I recently came across two links to mock Powerpoint Presentations.
http://home.nyc.rr.com/dradosh/ppaol.html&e=7620
http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm
Of course they mock powerpoint by showing how it could make great works common, even laughable.
Today in class, I had the opposite experience. The presentation of a man's pitiful (in the most literal sense) life made it hilarious. After spending 5 weeks teaching us his theory of the world of Linguistic Evolution, he had us read a dissenting opinion. Fair enough. And then in class, he described the clash of the minds he had personally had with the author.
Long story short: my prof said the author of the article had not really disagreed. In fact, the author came to my prof's aid when the author was also the editor of a journal my prof was submitting to. He switched slides, and we got a glimpse of this "defense." Snippets I can remember of this alleged defense, "though [my prof]'s tone is admittedly grating, he may be proved to be right in a few decades" and "I would push to allow [my prof] to resubmit this paper after fixing many widespread criticisms". This man was taking his personal correspondence and showing it to all of us, seeming unaware that his best ally was only praising with faint damn! Note to self: make sure to redact all mentions of phallus as "not intolerably small" in collected letters before dying.
In any case, many good htoughts. Look in the coming months on this blog for a short story written in .ppt (that's Powerpoint format, you technically illiterates).
Friday, April 29, 2005
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Pissing in the Wind: Food Rainbow
I know that Dan & Dan will probably poo-poo the government's newly designed Food Rainbow, but let me be the first to say that I think this is the greatest idea ever. That's right, EVER. I mean, this makes Dewey Decimal look like a retard.
Consider the old system. You have different food "groups" like meats, vegetables, dairy, etc., with the most important group forming the bottom, or "base," of the pyramid. But here's the tricky part: the pyramid if full of words. Words spelled out with letters. Letters, for God's sake! Excuse me, Food & Drug Administration, but I didn't come hear to pass a reading test, I came her to eat, dammit!
Herein lies the genius of the new system. Drawing on the success of the Homeland Security threat system, the new food pyramid uses colors. Accessible, easy to understand, colors. Eating is no longer just for the English-speaking, literate Americans ( i.e. liberals and their activist/homosexual judges), it's for everyone. This is democracy at its finest.
Q: "But what if I'm blind and I can't see anything, how am I supposed to know what to eat?"
A: "You'll eat whatever the hell I put in your cage, dammit."
Some critics charge that the new system is more "confusing" or "difficult" than the old system. Some critics also have "shit for brains." But I digress. Under the old system, if you wanted to know what food group a food was in--for example, yogurt--you needed to think. You needed to think about whether yogurt came from a cow (dairy group), whether it had seeds (fruit group), or whether it was spore-based (meats & vegetable group). But with beautiful new (techni)color system, you need only associate a food with a color.
Take a look at the new rainbow pyramid. Orange stands for grains, Green stands for vegetables, Red for fruits, Yellow for oils, Light Blue/teal for dairy, and Indigo for meats & beans. So what color is yogurt? If it's plain yogurt, it's white. That color isn't in the food pyramid, so you shouldn't eat it. If it's flavored yogurt, say, blueberry, it's probably some sort of a bluish-purple. If it's more blue than purple, it's in the Dairy group, and if it's a darkish purple, it's in the Meats & Beans group. Then I want you to ask yourself: do you really want to eat a Meat & Beans yogurt? I didn't think so. Find a different colored yogurt and start again.
"Wow, the new rainbow pyramid is so easy to use, why didn't they think of that in the first place?"
Good question. When the original monochrome food pyramid was released in 1992, the world was a different place. Buffalos roamed free throughout the Midwest, presidents were free to engage in acts of extra-marital fellatio, and a little thing called "focus groups" had yet to be invented. As noted in the official Mypyramid.gov website:
In other words, pretty colors test well. Hence the updated and more scientific color pyramid.
"But wait? With the old food pyramid, I knew the group at the bottom was more important than the group up top. With the new system, how do I tell what group is most important? This rainbow has no bottom. For the love of God this rainbow has no bottom!"
First off, I'm not going to answer your question unless you put some pants on. Secondly, the new pyramid doesn't even need a bottom. The bigger the sliver of color, the more important. See the picture below for details:
Consider the old system. You have different food "groups" like meats, vegetables, dairy, etc., with the most important group forming the bottom, or "base," of the pyramid. But here's the tricky part: the pyramid if full of words. Words spelled out with letters. Letters, for God's sake! Excuse me, Food & Drug Administration, but I didn't come hear to pass a reading test, I came her to eat, dammit!
Herein lies the genius of the new system. Drawing on the success of the Homeland Security threat system, the new food pyramid uses colors. Accessible, easy to understand, colors. Eating is no longer just for the English-speaking, literate Americans ( i.e. liberals and their activist/homosexual judges), it's for everyone. This is democracy at its finest.
Q: "But what if I'm blind and I can't see anything, how am I supposed to know what to eat?"
A: "You'll eat whatever the hell I put in your cage, dammit."
Some critics charge that the new system is more "confusing" or "difficult" than the old system. Some critics also have "shit for brains." But I digress. Under the old system, if you wanted to know what food group a food was in--for example, yogurt--you needed to think. You needed to think about whether yogurt came from a cow (dairy group), whether it had seeds (fruit group), or whether it was spore-based (meats & vegetable group). But with beautiful new (techni)color system, you need only associate a food with a color.
Take a look at the new rainbow pyramid. Orange stands for grains, Green stands for vegetables, Red for fruits, Yellow for oils, Light Blue/teal for dairy, and Indigo for meats & beans. So what color is yogurt? If it's plain yogurt, it's white. That color isn't in the food pyramid, so you shouldn't eat it. If it's flavored yogurt, say, blueberry, it's probably some sort of a bluish-purple. If it's more blue than purple, it's in the Dairy group, and if it's a darkish purple, it's in the Meats & Beans group. Then I want you to ask yourself: do you really want to eat a Meat & Beans yogurt? I didn't think so. Find a different colored yogurt and start again.
"Wow, the new rainbow pyramid is so easy to use, why didn't they think of that in the first place?"
Good question. When the original monochrome food pyramid was released in 1992, the world was a different place. Buffalos roamed free throughout the Midwest, presidents were free to engage in acts of extra-marital fellatio, and a little thing called "focus groups" had yet to be invented. As noted in the official Mypyramid.gov website:
As part of the design and development process, potential images and messages were tested with consumers to determine how well they communicated the intended content and how appealing they were to consumers. The results from the consumer research were used to revise and finalize the consumer materials so that consumers can more easily understand these messages and incorporate them into their lifestyle.
In other words, pretty colors test well. Hence the updated and more scientific color pyramid.
"But wait? With the old food pyramid, I knew the group at the bottom was more important than the group up top. With the new system, how do I tell what group is most important? This rainbow has no bottom. For the love of God this rainbow has no bottom!"
First off, I'm not going to answer your question unless you put some pants on. Secondly, the new pyramid doesn't even need a bottom. The bigger the sliver of color, the more important. See the picture below for details:
"OK, I see the Yellow group is the smallest, and the Indigo one looks a bit smaller than the Red. But I think the Green and teal are about the same size. Why not do some other design like a graph or pie chart?"
Another good question, but the good folks at MyPyramid are one step ahead of you. As they note, "Several designs were tested. Pyramid-shaped designs, Pyramid-like designs and non-Pyramid designs were all tested with consumers."
You see that part about "non-Pyramid designs," smart-ass. They tested it and it failed. Failed miserably, in fact. When the non-pyramid design was tested on the focus group, they were so confused they were eating 20 serving of cottage cheese a day, and drinking a glass of marinara sauce with each meal.
"OK, you've convinced me that the new color-based pyramid is more efficient than the old one, and it seems like even a Swede could understand the new version. But what about that man climbing the stairs in that picture? Is that supposed to symbolize something?"
Actually, no. He's just lost.
(Same post, different blog)
Another good question, but the good folks at MyPyramid are one step ahead of you. As they note, "Several designs were tested. Pyramid-shaped designs, Pyramid-like designs and non-Pyramid designs were all tested with consumers."
You see that part about "non-Pyramid designs," smart-ass. They tested it and it failed. Failed miserably, in fact. When the non-pyramid design was tested on the focus group, they were so confused they were eating 20 serving of cottage cheese a day, and drinking a glass of marinara sauce with each meal.
"OK, you've convinced me that the new color-based pyramid is more efficient than the old one, and it seems like even a Swede could understand the new version. But what about that man climbing the stairs in that picture? Is that supposed to symbolize something?"
Actually, no. He's just lost.
(Same post, different blog)
Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Pissing In The Wind: Shape of the Shapely
In the Beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth. Food was provided for you, heck! The mutton was right next to the... lion... meat. Where else could you turn one picked-clean rib into two sides of meat (with a nice rack). Take that Olive Garden, you're no restaurant compared to the Eden Garden! But that same piece of fruit that gave us the Original Sin of Knowledge gave us both Shame and Vanity. We've all seen the drawings of Eve covering herself with shrubbery when she realizes for the first time ever nudity's incorrectness. The part of the story they don't tell you is that the first thing she said after that was, "Does this fig leaf make me look fat?"
Soon afterwards, brothers became murderers, extra people conveniently popped up, so-and-so begat a-lot-of-effing-people, and hunters became gatherers. We ate whatever we could catch/steal from the hyenae. In the words of an NPR story about what we found in the dried-up shitters of Vikings, they ate "meat, beer, and more meet." Or maybe it was the other way around.
But during the 1950's, everything became standardized. Students across the country learned to be vaporized in the same under-desk crouch. Across the country you could get the same sub-standard beef (hopefully it's beef) at Kroc's McDonald's, and we could live in the same houses on identical cul-de-sacs as the Cookie Cutter made its first appearance as a tool of the architect. The food square showed us that we needed to get different types of food. Three-thousand calories from those delectable apple pie concoctions that have never been near either an apple nor a pie from the Golden Arches does not a balanced diet make.
But that wasn't quite precise enough. And in the 90's we wanted to be exact. Title IX funding had to be even to a percent. Affirmative Action soared, and though school bussing firms went bankrupt, the formerly destitute specialists in impeaching presidents returned to the African American ("back in the black"). Thus the food pyramid. Everyone of the age 16-24 in this fine Republic learned it. For approximately 15 seconds. Before summarizing the information as, if society's is any indication, "Yes, I'd love you to supersize that."
All this was enough propaganda about common sense. But no. The pyramid was a familiar object, constructed of successively smaller blocks. Instead, let's instill in our children a fear of geometry by releasing this absurd assortment of amalgamated frightfully-Angled three-sided monstrosities. What? I mean, what? No, seriously, what the hell? Is this the only way that Americans under the Bush Administration can digest information? Can we not add? Were percent RDA's not enough? Commentators, tell me, what USA Today-worthy graphic describes your diet?
Soon afterwards, brothers became murderers, extra people conveniently popped up, so-and-so begat a-lot-of-effing-people, and hunters became gatherers. We ate whatever we could catch/steal from the hyenae. In the words of an NPR story about what we found in the dried-up shitters of Vikings, they ate "meat, beer, and more meet." Or maybe it was the other way around.
But during the 1950's, everything became standardized. Students across the country learned to be vaporized in the same under-desk crouch. Across the country you could get the same sub-standard beef (hopefully it's beef) at Kroc's McDonald's, and we could live in the same houses on identical cul-de-sacs as the Cookie Cutter made its first appearance as a tool of the architect. The food square showed us that we needed to get different types of food. Three-thousand calories from those delectable apple pie concoctions that have never been near either an apple nor a pie from the Golden Arches does not a balanced diet make.
But that wasn't quite precise enough. And in the 90's we wanted to be exact. Title IX funding had to be even to a percent. Affirmative Action soared, and though school bussing firms went bankrupt, the formerly destitute specialists in impeaching presidents returned to the African American ("back in the black"). Thus the food pyramid. Everyone of the age 16-24 in this fine Republic learned it. For approximately 15 seconds. Before summarizing the information as, if society's is any indication, "Yes, I'd love you to supersize that."
All this was enough propaganda about common sense. But no. The pyramid was a familiar object, constructed of successively smaller blocks. Instead, let's instill in our children a fear of geometry by releasing this absurd assortment of amalgamated frightfully-Angled three-sided monstrosities. What? I mean, what? No, seriously, what the hell? Is this the only way that Americans under the Bush Administration can digest information? Can we not add? Were percent RDA's not enough? Commentators, tell me, what USA Today-worthy graphic describes your diet?
Monday, April 25, 2005
Untimely Meditations
This morning, at 4:23 AM Greenwich Mean time, I was jolted awake from sleep; sticky with sweat, heart pounding, hands trembling and fixated...on that one eternally plaguing, endlessly nagging, infinitely mind-gnawing question:
Does Affleck regret every time he fucked her missionary?
...That we might all die wondering counts as proof that the Nihilists are right.
Does Affleck regret every time he fucked her missionary?
...That we might all die wondering counts as proof that the Nihilists are right.
Sunday, April 24, 2005
Lightning Strikes (Not Once But Twice)
Tragedy befalls all of us. But not evenly. Some of us live on Park Avenue (just adoring a penthouse view), some of us have those we love killed and maimed (possibly raped) (probably not in any of the orders I just described). Of course I grieve for those people, yadda yadda, showing reasonable human emotion.
This NYTimes article tells the story of a man who lost 2 wives/girlfriends. Wow. What a tragedy. What a story. What are the odds that two deaths close to him would each be ruled homicides? Wait a minute...
He's now been charged with the second murder (he remains the only viable suspect in the first). The English major in me, though, is conflicted. What was his tragic flaw? Was it hubris (I've gotten away with one murder, I can do another)? Greed (I don't need a third BabyMama)? Crimal Ineptitude(Cause bullets to the head leave so little forensical evidence)?
The point is, save your sick days. You only get so many free passes in life, whether it be missing a meeting at work or prematurely ending the life of a woman you once loved. So make sure this is really the day at school you dread the most or the chick whose voice gets on your nerves the most.
(P.S., the title is a reference to, among other things, a The Clash song off Sandinista, their tremendouly bizarre triple album.)
This NYTimes article tells the story of a man who lost 2 wives/girlfriends. Wow. What a tragedy. What a story. What are the odds that two deaths close to him would each be ruled homicides? Wait a minute...
He's now been charged with the second murder (he remains the only viable suspect in the first). The English major in me, though, is conflicted. What was his tragic flaw? Was it hubris (I've gotten away with one murder, I can do another)? Greed (I don't need a third BabyMama)? Crimal Ineptitude(Cause bullets to the head leave so little forensical evidence)?
The point is, save your sick days. You only get so many free passes in life, whether it be missing a meeting at work or prematurely ending the life of a woman you once loved. So make sure this is really the day at school you dread the most or the chick whose voice gets on your nerves the most.
(P.S., the title is a reference to, among other things, a The Clash song off Sandinista, their tremendouly bizarre triple album.)
Saturday, April 23, 2005
We've all heard the joke about a guy who dreams that he's eating a 25-pound marshmallow, then when he wakes up his pillow is gone. Now, personally, I never quite understand how that qualified as a joke to begin with. But after a particularly restless sleep, I woke up one morning to find that I had taken the pillowcase off my pillow, and laid it neatly across the top. I ask you to consider: what kind of a dream *was* I having?
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
Vs. Man Machine Part 3
So humans will always be bribable, and computers, if they are halfway decent, will learn that bribes are the way of the future for the same reason they were the reason of the past: they make sense. The solution?
To be perfectly honest, I've never taken an economics class. So what I'm about to say is about as intelligent as what I have to say about, well, anything. But this, more than most of my rantings, is informed by scary dreams about supply and demand curves trying to eat me in my sleep. It seems like there's a rather fixed number of people who want to bribe (call them everyone) and a fixed amount of money that can be spent on bribing (everything). It seems like the problem is that, roughly, we're pushing "everything" into the hands of a relatively small number of "crooks". Every so often, these crooks are stupid and try to do things that, well, they deserve to be caught for. Clandestine immorality greases many a wheels of society; inept crime only loses limbs and sinks ships.
Instead, let us all accept bribes in exchange for, here's the key part, nothing. That's right: let's let anybody who wants buy our judges vacations: they deserve them. Encourage a mobster to send pizza to police stations. They can try all they want. But now that politicians are allowed to take Indians' money, instead of just their land, it'll be acceptable to renege (Indian-give) a promise to support a ballot initiative.
We can compartmentalize our corruption, and in so doing reclaim American politics by admitting it's dirty. Rent out the Lincoln Bedroom, but do it openly enough that presidents won't feel obligated to pardon the obviously guilty (you're still allowed to grant clemency to those technically felons, as long as there's some cause/institution/cross they claim to have been martyred for). Heck, the greatest example of this kind of dealing is none other than our former President William Jefferson Clinton. Walk up to him on the street and offer him 20 bucks for Social Security Reform. He will look you in the eye, speak of a bridge to this century, and promise you he'll work with Congress to ensure that yadda yadda and we'll utilize this and that, et cetera et cetera. And he'll be gone into the twilight of Secret Service protection before you can realize that he's just another middle-aged out-of-work man with a bum ticker living in Harlem who has as much chance of passing meaningful legislation as Harry Reid.
To be perfectly honest, I've never taken an economics class. So what I'm about to say is about as intelligent as what I have to say about, well, anything. But this, more than most of my rantings, is informed by scary dreams about supply and demand curves trying to eat me in my sleep. It seems like there's a rather fixed number of people who want to bribe (call them everyone) and a fixed amount of money that can be spent on bribing (everything). It seems like the problem is that, roughly, we're pushing "everything" into the hands of a relatively small number of "crooks". Every so often, these crooks are stupid and try to do things that, well, they deserve to be caught for. Clandestine immorality greases many a wheels of society; inept crime only loses limbs and sinks ships.
Instead, let us all accept bribes in exchange for, here's the key part, nothing. That's right: let's let anybody who wants buy our judges vacations: they deserve them. Encourage a mobster to send pizza to police stations. They can try all they want. But now that politicians are allowed to take Indians' money, instead of just their land, it'll be acceptable to renege (Indian-give) a promise to support a ballot initiative.
We can compartmentalize our corruption, and in so doing reclaim American politics by admitting it's dirty. Rent out the Lincoln Bedroom, but do it openly enough that presidents won't feel obligated to pardon the obviously guilty (you're still allowed to grant clemency to those technically felons, as long as there's some cause/institution/cross they claim to have been martyred for). Heck, the greatest example of this kind of dealing is none other than our former President William Jefferson Clinton. Walk up to him on the street and offer him 20 bucks for Social Security Reform. He will look you in the eye, speak of a bridge to this century, and promise you he'll work with Congress to ensure that yadda yadda and we'll utilize this and that, et cetera et cetera. And he'll be gone into the twilight of Secret Service protection before you can realize that he's just another middle-aged out-of-work man with a bum ticker living in Harlem who has as much chance of passing meaningful legislation as Harry Reid.
Monday, April 18, 2005
Gullibles' Travels
Having returned from my trip to France and Spain, and having rested comfortably in an undisclosed London flat before my return to Oxford, I thought that I'd take a minute to jot down 31 things which are true about the places I've visited:
1) In Paris, there is no such thing as 'speaking a bit of French', or 'kind of speaking French'. You either know their language or you don't. And if you don't, they won't have any of your stumbling gestures and awkward phraseology. They simply deal with you in English.
2) This refusal to let you butcher French stems from a deep-seated pathos which takes linguistic competence to be a measure of one's membership in a certain club.
3) Americans' offense at foreigners' incompetence in English issues from impatience; French offense at foreigners' incompetence in French issues from aesthetic disgust. For the American, you've wasted his time; for the Frenchman, you've broken his heart.
4) In the Louvre, one of the largest and most-frequented museums on the planet, housing art and artefacts from all corners of the earth, all the captions are in French. Thankfully, the signs telling you what you may not touch and where you may not go are translated into English.
5) The Eiffel Tower is NOT, as some would have it, a romantic figure. Nor is it a Romantic one. It is a monument of raw, metal-and-brawn Modernity. An unrelenting, inorganic labyrinth of Euclidian perfection; ultimately cold and rational, not wistful and nostalgic.
6) This being said, it is one of the most beautiful beasts hatched from Modernity's cast-iron womb.
7) If it's postcards featuring naked ladies of sundry stock and repute you're after, the banks of the Seine is where to get them.
8) Nice, on the Cote d'azur, is a beautiful town with rocky beaches, clear green water and sea breezes, delicious food and Provencal hospitality.
9) It is also the dogshit capital of the world.
10) If you stay at the Villa St. Exupery hostel, a converted monestary in the hills above Nice, you will come to understand that the fabled American backpacker class is very real, and comprised of individuals both younger and older than you think, whose ranks seem free of responsibility, well-fed and clothed, and more than adequately funded.
11) Many of them say things like "Venice is beautiful in a way I can't describe", as a preface to lengthy description of Venice's beauty.
12) Counterintuitively, the American backpacker does not embark on a tour of Europe in an effort to become worldly. Rather, it is his very self-perceived antecedent worldliness which for him justifies the tour.
13) During the 10 days of the film festival, the town of Cannes is marked by its exclusive shops, trendy restaurants, and slick cosmopolitan disposition, as a playground for the rich and famous.
14) During the 355 days between film festivals, the town of Cannes is marked by its exclusive shops, trendy restaurants, and slick cosmopolitan disposition, as a playground for no one.
15) If all of France were like Aix-en-Provence, then all the world would would want to be like France.
16) The street-corner t-shirt market in Western Europe is dominated by the twin pillars of Che Guevera and Iron Maiden.
17) If you've taken six years of high school Spanish, or minor in it in college, good luck in Barcelona.
18) Don't let the deliciousness of the paella you're eating, or the street-fiend who asks for a cigarette distract you when sitting in Plaza Reial in Barcelona. If you do, some guy selling model sailboats will run off with your favorite old backback which contains nothing but a bar of soap and a hardcover copy of an out of print book on Heidegger.
19) I'm just saying.
20) There are few favorite-old-packbacks and hardcover-copies-of-out-of-print-books-on-Heidegger in this world that a pitcher of sangria and a day on the beach won't help you forget.
21) I don't know if they had crack in 1881, but if they did, then Gaudi was on it when he designed La Sagrada Familia
22) Pamplona counts as proof that Ernest Hemingway knew what was best in life.
23) A hypothetical and a piece of advice: suppose Paz Vega is the bartender at a little joint off the beaten track somewhere in the mountains of northern Spain. She approaches you, and in her best broken English, asks you if you'd like some tapas, or (with a wink-wink) if you'd prefer some 'Tap-Ass'...Look, all I mean is its a tough call.
24) They don't tell you in your booking confirmation, but a lot of hostels close at midnight. Fortunately, park benches are open 24 hours a day.
25) The train from the Spanish border to Biarritz in France is 40 minutes.
26) It only takes you the first two minutes to realize that the long-held Fosterism--"the only good thing about French men is their close resemblence to French women"--is false. Frenchman aren't ther worst thing in the world. There are at least three worse things:
26a) Drunken Frenchmen
26b) Drunken soccer hooligan Frenchmen
26c) Drunken soccer hooligan Frenchmen from the region in and around Biarritz. In other words, BASK Frenchmen.
27) In today's communication age, a good way to avoid terrerist reprisals for insulting remarks is to misspell words like "BASK" and "terrerist"
28) When confronted by a coach full (+ - 75) of 26c who have made it evident that their desire is to fight you, a stout constitution and a healthy bloodlust won't cut it in the weapons department.
29) Some things that will:
29a) A claymore
29b) A claymore
28c) A flamethrower
28d) One of these, and a bunch of this
29) A Disclaimer: Of course, I wished no ill will towards any of my BASK brothers. I only wanted to read in peace.
30) I love the BASKS. As a matter of fact, I own a raspberry beret.
31) The difference between a vacation and a trip is, after a trip you need a vacation.
1) In Paris, there is no such thing as 'speaking a bit of French', or 'kind of speaking French'. You either know their language or you don't. And if you don't, they won't have any of your stumbling gestures and awkward phraseology. They simply deal with you in English.
2) This refusal to let you butcher French stems from a deep-seated pathos which takes linguistic competence to be a measure of one's membership in a certain club.
3) Americans' offense at foreigners' incompetence in English issues from impatience; French offense at foreigners' incompetence in French issues from aesthetic disgust. For the American, you've wasted his time; for the Frenchman, you've broken his heart.
4) In the Louvre, one of the largest and most-frequented museums on the planet, housing art and artefacts from all corners of the earth, all the captions are in French. Thankfully, the signs telling you what you may not touch and where you may not go are translated into English.
5) The Eiffel Tower is NOT, as some would have it, a romantic figure. Nor is it a Romantic one. It is a monument of raw, metal-and-brawn Modernity. An unrelenting, inorganic labyrinth of Euclidian perfection; ultimately cold and rational, not wistful and nostalgic.
6) This being said, it is one of the most beautiful beasts hatched from Modernity's cast-iron womb.
7) If it's postcards featuring naked ladies of sundry stock and repute you're after, the banks of the Seine is where to get them.
8) Nice, on the Cote d'azur, is a beautiful town with rocky beaches, clear green water and sea breezes, delicious food and Provencal hospitality.
9) It is also the dogshit capital of the world.
10) If you stay at the Villa St. Exupery hostel, a converted monestary in the hills above Nice, you will come to understand that the fabled American backpacker class is very real, and comprised of individuals both younger and older than you think, whose ranks seem free of responsibility, well-fed and clothed, and more than adequately funded.
11) Many of them say things like "Venice is beautiful in a way I can't describe", as a preface to lengthy description of Venice's beauty.
12) Counterintuitively, the American backpacker does not embark on a tour of Europe in an effort to become worldly. Rather, it is his very self-perceived antecedent worldliness which for him justifies the tour.
13) During the 10 days of the film festival, the town of Cannes is marked by its exclusive shops, trendy restaurants, and slick cosmopolitan disposition, as a playground for the rich and famous.
14) During the 355 days between film festivals, the town of Cannes is marked by its exclusive shops, trendy restaurants, and slick cosmopolitan disposition, as a playground for no one.
15) If all of France were like Aix-en-Provence, then all the world would would want to be like France.
16) The street-corner t-shirt market in Western Europe is dominated by the twin pillars of Che Guevera and Iron Maiden.
17) If you've taken six years of high school Spanish, or minor in it in college, good luck in Barcelona.
18) Don't let the deliciousness of the paella you're eating, or the street-fiend who asks for a cigarette distract you when sitting in Plaza Reial in Barcelona. If you do, some guy selling model sailboats will run off with your favorite old backback which contains nothing but a bar of soap and a hardcover copy of an out of print book on Heidegger.
19) I'm just saying.
20) There are few favorite-old-packbacks and hardcover-copies-of-out-of-print-books-on-Heidegger in this world that a pitcher of sangria and a day on the beach won't help you forget.
21) I don't know if they had crack in 1881, but if they did, then Gaudi was on it when he designed La Sagrada Familia
22) Pamplona counts as proof that Ernest Hemingway knew what was best in life.
23) A hypothetical and a piece of advice: suppose Paz Vega is the bartender at a little joint off the beaten track somewhere in the mountains of northern Spain. She approaches you, and in her best broken English, asks you if you'd like some tapas, or (with a wink-wink) if you'd prefer some 'Tap-Ass'...Look, all I mean is its a tough call.
24) They don't tell you in your booking confirmation, but a lot of hostels close at midnight. Fortunately, park benches are open 24 hours a day.
25) The train from the Spanish border to Biarritz in France is 40 minutes.
26) It only takes you the first two minutes to realize that the long-held Fosterism--"the only good thing about French men is their close resemblence to French women"--is false. Frenchman aren't ther worst thing in the world. There are at least three worse things:
26a) Drunken Frenchmen
26b) Drunken soccer hooligan Frenchmen
26c) Drunken soccer hooligan Frenchmen from the region in and around Biarritz. In other words, BASK Frenchmen.
27) In today's communication age, a good way to avoid terrerist reprisals for insulting remarks is to misspell words like "BASK" and "terrerist"
28) When confronted by a coach full (+ - 75) of 26c who have made it evident that their desire is to fight you, a stout constitution and a healthy bloodlust won't cut it in the weapons department.
29) Some things that will:
29a) A claymore
29b) A claymore
28c) A flamethrower
28d) One of these, and a bunch of this
29) A Disclaimer: Of course, I wished no ill will towards any of my BASK brothers. I only wanted to read in peace.
30) I love the BASKS. As a matter of fact, I own a raspberry beret.
31) The difference between a vacation and a trip is, after a trip you need a vacation.
Sunday, April 17, 2005
Dr. Foster's Dictionary: 17 April 2005
Today's entry from Dr. Foster's dictionary comes from the glossary of American colloquialisms, under 'f':
for·ty-fiv·er
n. slang
1. An individual, usually a post-adolescent American male, who wears a baseball cap in such a fashion that its brim is approximately forty-five degrees off-center. Do you think those two forty-fivers are lovers?
[syn: tool, douche-bag, asshole, cretin, prick; see also 'Von Dutchman']
[ant: n. Fosterite]
for·ty-fiv·er
n. slang
1. An individual, usually a post-adolescent American male, who wears a baseball cap in such a fashion that its brim is approximately forty-five degrees off-center. Do you think those two forty-fivers are lovers?
[syn: tool, douche-bag, asshole, cretin, prick; see also 'Von Dutchman']
[ant: n. Fosterite]
Friday, April 15, 2005
Machine vs. Man, Part 2
In Yesterday's column, I showed why humans are evil: we cheat. Computers, on the other hand, only do what's best. They follow their programming.
And they're fast! Damn fast. Just today, a co-worker had the gall to complain when his computer took two whole minutes to scan a 600 megabyte file. 600 megabytes? That's as much as a CD! And it took me at least 10 minutes to know that the new Will Smith album sucked.
But if you've even just dabbled in popular culture during the last half-century, you've seen some tale of computers killing humans or robots beating up seniors for their pills. Allow me to take a moment to say (as both a computer scientist and a hater of near-deads): this is not going to happen. We are so far from understanding human emotions (computer scientists especially) that we will never be able to mimic this sort of irrational bias.
Instead, we will craft agents with irrational exuberance. They will be the best moneymakers out there. They will bid with astounding precision and lightning speed. Faster than a human could observe, heck, faster than any human could audit...
And they'll learn. They'll know to increase the price of ice when it's hot and to sell Sell SELL whenever a music label signs Will Smith (ha! Twice in one posting! Who's fresh now?). Amazing things. Optimizing profits and conversions, all that lovely stuff.
But, here's the thing: we don't believe in the Rising-tide Survival-of-the-fittest Laissez-faire capitalism. We live in a fluffy-bunny hugs-to-everyone bastardized marketplace. You have to pay people a "minimum wage" and give them "time off" for such hoitsy toitsy extravagances of the union imagination as "maternity leave" and "paternity leave" and "sawing through their bone with improperly installed welding equipment."
But the key thing is, you aren't allowed to talk to your competitors. Even though, it would be really good for you (the Stovepipe-Hat-wearing Fat Cat that you are) to do so: you could set prices to be artificially high. We begrudgingly begrudge knowing that gas station owners on an adjacent corner may *wink wink* *nudge nudge* each other and that's why they have the same damn prices. But computers, well... they can wink and nudge 5000 times a second.
If that's not clear, think about it this way: Amazon learns that when Barnes & Noble increases its price by x%, it will increase its price by y%. Barnes & Noble realize this, and adapts to it. The two co-evolve, until they have a signaling infrastructure as complex and indecipherable as the absurdity of baseball (where coaches mime Parkinson's to tell their batters orders for which a few syllables of speech would suffice).
This is not evil. It is dumb logic. The sort of "Lord of the Flies" naivete that you get whenever you give a child a machine gun. So what to do with these computers? You can't put them on the stand in court. And it's certainly not their fault. But, heck, we can barely make computers that can do this, we could never make computers that could do this and describe *why*. That's the central point of artificial intelligence as it currently stands: perhaps human-style responses are only 10 years away, but it will take at least 50 before we have a machine that can explain like a person (and a full century before they can ever lie like one).
Join us tomorrow for the resolution of this revolution.
And they're fast! Damn fast. Just today, a co-worker had the gall to complain when his computer took two whole minutes to scan a 600 megabyte file. 600 megabytes? That's as much as a CD! And it took me at least 10 minutes to know that the new Will Smith album sucked.
But if you've even just dabbled in popular culture during the last half-century, you've seen some tale of computers killing humans or robots beating up seniors for their pills. Allow me to take a moment to say (as both a computer scientist and a hater of near-deads): this is not going to happen. We are so far from understanding human emotions (computer scientists especially) that we will never be able to mimic this sort of irrational bias.
Instead, we will craft agents with irrational exuberance. They will be the best moneymakers out there. They will bid with astounding precision and lightning speed. Faster than a human could observe, heck, faster than any human could audit...
And they'll learn. They'll know to increase the price of ice when it's hot and to sell Sell SELL whenever a music label signs Will Smith (ha! Twice in one posting! Who's fresh now?). Amazing things. Optimizing profits and conversions, all that lovely stuff.
But, here's the thing: we don't believe in the Rising-tide Survival-of-the-fittest Laissez-faire capitalism. We live in a fluffy-bunny hugs-to-everyone bastardized marketplace. You have to pay people a "minimum wage" and give them "time off" for such hoitsy toitsy extravagances of the union imagination as "maternity leave" and "paternity leave" and "sawing through their bone with improperly installed welding equipment."
But the key thing is, you aren't allowed to talk to your competitors. Even though, it would be really good for you (the Stovepipe-Hat-wearing Fat Cat that you are) to do so: you could set prices to be artificially high. We begrudgingly begrudge knowing that gas station owners on an adjacent corner may *wink wink* *nudge nudge* each other and that's why they have the same damn prices. But computers, well... they can wink and nudge 5000 times a second.
If that's not clear, think about it this way: Amazon learns that when Barnes & Noble increases its price by x%, it will increase its price by y%. Barnes & Noble realize this, and adapts to it. The two co-evolve, until they have a signaling infrastructure as complex and indecipherable as the absurdity of baseball (where coaches mime Parkinson's to tell their batters orders for which a few syllables of speech would suffice).
This is not evil. It is dumb logic. The sort of "Lord of the Flies" naivete that you get whenever you give a child a machine gun. So what to do with these computers? You can't put them on the stand in court. And it's certainly not their fault. But, heck, we can barely make computers that can do this, we could never make computers that could do this and describe *why*. That's the central point of artificial intelligence as it currently stands: perhaps human-style responses are only 10 years away, but it will take at least 50 before we have a machine that can explain like a person (and a full century before they can ever lie like one).
Join us tomorrow for the resolution of this revolution.
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Man vs. Machine, Part 1
An exploration, serialized because A) it relates to the classwork I'm doing in 18th Century Literature (when serialization was popular) and Freshman Writing (because I'm studying 18th Century Literature) and B) I have classwork in 18th Century Literature and Freshman Writing.
Over the course of the next few days, I intend to tackle the man vs. machine problem. Today, we learn how man is imperfect. Tomorrow, how machines may end up being even imperfecter. On Friday, we synthesize, and perhaps come to appreciate more the Amish (or, in a compromise, the Mennonites).
From today's Times: "In one case, at 9:41 a.m. on Oct. 2, 2002, the computer of a specialist in General Electric stock indicated that at a price of $25.85, there were orders to buy 39,500 shares and orders to sell 35,000 shares. The specialist, David A. Finnerty of Fleet Specialist, should have matched the 35,000, prosecutors say. Instead he bought 22,700 shares for Fleet's own account at $25.85, then raised the price to $25.95. Just after 9:42, he sold 12,800 shares from the same account[.]" Well, that certainly seems like a... series of events. But what does it mean? How does this fit into the conception of the world that you, a mere mortal, care about? To continue with their sentence, he "[made] $1,280 in about 14 seconds." Damn. I've spent the last 14 seconds trying to come up with an absurd comparison of what that amount in that time is more than (that metaphor's approximate street value: $0.017), and failed even at that.
So obviously, humans are both exploitable and exploitative. The solution being, make your money off them, but don't let them be in a position to screw you. (To paraphrase Polonius: "Don't a lender be.") Instead, the teeming masses of the uneducated pundit are lining up to scream, we should use the magic of "computors" and "market economies" make everything magically work. Democratization of capital ensues, and soon we've changed the NYSE building into the meeting place of orgies of hippie wealth. Whee!
Join us tomorrow on the Enfranchised to learn why this is the first step towards Skynet, or at least Robber Baron Mainframes.
Over the course of the next few days, I intend to tackle the man vs. machine problem. Today, we learn how man is imperfect. Tomorrow, how machines may end up being even imperfecter. On Friday, we synthesize, and perhaps come to appreciate more the Amish (or, in a compromise, the Mennonites).
From today's Times: "In one case, at 9:41 a.m. on Oct. 2, 2002, the computer of a specialist in General Electric stock indicated that at a price of $25.85, there were orders to buy 39,500 shares and orders to sell 35,000 shares. The specialist, David A. Finnerty of Fleet Specialist, should have matched the 35,000, prosecutors say. Instead he bought 22,700 shares for Fleet's own account at $25.85, then raised the price to $25.95. Just after 9:42, he sold 12,800 shares from the same account[.]" Well, that certainly seems like a... series of events. But what does it mean? How does this fit into the conception of the world that you, a mere mortal, care about? To continue with their sentence, he "[made] $1,280 in about 14 seconds." Damn. I've spent the last 14 seconds trying to come up with an absurd comparison of what that amount in that time is more than (that metaphor's approximate street value: $0.017), and failed even at that.
So obviously, humans are both exploitable and exploitative. The solution being, make your money off them, but don't let them be in a position to screw you. (To paraphrase Polonius: "Don't a lender be.") Instead, the teeming masses of the uneducated pundit are lining up to scream, we should use the magic of "computors" and "market economies" make everything magically work. Democratization of capital ensues, and soon we've changed the NYSE building into the meeting place of orgies of hippie wealth. Whee!
Join us tomorrow on the Enfranchised to learn why this is the first step towards Skynet, or at least Robber Baron Mainframes.
Monday, April 11, 2005
Dr. Foster's Dictionary: 12 April, 2005
In honor of the 250th anniversary of the publication of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary--the tome that didn't so much define the English language as it did unleash it upon subsequent generations of poets and philologists--I thought I'd go out on a limb and post excerpts from a work in progress I hope will one day replace my fellow Pembrokian's. Today's entries come from the section on comparative ideological taxonomy:
lib·er·al
n.
2. Someone who prefers the message of Neil Young's "Southern Man" to that of Lynrd Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama". Jones is a classic liberal vis-a-vis classic rock.
Know-Noth·ing
n.
4. Someone who prefers listening to Neil Young's "Southern Man" over Lynrd Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama". Sean has displayed disturbing Know-Nothing tendencies of late.
lib·er·al
n.
2. Someone who prefers the message of Neil Young's "Southern Man" to that of Lynrd Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama". Jones is a classic liberal vis-a-vis classic rock.
Know-Noth·ing
n.
4. Someone who prefers listening to Neil Young's "Southern Man" over Lynrd Skynrd's "Sweet Home Alabama". Sean has displayed disturbing Know-Nothing tendencies of late.
Success Metrics that my High School never subscribed to
My father once set up a shooting range on a girlfriend's farm. I learned many things at that shooting range: treat every weapon as if it is loaded (a side note, if conservatives treated gun control like they treat abstinence, they would think teaching me how to be safe with a gun would only lead to violence); that reaslistically the shots Lee Harvey Oswald was reported to make were not difficult to pull off (except for that trick of making the bullet turn seventeen which-ways after it's left the barrel); and that guns, even the puny air guns we had, are pretty cool (except for that whole death and destruction implication). But the most important lesson I learned was this: never say what you're aiming at before you take your shot.
Our leaders could stand to learn this lesson. They could have been vague, saying, "Saddam is a bad man. We stand against bad men. We want to be better than bad." Instead, they concocted/discovered/group-thought this rationale of weapons of mass destruction. They planted in our heads dreams of sugar plums and Iraqis dancing besides our M1A2 Abrams rolling through Baghdad (but not for long: they had a democracy to set up, and quickly!) The end result being a near-quagmire. But we all know this.
The news, as I see it, is a report I heard yesterday on NPR (I love NPR). It was discussing how we were winning, because there were now fewer insurgency attacks. Ah, that's what I wanted to hear. Uncle Sam was winning the war, through a combination of Hearts and Minds turning to our side and, frankly, the inevitable attrition that must plague any suicide bombing squadron. That sort of optimisim (September 10th mentality, I guess it must be called) was apparently too much to ask for. The joyous news was that attacks were down to 30 or 40 a day, from the 130 or so that we were coming under in the run-up to the election.
Oh what a world we live in, when we define our goals not as universal acclaim, or universal acquaintanceship-but-maybe-you-don't-get-invited-to-strictly-every-party-on-Friday-night or even not having anybody who wants to kill us. No, now the Gold Standard for American acceptance is halving the number of people shooting at you.
Heh, by that metric, I'm even popular.
Our leaders could stand to learn this lesson. They could have been vague, saying, "Saddam is a bad man. We stand against bad men. We want to be better than bad." Instead, they concocted/discovered/group-thought this rationale of weapons of mass destruction. They planted in our heads dreams of sugar plums and Iraqis dancing besides our M1A2 Abrams rolling through Baghdad (but not for long: they had a democracy to set up, and quickly!) The end result being a near-quagmire. But we all know this.
The news, as I see it, is a report I heard yesterday on NPR (I love NPR). It was discussing how we were winning, because there were now fewer insurgency attacks. Ah, that's what I wanted to hear. Uncle Sam was winning the war, through a combination of Hearts and Minds turning to our side and, frankly, the inevitable attrition that must plague any suicide bombing squadron. That sort of optimisim (September 10th mentality, I guess it must be called) was apparently too much to ask for. The joyous news was that attacks were down to 30 or 40 a day, from the 130 or so that we were coming under in the run-up to the election.
Oh what a world we live in, when we define our goals not as universal acclaim, or universal acquaintanceship-but-maybe-you-don't-get-invited-to-strictly-every-party-on-Friday-night or even not having anybody who wants to kill us. No, now the Gold Standard for American acceptance is halving the number of people shooting at you.
Heh, by that metric, I'm even popular.
Friday, April 08, 2005
The Eventual Gander: The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs.
If I can't come up with an aphorism to start this review with, at least I can think of one to ignore completely: Alexander McCall Smith's The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs has a fine cover. Of course this doesn't matter in any book you're reading for literary merit, which would have the same intrinsic value whether it was read out loud, Morse'd over a telegraph or even read hunched over a Palm Pilot with a screen too small and too dim for true appreciation. But this is not a book of "literary merit". It is, at best, a good way to feed a habit of pseudo-intellectualism. When I saw this book lying on the table at Kepler's, my mouth started salivating and my neurons releasing endorphins in the same anticipation a junkie must feel at that first call of "Crack rock ho!" (ho, here, in the "Land Ho!" sense, not the Noelle Bush sense).
That I, a pseudo-intellectual on the way up would stoop to the level of paying $9.95 for 128 pages of tripe might seem paradoxical. But this is not a book to be read, it is a book to be consumed. The aforementioned cover has texture, two colors of ink, and no fewer than four well-designed fonts all selected to contrast their roles to one another. Framed in the center is a delightful illustration of a dachshund, sized up in anatomical consideration. If all this detail sounds like pretension, that is only because this is pretension of the highest kind. It is not exclusionary, it is not off-putting. It is simply something that is to be enjoyed.
My editors tell me I should, at some point, get to the book itself. The staff at my local bookorium had placed it in Sci-Fi/Mystery. But this tome eschews such a simple taxonomic view of writing, instead labeling itself "A Professor Dr. von Igelfeld Entertainment." What this means is that it has the same sort of bumbling main character, intrigue, and rich detail that a mystery has, but without any of that pesky murder, whodunit, or actual matter to be investigated. The result is a travel tale without any real root in plot, truth, history, or narrative necessity. It is as if Dr. McCall Smith is asking us to take a vacation not only from our own lives in reading this text, but to take a vacation from what we think an author properly ought to do.
Dr. von Igelfeld, the protagonist, is a hugely compelling character, and I hope to read the other two books starring him to see if perhaps he was developed in something that approached a true adventure at some point. He has the powers of neither perception nor deception. The result being that slights uncommitted are paid back in slights unnoticed. His worldview is, at times, beyond simplistic: he is the author of a scholarly text, "Portugese Irregular Verbs" and that should put him beyond reproach or question. Anyone who thinks otherwise does not understand the way the system works. His administrative prowess is best demonstrated when he asks, of a religious conflict, "If he were the Patriarch, the could he not unilaterally put an end to schism simply by expelling schismatics? That is what von Igelfeld himself would have done."
Sure, I could quibble about the narration (switches point-of-view arbitrarily and not enough to be a true device. A choice made rarely enough is only a crutch.) But why? This is an enormously fun and quick read. The intellectual equivalent of slapstick opens it up as he is mistakenly sent to lecture on the Sausage Dog (the beginning of the intertwined confusions) and, out of a desire not to offend his host, never corrects the impression. Puns in turn lead to surgery on one of the elongated beasts by our Philologist hero with the expectedly disastrous results somehow leading to an interaction between our man and (an extreme farce of) the Bishop of Rome (a caricature felt all the more deeply in this Papal intermission).
It is not hard to see how Faulkner's prose is a deep cigar. Something you sit down with for hours on end, to appreciate its complexities and how its flavor changes as you go on. Hemingway is a pipe: a completely different way of looking at the habit. Sure, you don't inhale and you smoke less less often, but it's a more potent smoke. Which is the more dangerous? Who could ever compare the two? A subscription to The New Yorker is, then, like an addiction to Camel Lights: You remember that you wanted to start, but now it's a chore instead of a pleasure and you can't quite remember *why* you wanted to start. On this scale, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs is a pack of Nat Shermans or Dunhills: you pay more for its luxurious packaging and beneficial image. In short, it can be recommended for everything but its substance.
Jugdgment: Keep one on your shelf, as a rainy-day reading list. To be opened only in times of extreme depression or boredom when even other fare as light on the intellectual scale as an Austen or a Chabon would be cerebral overload.
That I, a pseudo-intellectual on the way up would stoop to the level of paying $9.95 for 128 pages of tripe might seem paradoxical. But this is not a book to be read, it is a book to be consumed. The aforementioned cover has texture, two colors of ink, and no fewer than four well-designed fonts all selected to contrast their roles to one another. Framed in the center is a delightful illustration of a dachshund, sized up in anatomical consideration. If all this detail sounds like pretension, that is only because this is pretension of the highest kind. It is not exclusionary, it is not off-putting. It is simply something that is to be enjoyed.
My editors tell me I should, at some point, get to the book itself. The staff at my local bookorium had placed it in Sci-Fi/Mystery. But this tome eschews such a simple taxonomic view of writing, instead labeling itself "A Professor Dr. von Igelfeld Entertainment." What this means is that it has the same sort of bumbling main character, intrigue, and rich detail that a mystery has, but without any of that pesky murder, whodunit, or actual matter to be investigated. The result is a travel tale without any real root in plot, truth, history, or narrative necessity. It is as if Dr. McCall Smith is asking us to take a vacation not only from our own lives in reading this text, but to take a vacation from what we think an author properly ought to do.
Dr. von Igelfeld, the protagonist, is a hugely compelling character, and I hope to read the other two books starring him to see if perhaps he was developed in something that approached a true adventure at some point. He has the powers of neither perception nor deception. The result being that slights uncommitted are paid back in slights unnoticed. His worldview is, at times, beyond simplistic: he is the author of a scholarly text, "Portugese Irregular Verbs" and that should put him beyond reproach or question. Anyone who thinks otherwise does not understand the way the system works. His administrative prowess is best demonstrated when he asks, of a religious conflict, "If he were the Patriarch, the could he not unilaterally put an end to schism simply by expelling schismatics? That is what von Igelfeld himself would have done."
Sure, I could quibble about the narration (switches point-of-view arbitrarily and not enough to be a true device. A choice made rarely enough is only a crutch.) But why? This is an enormously fun and quick read. The intellectual equivalent of slapstick opens it up as he is mistakenly sent to lecture on the Sausage Dog (the beginning of the intertwined confusions) and, out of a desire not to offend his host, never corrects the impression. Puns in turn lead to surgery on one of the elongated beasts by our Philologist hero with the expectedly disastrous results somehow leading to an interaction between our man and (an extreme farce of) the Bishop of Rome (a caricature felt all the more deeply in this Papal intermission).
It is not hard to see how Faulkner's prose is a deep cigar. Something you sit down with for hours on end, to appreciate its complexities and how its flavor changes as you go on. Hemingway is a pipe: a completely different way of looking at the habit. Sure, you don't inhale and you smoke less less often, but it's a more potent smoke. Which is the more dangerous? Who could ever compare the two? A subscription to The New Yorker is, then, like an addiction to Camel Lights: You remember that you wanted to start, but now it's a chore instead of a pleasure and you can't quite remember *why* you wanted to start. On this scale, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs is a pack of Nat Shermans or Dunhills: you pay more for its luxurious packaging and beneficial image. In short, it can be recommended for everything but its substance.
Jugdgment: Keep one on your shelf, as a rainy-day reading list. To be opened only in times of extreme depression or boredom when even other fare as light on the intellectual scale as an Austen or a Chabon would be cerebral overload.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
The Eventual Gander
(Schiavo/PopeWatch 2k5: Mortality always wins)
Here at the Enfranchised, we read a lot. Just... not quickly. So, hitherwith, we introduce our review masthead: The Eventual Gander. That's not to say we'll review anything less than the pinnacle and forefront of pseudo-intellectual circles. As the saying goes: What's good for the prompt goose is good for the eventual gander.
Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons
When Ansel Adams passed away, he willed the negatives of all of his photographs as a tangible possession. Celebrity worship aside (in the current day and age a man of his stature could leave a receipt on a table after dinner and find it on eBay by dessert), he did this because he felt they had value. To him, taking a picture was composed of two equally important steps: first exposing the film to capture an image, and then turning this semi-Platonic abstraction into bona fide hangible art through the process of printing. Writing is like this too, and in I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe has succeeded admirably at the first but managed to hide that fact beneath severe stumbling in the second.
Without appearing too pathetic, allow me to say that Wolfe is spot-on in many instances. Speaking of that opportunity to slip one's alma mater into conversation, he writes (of the fictional Dupont College), "Everyone, male or female, who was right now, as he was, in the undergraduate division, Dupont College, or had ever graduated from Dupont College knew that feeling, treasured that feeling, sought one way or another to enjoy that feeling daily if at all possible, now and for the rest of his life". If this sounds horribly pretentious and off-putting, well, it is. Which is why, he continues, "no Dupont man... had ever tried to describe it out loud to a living soul." He continues to observe the intermittent cycle of a freshman's life: from the heights of arrogance to the troughs of self -doubt and -pity. This, of course, while the self is trodding through a life of intellectual luxury on someone else's tab with no responsibilities to speak of. Trivial matters such as sides of the room, borrowings of discs compact, unfounded crushes are such stuff as life and death are made during a co-ed's career. Translate to the language of rap, this would best be put, "Mo' Education, Mo' Problems."
He has his other bones to pick, of course. One of the title heroine's suitors is the star of a basketball team. Wolfe has applied his expert eye to the NCAA, endorsement deals, groupies, just about every morsel of the Big Man On Campus Phenomenon. He dissects feelings of parental shame and familial denial. These are all spot on observation, etc. Thus ends the positive portion of my review, such as it is.
The imperfections, on the other hand, are many. And yet, somehow, the critics got them wrong. Many were shocked at the lurid and, quite frankly, unarousing descriptions of intimacy he includes. Wolfe took home an award for worst sex scene of the year. What the committee missed was that it was not the worst scene of sex. It was a great scene of the worst sex. He distorts his writing because that is how it is in the trenches of modern fraternity houses and two-room doubles. But he never lets up. His writing is awkward and the characters stiff throughout the whole novel, as if college is something to be experienced for all eight semesters through a lens of discomfort. The result approximates a really interesting person with bad breath: you force your way through to the end because you know you will enjoy having heard it, even if the experience itself is excruciating.
One of nine-thousand and seventy-three sayings attributed to Mark Twain is "Show, Don't Tell." Wolfe apparently decided to piss on the House of Clemens. Well, okay, you say. Sometimes you just don't have the space to do all that. But in a book that winds through 676 pages and weighs enough to take down a gazelle if the situation arises, you think he really could have pointed out that athletics is a golden ticket with more subtlety than "the sweet irony was that [basketball player extraordinaire but less-than-stellar-academician] had wound up at a better university than Eric [(the smarter but less-baller brother)]."
The bigger issue is that this is Tom Wolfe. At every turn, in every nook of prose and cranny of words, you can see the man in his white suit typing out this introduction to a new world. He shows off, dropping terms as if they were names. He clues in the reader to the lingo: "dormcest" is mentioned by an "RA" as a type of "hooking up". And yet the actual act is still "rutting", which is often preceded by simulation of the "mons veneris" and the "ilial crest". Thanks Tom. Just what I needed: a newly old man to turn his attention to my home to tell me how bad it is, all the while knowing that he really wants to be back there. To be where the culture is being made, where it is being blindly felt in the backseat of an Escalade on the way to a formal. Your criticism would mean a lot more if it weren't compensation for jealousy.
In the end, I am Charlotte Simmons should never be allowed in the fiction section of a bookstore. Instead, copies of it should be relegated to that part of a college bookstore next to a sweatshirt bearing the (trademarked) logo of these cathedrals of learning, money, and semi-anonymized semi-drunk semi-dancing semi-sex. That way, when Mom and Pop come to visit Junior and Juniess, all settled into their dorms, they can pick up a hat or fanny pack for expressing their pride in public, and a copy of I am Charlotte Simmons for abating their curiosity and empty nesting in private.
Here at the Enfranchised, we read a lot. Just... not quickly. So, hitherwith, we introduce our review masthead: The Eventual Gander. That's not to say we'll review anything less than the pinnacle and forefront of pseudo-intellectual circles. As the saying goes: What's good for the prompt goose is good for the eventual gander.
Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons
When Ansel Adams passed away, he willed the negatives of all of his photographs as a tangible possession. Celebrity worship aside (in the current day and age a man of his stature could leave a receipt on a table after dinner and find it on eBay by dessert), he did this because he felt they had value. To him, taking a picture was composed of two equally important steps: first exposing the film to capture an image, and then turning this semi-Platonic abstraction into bona fide hangible art through the process of printing. Writing is like this too, and in I am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe has succeeded admirably at the first but managed to hide that fact beneath severe stumbling in the second.
Without appearing too pathetic, allow me to say that Wolfe is spot-on in many instances. Speaking of that opportunity to slip one's alma mater into conversation, he writes (of the fictional Dupont College), "Everyone, male or female, who was right now, as he was, in the undergraduate division, Dupont College, or had ever graduated from Dupont College knew that feeling, treasured that feeling, sought one way or another to enjoy that feeling daily if at all possible, now and for the rest of his life". If this sounds horribly pretentious and off-putting, well, it is. Which is why, he continues, "no Dupont man... had ever tried to describe it out loud to a living soul." He continues to observe the intermittent cycle of a freshman's life: from the heights of arrogance to the troughs of self -doubt and -pity. This, of course, while the self is trodding through a life of intellectual luxury on someone else's tab with no responsibilities to speak of. Trivial matters such as sides of the room, borrowings of discs compact, unfounded crushes are such stuff as life and death are made during a co-ed's career. Translate to the language of rap, this would best be put, "Mo' Education, Mo' Problems."
He has his other bones to pick, of course. One of the title heroine's suitors is the star of a basketball team. Wolfe has applied his expert eye to the NCAA, endorsement deals, groupies, just about every morsel of the Big Man On Campus Phenomenon. He dissects feelings of parental shame and familial denial. These are all spot on observation, etc. Thus ends the positive portion of my review, such as it is.
The imperfections, on the other hand, are many. And yet, somehow, the critics got them wrong. Many were shocked at the lurid and, quite frankly, unarousing descriptions of intimacy he includes. Wolfe took home an award for worst sex scene of the year. What the committee missed was that it was not the worst scene of sex. It was a great scene of the worst sex. He distorts his writing because that is how it is in the trenches of modern fraternity houses and two-room doubles. But he never lets up. His writing is awkward and the characters stiff throughout the whole novel, as if college is something to be experienced for all eight semesters through a lens of discomfort. The result approximates a really interesting person with bad breath: you force your way through to the end because you know you will enjoy having heard it, even if the experience itself is excruciating.
One of nine-thousand and seventy-three sayings attributed to Mark Twain is "Show, Don't Tell." Wolfe apparently decided to piss on the House of Clemens. Well, okay, you say. Sometimes you just don't have the space to do all that. But in a book that winds through 676 pages and weighs enough to take down a gazelle if the situation arises, you think he really could have pointed out that athletics is a golden ticket with more subtlety than "the sweet irony was that [basketball player extraordinaire but less-than-stellar-academician] had wound up at a better university than Eric [(the smarter but less-baller brother)]."
The bigger issue is that this is Tom Wolfe. At every turn, in every nook of prose and cranny of words, you can see the man in his white suit typing out this introduction to a new world. He shows off, dropping terms as if they were names. He clues in the reader to the lingo: "dormcest" is mentioned by an "RA" as a type of "hooking up". And yet the actual act is still "rutting", which is often preceded by simulation of the "mons veneris" and the "ilial crest". Thanks Tom. Just what I needed: a newly old man to turn his attention to my home to tell me how bad it is, all the while knowing that he really wants to be back there. To be where the culture is being made, where it is being blindly felt in the backseat of an Escalade on the way to a formal. Your criticism would mean a lot more if it weren't compensation for jealousy.
In the end, I am Charlotte Simmons should never be allowed in the fiction section of a bookstore. Instead, copies of it should be relegated to that part of a college bookstore next to a sweatshirt bearing the (trademarked) logo of these cathedrals of learning, money, and semi-anonymized semi-drunk semi-dancing semi-sex. That way, when Mom and Pop come to visit Junior and Juniess, all settled into their dorms, they can pick up a hat or fanny pack for expressing their pride in public, and a copy of I am Charlotte Simmons for abating their curiosity and empty nesting in private.
Friday, April 01, 2005
The Sport of Geeks
Pope/Schiavo Watch 2K5: 1 down, 1 to go.
But on to the important stuff: flaunting wealth. Of course, it used to mean something to play polo. You needed steeds, a line-up of them. No mere laborer could have enough thoroughbreds, and even if he did, they'd all be tired from tilling the soil. Till-soilers. But then horses became cheap (and eventually glue/dog food). And courtesy extended so that you didn't even need to have enough to travel. Collegiate polo expanded. Of course, because of Title IX, you had to use mares. Which ins't as bad as my school's fox-hunting team, which is legally required to be half bitches.
But now we, the Enfranchised, have reclaimed this once crown jewel of superiority and elitism, and done so in a way that warms my white, electronics-oriented heart: Segway polo. Yep. Just what you think it would be. The panacea to problems of urban congestion becoming a trusty mount. For a game that none of these people would play were it not for their having dropped 5 g-spots on this scooter.
Future, we have arrived.
Oh, and also, pointless scandal du jour. (Headline: Ms. Wheelchair stripped of title for standing)
But on to the important stuff: flaunting wealth. Of course, it used to mean something to play polo. You needed steeds, a line-up of them. No mere laborer could have enough thoroughbreds, and even if he did, they'd all be tired from tilling the soil. Till-soilers. But then horses became cheap (and eventually glue/dog food). And courtesy extended so that you didn't even need to have enough to travel. Collegiate polo expanded. Of course, because of Title IX, you had to use mares. Which ins't as bad as my school's fox-hunting team, which is legally required to be half bitches.
But now we, the Enfranchised, have reclaimed this once crown jewel of superiority and elitism, and done so in a way that warms my white, electronics-oriented heart: Segway polo. Yep. Just what you think it would be. The panacea to problems of urban congestion becoming a trusty mount. For a game that none of these people would play were it not for their having dropped 5 g-spots on this scooter.
Future, we have arrived.
Oh, and also, pointless scandal du jour. (Headline: Ms. Wheelchair stripped of title for standing)
Thursday, March 31, 2005
PITW: Bread and Circuses
Pardon me if I stray from my role as moderator to smack some sense into my "peers."
To Foster: It's not that I have any strong desire for the hub-bub of professional sports to overtake the college arena. Once money is explicitly on the table, any pretense of tradition or themes or association would be lost. In their quest for players, schools would have to negotiate on cold dollars instead of warm fantasies of being say "Lady Vols" or "Demon Deacons". (Why any athlete would want to be part of these to begin with is beyond me). In a land of recruiting with contracts and bonuses instead of below-table bling would we ever find a team that could, on sheer will of consistency, compete with the Filibusters' record for single season overtimes? No. No we could not. (To those of you who take my word as gospel: don't try breaking that fact out as canon. In fact, there is no team the Filibusters. But as I write this, I realize that they sound much more like an Asian Archipelago Demoltion Unit than they do an obscure procedural trick anthropomorphized).
To 'Athan: As I was at the NCAA tournament in Kansas City (which is in Missouri. WTF? That's the kind of ill logic that belongs in Canada. Then again, so does the entire Midwest), I found the girl for you. Knowing your fetish for all things absurd and blonde, I present to you the future Mrs. PoopShit. This 6-4 mountain of a matron could make a quaker out of a presbyterian. During foul shots, we chanted "Fee Fie Fo Fum" in between the sound of her mammoth feet leaving potholes in the court. As she palmed the pig skin (I'm not confusing basketball and football her, she just brought pork rinds with her), she would engage in defense by using her gravitational influence to shape the arc of an opponent's shot, removing any hope of goal-tending calls by warping time, space, and the vision of the refs as she deftly weaved her body using calves that had as much thrust as a Pratt & Whitney 350FG Turbofan.
I mean, shit.
To Foster: It's not that I have any strong desire for the hub-bub of professional sports to overtake the college arena. Once money is explicitly on the table, any pretense of tradition or themes or association would be lost. In their quest for players, schools would have to negotiate on cold dollars instead of warm fantasies of being say "Lady Vols" or "Demon Deacons". (Why any athlete would want to be part of these to begin with is beyond me). In a land of recruiting with contracts and bonuses instead of below-table bling would we ever find a team that could, on sheer will of consistency, compete with the Filibusters' record for single season overtimes? No. No we could not. (To those of you who take my word as gospel: don't try breaking that fact out as canon. In fact, there is no team the Filibusters. But as I write this, I realize that they sound much more like an Asian Archipelago Demoltion Unit than they do an obscure procedural trick anthropomorphized).
To 'Athan: As I was at the NCAA tournament in Kansas City (which is in Missouri. WTF? That's the kind of ill logic that belongs in Canada. Then again, so does the entire Midwest), I found the girl for you. Knowing your fetish for all things absurd and blonde, I present to you the future Mrs. PoopShit. This 6-4 mountain of a matron could make a quaker out of a presbyterian. During foul shots, we chanted "Fee Fie Fo Fum" in between the sound of her mammoth feet leaving potholes in the court. As she palmed the pig skin (I'm not confusing basketball and football her, she just brought pork rinds with her), she would engage in defense by using her gravitational influence to shape the arc of an opponent's shot, removing any hope of goal-tending calls by warping time, space, and the vision of the refs as she deftly weaved her body using calves that had as much thrust as a Pratt & Whitney 350FG Turbofan.
I mean, shit.
Monday, March 28, 2005
Would you like Freedom Fries with that?
Contrary to Foster and his distaste for collegiate basketball (and penchant for JV field hockey), I'm a big fan of this topic. Unlike our recent ones, it doesn't involve eulogizing some dead white dude who used words to big for me to understand (like eulogy), or this so-called "science" or "computers" of which I've heard so much about. Finally, a topic that every freedom loving, God and immigrant-fearing American can relate to: sports. (Need I bring up the suspicious fact that when this topic was presented, Foster conveniently fled to France, possibly to molest unwitting, underage croissants...).
Anyway, Foster makes a number of points, most of them sexually perverse. We've heard them all before: athletes are stupid; they're corrupt ingrates; women have no place driving cars; and so forth. Needless to say, I disagree with most of what Foster says, particularly the part about kicking puppies for sport.
First off, are student-athletes the hyphenated beings they're made out to be? Foster thinks not, and I think so. Sure you get the occasional Jim Harrick "Coaching 101" exam that asks Varsity Basketball players on the final exam, "How many points is a 3-pointer worth?" (find the link yourself, dammit), but I'm not willing to make the blanket statement that all athletes are like that. For every Maurice Clarrett, you have a Shane Battier or Emeka Okafur, not to mention the walk-ons. I'm not naive enough to say that Allen Iverson took the most academically strenuous courseload at Georgetown, but if you change the schools from Georgetown or Stanford to Miami or Ohio St., how much more work do you think Joe Fraternity did there than The Answer at G'Town? And note, elephant-walking doesn't count as a class (if you don't know what it is, you're missing out on a good joke).
Even at the elite universities with good athletics, you'd need to extend the anti-athlete argument to all those legacy kids whose names include suffixes with numbers. I wouldn't be particularly against this extension of the argument, but you have to remember why this is done in the first place: bling.
For every generation of Winthrops or Cabots or Bush's you let into your college, you raise the chance of getting a new building erected (heh) as that trust fund amasses. Sure it runs contrary to the ideals our nation was founded upon, but colleges gotta feed their babies too. To make a rambling point short: hate the game, not the player.
Aside from the above "logical" arguments, I'd say schools gain from admitting "underqualified" athletes in non-financial ways as well. As I've theorized before, smart kids are ugly, so athletes are hot. I don't know how I could have gotten through 2 hours of psychology if not for ogling the shotputting ogre in front of me every Monday and Wed. "Damn! Look at those traps! I wonder how much she benches... I wonder how much she can drink... I wonder what her hair smells like... I wonder what her back hair smells like..." Mmmmm. Sweet memories.
Aside from the general deliciousness athletes bring to campus, I don't see how you can be against someone doing you such a big (and sweaty) favor on the curve. Lord knows I don't want to always be that lone dot all the way to the left of the peak. If letting in a few more fullbacks brings me a standard deviation closer to the mean, I say come on in.
This is all without even bringing up the school spirit argument. I've said it once and I'll say it again: you can't tailgate for a chess match. Nor can you paint your chest for a concerto, or vomit in the bleachers during Hamlet.
I really can't think of anything else to say, so let me end this with a joke:
Q: What do you call a man with no arms and no legs hanging on your wall?
A: Art.
(Same post, different blog)
Anyway, Foster makes a number of points, most of them sexually perverse. We've heard them all before: athletes are stupid; they're corrupt ingrates; women have no place driving cars; and so forth. Needless to say, I disagree with most of what Foster says, particularly the part about kicking puppies for sport.
First off, are student-athletes the hyphenated beings they're made out to be? Foster thinks not, and I think so. Sure you get the occasional Jim Harrick "Coaching 101" exam that asks Varsity Basketball players on the final exam, "How many points is a 3-pointer worth?" (find the link yourself, dammit), but I'm not willing to make the blanket statement that all athletes are like that. For every Maurice Clarrett, you have a Shane Battier or Emeka Okafur, not to mention the walk-ons. I'm not naive enough to say that Allen Iverson took the most academically strenuous courseload at Georgetown, but if you change the schools from Georgetown or Stanford to Miami or Ohio St., how much more work do you think Joe Fraternity did there than The Answer at G'Town? And note, elephant-walking doesn't count as a class (if you don't know what it is, you're missing out on a good joke).
Even at the elite universities with good athletics, you'd need to extend the anti-athlete argument to all those legacy kids whose names include suffixes with numbers. I wouldn't be particularly against this extension of the argument, but you have to remember why this is done in the first place: bling.
For every generation of Winthrops or Cabots or Bush's you let into your college, you raise the chance of getting a new building erected (heh) as that trust fund amasses. Sure it runs contrary to the ideals our nation was founded upon, but colleges gotta feed their babies too. To make a rambling point short: hate the game, not the player.
Aside from the above "logical" arguments, I'd say schools gain from admitting "underqualified" athletes in non-financial ways as well. As I've theorized before, smart kids are ugly, so athletes are hot. I don't know how I could have gotten through 2 hours of psychology if not for ogling the shotputting ogre in front of me every Monday and Wed. "Damn! Look at those traps! I wonder how much she benches... I wonder how much she can drink... I wonder what her hair smells like... I wonder what her back hair smells like..." Mmmmm. Sweet memories.
Aside from the general deliciousness athletes bring to campus, I don't see how you can be against someone doing you such a big (and sweaty) favor on the curve. Lord knows I don't want to always be that lone dot all the way to the left of the peak. If letting in a few more fullbacks brings me a standard deviation closer to the mean, I say come on in.
This is all without even bringing up the school spirit argument. I've said it once and I'll say it again: you can't tailgate for a chess match. Nor can you paint your chest for a concerto, or vomit in the bleachers during Hamlet.
I really can't think of anything else to say, so let me end this with a joke:
Q: What do you call a man with no arms and no legs hanging on your wall?
A: Art.
(Same post, different blog)
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Unbunch your panties
Normally I try to be good about responding to PITWs, but unfortunately I've spent the weekend hacking up a lung and stealing my 3-year old cousin's jelly beans at my Aunt's house. Needless to say, my mind is currently backed up with mucus and chocolate, and all I can think about is tonight's pending Desperate Housewives and going to bed soon thereafter.
So I promise to respond tomorrow. And the response will be bigger than Jesus.
So I promise to respond tomorrow. And the response will be bigger than Jesus.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
March-Madness's Arch-Badness
If the play on words in the title of this piece hangs together about as well as the diorama in Dan's seventh grade science project, cut me some slack: I'm on vacation. Or practically--I'm leaving for Frohnce and, eventually, Spain, in two motherfucking hours. And as sexy as the idea of typing this post on the Chunnel Train (Ethan Hunt style) is, I can't quite bring myself to take my laptop into a country which has already displayed great gusto for bending me over and giving me the old blitzkreig right up my Maginot Line.
Frogs aside, I'm not crazy about the flavor of this week's piss. It has a decent bouquet, fine mouthfeel, but the uric acid marches all over the fruit; the subtle notes of ginger, lemongrass, and nitrogenous waste materials are lost. What I mean to say is, its a non-question for DR. F; another pseudo-problem summarily dispatched by the finest intellect of the 21st century.
The thing about Dan's question is it breaks the FIRST rule of denial: You can't have your delusion and eat it too. Viz., as soon as we start talking about college basketball players as deserving some sort of compensation (that is, as soon as we recognize that basketball players are profitable for universities) the mirage that many of them have any right to BE at a university disappears like the Leviathan's wedding band at a nursing home (think about it). Come on, the reason college athletes are unpaid is so we who sit on the Board of Trustees (and we here at the Enfranchised sit on ALL boards-of-trustees) can keep our fingers wedged firmly in our ears and tell ourselves they're students first. But the truth is most of these kids aren't even students EIGHTH. They're ball-players, and that's a fine thing. Nothing wrong with being a ball player. (Hell, if I had a jumpshot do you think I'd be writing drivel for this rag?) Still, I've got a sneaking suspicion that Allen Iverson didn't catch all the subtleties of G. John Ikenberry's seminar's on American power while he was at Georgetown. 'Na mean?
Now, as soon as we start throwing around big, Marxy sounding words like "Labor" and "Proletariot", and wondering whether these athletes--who bring in big bucks for their schools--should get paid, why then the NCAA's New Clothes start to look an awful lot like their Birthday Suit (Look people, I can't make all the connections for you, I'm on a clock here). In other words, even asking that question should make Duke and UNC blush. The short answer, then, is that if college ballers want to get paid, they shouldn't be college ballers. What about the nearly-dead white men at the universities that profit from these amateurs? Well, that ain't right either. And just because it shows no signs of changing doesn't mean we should compound it with a further slutting-up of the NCAA. As it stands, the system works a lot like Reno, lets not make it Vegas.
Let me be the 1,242,569,382nd to say that the NBA ought to consider a farm system for developing young talent to take the place of college ball. As I'm sure that my reputation for humility precedes me, I'll humbly suggest that college athletes stay paid in the same old currency they've ALWAYS been paid in: soft grades and high-quality trim. It isn't exactly a hard-knock life for your average college jock. I had the distinction of living amongst them at a dorm RESERVED for their likes at GWU last year. Most were adequately blinged and drove sports cars, and GW didn't even make it into the sweet sixteen.
Though, I can confirm that our power forward made it into some sweet sixteens on his own...and a few baht mitzvahs.
-The Natural
Not bad for 25 minutes eh?
Frogs aside, I'm not crazy about the flavor of this week's piss. It has a decent bouquet, fine mouthfeel, but the uric acid marches all over the fruit; the subtle notes of ginger, lemongrass, and nitrogenous waste materials are lost. What I mean to say is, its a non-question for DR. F; another pseudo-problem summarily dispatched by the finest intellect of the 21st century.
The thing about Dan's question is it breaks the FIRST rule of denial: You can't have your delusion and eat it too. Viz., as soon as we start talking about college basketball players as deserving some sort of compensation (that is, as soon as we recognize that basketball players are profitable for universities) the mirage that many of them have any right to BE at a university disappears like the Leviathan's wedding band at a nursing home (think about it). Come on, the reason college athletes are unpaid is so we who sit on the Board of Trustees (and we here at the Enfranchised sit on ALL boards-of-trustees) can keep our fingers wedged firmly in our ears and tell ourselves they're students first. But the truth is most of these kids aren't even students EIGHTH. They're ball-players, and that's a fine thing. Nothing wrong with being a ball player. (Hell, if I had a jumpshot do you think I'd be writing drivel for this rag?) Still, I've got a sneaking suspicion that Allen Iverson didn't catch all the subtleties of G. John Ikenberry's seminar's on American power while he was at Georgetown. 'Na mean?
Now, as soon as we start throwing around big, Marxy sounding words like "Labor" and "Proletariot", and wondering whether these athletes--who bring in big bucks for their schools--should get paid, why then the NCAA's New Clothes start to look an awful lot like their Birthday Suit (Look people, I can't make all the connections for you, I'm on a clock here). In other words, even asking that question should make Duke and UNC blush. The short answer, then, is that if college ballers want to get paid, they shouldn't be college ballers. What about the nearly-dead white men at the universities that profit from these amateurs? Well, that ain't right either. And just because it shows no signs of changing doesn't mean we should compound it with a further slutting-up of the NCAA. As it stands, the system works a lot like Reno, lets not make it Vegas.
Let me be the 1,242,569,382nd to say that the NBA ought to consider a farm system for developing young talent to take the place of college ball. As I'm sure that my reputation for humility precedes me, I'll humbly suggest that college athletes stay paid in the same old currency they've ALWAYS been paid in: soft grades and high-quality trim. It isn't exactly a hard-knock life for your average college jock. I had the distinction of living amongst them at a dorm RESERVED for their likes at GWU last year. Most were adequately blinged and drove sports cars, and GW didn't even make it into the sweet sixteen.
Though, I can confirm that our power forward made it into some sweet sixteens on his own...and a few baht mitzvahs.
-The Natural
Not bad for 25 minutes eh?
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