the thing that would only deepen my phobia and make me unhappy. So please please please, keep speculation about type and danger (if you are so inclined) to a forum inaccessible to myself.

And that is my thrilling tale of horror.

Studies I would like done: Athelete Attractiveness over Time

Hypothesis: Basketball stars have gotten more attractive, as a group, each decade since the inception of the NBA.

Required Definitions:

1. Is there an objective definition of attractiveness? I doubt it. Probably you're looking at so many dozens or hundreds of responses using a Likert scale to reach an adequately powered sample for analysis. Actually, you might need more than one - do people need to differentiate "cute" from "handsome" or "sexy"?
   
2. Who are you asking: fans or the general public? I wonder if there's a difference. Would fans find a player more attractive because he played for their team, was a great player or won championships? I think that would have to be evaluated before embarking on the main body of research. And then you'd have to evaluate whether or not that held true for fans from all teams or just fans from the player's home city. If you went with fans, you'd likely need a cross-section of fans from all over the country. If you went with the general public, you'd probably need a set of questions aimed at determining if they are or are not fans, and if so, how much of their lives are dedicated to watching basketball.
   
3. In the context of the time in which they played or the modern era? One could try to evaluate how attractive the long-ago peoples of the 1950s found their sports heroes, but that seems likely to turn into some kind of tedious historical sports writing exegesis. I think you have to go with live people you can survey today, but maybe it would be interesting to see if you have to adjust for age. Probably you'd need a question about how long each respondent has been paying attention to basketball, and what kind of time they've put into it over time. That would be a hard question to ask, I think!
4. What is a "basketball star"? You'd either need a list determined by a trustworthy third party (like the NBA itself, or maybe something like Sports Illustrated) or you'd have to craft a definition of "star" from scratch. You could go with a Lexis-Nexis search and pick the players who appear the most frequently, but you'd also get players who had a lot of scandals but weren't necessarily stars. You could go by pay scale, but you'd have to determine whether or not well-paid players are always stars and if they're considered as good at the beginning and end of their careers. You could go by stats, but you'd have to determine which stats, at what tolerances, and if your chosen tolerances are appropriate in every decade. I mean, maybe rebounds and assists are important now and there are star players who only score 4 points a night but kick ass at getting the ball into the hands of their teammates, but was that true in the 60s? in the 70s? And did the ABA and NBA have different methods of tracking stats? There are a lot of questions here that I'm sure a sports statistician would be happy to suss out with you.

Methodology: It seems like you could use a paper survey or even a telephone survey for something like this, but I think there's a lot of potential for using the internet.

Do a pre-survey to get basic demographic information (age, gender, self-identified race and ethnicity, level of education, city/state where they spent the most years between the ages of 1 and 18, current city/state, how long they've lived there, socioeconomic status, marital status).

Then show a slide show and ask them to rate the attractiveness of the picture they're seeing. I'd use two or three pictures for each player in random order. You could use two pictures in uniform - one home, one on the road- and one not in uniform. (But which uniform? Maybe wherever they played longest?) It would also be interesting to try putting names on the photos for some people but not for others. How many respondents would recognize all of them by sight alone?

Do a post-survey with your fandom questions and maybe thoughts on attractiveness in general. I'd be sure to ask which team, if any, they rooted for as a kid, and let them pick as many as they like. I'd also ask if they thought someone had been left out of the line up of stars.

You'd have to account for people who don't use the internet. Maybe you could have a study center and advertise publically for people to come in and take the survey in person. That might hurt your national sample, though - too much input from one region.

Analysis: Aside from proving or disproving the hypothesis, there's a lot of potential for exploring some interesting questions about how fandom influences perception. Do the people who self-identify as rooting for Atlanta differ in their perceptions from people who self-identify as rooting for the Hawks? (Yes, I know that's the same team. That's the point: is one person rooting for the city while the other is rooting for the actual team and the players who comprise it?) Also, does it matter if you know who the pictures are of? How many people recognize the names of sports heros without having any idea what they look like? How many people recongnize pictures of sports heros without having any idea who they are? What is the influence of age on ideas of what makes an attractive basketball player? Is there a different standard of attractiveness for basketball players and non-basketball players? What kind of comments do people make as they're making their evaluations?

Okay, sports social science: get to it!

Mike Rice: unintentional dirty old man

Mike Rice cracks me up; his commentary is peppered with unintentionally dirty comments. Tonight I will do my best to catalog some of the inappropriateness.

Of Jeff Pendergraph:

He'll bang ya. And there's a guy named Dwight Howard on the other team who maybe needs some bangin tonight.

About a foul:

Andre Miller really nailed Howard and he thought it was the big guy, Joel Przybilla, and they're goin' at it.

Just calling the game:

Miller really gets it from behind.

On Joel Przybilla:

Boy I'll tell you, Joel is huffin' cause he is just bangin'. Every time down, him and Dwight Howard bang each other.

You've gotta meet Dwight Howard early so he doesn't get low-post position, so you bang him there. You bang him everywhere.

Joel going out of the game made the Orlando Magic spurt.

Even Mike Barrett got in on it tonight:

It was all set up on the penetration of Bayless.

Execution and intent: "In Bruges" and "Revolver"

I have a terrible head cold, and as a consequence, I seem to be spending the long weekend watching movies. Last night we watched In Bruges, with Colin Farrell, and this afternoon we watched Revolver, with Jason Statham. I knew that Revolver had gotten rather bad reviews and that In Bruges had gotten good reviews. (I even remembered reading that it had been almost criminally misrepresented in its ad campaign.) But, you know, I liked The Transporter and it's not like I'm doing anything with this time other than keeping Kleenex stock on the up-tick. Interestingly, these movies work as a kind of gangster-genre Goofus and Gallant. Although Revolver was released in 2005 in Europe, it didn't make it to the US until March 2008, a month after In Bruges, almost as if the distributors wanted viewers to make that connection.

While there are some overt similarities - both are gangster movies that take place in somewhat imaginary locations, both have accented (to my American ears) leads from the British Isles, neither movie begins at its story's beginning, both have a mysterious and powerful gangster king pulling the strings in the background - the most striking similarity is one of intent. Both movies would like to be a deeply affecting, multifaceted meditation on what it is to be a certain kind of person. In Bruges succeeds at delving into what it is to be a good person, while also being clever, funny, touching, tense, thoughtful, well-crafted and well-acted. Revolver, on the other hand, is like one of those stories you write at summer camp, where each person adds a line and then folds the paper so that the next person can only read the most recent addition before adding their own line. It's confusing, noisy, directionless, and -worst of all- pretentious beyond all reason. It seems to think it's a meditation on ego and personal strength, full of mantras plundered from someone's freshman social studies notes they found on a bus. I've seen Triscuit boxes with more philosophical value.

I have so much I want to say about this, but I'm having trouble constructing coherent sentences due to my head cold/medication situation. I hope Pete will write about this himself. When we finished In Bruges last night, neither of us could really talk about it. It was so dense and funny and sad and strange and wonderful. About a quarter of the way into Revolver, I said to Pete, "This doesn't make any sense." And then one of the characters said, "This doesn't make any sense." I thought, "Oh, okay, this is how it's supposed to be." But it never made any sense. It just kept pushing on and on forever, like a sheep with its head stuck between two slats in a fence.

And another ad I don't get

I can't find the video for this one, and I'm not really all that inclined to look too hard, so I'm just going to put this out there for you to ponder:

There is an ad where a dude high-fives his own reflection in a window after talking to his doctor about Viagra.

I have tried, and failed, to come up with a way in which this is not the least cool thing ever broadcast.

I don't get this either

Here is another entry in the Annals of Marketing That Can't Possibly Be Effective.

I assume that the idea is that you'll see this ad and think, "Wow, that girl is cute and hip and singing right to me. And this song isn't at all an irritating earworm!" What I find surprising is that she says, in the song, that internet college is not real college. Well, she says they're not all the same and you have to find "the right one." But University of Phoenix and ITT Tech commercials spend hours every day telling you how real they are and how much the people who "attended" them love them. It seems like admitting that internet colleges might be less than legitimate undermines that whole idea.

I also find it curious how much this ad diverges from the University of Phoenix/ITT Tech model. Where are the successful professionals, the single moms, the guys who no longer live in their mother's basements? No one in this ad is wearing khakis or a sports jacket; no one is giving a testimonial about how much they love working at an IT help desk in some nameless corporate dungeon. A friend of mine tells a story about how someone she works with has paid upwards of $20,000 for a University of Phoenix MBA and couldn't understand why they never got past the interview stage for any new job. Finally, they asked one of the interviewers, "What could I do to make my interview stronger?" and was told that the problem wasn't with their interview skills, it was with their degree. The interviewer said that while s/he was sure one learned something in online college, it just wasn't the same as a real degree. My friend's coworker was completely blindsided by this information. It is my experience that most people who decide to get an online degree really believe in the process - I mean, you'd have to with the price you pay. I am surprised that someone out there believes internet college has great untapped market in wannabe hipsters watching The Mighty Boosh on Adult Swim late on a Sunday night.

There's another one with a girl in her pajamas saying something about "I'm not going to bed; I'm going to college. No, really!" Like no 19-year old girl has ever gone to college in her pajamas. Really - have the people who make these ads never been to an actual college campus? Going to class in your nightwear is not an experience exclusive to classroomless courses. Also: why is that a selling point? Shouldn't the selling point be "you don't have to find parking" or "you can do this late at night, between your two full time jobs, after you put the kids to bed but before you have to drive them to school"? Anyway, these commercials bug me and I don't know why I care. Maybe because the song in the first is such an earworm. Or maybe I wish that I had gone to internet college. It wouldn't have saved me any money and I wouldn't feel comfortable telling anyone where I went, but it would have been a shorter walk.

I don't get it

Please tell me how this makes sense:

Seriously: how is this selling diapers? What does Woodstock or The Young Bloods have to do with Ultra Leak Protection? Are those babies stoned? Where are their parents? What kind of message is this promoting? I'm so confused!

Response to Joe, re: women and sport

This post is a response to my friend Joe’s post about roller derby. I suggest you start there.

The whole "sports but also sexy" aspect of women's athletics has always bothered me. It's like women have to be objectified to participate in organized sports or it's simply too boring for anyone to bother watching (men and women alike). Look at the WNBA- they aren't trying to be sexy or cute, just really awesome at basketball, but there's no dunking and I guess it's not as exciting or something, so no one watches.

Aside: I maintain that all sports are boring because every game is essentially the same: they run up the field/court, they run down the field/court, sometimes they defend, sometimes they try to score, sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but really, blocking is blocking and scoring is scoring and how many times can I be expected to watch blocking and scoring before I want to die?

No one liked the LPGA until there were cute women to watch. My impression of women's tennis is that it wasn't an en vogue spectator sport until people were interested in catching a glimpse of whatever was under those short skirts. Also the grunting.

Aside: I also hate the L in LPGA. I get that WPGA would take too long to say as an acronym, but the seniors tour gets to be the PGA Seniors Tour, so why not have the PGA Women's Tour?

It all bothers me. It's shameful that for women, sport and sex are so intrinsically linked. I agree with you that Roller Derby is preferable to the utterly disgusting spectacle that is lingerie football, but that’s because lingerie football isn’t a sport at all; I would argue that it’s not even a pretense of a sport. It’s an outdoor strip club minus the nudity. And it’s a distillation of everything that’s wrong with the presentation of women’s athletics. The majority of sports consumers are men, and ultimately, they would rather watch a football-themed floorshow than female athletes really playing football. In my head, I can actually hear the Western Male Psyche saying to me, “Women’s football league? Why do we need that? We’ve already got a football league.” (The more cynical part of me can also hear an ass being slapped and a demand to “get me some more beer, Sweet Cheeks.”)

My point is that I wish we were more careful, as a culture, about confounding sex and sport when it comes to women. I would agree with you that you’re a better man for being attracted to archetypes of strong, independent women, and for being generally uninterested in the assault on the women’s movement that is lingerie football. (Now, if you’re a dude who’s into it in the same way he’d be into a strip club floorshow, I think that’s an appropriate and understandable reaction.) But let’s be clear (and I think this is the point Beau was making before): you’re attracted to strong women, and roller derby is, in your experience, full of demonstrably strong women. That does not mean roller derby is an inherently sexier event. You’re also attracted to authenticity of experience. Lingerie football is a very poor football simulacrum. It’s not even a good stripper simulacrum because no one actually gets naked (I assume). And you saw real women doing real sport at the derby, so it wins on authenticity. But everytime we make a value judgement about which sport is better and include "which does a better job of turning me on" in the calculation, we're no longer talking about sports.

I don’t know if it’s possible for men to separate their enjoyment of athletic excellence from their sexual desire when it comes to women’s sports. But I do know that I don’t ever find myself thinking, “I prefer being forced to watch the Blazers over the Seahawks because they’re a better looking team and you can actually see their sexy, um… selves? …” even though that’s technically true, now that I think about it. But I do find myself thinking, every basketball season, “It could be worse. Pete could be a huge fan of the NFL, or baseball. ::shudder::” That is about sport: game length, game pace, frequency of scoring, and ability to see the action without six hundred replays. It does not occur to me that you could objectify male athletes while they’re playing because they’re too busy being, well, athletes. But it seems to occur to everyone that you not only can, but should, objectify female athletes. I assume, because they’re women. It would be dishonest of you to claim that you aren’t turned on by roller derby girls, and I applaud your honesty. But it would be nice if women's sports were as interesting to the general public on their athletic merits as men's.

Thesis: MTV should make music videos freely available

Does anyone watch MTV for music videos anymore? Can you even see them on MTV? They can't sell you albums if you never see them. And shows like TRL (which I don't think is even on the air anymore) relied on people knowing what videos they wanted to see before they called in. MTV ought to just make it all available online, like a Hulu for music videos. It can't possibly hurt viewership and it would sell more albums (if videos have ever had that effect). I'm sure the music industry would hate it and want royalties, but the networks have their own man-eating lawyers. Plus, you know they'd have ads and banners like everyone else, so they'd make more ad revenue that way. It would also give new bands a chance at a larger audience, the way MTV used to at its inception. When it played music.

The Next Facebook

Pete has asked a very valid question via stupidTwittergoddamnit: what is the next facebook that everyone's parents aren't on? Although neither of us would ever post anything to facebook that wasn't for general consumption, and both of us keep our pages private anyway, it's still mildly troubling that when a friend posts something profoundly stupid or grotesque, the older adults in my life can just bop on over to my page and check it out. Perhaps I shouldn't have friended them, but how cruel would it be to say to your mother, the woman who gave you life, "No, I'm worried you'll find my friends' fart jokes offensive. Or asinine. And then you won't want me to be friends with them." Okay, so this is not a literal issue for me. My friends don't tell fart jokes (at least not on facebook) and my mom wouldn't care (or notice) if they did. She has better things to do with her time and is a fully licensed and bonded member of the On-Line Community. But I think about other people's moms. If I comment on someone's picture that looks like they're getting a bj from a pirate statue, will their mom read it and think, "Oh my lands! mah baaaaby!" (All other people's moms sound like southern ladies from old Bugs Bunny cartoons in my head.)

Pete thinks they should just be generationally separated somehow. Maybe by reunion decade. All the people between grad and 10 years can see each other, but not those between 10 and 20. Or if you have kids who are old enough to understand what facebook is. My 15-year old cousin friended everyone in the family and we're all weirded out by it. Not because he isn't great (he is!), but because we lead completely different, non-intersecting-except-that-we're-related-and-see-each-other-at-holidays lives. I'm not in high school. He's not pondering how to advance his career, buy a house and start a family. It doesn't mean I don't love him or that I'm not interested in what he's up to; it just means I don't want to see his quiz results in my news feed (but which muppet is he?? and how does he even know what a muppet is! Jim Henson had been dead for almost four years by the time he was born!) and I don't want him to see my comments on people's crap on his (I guess I'm a balloon full of mayonnaise? whatever that means; I wanted to be a chair).

The thing is, facebook is the It thing right now, but remember when MySpace was all the rage? I kept hearing about it, but looking at one of those things feels like being hit in the face with epilepsy, so I was never personally interested. And now all the parents are getting into stupidTwittergoddamnit, so that we can all know when they've eaten a sandwich or if it's hot today or whatever it is that people tweet about. (When I investigated stupidTwittergoddamnit in grad school, lo these many (3) years ago, it seemed like all the posts were "I'm eating a ham sandwich" or "Home from work. TGIF, lol!" I have not seen any convincing evidence that things have changed much since then. And yes, I've seen Shaq's feed.) But that too shall pass. The truth of the matter is, in my opinion, our parents are always going to join new social networking stuff online because we'll always talk about it. Or people they work with will.

Ultimately, the best policy is the one drilled into you in kindergarten: If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. The internet is not the free-for-all, anything-goes, anonymity that many would like to believe it is. Everything can be traced back to its progenitor (or 4-Chan, but those are often one and the same) and eventually that fat guy at work is going to find out you refer to him as Muffin Stuffer "in your facebook"; your dad's brother-in-law is going to stumble upon that picture of him tripping over his own ridiculous lawn ornament on Fail Blog; and your grandmother is going to be horrified to discover that you're an atheist. Typing without thinking, editing, carefully weighing each potential misunderstanding, profits no one, and yet everyone does it everyday. Me, I'm trying to keep putting my foot in my mouth the old-fashioned way, by not thinking before I speak. (Yes, a superior at work actually said to me yesterday, "That's Dr. Dude to you," and for that, I thank her. It's good to be reminded that being friendly, that liking someone professionally, does not mean you're friends. Not in the fullest sense of the word, anyway.)

Cultral Tropes: Riding in Vehicles

On our way home from dinner tonight, Pete and I saw this great little MG convertible containing a guy and (probably) his son. It occurred to me that I don't think I've ever actually ridden in a convertible. I feel like I have. I've certainly seen enough of them and experienced it vicariously through TV and movies that this personal oversight has gone unmarked. That got me started on thinking about how many other vehicle-related cultural tropes there are that you might not actually ever experience without feeling any personal lack for not having done so. I'm going to start a list here of the ones I can think of. Maybe you have additions? How many of these things have you done? Have you ever thought, "Man, I'd really like to do that someday!" about any of them, or are these the kinds of things that no one ever really feels like they're missing out on? Here is my list. I've put an asterisk before the one's I've done.

• *Drive in general
• *Ride as a passenger in general
  
• Ride in a convertible
• *Ride in the back of a pick-up truck (in the bed)
  
• *Ride in a limo
• *Ride in a taxi in general
• *Ride in a yellow cab in New York
• *Ride in an old black taxi in London
  
• *Be driven in a town car
• Ride in an ATV
• Ride a motorcycle
• Ride a scooter/moped
• *Ride a bicycle
• Ride a tandem bicycle
• Ride in a car with your feet out the window (My mom has a terrible story about someone doing this that results in a broken leg, so I could never bring myself to do it.)
• *Ride a city bus
• *Ride the subway in any city
  
• Ride the subway in New York
• *Take a San Francisco trolley
• Ride in the Portland tram (gondola? what is that thing called again?)
• *Ride in a funicular
• Ride a Swiss gondola (the mountain kind)
  
• *Take a train in the US
• *Take a train in Europe
• Ride a train from one state to another
• *Ride a train from one country to another
  
• *Sleep in the sleeping car of a train
• Take the Trans-Siberian railroad
• Take the Orient Express (Can you even do this anymore?)
  
• *Drive from one state to another (Oregon to Washington doesn't count, Oregonians. And Virginia/Maryland/DC doesn't count, DC-area people.)
• *Drive across the US
• *Drive across a country other than the US
  
• *Drive between countries
• Drive between countries other than the US and Canada
• *Ride a ferry
• *Drive your car onto/off of a ferry
• Take a cruise
• *Canoe
• Kayak
• Whitewater raft
• Ride in a speedboat (Maybe? I don't think so, but I'm not sure)
• *Ride in a rowboat
• Ride in a Dragonboat
• Ride in a sailboat
• Ride in a Venetian gondola (Had the opportunity; couldn't bring ourselves to do it)
• *Take the Sternwheeler
• Ride in a Mississippi riverboat

Well, that's probably good enough. I probably shouldn't have bothered with the boats. In any case, I hope it's at least food for thought.

An Open Letter to the Loud Engine Dickwads Who Drive Past My House

Dear Dickwads,

Okay, I get it, you have small penes. But there are many quieter alternatives to an unmuffled exhaust system for letting everyone know that. For instance, you could just walk around pantsless wearing a t-shirt that reads, "Hey everyone, I've got a small penis!" Or, if that's too direct for you, what about silk shirts open to the navel so that everyone can see your copious chest hair and gold medallions? Gold medallions + chest hair + unbuttoned silk shirt = small penis. That is math anyone can do. Another idea is to join a glamrock Toby Keith cover band. See? I'm full of ideas here and all of them are quieter than your goddamned engines!

The thing is, when you drive by I can't hear my husband speak, I can't hear the TV or the radio, I can't hear myself think. Sure, I know you have a small penis (your obvious goal in all of this), but I can't, in point of fact, see you because - and this is crucial - I'm inside my house. So you have not actually achieved your goal at all! I know someone has a small penis, but it could be your neighbor, Silk Shirt Steve. Or any of your biker buddies, or the guys in your Assholes of America Car Club. See? The pantsless thing would work way better! I mean, I can’t see you when I’m in my living room trying to watch Miss Marple on OPB anyway. So there’s no need to alert me to the passing-by of a truly tiny John Thomas. But if you did the pantsless thing, or the cover band thing (I do live next to a live music venue!), the laughter of the people who could see you would alert me and make me come to the window. Then, voilá! You would achieve your goal of me knowing about your less than mighty member!

In conclusion: GET A GODDAMNED MUFFLER, ASSHOLES!

With ire and lip-curling, homicidal frustration,

Sydney

PS Maybe check the comments section for other ideas as to how you could more quietly share your little longfellow with the world. I have found the people who read my blog to be most helpful in all respects.

Blogging from my new phone!

Really I just want to see if this works. I have to say though, typing on the qwerty keyboard with my two thumbs makes me feel like one of the cool kids! Seriously, I'm pretty sure I am now both smarter and more attractive for using the internets with my thumbs. And I'm sure I look younger, and not that I wanted to look any younger, mind you. But I've just been notified that it's two on the morning, so I'm going to bed. TAH DAH!!

How did this ever sell beer?

Spuds McKenzie.

Evidence:



This one in particular:



And this exists. Seriously. I cannot believe my eyes, but this exists:



Alright, discuss.

"It's your f-ing duty, so just buy a GM already. Jesus!"

I know I'm a little behind on the times with this, and I've been meaning to write about it for a while, but I've been busy and haven't found the time. Until today! Because I'm home sick, and I'm bored and can't watch the TV because it is babysitting our niece!

Have you seen the GM rally cap ad? If not, here you go:



So. Right. I think it's just awful. Insulting, really.

"You know what America needs right now?"

Yes, in fact, yes I do. America needs equal pay for equal work. America needs health care coverage for all Americans. America needs her troops back home and getting the benefits they were promised and deserve. American needs her people to stop buying on credit and to learn to economize. America needs to educate all... What now? I'm sorry, what was that?

"America needs a come back."

Um, okay. I guess that's kind of the same thing, I mean, assuming we had all those things before the most recent economic crisis.

Nope, sorry: upon a quick check of any reference anywhere, we have never had those things, so a "come back" is setting the bar kind of low.

"Because we can do this, if we all start thinking differently."

Yeah, that's true! We can get this country all the things her citizens need and it will need to start with thinking differently!

Huh? Oh, you meant that whole "come back" thing. Right. So, um, how will thinking differently get us to this to the low bar you've set? It seems like "thinking samely" would be a better way to get back to where you were a decade ago.

"At GM, we're reinventing the entire company, starting with the ownership experience."

That is a great idea! Yes, make owning a GM like owning a better, more reliable car. Wait, can you just make a better, more reliable car instead?

"Introducing the Total Confidence Plan. It starts with up to nine months of payment protection. Lose your job? We'll make your payments, up to five hundred a month."

Okay, this seems like a nice thing to do, but is based on anything? What is the average length of time someone is out of a job these days? Will 9 months cover you? And what's the catch: do you have to make payments for 9 additional months once you get a new job? Also: why are you encouraging people to buy a new car with $500/month payments in this economy?? That just seems irresponsible.

"Then something you've never seen before: vehicle value protection. When you buy a new car, we'll help protect it's retail value at trade in time."

Again, unless you can make it be Not A GM, I don't see how this is possible. I assume it's because you'd be buying another GM. But doesn't that seem like blackmail? Or at least coercion?

"It also comes with our fully-backed, five-year/100,000 mile powertrain warranty, and the safety and security of On-Star, standard."

I'm just gonna go ahead and assume everyone hears "And believe us, you're gonna need it" after "warranty". On-Star just seems like bells and whistles to distract from the major faults inherent in any recent GM. And just as an aside: I have always wondered about the phrase, "fully-backed powertrain warranty." 1) Are you ever offered a "partially-backed" warranty? 2) Is it just on your powertrain? I assume that's something to do with the transmission. Or is it a PowerTrain warranty, like, it's as powerful as a train?

"It's time to reinvent, it's time to rally. It's time to come back with the total confidence plan."

Okay, where is the reinvention? You're still selling GMs. You have not once said that they will be of better quality, more reliable, better looking. Will they get better mileage? Will they have lower emissions? Will they buy you a puppy? You can't just point at a thing and say, "Ah, haha, I hereby reinvent this! See, it's reinvented!" It's not a performative, like pronouncing two people man and wife.

I'm going to skip over the next phrase for a moment to comment on the final sentence of the commercial (before they tell you to visit their website), but don't worry, I'll come back to it. (Ha! See what I did there?) Telling people "it's time to come back" implies that they were GM customers and left for whatever reason, but that those reasons are moot because they evidently signed some kind of agreement that after a certain amount of time, they would return to GMs cold, steel bosom. It's got this whole paternalistic vibe to it that, while appropriate for calling your kids in at night ("Kids! It's time for dinner! You have to come in, now!"), is not really appropriate for appealing to potential customers.

And now back to the phrase, "It's time to rally."

I guess the paternalism is really the core of what bothers me here. GM seems to believe that it has the right to tell you when to buy its vehicles and that it has simply held back in exercising that right because up until now, the economy was strong. They aren't saying, "These new models are totally awesome and address any, let alone all, of your concerns." They're saying, "Okay kids, it's time to suck it up! You have to buy a GM now!" And they're telling you that somehow this is going to fix America. That buying a GM is going to... what? Make us what we were? No, just make GM what it was. Kind of.

Finally, the whole rally cap thing strikes me as a misjudgement. If I understand the concept of the rally cap correctly, it's when fans turn their ball caps inside out if their team is losing near the end of the game. It's a show of support where there's nothing else you can do. (It's also another example of Magical Thinking in baseball, like the curse on the Cubs, but that is neither here nor there. I just think it's funny that baseball has more superstitions than a 17th century Welsh farmer.) So here is GM's basic thesis, in SAT syllogism format, as far as I can understand it.

Rally cap : Baseball game outcome :: Buying a GM : Fixing the economy

It implies that the only Americans who are cheering for the home team are those who are buying a GM. It implies that the average American cannot effect change in their country so they might as well give up on anything more significant than a symbolic gesture. It implies that GM has the right to make demands of you, that GM is the sole arbitrator of what is or is not American, and that like growing a Victory Garden in WWII, buying a GM in 2009 is a patriotic duty. And they're not going to offer you a goddamn thing to make it worth your while. 5 year/100,000 mile warranties and On Star are old hat; GM's been slapping those on their cars for years now.

The only things that are new are the "payment protection" plan (which also implies that you're likely to lose your job, making it unclear why you should be encouraging people to add another payment to their monthly bills) and the mythical "value protection" plan. I mean, whose to say in five years that they didn't do their damnedest to protect the retail value of your car, and they did, they really did, but gosh, how could they have known car values would drop by half, but they saved you some of that, so you're really only losing 40%, aren't they great?

What are your thoughts? Did this strike you as ridiculous as well? Were you insulted? Do you think anyone heard this message and went out and bought a GM?

Sydney Makes Things Up About Rebecca Haarlow (9)

Rebecca Haarlow is spending the off-season working on her soon-to-be-published, sure-to-be-a-best-seller academic tome, "1,001 Mopboy Nicknames and Their Origins."

Computer Nerds: Help My RSS Feed

Or the Portland Tribune. Whichever. Here is my brilliant idea that is possibly impossible and probably tedious. I subscribe to the Trib's RSS feed through NetNewsWire (it's a reader!). Every time they update a story (like change a misspelled word, add missing punctuation, add "alleged" between phrases like "a Tigard Man wanted for the" and "a Gresham Man wanted for the" and words like "murder" and "assault", etc.), I get a new item in my feed. I would like, when I read the most recent version of the story, for my reader to mark all prior versions as read. Either that or could someone send a tutorial to the Trib's web guy on how to edit stories before posting them. Or how to update an old post without creating a new one.

THAT IS ALL.

Thank you for your time.

Haha- did this edit just come up as a new item in a news feed? If so, sorry!

On Science and TV

TV and science have a rocky relationship. They love each other, but they don't really understand each other. Or rather, TV loves science with zero understanding of how it functions, much like the unworldly spinster and one Mr. Liberace. Oh sure, he's sparkly and glamorous, talented and good to his mother, but ladies: he's gay and he's passed on; he can never love you back and you are never going to have a little cottage together on the beach in Malibu. TV sits up at night drawing hearts around pictures of beakers and diagrams of atoms. It writes Mrs. T. V. Science on all its peechees in elaborate cursive.

But I digress... TV shows seem invariably drawn towards the scientific, and to my way of thinking, they are better when they recognize and accept that their love can never be and just shrug it off with a "yeah, but what if..." and a wistful smile. For example:

Star Trek.
How does warp speed work?
Crystals. It's science!

The X-Files.
How come things are unexplained in the world and mysterious?
Aliens. It's science!
(What's with the weird guy who ate you and then barfed you into an underground man-mould?
Uh, Indian folk magic? Look, we're just enjoying ourselves here.)

Heroes. (Okay- I only saw season 1. Maybe they have fucked it up. I don't know.)
What's with the super powers?
What do you want from us- they're super powers.

Star Wars & Firefly.
So, spaceships, eh? Laser guns? Chinese and English in the same sentence?
Time out of mind! The distant past, the distant future and far far away.

Law & Order.
Forensics, that's got beakers and stuff, right?
We're only civil servants! It takes weeks, nay, months!, to get results on this stuff. We don't need to understand it, we just need to do our due diligence. Hey- look at that shouty guy over there!

These programs accept that they are entertainment. People don't watch Firefly to learn how spaceships fly; they watch because it's awesome. They don't watch Law & Order because they want a lesson on Watson and Crick; they want a police procedural. (Don't worry, I'm getting to CSI: Branson.)

What was great about the X-Files, I have come to realize, was that half the time Mulder just shrugged and grinned his goofy half-grin at whomever he was with, as if to say, "I know, right? Crazy times!" The other half of the time Mulder burst into a room, shouting, "Scully! I have an insane conspiracy theory about alien technologies or something!" And Scully would do an awesome Leela impression ("Oh lord, he's made of wood"), her hand on her brow as she looked at the floor, gathering strength to soldier on.

One of my favorite scenes in Star Trek was in one of the movies, the one where they travel back in time, and the doctor is in a hospital. He passes a guy on a stretcher, checks his chart while he surreptitiously scans him. When he looks at the chart and his tricorder or whathaveyou, you exclaims, "My god, the barbarians!" because they're going to remove the patient's kidney or something. I think he says, "I can cure him!" and zaps him with his Future Technology and like magic, er, I mean, science, the man is cured! Yay! No one pauses to explain how it theoretically works. It's a grey box. It has a red light and a touch screen. It makes noises. You point it at a guy and push the screen to make the noises and it fixes the guy. SCIENCE!

But not everyone is the cool girl at the party who just kind of hangs by the tin tub full of melting ice and light beer looking awesome in her skinny jeans and old concert t-shirt saying, "What's up" to everyone who passes by, laughing at jokes, just, like, being cool. Someone has to be the over-eager girl at the front door putting everyone's jacket on the bed in the guest room, laughing too loudly so everyone knows she's having a good time, doing one shot after much preamble and immediately vomiting into the kitchen garbage can. That girl is the show whose entire season I recently watched on Hulu. That girl is Fringe. Fringe has carefully coordinated her headband, belt and socks without noticing that she is a bald double-amputee in sansabelt pants. Fringe practices opening conversational salvos in the mirror before going out only to overwhelm strangers with stories about her dead cat ("ohmygodMittensItwassosad") told in a rushed, overloud voice. You can't dislike her because she's trying so hard. But the closest you can get to liking her is pity, and that makes you feel kind of icky.

Fringe spends about a quarter of each episode providing "plausible" explanations for how its "science" works. This is a terrible mistake because it's all so easy to understand and therefore feels, well, unscientific. (On a related note: part of how ER sounds authentic to the layman is the amount of jargon they use in the "medical" parts of the show. You're not meant to understand it. You're supposed to just let it wash over you, a wave of medicalese to set the mood.) Fringe insists on explaining things in words I know, which really takes away from the authenticity (for lack of a better word) because I'm pretty sure I don't understand advanced genetics, biochemistry and physics.

In a recent episode, one of the characters asks, "Tell me: did the creature have the arms of a tiger, the body of a scorpion and the tail of a rattlesnake?" He later exclaims, "Bat DNA! Of course! That was the missing ingredient." Um, right. I know they're going to glibness-in-the-face-of-incredible-weirdness as their attempt at The Cool Girl, but it just comes off like a poor imitation. (Oh Lord, she's put on her Osmunds t-shirt.) Fringe would be so much better if it took a page from the X-Files and used that time for character development and to generate an atmosphere. J J Abrams: more shrugging, less fakey science.

The sad thing is, like CSI: Frankfort, Explaining The Science is part of the salespitch. The difference is that CSI: knows what its audience wants, namely ballistic gel and mood lighting. I don't get the impression that it thinks its a great police procedural ("Yes, let the CSIs make the arrest! They're all armed and go in for busts all the time!") or even much of a mystery show ("Huh, you say he was holding the gun and confessed to firing it? I dunno guys, sounds like a real poser!"). It is a showcase for Future Technology and lighting design and it seems happy with that. (CSI: Miami, of course, is a showcase for David Caruso's mad standing-at-an-angle skills and Khandi Alexander's awesome cleavage, if little else. Personally, I can't watch either show and I refuse to acknowledge the existence of NCIS and CIS: Big Apple. But that is neither here nor there.)

Fringe doesn't seem to know what its audience wants. Sometimes it thinks the viewer wants to know how the actual molecular reactions work. But then it gets bored (and also, it doesn't know what it's talking about anyway) and so then it thinks the viewer wants Action. There is a flurry of activity where people can travel across the country in a single hour, where there is always interagency cooperation and no one ever asks the protagonist about her crazy diction (what is up with Anna Torv's accent?). No, no, the people want to see monsters! Enter the bad CGI... Now maybe a love interest? No, no they're just friends. (Another digression: there was one moment between Anna Torv and Joshua Jackson, of Dawson's Creek fame, where, to comfort her -as a friend, mind you- he reaches out cups her face in hand, running his fingers into her hair and then drawing her to him to hold her while she weeps (? I don't know-maybe she was just sleepy). I tried to imagine one of my friends doing this and all I could see was a Craft Night gone horribly, hilariously wrong. I tried to imagine two friends of the same gender touching each other like that. Nope: that move is for lovers only, guys.

But back to the science thing. I'm really kind of disappointed. How is it possible that writers and TV producers don't get that you don't have to explain every goddamn thing?

Star Trek, how do your transporters work?
They break you down into your constituent parts and then reassemble you somewhere else.
No, really: how do they work?
It's future science! Just climb right in- it's awesome and it works every time, except for that time we beamed Spock half way into a rock and Bones had to build him a bionic ass. But that at least was funny!

Fringe, how does teleportation work?
Well, you see, you break the object or person down into is constituent parts and then reassemble it somewhere else. There is this ring-thingy that you have to build on the receiving end of the process, but not on the starting end. Did we mention this is advanced Quantum Physics? Yeah, it totally is. Real bleeding edge. But the object being teleported gets a large dose of radiation, so if it's a person, they better wear gloves and sunscreen!
No, really: how... wait, what? Sunscreen protects you from radiation when you're broken down into a bunch of molecules? That doesn't make sense!
Uh oh... Cheese it!

Is it to make up for not having enough plot? For having wooden actors? (Or in Joshua Jackson's case, actors who somehow manage to make bedroom eyes in every scene regardless of what's going on.) Does Fringe think its "science" gives it a veneer of legitimacy? Because it's like calling a ratty old Osmunds t-shirt "My Rock'n'Roll Shirt." I don't think Fringe could be saved from being so-so at best even with a She's All That nerd-to-hot-chick makeover. (And not just because the "nerd" in that scenario was acutally a hot chick with glasses and a pony tail.) I keep watching it because I don't really have to pay attention, so I can knit at the same time, and I can watch it on my computer when Pete is watching endless basketball. And I don't find it unbearable. I mean, it's not Two and a Half Men or anything. But good lord it makes the tiny, atrophied fraction of my brain that was been devoted to studies loosely labeled "science" cringe.