also, I have some Dukes of the Stratosphear

In my effort to convince Dan to get rid of virtually all of our cassette tapes, I’m tossing mine. Even this mix tape, dated “May/ June 1988.”

Side A:
Say You Will (Foreigner)
Angel (Aerosmith)
Land of Confusion (Genesis)
Faith (George Michael)
Pour Some Sugar on Me (Def Leppard)
Nothin’ But A Good Time (Poison)
Amanda (Boston)
Make Me Lose Control (Eric Carmen)
Never Say Goodbye (Bon Jovi)
Can’t Stand Losing You (Police)
Owner of a Lonely Heart (Yes)

Side B:
Hold Onto The Night (Richard Marx)
With or Without You (U2)
The Flame (Cheap Trick)
Need You Tonight/ Mediate (INXS)
Foolish Beat (Debbie Gibson)
Here Comes The Sun (Beatles)
Heart of Rock & Roll (Huey Lewis and the News)
And She Was (Talking Heads)
Devil’s Radio (George Harrison)
One More Try (George Michael)
The Night (Moody Blues)

I am becoming less jaded in my old age

I've been listening to more radio in the car lately, both as an attempt to shake off Kurt Cobain and because I've had more car time in the past week than in the previous month. What I’ve been hearing is catchy but disturbing. I laughed when I caught the line, “I know she loves me- she loves everybody.” Listening more carefully though it’s a sad and creepy song. Yet it's nowhere near as bad as "a kiss with a fist is better than none." It’s sickening to hear, and even assuming it is supposed to be metaphorical, it’s suggesting that it’s better to be in a painful relationship than in none at all. Please, go find the girl who loves everybody instead.

90% of you still have at least one kidney! Congratulations!

Social marketing can work. And pointing out that most of your peers are engaging in healthy or prosocial behavior can be effective, so, for example, a 16-year-old virgin doesn’t think she’s the only one left. But the University at Albany attempts to do this in a rather confusing way.

Every semester the counseling center hangs up posters around campus: click here to see them. The one on my floor says: “79% of UAlbany students drink alcohol twice a week, less often, or not at all.” This is presumably supposed to make students who don’t drink frequently feel better about themselves. My reading? More than a FIFTH of the student population is drinking three or more times a week. WOW. Really, twice a week on average is quite a bit, assuming that it’s typical student-type drinking rather than a beer with dinner. Wouldn’t the statistic have been a little more encouraging to non-drinkers if it only included those who drank less than once a week? Or was that number too embarrassingly low to publish?

Another? “80% of UAlbany students have not engaged in unprotected sexual activity as a result of alcohol use.” I’m not entirely sure what this is trying to convey. That those in this 80% shouldn’t feel like prudes? Seems a little bit backwards. Maybe it would be more effective to point out that an entire FIFTH of the population apparently has, which (a) you may want to make an effort to avoid, and (b) means that whoever you’re sleeping with may well be in this category and perhaps more likely to be diseased. (Also: 77% have not physically injured themselves and 88% have not gotten into a fight due to alcohol. Reverse those odds, and wow.)

There are more. “58% of UAlbany students consume four or less alcoholic drinks at bars.” Disregarding the grammar, it’s hard to even know what this means (other than that 42% consume 4+). Is this only among students who are old enough to drink at bars, or can just about anyone get served around here? Or are all the people lacking fake IDs included in that 58%? “89% of UAlbany students believe that alcohol shouldn’t interfere with academics.” The rest think it SHOULD?

I’m not sure whether the survey results were so disturbing that there was no good way to present the data positively, or if the campaign’s designers just weren’t thinking. I find it pretty hard to believe that these posters are going to do what they hope.

I'm no longer sure how I feel about the Internet. Or the funny papers.

C (laughing): I looked up a chemical and it talked about its atomic number, so then I had to look up what atomic number meant, and it said it was the number of protons in the nucleus. But then I had to look up what nucleus meant!
My father: What chemical were you looking up?
C: Chlorine. It said it was hay-lo-genic.
My father: Yes, it’s a halogen. Why were you looking up chlorine?
C: Because when I looked up IED the article talked about chlorine.
S: What’s an IED?
C: Improvised Explosive Device.
S: Er, why were you looking up IED?
C: It was in one of the comics.

clothes are useful when it's cold

“Now that I've got long lovely red hair and wear skirts and push-up bras and shit, life is better.... Part of attracting boys is wearing the "I'm attracted to boys" uniform, and, well, I know it's weak but I'd rather have the boys than be a Gender Revolutionary.”

I don’t think I could begin to separate the way I present myself from the way I want other people to see me. I make choices based on comfort, time, and personal aesthetics, but what I choose to wear is fundamentally determined by the message I want to send out into the world. I have no idea how I’d dress if it didn’t affect other people. At home I go naked a lot and wear more dresses. (The dresses I own are very comfortable for many tasks but not for bicycling or anything that requires pockets, so are fairly impractical for leaving my neighborhood.) Would aesthetics matter if no one else noticed, or would comfort be the only consideration? I have met a few people who appear in most circumstances to think very little about what they project to the outside world (though I know this can be misleading; I had a good friend in college who spent hours to look as if she’d just rolled out of bed and thrown on a flannel shirt). I’m a bit jealous. Some of them (men) are judged less on their appearance, but all of them have decided that they don’t need to get the benefits I do from looking a certain way, and I’m a bit in awe of that. I’ve chosen to give up some of the things I’d get if I wore makeup and dressed more “nicely” by Delmar standards; in return I feel more true to myself. How much more self-actualized are the folks who’ve given up more?

they surely had time to grow it out

For the most part, Hair has made the transfer from Central Park with its high spirits intact. But during the famous mass-nudity moment, my companion noticed a lack of hair that helped crystallize what feels just a little off-kilter about this production: "I didn't think," she whispered, "that hippies had Brazilians."

Would it kill these actors' careers to be seen with body hair?

wasn't there a movie about this?

"Robots must be constrained to adhere to the same laws as humans or they should not be permitted on the battlefield," Arkin wrote. Asimov already came up with excellent laws of robotics, but by definition war robots can not conform to them.

this is NOT a suggestion. Just popped into my head.

When I read Stranger in a Strange Land as a teenager, the messages about freedom and religion and sex didn’t seem too profound to me. But eating dead bodies- that was something to think about. Made sense, after all. Maybe that’s why Soylent Green never made an impact on me. It was only logical, what with the hunger and overpopulation, and meat was harvested in a rather less disturbing way than in the warren surrounded by snares in Watership Down.

maybe I should've gone for a Harlequin

A few weeks ago I realized that I couldn’t recall ever having read a romance novel. I decided to remedy this with Pride and Prejudice. I was unimpressed.

I remember getting into a debate with a women’s studies professor at Alfred about whether Tom Sawyer was more entertaining than Little Women. I felt exploring caves to be inherently more interesting than reading Pilgrim’s Progress. She pointed out that the values placed on stereotypically gendered diversions were socially defined, and that my preference for action/ adventure stories was likely because they, like masculinity, were valued more by my culture. I’m still not sure how much I agree with her. But even the March girls, whom I found boring, were more interesting than the Bennets. Both books concluded in marrying off a passel of sisters but at least in Little Women they did a few other things too.

I do not however miss tape drives

In fourth grade or so I did an in-depth research project on the Pony Express. My mother suggested I dig up newspaper articles as source material and escorted me to the Schenectady Library (the main branch of our library system). Paper indices of the New York Times were cross-referenced to the boxes of microfilm I needed, but staying on-task once the film was loaded into the reader was near impossible. These were real newspapers from the 1860s! The advertisements! The headlines! Sitting in front of the machine with the stories glowing in front of me, the film whirring as I skipped forward and back, heightened the sense of time-travel.

The process became somewhat less exciting as my academic career progressed; looking up 20-year-old academic articles isn’t quite so fascinating. But in graduate school I worked in the library’s microfilm department and was again enchanted. Most people were too lazy to get their articles themselves so they sent in a request and paid me to do it. I’ll admit to occasionally being glad when they wanted something from the less time-consuming microfiche collection. But the process of seeking out articles on all subjects from all eras was made more romantic by the pages of the microfilm flying by, and I became adept at stopping on the right page on the first try.

Long periods of reading microfilm is awful on your eyes; storage and retrieval is space and time inefficient. But it gives me the same pleasure as a few other time-consuming anachronisms- darkroom work and mixed-cassette-tape production come to mind. There’s the visceral pleasure in the process itself plus the technical pleasure in accomplishing something that requires some work- it gives a sense that you’ve Done Something, not just hit “print” after using a search engine or clicked an icon in Photoshop. I miss it.

(Reminded by this.)

"I take my family everywhere I run."

Interestingly, this cell phone ad clearly articulates one of my major reasons for NOT purchasing a phone. If you have one people assume you're always on call. I want to avoid this primarily for selfish reasons, but being unavailable also empowers other people to work out their own problems. Really, a caregiver who's regularly interrupting her exercise to discuss pacifiers ought to be fired or divorced.

(Imagine a gender role reversal in this ad. Click on picture for larger image.)

Dollhouse review

The most annoying character on Firefly was a girl named River, who spent most of her time walking around in a dreamy daze but occasionally said and did batshit crazy things. This was a side effect of the government manipulating her brain to turn her into a weapon or something. In the first episode, Dollhouse appears to be all about a group of underweight but otherwise attractive women who walk around in dreamy dazes until they are injected with mission-appropriate personalities, and then they kick ass with occasional craziness thrown in. They have new-agey names like Echo and Sierra. I am thusfar unimpressed, but I’ll admit that it took more than one episode to draw me into Firefly.

regional foods fail

In small print on my "Cape Cod Cranberry" juice: "Cranberries in this product are not from Cape Cod."

SimCity and urban planning

This reminded me that I once tried to set up a city with no roads, just rail. Didn’t work. I tried building one road leading from the edge of the screen (presumably where other cities might be) that stopped on the outskirts of town but that didn’t work either. Wonder if it would in real life. If there’s not a SimSustainableCity out yet, that allows you to build windmills and greenhouses and bike trails and horse stables, there should be.

(The rate of nuclear meltdowns, incidentally, was more than a little high in the Sim universe. I guess that was the only way they had to provide a reason NOT to go nuclear, because otherwise it was by far the best choice. Maybe they should have had protestors instead, or bad-karma points.)

don't let Tumnus break your heart

A has informed me that she doesn’t believe in Jesus but does believe in Santa Claus. She cites Santa’s presence at the Delmar holiday parade as evidence for this position. I’ve cautiously suggested that sometimes people like to dress up as Santa, but she does not think anyone other than Santa himself could produce a costume that good. Dan wonders if she’ll convert if we take her to a production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Some people say they felt betrayed upon learning that Santa wasn’t real. I’m not concerned about that. The big betrayal of my childhood was perpetrated by C.S. Lewis. I read and reread The Chronicles of Narnia at an age when I could immerse myself in fantasy and half-believe that it was real. I longed to be Lucy and set up elaborate worlds with paper and glue and Playmobils and gerbils (one named Aslan).

I was 12 or so when I picked up The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe again and saw the religious symbolism. I was truly devastated. To see that something that meant so much to me was nothing more than a medium Lewis created to forward his religion (which was, by chance, the same ones I’d been raised in, but had never particularly subscribed to) was profoundly disillusioning. Now I can appreciate that most of the books can be read as damn good stories irregardless of Lewis’s intent (or was it that he used the proselytizing as an excuse to justify writing fantasy?) but as a teenager, no.

I’m not the only one who had this experience. I thoughtlessly mentioned it to an unsuspecting friend at summer camp in 1989 and he had to fight back tears.

I don’t think that C is as fanatical a reader as I was. While he reads continuously he never rereads books or uses their characters in his play. If I hand him the first book* it’s likely that he’ll whip through it cheerfully and then go back to drawing up his plans for snowball-throwing tanks**. On the one hand this makes me sad because I’d like to share the experience with him (in a way I really couldn’t with his WWII obsession) but on the other I hope it means that he’ll never experience the same sense of betrayal I did.

Until now I put off giving him the books because of the violence, but given his research on the invasion of Normandy that’s not really relevant at this point. I’ve considered mentioning the allegorical components to him but decided against it. I’m hoping that the joy he may obtain from reading them uncritically*** will override any loss he might feel when he recognizes what’s behind the story. And if he doesn’t read them soon he won’t appreciate it in the ways that only children can. But I still hesitate to do it, remembering how hurt I was and wanting to protect him from that.

* Meaning The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe- there’s a movement to reorder the books chronologically but starting with The Magician’s Nephew is WRONG. Gee, you think I have any emotional investment in this?

** Inspired by the go-carts in The Dangerous Book for Boys. Thanks Shannon- I think.

*** I am usually incapable of reading uncritically now which is somewhat of a shame.

why no one gets newspapers anymore

I need to remember to check in on the awesomely random comments of the Bethlehem blog more frequently. A post on a pleasant experience at the Delmar post office led to a shrill indictment of Bethlehem snobbishness (recurring theme), a rail trail announcement became a forum to complain about irresponsible hunters, and a picture of my kids led to the TU being damned for using children to push their political agenda.

C's reactions to YouTube videos

Radiohead (Creep):
I think he's a good singer but I don't like what he's singing about.

Jane's Addiction (Ocean Size):
It's great!!
Why aren't they wearing shirts?

Metallic (Unforgiven):
It's a sad song. I think it's about how people are never free.

Black Sabbath (Iron Man):
Do they just keep doing the same thing over and over again?

(Yes, I like to play happy stuff for him before bed.)

adult bath toys

There is a children's book about the true story of thousands of rubber ducks lost in a shipwreck being washed ashore and helping scientists learn about ocean currents. A loves it. It would be a very different kind of story were it following 130,000 inflatable breasts.

embarrassingly spot on

I've wanted to put this up for a while but BoingBoing crashed his server for a bit. Photoshopped sci fi/ fantasy book covers.

I just need to remind myself that other people let their kids play GTA

I decided not to read past the third Harry Potter book with C because they get disturbing after that. But then I somehow thought it was a good idea to read him The Hobbit. Clearly I didn't really think this through. It's not gory, and doesn't delve into "evil" in the same way The Lord of the Rings does, but its casual violence is a bit jarring. I have to wait until A goes to bed before reading it.*

In the period when C's computer was out of commission (thanks for fixing it Dad!) I loaded Gazillionaire and a Doom-ish multiplication game onto our computer. But Dan let C borrow his laptop one day and C found a trial version of Fate . Bad parents that we are, we don't do much monitoring of his computer time so we didn't vet the game at all before he found it and played it. Luckily it appears to be relatively innocuous because he absolutely loves it.


* C is thrilled by the book, however, and I'm enjoying it too- I'm not sure if I've read it since I was 8 myself. The language makes it much more difficult to read out loud than most of the books I choose, and it's too complicated for me to give the characters different voices as I usually do. But that means I have to pay more attention to what I'm saying instead of letting the words bypass my brain.