It’s bizarre that I would even attempt to lay down a Blog entry today.  I’m realizing that I’ve got about a month to write two papers, and that I’ll also need to spend most days of this month doing little but grading papers and prepping for class.  Disaster sittin in a test tube, just a-waitin to be shaken.

So today it is all I can do to point my mostly imaginary readers in the direction of the eXile.  Actually, I’m not sure why I’d do this, since the eXile is an English language alternative zine published by mostly American expats hanging about in Russia, most of whom seem like people you’d prefer not to know.  They write hardcore (or hardboiled?)  articles about picking up whores and gutting deer with simple peasants who are praised for their humble acceptance of oppression.  Edgy adventures of guys in their twenties and thirties who in Russia have enough American dollars to fully express a kind of misanthropy that in the US would probably go underutilized. 

But some things posted there are of interest.  Of particular interest are remarks by Gary Breecher (aka “Warnerd”), who is a rank homophobe and apologist for torture, but also a vociferous opponent of the Bush cartel and dedicated defender of the French military.  Most importantly WarNerd paints what might be the best picture yet of what war with Iran would look like.  If you think you now have a full grasp of how disastrous such an adventure on the part of the US would be, you might reconsider once you’ve read this.  Sample:

If we couldn’t get people on our side after deposing a monster like Saddam, what chance do you think we have of winning hearts and minds in Iran? The kids in Iran are pissed off at the way the old Mullahs won’t let ‘em rock and roll, but the idea that they’ll support an American invasion because they’re bored is totally insane. It’s like imagining that the kids in Footloose would’ve backed a Soviet invasion of Nebraska because John Lithgow wouldn’t let them hold school dances.

It does sometimes make for pretty good reading.  Stylistically, WarNerd hearkens back to David Rees, The Rude Pundit, and FucktheSouth.com — one of the new Furious Neurotics.  It’s a kind of prose that can be effective in its graphic punch, but which is starting to get a little commonplace.  Especially when interspersed with racism and schoolboy references to “fags” and such.

Where are you?

There are three or four things I’d sort of like to blog a word about now — but there’s no time now to say much.  I’m sitting in the Aroma cafe, at the only table that was open, listening to an epic conversation between a biological and (wicked?) stepmother about whether or not the stepmother is indeed wicked.  Just this second: “I’ve never heard Tina tell me she’d had a problem with another adult besides *you.*”  I’m occasionally glad to be single and childless.

Anyway.  I’m just going to say a word or two about this year’s presumptive Oscar-Winner for “Best Picture” — The Aviator.  I have no striking revelation to make with regard to this film, except that it’s not particularly good. 

As the NYT has been observing, no one seems too interested in the Oscars this year.  After-all neither Passion of the Christ, nor F-911 are nominated for anything.  And none of the remaining films are were especially popular, controversial, or artistically compelling.  Not that I’ve seen most of them.  But I pronounce nonetheless. 

Scorsese’s _The Aviator_ is a soggy meandering period-piece with no really interesting features.  [Overheard just now: “I am not the hard-headed bitch that you’ve probably portrayed that I am.”].  We focus for a long time for unknown reasons upon Howard Hughes, who is mentally ill but purpose-driven.  He builds planes,  makes movies, and thinks big.  And he is increasingly beset with an obsession with cleanliness that we’re supposed to believe was somehow instigated during the film’s opening primal moment, where Hughes’s mother gives the young boy a bath and lectures him disturbingly on the need to avoid germs.  But why engage in such an obviously platitudinous explanation of Hughes’s obsession?  Unfortunately, it helps the film skirt any tricky (i.e. potentially interesting) questions about the nature of obsessive disorders, or about the actual creepiness of the lived world.  The scene introduces  a limiting sentimentalism that persists throughout the film.

Cate Blanchette (who we do in general adore) seems mostly wasted in a film in which all characters serve only as foils to the sentimentalized colossus of Howard Hughes.  She’s really reduced to doing a (very good) impersonation of Katherine Hepburn.  A neat trick, but there’s little sense in this film of why her relationship with Hughes should be interesting or compelling.

And then, towards the end of the film, we have long lingering scenes of Hughes in the midst of his mental breakdown — scenes in which woozy psychedelic collages are intercut with repeated viewings of rows of bottled urine, as a naked Leo DiCaprio rolls about on the floor.  Some of the most maudlin and embarrassing stuff I can remember seeing on film, and right in line with the  fake opening scene.

Kate Bekinsdale as Ava Gardner is probably the best part of this film, though she appears only briefly.

I probably won’t bother watching the Academy Awards this year, but if I do, it will be mostly to root against this monument to sentimental mediocrity.

Ick.

p.s. - The good news is that the mom v. stepmom battle at the next table has taken a turn for the better.  Mutual understanding, and so forth.  Wicked step-mom seems receptive to suggestions and duely chastised, while bio-mom has mostly eased-off the accusations.  Peace reigns, for now.  And moreover I’m impressed at how both parties managed the whole thing.  Moving from what seemed to be trainwreck of a confrontation into delicate consensus, based on a shared interest in doing right by the kids in the situation.  Impressive.

Ah, if Alabama didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court rejected on Tuesday a constitutional challenge to an Alabama law that makes it a crime to sell sex toys.

The high court refused to hear an appeal by a group of individuals who regularly use sexual devices and by two vendors who argued the case raised important issues about the scope of the constitutional right to sexual privacy.

The law prohibited the distribution of  “any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.”  First-time violators can face a fine of up to $10,000 and as much as one year in jail.

While the ACLU had argued that the right to privacy was at steak here, the 11th US Circut COurt of Appeals disagreed, concerned that “siding with the sex toy merchants could open the door to the legalization of behavior such as prostitution.”

Wow.  Good point.  Who better to parse this than BitchPhD?

Ah yes, we all know this story. A young girl, fresh and innocent, purchases her first vibrator. She becomes addicted to sexual pleasure, masturbating constantly, and neglecting her studies and her family duties. Her hair becomes greasy and unkempt, and her eyes unfocused, and she begins to steal money to purchase more vibes. Anything, anything! to feed her habit. Next thing you know, she’s lost touch with all that is Good and Holy and is prostituting herself on the street, mere pennies for a blow job, anything to earn money towards a rabbit vibe. By the end of the novel, there she is, poor, ruined thing, standing on a street corner in the freezing rain, fingering herself right out there in public in front of god and everyone without even realizing what she’s doing, all sense of shame lost in her addiction, muttering “suck your cock?” to every passing car.

Happens all the time. Only by outlawing sex toys can we protect women from their inner whores. Don’t give me that “if you outlaw sex toys, only outlaws will own sex toys” crap, or the “they’ll just masturbate with cucumbers or electric toothbrushes” argument. It’s a slippery slope, and we must stop masturbation here and now or we’ll descend into a nightmare world of humping and groaning and civilization, as we know it, will be doomed.

Curses!  These judges have complicated my efforts to befriend attractive Alabamans who share my interest in teledildonics.  Some things, it seems, were never meant to be.

The ruling is also considered likely to hurt Alabaman sales of JackhammerJesus.    (Unsafe for work, church, or anywhere in the US south of Kankakee, Illinois).

This does not seem a happy development:

Adding to the industry’s problems, children are losing interest in toys earlier, their attention seized by video games, cable TV and the Internet, in a phenomenon known to the trade as “kagoy,” which stands for “kids are getting older, younger.” What only a few years ago nicely held an 8-year-old’s attention - action figures, for example - now is considered marketable only to 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds

From the New York Times.

One good question is: Just what the hell is wrong with me?  Many answers there, but clearly one is:”I can’t spell,” while another, just as clearly, is: “I can’t type.”  When abetted by a third (”I can’t proof-read”)* these form an evil triad that culminate in: “I cannot produce persuasive written statements of any kind.”

I just sent out an email to everyone in my department full of typographical errors.  This is Not So Good in a Department of English.  Really this is trivial of course, but you know how it is.  I sent out an email about the phone situation at the local Jail (see below), and I as usual forget to proof-read it, and suddenly my noble call to action becomes a deeply sad gesture.  And I’m then faced with the question of whether to send a second, correcting email.  Do I?  All it will do is point out the errors of the first to people who mostly won’t even have bothered to read it.  Surely it would serve no useful purpose….

But of course I do.  I send one that also provides a trivial bit of extra information about the situation, and that shrugs off the mis-typing/spelling with a lame little joke.

What’s worse is that I sent out some similarly mis-typed professional correspondence about a week ago. 

While everyone has trouble proof-reading their own work, it seems that I routinely bring this sort of obliviousness to a whole new level.

And it’s hard to know the etiquette of self-correction.  Yes, the rule is “don’t do it,” but generally  I find the urge to self-correct (by for eg sending a second email) almost irresistible, despite the fact this this sort of thing serves mostly to point out my mistakes and to waste the time of all concerned.

Recent triumphs of creative orthography include:

“sucide”
“oranizing”
“conern”
“iconphobia”
“disseration”

No word is safe!  I will spindle and mutilate them all! 

Anyhow, the prison issue is a serious one and only a deeply twisted person like myself would worry so much about self-presentation in the context of something like that, I know.  But there you have it. 

I don’t know of anyone in my profession who shares my strong propensity for stupid little writing errors.  However, I wonder if anyone can offer advice on the etiquette of self-correction.  Should one *ever* waste everybody’s time by self-correcting?  Or it always better to quietly let one’s errors lie?

[*-Can’t proof-read my own writing, of course.  Naturally, I’ll catch every mistake of everybody else.]

This thing with the phones and the inmates and such at the CU County Jail is pretty horrific.  You may want to sign this petition.

“How fortunate,” I thought, when I saw a couple weeks agon in the NYT that the Sistani’s Shite coalition had won only 48% of the vote in Iraq.  This meant that they wouldn’t be able to dictate the terms of the constitution, and that a more secular form of government might result from a political process that would involve compromise.  The picture of a weeping cleric on the front page told the story.

Well, it turns out that that 48% of the vote somehow translated into 140 seats in the 275 seat Iraqi parliament.  If some news outlet has explained how the 48% turned into a majority of the seats in parliament, I missed it.  But it’s bad news for secularism in Iraq. 

Maybe the Shi’a shift from minority to majority was due to some obsure procedureal rules.  Or — as now seems more likely — this unexplained shift may have resulted from behind-the-scenes power struggles in the midst of a fixed election.  This second explanation would seem to fit with the claims made by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter at a talk two days ago in Olympia, WA:

    The former Marine also said that the Jan. 30 elections, which George W. Bush has called “a turning point in the history of Iraq, a milestone in the advance of freedom,” were not so free after all. Ritter said that U.S. authorities in Iraq had manipulated the results in order to reduce the percentage of the vote received by the United Iraqi Alliance from 56% to 48%.

    Asked by UFPPC’s Ted Nation about this shocker, Ritter said an official involved in the manipulation was the source, and that this would soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine — an obvious allusion to New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh.

So was it then the sweet smell of Democracy–or just a bunch of purple fingers?

It gets worse.  Ritter said also that the Bush admin has already decided to attack Iran:

On Iran, Ritter said that President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran�s alleged program to develop nuclear weapons, but Ritter said neoconservatives in the administration also expected that the attack would set in motion a chain of events leading to regime change in the oil-rich nation of 70 million — a possibility Ritter regards with the greatest skepticism. [. . .]  Scott Ritter said that although the peace movement failed to stop the war in Iraq, it had a chance to stop the expansion of the war to other nations like Iran and Syria. He held up the specter of a day when the Iraq war might be remembered as a relatively minor event that preceded an even greater conflagration.

Here’s hoping Mr. Ritter is less correct about this possiblity than he was about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.  But a rigged election is the kind of thing that could begin to prove him right.

[via King of Zembla]

Busy, so no post today.

I wasted far too much time already over at this contentious thread over at The Daily Kos, where I felt myself complelled to defend various forms of good old fashioned commonsense.  A productive use of my time, to be sure. 

The thread began with a discussion of this highly skilled teaching professional pulling a chair out from under one of his students who refused to stand-up for the national anthem.  (Had to click on “full screen” to get the video to play properly).

(I bet this guy doesn’t get too many ICES form comments complaining about his his elitism…)

Ok, off to get some dinner and do some grading.

I’m pretty tired, and so will hold off (if you don’t mind) posting anything too interesting, except to comment briefly on the teaching evals. I got back a couple weeks ago.  My students generally liked me.  But, as usual, not all of them, as you can see from the image at right.  I’ll note defensively that only one of my 70 or so students from last semester filled in the “exceptionally low” bubble on my ICES forms; still, the rightward black spot next to question one is still not a gladsome tiding.  In answer to the question: “What are the major strengths and weaknesses of the instructor?” the student wrote only: “weaknesses — too smug, elitist attitude.”

Well ok then.  I guess.  But somewhat at odds with what others said, e.g. “. . .is also GENUINELY interested in his students opinions, which not all teachers are, ” or “very good at communicating one on one and easy to talk to,” or (my favorite) “Very interesting as a teacher.  He is not phony in any way.  He is honest and down to earth with his students.”  There were some fair criticisms for some syllabus changes, and a few people felt I could sometime have been more organized (fair enough), but almost everone seemed to find me “enthusiastic” and nobody else complained about my elitist ways.

My engineering students were also generally complimentary, though sometimes not too loquacious.  I like to think that one of my in-class exercises (”describe, in a page or so, this room”) helped produce my favorite set of comments from among my engineers:

A. What are the major strengths and weakness of the instructor?

WEIRD ROOM

B. What aspects of this course were more beneficial to you?

WRITING

C. What do you suggest to improve this course?

NEW ROOM

Funny.  This student doesn’t take the form too seriously, which is ok by me.  Moreover he (probably) or she seems to have noticed that freaky room.  Excellent.

-

You’d think that we at TDQ would be desperately opposed to Valentine’s day, pointed as it is towards the romantic sphere, in which we have historically been so tragically unsuccessful.  But you’d be wrong.  V-day is in fact sorta cool in a pre-Reformation way.  And the little trinkets, charms and doo-dads are not to be underestimated, as old WS was always — especially in this underappreciated moment  — very well aware.

Do I approach such items with the lamest kind of irony?  Maybe, but they’ll be ok.  Any crossoive irony issuing from me will serve only to burnish the bright gleaming surface of the Valentine’s edifice.

-

The roses and cheap gestures are ok by me.  What’s more creepy are the gestures of extravagant and authentic originality.  From today’s NYT:

In this city of sharp elbows, aspiring billionaires and hypercreativity, the competition for the most loopy and unforgettable marriage proposal has become increasingly fierce.

Inspired by outlandish sitcom proposals or perhaps egged on by the co-worker who hired a squadron of skywriting jets to spell out the question, men - and occasionally women - are upping the ante on what qualifies as a suitable proposal “event.”

And as usual, the originality is for sale:

Some men have been turning to proposal consultants for ideas and help. Paul Alden, who runs the Web site 2propose.com, charges $9.99 for access to more than 100 proposal concepts, and, for a considerably larger sum, professional proposal coordinators who will carry out the plan with precision and flair.

Authenticity is often alright, but fake neo-pagan trinkets are reliably more fun.

On the subject of love, I came across something awhile back on Nervousness.org, which is a  web community devoted to using the mails to produce various forms of collective artwork.  Somewhat unexpectedly, there is a Nervousness a Moral Debate Page, where art-makers are invited to answer a number of thoughtful and not-so-thoughtful moral questions submitted by readers.  The most evenly disputed of the Nervousness moral questions is also the first:

In a relationship, if you could choose to be the person who loves the other more, or the person who is loved by the other more, which would you choose?

Something to consider.

. . . in retrospect.

Is it militant fundamentalism, or fundamentalist militarism?  Hard to tell, but Shlonkom Bakazay provides some thick description of some very unnerving, if not surprising, efforts at military recruitment.